Great Book #65: The Magician

"You think me a charlatan because I aim at things that are unknown to you. You won't try to understand. You won't give me any credit for striving with all my soul to a very great end."

I'd originally planned to read Of Human Bondage so I could tick W. Somerset Maugham off my never-read list. Then Seanan kept telling me to read The Magician, which was published in 1908, seven years before his best-known work. One Saturday afternoon last month I was browsing in The Old Children's Bookshelf, and when I found a nice red hardcover reissue of The Magician I took it as a nudge. (Not that this is a novel for kids, oh heck no!)A literary genre-bender featuring a black magician and a plain-but-plucky spinster-heroine, fin-de-siècle cafés and a creepy crumbling-down country house: this novel is right up my alley. I'm glad I picked up this particular edition, too: it includes a 'fragment of autobiography' that explains how Maugham made the acquaintance of the infamous self-proclaimed sorcerer Aleister Crowley, who inspired the novel and its curiously mesmerizing anti-hero, Oliver Haddo.Here's the gist. Arthur Burdon, an English surgeon of the unimaginative-but-110%-reliable sort, is all set to marry the lovely young Margaret, who is dabbling in landscape painting at a Parisian academy before settling into housewifely duties back in London. A few weeks before their wedding date, the happy couple are introduced to Oliver Haddo, a boastful adventurer who seems to be universally reviled, and yet no one can ever deny him a place at their café table. Haddo quickly insinuates himself into Arthur and Margaret's small circle, to the mounting horror of all involved. With the help of Dr. Porhoët, his childhood guardian (and, conveniently, the author of a treatise on the great alchemists of old), and the strong and sensible Susie Boyd, Margaret's closest friend, Arthur must confront Haddo before his fiance is lost to him forever.In that autobiographical fragment, Somerset Maugham writes that The Magician is the only one of his early novels that he was able to reread, which in my mind goes a long way toward recommending it. The final chapter feels like Frankenstein spiced up with a healthy dash of Lovecraft, and the result is simultaneously disgusting and unputdownable:

But the terror of it was that at the neck it branched hideously, and there were two distinct heads, monstrously large, but duly provided with all their features. The features were a caricature of humanity so shameful that one could hardly bear to look. And as the light fell on it, the eyes of each head opened slowly. They had no pigment in them, but were pink, like the eyes of white rabbits; and they stared for a moment with an odd, unseeing glance. Then they were shut again, and what was curiously terrifying was that the movements were not quite simultaneous; the eyelids of one head fell slowly just before those of the other.

I devoured this novel. Loved, loved, loved it. Now the question is, will I ever get around to reading Of Human Bondage? (This is the problem with loving a novel too much: I'm reluctant to read any of the author's other books for fear I'll be disappointed.The Time Traveler's Wife and not wanting to read Her Fearful Symmetry is a case in point.)

Hexenhammer

Today's spot of witchery offers no witches, but merely the rumor of them.I first heard of the Malleus Malleficarum, "The Witches' Hammer," during my semester abroad in Florence. My friends were taking a medieval and Renaissance lit course, and I remember being in the cafeteria and laughing at the idea of runaway penises. There is plenty of cause for snickering when taken out of context, and I refer to it with no small degree of sarcasm in Petty Magic.But the Malleus Maleficarum belongs at the top of a list of books that should never have been written, because its publication in 1487 led to the persecution and murder of thousands of accused "witches" all over Europe. Written by "holy men"? Now there's a big fat W-T-F!Anyway, the book popped up again in Muriel McCarthy's history of Marsh's Library in Dublin, and this brief passage made me shiver.

Malleus maleficarum is a terrifying and cruel book. When it was first published it bore on the title-page the dreadful warning: 'Haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum non credere' (To disbelieve in witches is the greatest of heresies). The Dominican inquisitors amongst other quaint beliefs suggested that witchcraft was more natural to women than men because of the inherent wretchedness of their hearts.

'Quaint' isn't the first word that comes to mind, but you get the gist. If you'd like to learn more about the book and the resulting witch-hunts, here's a good online resource.

Little Witch

I was going to save this for the 31st, but it's Kate's birthday today. Happy Birthday, Snookie!

Halloween, 1984. Kate is two weeks old. (Who knows why the long face...maybe I was thinking I'd have to split my candy with her.)

Lolly Willowes

I've been fairly preoccupied with the subject of witchcraft (in all its forms and fakery) for this past year and a half or so. With that in mind, my friend Deirdre lent me her copy of Lolly Willowes, a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner published in 1926.The novel is beautifully written, and I was completely engrossed for the first two chapters. The natural imagery is wonderfully vivid--a "thick roof of lime trees" in a churchyard, or

[She] only cried when alone in the potting shed, where a pair of old gardening gloves repeated to her the shape of her mother's hands.

At first, Lolly Willowes reminded me, in very general terms, of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, except our protagonist is a maiden aunt who finds satisfaction in nature (she fills her tiny bedroom with exotic flowers, gathers plants to make herbal remedies, and goes for all-day walks in the forest) rather than illicit romance. Laura--called Lolly by her nieces and nephew--doesn't break free of her stultifying London life under her brother's thumb until halfway through the book, but I'm not one of those readers who gets annoyed with the writer when "not much happens" (so long as the prose is good).I loved the way this novel began, and I wanted to love it all the way through. But...I'd better back up and read you a few lines off the back cover:

After twenty years of self-effacement as a maiden aunt, she decides to break free and moves to a small Bedfordshire village. Here, happy and unfettered, she enjoys her new existence nagged only by the sense of a secret she has yet to discover. That secret--and her vocation--is witchcraft, and with her cat and a pact with the Devil, Lolly Willowes is finally free.

Here's the problem. There's absolutely no hint of supernatural activity until page 165 (out of 247 pages)--so that when she finds a strange kitten inside her (previously locked) parlor, the kitten bites her, and she 'realizes' she's entered into a pact with the Devil, I had to wonder if the promise of witchcraft on the back cover was nothing more than a delusion on Laura's part. It would have made sense if her pact with the Devil were something she had imagined to make her life more interesting, but it's not. It's real, and most of the other villagers have made the same bargain. But for a few pages there, until she goes to a midnight Sabbath attended by all the rest of the village, I was convinced that Lolly is mentally ill.As a writer, I'm very conscious of this basic principle of consistency. The writer makes a sort of contract with the reader on the very first page, the very first line even. You might not have any idea yet where this story is going to go, but you ought to know what sort of world the characters inhabit. So to begin a story in an all-too-realistic situation and end it with a conversation with Satan (who is posing as an easygoing gardener) is, in a sense, pulling a fast one on the reader. It feels cheap. I'm not saying an imp should have jumped out of a hole and cried "tee hee, I'm the Devil's minion!" before the first paragraph was out; but however it's done, the reader should proceed with the distinct impression that there is a supernatural layer to this story, a dark secret to which she'll eventually be made privy.When I finished the novel, I googled in search of some discussion on Lolly Willowes that might validate my feelings of disappointment. The novel is considered, by feminist readers especially, to be an unjustly forgotten classic, but virtually none of the blogs or other websites I visited mentioned the inconsistency that had partially spoiled the story for me.I had lent the book to my mother to read while I finished Hogfather over the holidays, and I wasn't fazed when she told me she hadn't cared for it much--our literary tastes don't always overlap. But when I finished the novel, I realized she'd had the very same reaction that I had. "It just doesn't work," she said. So it wasn't only me.Despite the consistency issue, Lolly Willowes is still worth a read for all its fine descriptive passages and classic feminist message. I wish I could recommend it with a whole heart.