withouten any compaignye

At the beginning of Lilith the world is not discovered yet, we need to break into the world or wake up to it, George MacDonald serious with religious joy, and so there is the Everyman Mr Vane going through the mirror for us all, therefore hope, the book ends with a hopeful tone from the author, but in The Sundial by Shirley Jackson (which I read a short time afterwards -- hence the mention -- the primary heart's-blood connection between books on this blog is not country of origin or sex of author but the fact that I have read them -- in the zoo they make their cries to one another --) in Jackson's book there is all surface and no hope; nobody breaks through into anything even though the world is due to end, there will be fire, the wind will scatter branches, the windows will need to be sealed with the backs of wardrobes. But Jackson has the desperate attitude of Mikhail Zoshchenko who gives his people nothing to be aside from selfish and petty. These people in the Jackson are not materially poor like Zoshchenko's people but they don't have any other model to follow and so they are all selfish because this is how the author (you assume) feels that people are, incurably and forever: the story extrapolates that forever.

Jackson is somewhat like the characters herself but not quite, she pays attention to them but her attention is cool and covert and she is not sympathetic even towards Aunt Fanny, sad and brittle, who is bullied by the rest of the cast.

Nobody listens to Aunt Fanny until one day when her dead father appears and tells her how to save them from Armageddon. The characters are only a short distance from stereotypes (so they are distanced from any illusion of being real people, you cannot feel that you are touching them); you could sum them up quickly as the arch young man or the domineering matriarch or the vapid wife -- they are ideas about people -- the arch young man's dialogue is typically arch, and the domineering matriarch domineers and the vapid wife mulls through the book eating chocolate and talking about the last movie she saw, which was the story of a doctor saving a tribe in a jungle. She spends days talking to different people about the acting and the romance but she never realises that her own tribe is sick in a different way, and so she can't do anything to heal them, she can't say, "We are sick." That the people are lonely and sick like this is Jackson's main point I think.

Aunt Fanny's dead father is preceded by warmth, warm marble arms and human statues; she panics, the living are not this warm. There is a confusion of warmth and fear. The arch young man in a roundabout way lets the domineering matriarch know that he loves her or likes her; she is thinking about her house. Shirley Jackson writes a huge house, as usual, overlooking a village, as usual, and people in the house, then the sundial on the lawn with "What is this world?" written across the disc, which is Chaucer, The Knight's Tale:

What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his cold grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.

Allone is the book's key word, the word that opens the rest, all lone, all one, the characters are a collection of ones, and even after Armageddon when they are going to live in a beautiful garden, the domineering older woman is going to ensure that she is allone: she orders a crown and a gold dress to make sure that nobody in Eden mistakes her for anyone else. Shirley Jackson believes that they will not change even after the world has ended, nothing will convert them, for, "you," says a little girl on page one hundred and thirty-two, "all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different. But I don't suppose people get changed any by just a new world." They will accept the end of the world, they will not accept the ends of themselves, their selfish selves, they will not sprout into new selves, they will not change. The tone of the book is dread but what are they dreading? The same state they ensure, which is loneliness. Or the contact that would end it. O prevailing chill of stasis. This chill the same chill I've felt in all of the Jackson books I've read, this bitter ice that clenches itself around the characters and stops them ever moving too far in mind or limb. She writes about houses and her characters do not move.

turning over every stone of any size

So Mr Vane never has to think about work or putting ink in the printer because the author George MacDonald has given him tonnes of money, doling it out with the same vivid and enviable freedom that he used when he was killing the forebear, not feeling guilty about either largesse or murder, and Mr Vane takes the dead beautiful woman into a cave where he begins the river-water experiment, bathing her every day even when something decides to come at night while he is asleep to nip blood out of him through the hand. "The back of it was much swollen, and in the centre of the swelling was a triangular wound, like the bite of a leech.

As the day went on, the swelling subsided, and by the evening the hurt was all but healed. I searched the cave, turning over every stone of any size, but discovered nothing I could imagine capable of injuring me."

That "imagine" is the potent word in this sentence; the reader (meaning me) can see one obvious culprit lying there with him, soaking up water, and they are shouting, "Look behind you!" as in a pantomime. And the hero is shrugging at the children in the audience, shading his eyes, scanning the horizon, turning around (the villain stays behind him as he turns) -- "Where?" and the children are shrieking, "There!" and so anxious they're nearly throttling themselves, their faces go blue and they fall off their chairs. Still he goes on bathing the sweet corpse (Trakl) in a dutiful and reliable way, as if some higher power has ordered him to act like this, which (the author) it has, washing the dead woman and sleeping in the cave where the unknown thing drains his fluid. What are you doing, Mr Vane? I am being in an allegory. But he doesn't know that he is in an allegory, he can't, otherwise why would he give names to the objects around him, "bread," "princess," "white leech," and so on, why would he not cut to the chase and spend his time thinking, mm, now, never mind names, what does this object represent? What is that giant going to do, he could wonder, and then remind himself, "I am in an allegory," and at that moment he figures out what this giant-thing's allegorical behaviour has to be. Like this he will stare straight into the monster's subconscious. He will have a periscope into its heart and brain, he will be the reader. As for the monster, it will never know. It will still be a character in the book.

