Back from a quick trip to London, and quite by chance, I opened a book. It’s not a book I open often, and when I do, it’s usually somewhere in the middle. (It’s a precious book, and the binding needs careful hands.) This time, the book opened to the front endpapers, and a loose sheet of paper slipped out.

Exhibition, I read. Opening days: November 23rd until Christmas.  Place: Leicester Square. And I thought, Oh my goodness, we were there last week, how could I have missed it? What a shame! Now, I confess that was a very fleeting thought, as the date was indeed November 23 to Christmas, but the year was 1912, fully a century ago.

But, that’s all it takes to set my mind awhirl: imagining Leicester Square in 1912, imagining the gallery, the opening of the show, the exquisite originals on the walls, the hum of conversations… and thinking that yes, wouldn’t it be wonderful to set a century aside briefly and step back for an hour to visit an exhibition rather than going to a screening.

Somehow that odd coincidence, to which is added the fact that by some miracle that loose sheet of paper remained in the book for a hundred years, briefly suspended a full century and made possible a fleeting instant, dream-like and intense. An absence of mindedness, which was suddenly filled with a gale of emotion. I can’t honestly describe it.

But, what I would give to do it for real.

From the catalogue for an exhibition of cartoons by Max Beerbohm (1872-1956).April-May 1913.

I bought The Bells (published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1912) a few years ago, so enamoured am I of Dulac’s extraordinary illustrations to the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s not the lighter Dulac you most likely know. The series of images, twenty-eight in all, is as sombre and gloomy as the texts, a darker Dulac, possibly influenced by the storm-clouds building over his native France.

Edgar Allan Poe had died over half a century earlier, after being found delirious in the streets of Boston, “in great distress, and… in need of immediate assistance”. He never regained his lucidity and died four days later, in the early morning of October 7, 1849.

In the half-century after his death, although he had lived in near-poverty for most of his life, his writing had gained in popularity and esteem. His Poems were published in London as part of the highly-regarded Endymion series, with authors like Tennyson, Shelley, Keats and Milton, and illustrated by the best illustrators of the day: W. Heath Robinson, R. Anning Bell, and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.

Portrait of Edmund Dulac by the celebrated Bavarian photographer Emil Otto Hoppé (1878-1972). This version was used as the frontispiece to a catalogue of an exhibition of Dulac’s water-colour drawings, published by Scott & Fowles, New York, in 1916.

Edmond Dulac had arrived in London in 1904; French anglophile, born in 1882 in Toulouse, where he studied law (graduating with a law degree in 1902), he chose to pursue drawing and painting, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1900 to 1903 and discovering the work of Beardsley, Burne-Jones, Morris and others of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. He attended the Académie Julien in Paris the following year, where he so affected English fashion he was given the sobriquet “L’Anglais”. After a surprisingly brief marriage to Alice May de Marni, an American thirteen years his senior, he moved to England, anglicized his first name to Edmund, and settled in London.

Dulac quickly established his reputation. A first commission, sixty illustrations for an edition of Jane Eyre, published by J. M. Dent, was followed by regular contributions to Pall Mall magazine and other publications. He formed a relationship with the Leicester Gallery, who exhibited and sold his illustrations, which were simultaneously published by Hodder & Stoughton.  Books followed swiftly: Stories from The Arabian Nights in 1907, with 50 color illustrations; an edition of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1908, with 40 color illustrations; The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1909, with 20 color images; The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales in 1910; Stories from Hans Christian Andersen in 1911; The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe in 1912, with 28 color images and a handful of pen and ink drawings. Limited deluxe editions were bound in vellum and signed by the illustrator. (Once again, images spring to life: Dulac at the openings of his shows, signing books  and perhaps even doing quick drawings in them – it all makes his work seem even more alive; the temporality of those gestures measured against the timelessness of the published work itself.)

Although he was a member of the famous London Sketch Club, it seems Dulac preferred more tranquil circles to the boisterous atmosphere at 79 Wells Street. He was the friend of many of his equally illustrious contemporaries, the likes of John Hassall, Arthur Rackham, William Heath Robinson, Charles Ricketts, and Edmund Sullivan, as well as philanthropist and collector Edmund Davis. When he married in 1911, Dulac and his new wife Elsa Arnalice Bignardi, violinist daughter of a professor of singing, moved to one of a group of studios built by Davis in Ladbroke Road. There, they met other artists and performers of the day, including pianist Arthur Rubenstein and writer W. B. Yeats, with whom Dulac formed a lifelong friendship. The two would collaborate on a number of projects, including proposed coinage designs for the Irish Free State. Dulac also designed sets and costumes for Yeats’ play “At The Hawk’s Well” and composed the incidental music, even taking part in the first performance in 1916.

Dulac saw his contract with Hodder & Stoughton collapse with the outbreak of World War I. Now a British citizen, he contributed to many relief books, including King Albert’s Book, for Belgium, Princess Mary’s Gift Book, and a book of his own for his native France: Edmund Dulac’s Picture Book for the French Red Cross in 1915, which included 20 color images. (King Albert’s Book can still be found quite inexpensively; I have a copy I bought decades ago, and have only just found, still with a very tattered jacket, his book for the Red Cross, here in Wellington. I almost value the jacket, with its plea for aid, more than the book itself. Once again, I’m grateful to circumstance that kept it with the book, rather than being discarded. While the book itself might be considered timeless, there is a transient urgency imprinted on the jacket that is very moving and places the book in context.) He also designed posters, stamps and other ephemera for the wartime effort.

Whatever the circumstance, Dulac’s energy and artistic talents seem inexhaustible, and capable of being applied to any endeavour. He designed theatre productions, (Cyrano de Bergerac for C. B. Cochran and Phoebus & Pan for Thomas Beecham in 1919). He could turn his hand to anything: wallpaper, playing cards, industrial brochures, banknotes, coins (the famous profile of George VI is Dulac’s work), medals and whatever seemed to come his way, as well as continuing on in publishing. It also appears he filled his spare moments with bookbinding, the designing of musical instruments, cutting out stencils and applying his dexterity to an array of other arts and crafts. His work appeared overseas as well; for nearly a quarter-century, from 1924 onwards, he was a contributor to the magazine American Weekly.

Divorced in 1923, he lived with author Helen Beauclerk until his death. They fled London in 1939 for Dorset, returning to the capital after the war. His last book commissions were for the Limited Editions Club of America: The Golden Cockerel (1950), The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche (1951) and Comus (1955). Irrepressible Dulac, who died of a heart attack brought on by a too enthusiastic evening of flamenco dancing on May 25, 1953 at the age of seventy. Energy and elegance characterize his life, that same elegance and aristocratic touch characterize his art.

In the Illustrated London News Special Edition Christmas Number 1912, Edmund Dulac illustrations of a different character (Circe, Scheherazade, The Queen of Sheba and Salome) were featured alongside work by Charles Robinson, William Heath Robinson, Warwick Goble, Edward Detmold and Kay Nielsen.

That élégance recherchée, which he undoubtedly brought with him from France, mixed with Japonism and Orientalism that appealed to his Mediterranean character, is such a part of his work that it makes his illustrations for The Bells all the more striking. Dulac is anything but gloomy, he has little of the tendency to caricature of Rackham, nothing of the earthiness of Byam Shaw, the solidity of Fortescue-Brickdale, or the nervous pen of Sullivan. He is, despite a life spanning the two World Wars, a fin de siècle artist, poised, gracious and ever so slightly distant.