After he has thought about allegories for a while he realises that if this is an allegory then he must be allegorical too, and if so, what does he represent? He does not know that he is the narrator necessarily; he does not know that he is the focus or Everyman. He suspects that he is the Everyman but then he tells himself that everybody in an allegory would think they were the Everyman if they knew they were in one. He wouldn't know for sure. He might be one of the other characters. But why is he the only one like himself, why is he travelling, why does he keep meeting people? I am behaving like an Everyman, he thinks. I can't look at myself clearly, though. I don't know.

Now he has firm ideas about other peoples' manners and a shaky idea of his own, which puts him in the same mental category as so many people that he is confirmed as the Everyman though that fact is invisible to him and does him no good.

strangely in this strange world

The narrator in Lilith never could have realised that the person who created him did so in order to thwart him and turn him into a liar, since he can't name the things he is looking at and must lie about them; and he describes them like this, "A white leech, a loaf of bread, a princess," when he does not, according to himself, see any of those objects and so he might as well say, "A suction pump, a slice of roast beef, the prime minister," or, "A vampire bat, a bag of chips, my employer," though he has no employer; he is a man of independent money, having inherited a manor house from somebody who dies before the story starts -- dying purely to get this narrator intimately engaged with the necessary housing arrangements; this dead man was destined from the instant of his creation to become a neglected forebear, he is a martyr to storytelling and to George MacDonald's ideas about religion, which, ultimately, he serves with his death, delivering the narrator into allegory.

This narrator, whose name is Mr Vane (vanity, lightness, maybe weathervane-wind), pursues a magical raven-man around the house he has inherited and by following this man-bird or bird-man he discovers the mirror with the magical world on the other side. If he had been employed in a normal business and working regular hours like the people I see on the streets in the morning then would he have had time to involve himself with resurrection-allegories and follow the raven through the mirror or would he have had other things to do, like soap his knees, put on his shoes, and brush mud off his hems, and would he not have spent the whole time he was in the magical country wondering if he was late for work, if he was going to get fired when he went back, what deadline he was missing, what time today's shift ended, whether that other employee had been notified about the problem with the chair in the break room, etc etc, and when he came across the corpse of a woman who maybe or maybe not seemed almost not quite deathly cold and sort of perhaps able to come back to life although that might have been wishful thinking ("Could she be still alive? Might she not? What if she were! Things went very strangely in this strange world"), wouldn't he have hesitated and turned his back on the time-consuming job of trying to resurrect her with river water?

But if he had worried about those things then the book would have been comedy or comic, the adventures would have been shrunk or altered by the contrast, Mr Vane saying, "I can't devote myself to you magical tiny people, I need to go back and put ink in the printer," and the seriousness of the giant-villains shrivelling like snow.

In my imagination George MacDonald feels himself veering in that direction but he doesn't like the idea of a comedy so he makes Mr Vane renounce work. He writes these words: "Suddenly none of that mattered, and I devoted myself joyfully to the wellbeing of these tiny magical children. I disregarded the duty of the printer ink." (He does it in the narrator's voice. I'm just inventing a paraphrase.)

"That's it," George MacDonald says to himself as he finishes that sentence, "now this book is not a comedy," and renunciation becomes another theme in the story.

Now that the idea is there it strikes him that he should extrapolate and so he does, now the idea of work is incredibly important in the manuscript, but in the version of Lilith that I have with me today it was not important, it was invisible, it was banished on page one.

call it a state of things, an economy of conditions

The narrator of George MacDonald's Lilith chases through a mirror after a man who is a raven, and once he is through the mirror he tells the reader that he has trouble explaining to them what he can see because it is an economy of conditions.

He says, "I beg my reader to aid me in the endeavour of making myself intelligible -- if here understanding be indeed possible between us. I was in a world, or call it a state of things, an economy of conditions, an idea of existence, so little correspondent with the ways and means of this world ... that the best choice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what I would convey."

So there's a trick he can't do, this narrator, and he feels aware that he can't do it, the naming of experience in words on paper, and it might have been possible to solve his problem as Georg Trakl does, by juxtaposing words poetically and strongly and thereby meeting one economy of conditions with this other economy of conditions known as poetry (afterwards he might have felt satisfied that he has risen to the challenge even if he has not won), but the narrator's serious temperament leaves him disabled in this particular area, him, instead, wanting to write prosaically and be the dutiful person that Mikhail Zoschchenko was pretending to be in his Nightingale novella, that decent reporter who lets you know with jokeless fidelity what the character looks like and how he ate.