The illustrations for The Bells are an excursion, a foray out of the lighter tones and delicate pastels into a far darker world. Of the illustrators of Poe, he stands alone (the same could be said of Gustave Doré, whose engravings for The Raven are spectacular and eerie), perhaps by his circumvention of literal interpretation, his reluctance to set a recognizable stage or assume the trappings of a particular period, his erasing of horizons and creation of depth through colours that compose a shallow tapestry but nevertheless open on those infinite spaces of the mind that engulfed Edgar Allan Poe. This is the strange and discrete equipoise of Dulac, allowing us to see his darker side, composed and serene, but balanced on the very edge of the gulf of madness and despair. Dreamlike and unearthly, they are possibly the best illustrations ever done for Poe.

In the “Reviews & Notices” section of The Studio magazine for December 1912, the following appraisal appeared:

“The Bells and other Poems”. By Edgar Allan Poe. Illustrated by Edmund Dulac. (London; Hodder and Stoughton.)  15s. net. – One opens this book with some curiosity. Mr. Dulac has been one of our most successful illustrators of comedy and fairy tale in colour, he has the lightness, gaiety, and sense of grace which make him very happy in the illustrating of everything where these qualities are required. He is very successful with an eighteenth-century setting, for there is a way in which it might be said that as an artist he descends from Watteau. We find Mr. Dulac in this book departing from the styles most suited to book illustration; and after the fashion of too many illustrators this season, he ventures into complication of colour which does not lend itself to the requirements of a book in the lap. It is strange, too, that this mistake intrudes an air of commonplace in the illustrations, most unexpected in work from this artist. Painting is one art, book embellishment another. Proof is not wanting here that Mr. Dulac is capable of a profound note in design, but few of his designs have a chance against the dye-like colours in which the refinement of his compositions is destroyed. The cover of this volume is delightful in its scheme of gold upon grey, if somewhat dainty for the sombre genius of the poetry it contains.”

“Dulac had from the very beginning fine imaginative powers, and each group of drawings disclosed greater technical achievements  and an unsurpassed versatility. The daintiest draughtsmanship, a delicious humor, an amazing feeling for design, and a positive genius for rich radiant color as applied to the pages of a book, were all coupled with the power to grasp an author’s meaning, and to embody it most happily with the glamor or piquancy which pertained to the various literary works themselves. Indeed, he has frequently added a vein of high poetry to the poetic originals. He should, however, be regarded not as an illustrator, but as an original painter, who uses line merely as an accessory, and each of these little iridescent miniatures which seem to be made of opal dust on mother of pearl, satisfies the demand which Delacroix made upon all paintings, ~~ they are color feasts for the eye.”

So, in a word, whatever qualities his work possesses, and whatever flights of fancy they invite the spectator to take, while they are undimmed by the passage of precisely a century, they have, for me, been enhanced by serendipity and an overlapping of dates, by a brief insight disguised as a lapse, a sort of split-second epiphany of time telescoped and erased. While a century might as well be forever in an individual’s life, I suddenly feel I’ve understood more about the nature of art and illustration for seeing one disappear for that split-second last December.

And, since all this talk of books and pictures has hopefully made you wish to see the pictures themselves, since none of us can have the privilege of attending the opening night at the Leicester Gallery, here they are, with extended captions by Ann Carling, to whom I am terribly grateful, and without whom this newsletter might just have remained a split second of bemusement in December 2012.

Although it is a fleeting daydream relation, a vicarious one-way kinship, it was nevertheless a moment of absence transformed into a split-second sentiment of contact as profound as it was insubstantial. In the same way we might hope, with whatever modest means we possess, that we might inadvertently create such fleeting instants in those future lives we will not see, that we might be made to understand ourselves as single threads in vast tapestries, or single drops in wide rivers, truly taking measure of the diverse infinity of human creation despite the limits of our own participation.

Would that serendipity could bring us to create these points of contact, however brief, far, far more often.

~~

 EDMUND DULAC: COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS FOR THE BELLS

“With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not – they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), quoted from his own “Preface to the Poems”, included in numerous editions of his poetry, published both during his lifetime and posthumously.

~~~

1, 2 & 3. Illustrations for The Bells

Frontispiece and two further illustrations to the title poem The Bells, penned by Poe towards the end of his life, and published posthumously in November 1849. The poem apparently “examines bell sounds as symbols of four milestones of human experience – childhood, youth, maturity, and death.”¹ It has been suggested²  that Poe drew some of his inspiration for this from a visit to Marie Louise Shew, an intimate family friend to whom he dedicated several other poems. There is a much more credible explanation; that the conception of The Bells arose from reading Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), by François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848). In a short chapter, (translated from the original French and) entitled simply Of Bells³, the following excerpt appears: “It seems to us that were we a poet we should not reject the idea of a bell tolled by spectres in the ancient chapel of the forest, that which religious fear set in motion in our fields to keep off the lightning, or that which was rung at night in certain sea-ports to direct the pilot in his passage among the rocks. On our festivals the lively peals of our bells seemed to heighten the public joy. In great calamities, on the contrary, their voice became truly awful. The hair yet stands erect at the remembrance of those days of murder and conflagration, all vibrating with the dismal noise of the tocsin. Who has forgotten those yells — those piercing shrieks succeeded by intervals of sudden silence, during which was now and then heard the discharge of a musket, some doleful and solitary voice, and above all, the heavy tolling of the alarm-bell, or the clock that calmly struck the hour which had just elapsed?”

Studying the frontispiece for this book, the first of Dulac’s illustrations for the eponymous poem, it is easy to imagine that he too was familiar with these very words, so deeply evocative when read in his native tongue.⁴ He vividly conveys the visualization of  “…cette cloche agitée par les fantômes dans la vieille chapelle de la forêt…..” as clearly as it echoes Poe’s own verses:  “ — They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone — They are neither man nor woman — They are neither brute nor human — They are Ghouls: And their king it is who tolls;….”   Dulac’s ghoul is a more metropolitan manifestation, with his death-blanched face and swirling mantle. The softly drifting hues of the second illustration reflect the “balmy air of night”. In an image of mysterious and unearthly beauty, a flight of formless angels streams heavenward on curved and coloured wings that cast an opaque cloud across latticed windows, behind which a faded filigree of foliage trails across the pale moon. The third illustration returns to the ghoulish bell-ringers, and the voices of the bells themselves, “the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan.” Those voices are given ghastly shape; heavy dust clouds twisting into fantastically contorted faces, emblematic of “the moaning and the groaning of the bells.”

4. Annabel Lee

The lyric poem, Annabel Lee, thought by many to be in memory of his wife Virginia, who died in 1847, was published in The New York Tribune two days after Poe’s own death in October 1849. This poem has been cited as an example of “his sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women (that) inspired his most touching lyrics.”⁵

“It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;….”

Dulac executed a Renaissance-like figure in the foreground, with a curiously flattened profile. Her hair, and the flowing simplicity of her costume, together with the blocks of colour representative of rocks and trees, seem somehow reminiscent both of early Italian frescoes, and a Pre-Raphaelite rendering of Dante’s beloved Beatrice, draped in the shimmering satin of her shawl. The looming citadel perched on the cliffs in the background bears some resemblance to a medieval hill town built long ago of smooth golden stone.

5. Sonnet ~ Silence

Illustration for Sonnet ~ Silence, a poem composed by Poe in 1839. The writer and storyteller Andrew Lang (1844-1912) described the poet as “the singer of rare hours of languor, when the soul is….inclined to listen, as it were, to the echo of a lyre from behind the hills of death.”⁶ Dulac stirs the faint and distant echo that “dwells in lonely places”, his mournful minstrel’s lyre transmuted into the broken strings of a harp let slip by the desolate figure stretched out upon the barren ground beneath, “like a dying musical note.”⁷