Now he will ask the reader to aid him in "the endeavour of making myself intelligible," begging this as if it is a special request, as if it is not the exact thing all readers are called upon to do the moment they put their eyes on the pages and agree to read; he encourages them to clasp him extra-tightly, and come very close to the story, and merge with it, because it is set in a strange place and the reader's role needs to be reaffirmed he thinks; they need their spines stiffened and they are being alerted to the existence of a fact they will discover fully much later in the book: that Lilith is a religious allegory.

To disarm the reader MacDonald pretends that the narrator is failing them, and writes as if they should think that the characters are real, and that these real characters should see a thing that is actually there, but the magical landscape on the other side of the mirror thwarts him (though not really: it is playing into his hands, into the plans of the author), this landscape being inhabited by things that correspond only vaguely and irregularly to princesses, leopards, giants, white leeches, loaves of bread, and the other words that the narrator comes up with, yet the reader probably forgets after a short while that the narrator did not really see a leopard, a princess, a white leech, but according to himself ("the best choice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what I would convey") he saw only some phenomena that had to be suggestively expressed in those terms or else never be talked about or mentioned, and then the book would be unwritable and it would not be in front of you in your hand or anywhere else.

White leeches possibly exist somewhere but not in the place the narrator has visited, not in the mirror-land for whose sake he has written the words "white leech."

suspecting that I owed each moment of life

So the chilly weather came and the dandelions burst into those seed moons that look like frost but feel like fur. Put one against your lips and you have kissed a mouse. (Home is a bushfire summer, the trees are burnt, the Tasman Peninsula roars, here the winter, the cold ground, the dull car noises.) The leaves turned yellow in the grass, the Cosmopolitan sign was the same as it had always been, but the sign over the hamburger restaurant down the road lost six of its letters when the lights went out in them (the shapes still present but the intelligence gone); the changes in the natural world seemed seasonal but the humanly-constructed things seemed to deserve a prejudicial word like "broken," though the hamburger sign goes dead so regularly that you could call it seasonal and say that its seasonal cycle lasts about three weeks, and that it has a faster life than flowers. Conan Doyle, speaking through Sherlock Holmes, said that once you have eliminated all the impossibilities then whatever remains no matter how loony, must be the case, and what is the case, Wittgenstein said, is the world, though Einstein tried to fix his own theories to make the universe static, yet it would not remain so, and the possibility that the sign is simply breaking down at random in a planless way and can't be fixed is a possibility that won't be eliminated, which is why no one can say seriously that the sign is in fact informed by nature to go dark on cue every three weeks; perhaps some worker stays in business this way and nature likes him in particular for reasons it cannot articulate to the rest of us except through this sign; note that the Lord spoke to Elijah out of personal preference. The idea that the sign is designed to cycle through its behaviour like a plant is whimsical and whimsy or magic should be ignored sometimes, I think, because it did not help me when I was searching for the lard in the kitchen a few minutes ago, and I was making an automatic buttering action with my hand as if I had a knife and the knife was lifting lard out of its lard-box. That magical summoning gesture did not work, magic was doing nothing for me except give my wrist a little exercise, reason was everything, or memory, and the power of my hands, and the muscles that run up the arm, the whole collection of pieces, long strings, damp flocculents like curtain cords, juice, gum, red strata, the buttering gesture not powerful on its own, but only after memory had reminded me that M. had moved the lard into a plastic yoghurt container, and then my fingers lifted the lid and there was the lard that shone like snow and was welcome to my eyes though it would not have been welcome to the eyes of others, who I have heard say, "Lard!" in horror voices just before they pour sugar sugar sugar into their coffee -- ha ha I think, watching them with this pour pour pour, you will die of sugar but no man is an island and thoughts of death remind me that as they die so will I, and not seasonally but forever although George MacDonald in Lilith thinks this is a good thing, and that we will find a more religious and therefore spiritual life in death; also childhood ponies will be returned. I never had a pony and will miss out on this part. MacDonald dwells on this resurrection, and it is the climax of his book, and the point of the whole thing, and the reason it was written, but the passage I remember comes earlier, I gloss over the resurrection blah blah blah and recall instead the monster worms that come out of the ground to eat the hero but moonlight paralyses them. He walked through the night "never suspecting that I owed each moment of life to the staring moon." We are kept safe sometimes by mysterious accidents. Safety stands on a cobblestone, the cobblestone tilts, safety comes awake and feels inspired, aha, orroight it says: then it puts itself in motion. Of course that cobblestone is a reference to the last book of In Search of Lost Time, and Marcel stopping in the courtyard, saying with pages of words, aha, orroight, like a man about to fix a sink. I need to do something with my life or be forever like Marcel in the first one billion pages of the book, and not the Proust who is the narrator (Roger Shattuck divides him like this into Proust-the-Narrator and Marcel-the-Aging-Boy, and I think it works well) and not, I don't know what, always staring at the three trees, which say to me nothing and only wave.