6. The Raven

Illustration for The Raven, one of Poe’s most renowned poems, published in 1845. Dulac depicts the deep gloom of the despairing and grief-stricken protagonist, longing for his “lost Lenore”, by using those most sombre tones described by The Studio critic as “dye-like”, and presumably representing the lines: Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”  But these shadowy and dismal hues reflect an aura of despondency in keeping with the mood of the poem, and comparable in tone to the engravings of Gustave Doré (1832-1883) for the same subject, which were published during the year following his death. The long shadows, the subdued furnishings, and the drabness of the mourner’s clothing, are only offset by the lightness of the lady’s portrait in its golden frame above the fireplace, where a further dreariness is evoked by the cold and empty grate.

In an essay entitled “Death of Edgar A. Poe.” N. P. Willis⁸ included an obituary of the author, written by Poe’s rival wordsmith, Rufus W. Griswold (1815-1857), and which Willis described as “a graphic and highly finished portraiture.”  This had appeared in “The (New York) Tribune” newspaper and contained the following appraisal: “The remarkable poem of ‘The Raven” was probably much more nearly than has been supposed, even by those who were very intimate with him, a reflection and an echo of his own history. He was that bird’s ‘ — unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore — Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore Of ‘Never—never more.’”

7. To One in Paradise

“Ah, dream to(o) bright to last! Ah, starry Hope! That didst arise but to be overcast!”

This was the final version of a poem originally from 1833, published with the title “To One in Paradise” in 1843. The graceful, alabaster figure of a girl dances alone, draped in satin whose fluidity follows the curve of waters flowing past her, as if falling from the pale stars that are echoed in the glimmering flowers at her feet.

Dulac lyrically reflects one of Poe’s recurrent poetic themes, the evanescence of lost love, dreamingly recalled in the final verse: “And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams — In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams.” 

8. Lenore

Published in 1843, the poem “Lenore” was inspired by the death of Mrs. Helen Stannard, eulogized in the stanzas of “To Helen” (see caption 20).  It was initially a juvenile poem named “The Paean”, which Poe “subsequently greatly improved both in rhythm and expression, and republished under the musical name of “Lenore”. The description which Poe afterward gave to a friend of the fantasies that haunted his brain during his desolate vigils in the cemetery*, the nameless fears and indescribable phantasms ‘Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Woe!’ (are) compared to those which overwhelmed De Quincey at the burial of his sweet sister and playmate.” The memoirist believed that it was illuminating to “linger somewhat over this little-known epoch of Poe’s (life) story, because (it appears to be) ‘a key to much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet’s after life, in those solitary churchyard vigils with all their associated memories’”

The poem was apparently “always his favorite, and above his desk always hung the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore.”⁹

Dulac’s capture of the lines: “The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes, — The life still there, upon her hair; the death upon her eyes.” makes Lenore’s cascade of golden curls the focus of a painting otherwise defined in gloomy tones of blue and grey – the spectral backdrop of sea and sky; the hooded figures enveloped in the folds of their heavy and all-concealing cloaks; the drab drapery of the bier; the bleakness of the awaiting rock and stone – the pallor of death reflected in the faded flowers and the dully gleaming fabric of the deceased woman’s dress. Perhaps Dulac was also intent on interpreting an earlier part of the poem: “See! On yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!”       

* See caption 20 and associated footnote for the fuller story & source details.

9. To Helen

“To Helen”, the second poem of this name, dates from 1848, and its subject was Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), an apparently controversial romantic interest of Poe’s.¹⁰ In nebulous shades of blue, Dulac illustrates several of the sentimental lines that set the wraithlike woman within a phantasmal rose garden, reminiscent of the place where Poe appeared to have first set eyes on her:

“Clad all in white, upon a violet bank………..
The pearly lustre of the moon went out: The mossy banks and the meandering path, The happy flowers and the repining trees,…………
And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained;………….
—— the stars I kneel to In the sad, silent watches of my night;”

10. The Haunted Palace

“The Haunted Palace” was published as a poem in 1839, but later that year incorporated as a song in the macabre short story*, The Fall of the House of Usher, an unsettling tale of the morbidly disturbed Roderick Usher and his ill-starred sister, Lady Madeline. The poem appears as a song of Usher’s own composition (referred to by the narrator as one of the writer’s “wild fantasias”) which eerily presages the fate of the foredoomed pair. Dulac’s ghoulish figures with their gaunt features and fiendish glare, mirror the final verses:

“But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn! – for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
…………………..

And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms, that move fantastically
To a discordant melody…………..”

* As a narrative device, Poe incorporated a tale within his tale, for the storyteller takes up “(An) antique volume (called) the ‘Mad Trist’ of Sir Launcelot Canning”, which describes “a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanour, and of fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver: and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten — ‘Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win’.”

11. The City in the Sea

“The City in the Sea” is a poem known originally as “The Doomed City” when published in 1831, and renamed in 1845. The dates correspond with the original version of “The Valley Nis”, later redrafted in a companion piece to this as “The Valley of Unrest”. (See Caption 21.) Dulac portrayed the stone spires and pinnacles of a city sinking into the swirling waves of “the lurid sea” that will eventually submerge them. Left to the imagination are the “shadowy long-forgotten bowers Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers — …many and many a marvelous shrine Whose wreathed friezes intertwine The viol, the violet, and the vine.” The accompanying headpiece, however, where the sinister, crowned figure of Death stands surveying his newly acquired realm, captures the eerie opening lines of the poem: “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West.” Equally evocative, Andrew Lang said of Poe: “ He dwells in a world more vaporous than that of Shelley’s ‘Witch of Atlas,’ in a region where dreaming cities crumble into fathomless seas, in a fairyland with ‘dim vales and shadowy woods,’ in haunted palaces, or in a lost and wandering star.”⁶ (Shelley’s poem, written in 1820, dedicated to Mary Shelley, was published posthumously in 1824.)

12. The Sleeper

”The Sleeper” was first published in 1831, and several revised versions apparently followed. In a letter dated July 2^nd 1844, written from New York to the poet and penman James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), Poe expressed his belief that “The Sleeper” was one of his best poems – he named the others as “The Conqueror Worm”, “The Haunted Palace”, “Lenore”, “Dreamland” , and “The Coliseum” – but added that “all have been hurried and inconsidered”.¹¹  Dulac painted a fairytale figure swathed in the pale sheen of satin robes, with an opulent canopy that echoes the coverlet of the carved bed on which she lies. Her luxuriant, bejewelled hair is spread about her like a lustrous mantle, in peculiar contrast with the ghastly hue of her complexion. The curiously clouded, vaporous shades of her surroundings suggest  “the pale sheeted ghosts” that linger insubstantially in the air, to steal away the spirits of the dead.

13. Ulalume

This poem was published in the American Review magazine in December 1847.  Like other writings, it reflects on the grief and yearning for a lost love, telling in curiously dirge-like tones, the story of a bereft young man drawn almost supernaturally to the tomb of his dead sweetheart, one year to the day of her demise. Dulac’s illustration is defined again in the “dye-like colours” already commented on in caption 6. In shades of deepest indigo, the “alley Titanic, Of cypress…” looms on either side of a stone sepulchre, where sits, not the lovelorn wanderer, but the fragile form of Psyche, frail wings folded as she contemplates the closed door of a crypt, carved deep within the rock. “Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!” In a letter to N. P. Willis, quoted in his memoir of Poe⁸, Mrs Whitman¹⁰ described the “lofty and picturesque avenue across the aqueduct (close to his residence at Fordham, a then rural part of The Bronx, New York, and the place in which Poe is said to have written both the poems “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume”) where, in ‘ the lonesome latter years’ of his life, the poet was accustomed to walk ‘at all times of the day and night, often pacing the then solitary pathway for hours without meeting a human being.’ A rocky ledge in the neighborhood, partly covered in pines and cedars, and commanding a fine view of the surrounding countryside, was also one of his favorite resorts, and here, resumes our informant, ‘through long summer days, and through solitary starlit nights, he loved to sit, dreaming his gorgeous waking dreams.’ Towards the close of this ‘most immemorial year’, this year in which he had lost his cousin bride Virginia (née Clemm, 1822-1847), the assumed subject of “Annabel Lee”, he wrote his weird monody of “Ulalume”. Like so many of his poems it was autobiographical, and, on the poet’s own authority, we are informed that it was, ‘in its basis, although not in the precise correspondence of time, simply historical.’”

Andrew Lang, so comparatively poetic in his essay on Poe⁶, wrote – in what would have been a perfect reference to this poem – that “his spirit was always beating against the gate of the grave.”     

14. Eldorado

The myth of the Golden Man drew numerous conquistadors and adventurers into odysseys of hardship and often death in the remote highlands of Columbia and Ecuador. The persistent legend, like that of Cibolà and other fabulous cities of gold, is a symbol of the mad quest; perhaps Poe saw this as a parable for his own life, striving for golden horizons, forever lost in a wilderness of one’s own choosing. Possibly he came to see death as “the Valley of Shadow” leading to the final pass, with the bright horizon of peace at last beyond. Dulac’s striking painting depicts the rider galloping dead in the saddle, head bowed, urged on by a mocking Death against the black blue of space. The poem was first published in the April 21, 1849, issue of the Bostonian weekly story paper The Flag of Our Union. If the four sestets were indeed inspired by the California Gold Rush, Dulac’s image reaches out to depict the infinity of despair that inevitably follows the impossible quest, with only a life wasted as unique accomplishment. It is possibly the most powerful image in the book.

15. The Conqueror Worm

“Out — out are the lights — out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm that the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’ And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”

In the guise of a grotesque epilogue, a heavy grey curtain falls on the ashen and inert figures that litter the ground beneath gloomy pillars, like bones from the decaying carcass of some colossal prehistoric beast. Dulac illustrated the final stanza of Poe’s desolate poem “The Conqueror Worm”, first published in 1843 in  Graham’s Magazine  (see caption 25), and then apparently added to a revised version of the short story “Ligeia” , as a suitably morose and melodramatic lament composed by the dying heroine. According to Killis Campbell (1872-1937), editing a 1917 publication of Poe’s poetry¹², “The title was probably suggested…..by (a stanza from) a poem of Spencer Wallis (sic) Cone’s:

 
 ‘Lay him upon no bier,
But on his knightly shield;
 The warrior’s corpse uprear,
And bear him from the field.
Spread o’er his rigid form
The banner of his pride,
 And let him meet the conqueror worm,
With his good sword by his side.’ “

16. To the River

Doubtless Dulac’s portrayal of the elegant, ebony-haired damsel gazing at a pair of swans – symbolic of beauty, grace and fidelity – as they drift serenely on the water, was inspired by the following lines of this poem, “To the River”, published in 1828: “Fair river! In thy bright, clear flow Of crystal, wandering water, Thou art an emblem of the glow Of beauty — the unhidden heart —.”  He would surely be at one with Poe’s own belief¹³ that the true poet perceives Poetry “ – in the gleaming of silver rivers – in the repose of sequestered lakes – in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of birds – in the harp of Æolus – in the sighing of the night-wind – in the repining voice of the forest – in the surf that complains to the shore – in the fresh breath of the woods – in the scent of the violet – in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth – in the suggestive odour that comes to him, at eventide, from far-distant, undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored.” An echo of the exotic elements Dulac appeared to employ in the poetry of his own paintings and illustrations. Yet the perception of the poet or the artist also interprets beauty, and finds enchantment, in the simplest of experiences. So the pure and lyrical perfection of birdsong is comparable to the more elusive magic discovered in distant lands of make-believe.

 17 & 18. Al Aaraaf

Apparently based on stories from the Qu’ran, this was published by Poe in a collection dated 1829. The poet and critic George E. Woodberry (1855-1930)¹⁴ provided the following overview: “In the rapid growth of (Poe’s) intelligence, beauty, which had been merely a source of emotion, became an object of thought, — an idea as well as an inspiration. It was the first of the great moulding ideas of life that he apprehended. Naturally his juvenile fancy at once personified it as a maiden, Nesace, and, seeking a realm for her to preside over, found it in Al Aaraaf, — not the narrow wall between heaven and hell which in Moslem mythology is the place of the dead who are neither good nor bad, but the burning star observed by Tycho Brahe, which the poet imagines to be the abode of those spirits, angelic or human, who choose, instead of that tranquility which makes the highest bliss, the sharper delights of love, wine, and pleasing melancholy, at the price of annihilation in the moment of their extremest joy.” The descriptive passages explaining the poem continue at some length, but Woodberry concludes: “Of course, as a serious work it was a failure….(The obscure allegory)….was pardonable only in a boy. (This was amongst the earliest of Poe’s published poems.)

Dulac’s first illustration conjures the verses: “To lone lake that smiles, In its dream of deep rest, At the many star-isles That enjewel its breast — Where wild flowers, creeping, Have mingled their shade, On its margin is sleeping Full many a maid — “  In cool shades of lilac and blue, two of those aforementioned maidens recline, nymph-like, by the limpid waters of the lake. Their languid perfection of form is defined by an image of drowsy bliss. In the second painting, surrounded by distant starlight, “a maiden-angel and her seraph-lover” are seated “Upon a mountain crag” set above a cloudscape. And “Young Angelo”, beside his inamorata Ianthe, “ scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie……..his dark eye bent With eagle gaze along the firmament…”  This is the pair – in Dulac’s painting curiously without expression, and lifeless for lovers – whom, Woodberry explains, “cannot hear the summons (from Nesace, that all her subjects should attend her) because of their mutual passion, and so in reminiscences of the past and dreams of the future: “Thus, in discourse, the lovers whiled away The night that waned and waned and brought no day. They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.”

19. Bridal Ballad

Dulac chose suitably subdued cerulean shades for this illustration to the poem Bridal Ballad, dating from 1837. The painting captures a new bride, with wedding wreath still worn upon her brow, as she contemplates her doomed past love amidst a solemn setting of mournful cypress trees. By marrying another, after her first betrothed fell in battle, the bride, with her expression of misplaced melancholy, appears to beseech forgiveness of her lost beloved: “ And, though my faith be broken, And, though my heart be broken, Here is a ring, as token That I am happy now! Would God I could awaken! For I dream I know not how! And my soul is sorely shaken Lest an evil step be taken, — Lest the dead who is forsaken May not be happy now.”

20. To Helen

This, perhaps one of Dulac’s most strikingly literal portrayals of Poe’s words, illustrates the poem “To Helen” originally composed in 1831, followed by a revised version in 1845. Beneath the title is a note that “‘Helen’ was Mrs Stannard, whose death also inspired Lenore.” The classically draped figure, shrouded by surrounding shadows, and holding aloft a light that mirrors the starlit backdrop of a midnight blue sky, perfectly reflects the final verse: Lo! In yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within they hand! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land.

A lengthy memoir⁸  of Poe includes a reflection on his first encounter with Mrs. Helen Stannard, the subject of these verses:

“He one day accompanied a schoolmate to his home…where he saw for the first time Mrs. H(elen) S(tannard); the mother of his young friend. This lady, on entering the room, took his hand and spoke some gentle and gracious words of welcome which so penetrated the sensitive heart of the orphan boy as to deprive him of the power of speech, and for a time almost of consciousness itself. He returned home in a dream, with but one thought, one hope in life – to hear again the sweet and gracious words that had made the desolate world so beautiful to him, and filled his lonely heart with the oppression of a new joy. This lady afterward became the confident (sic) of all his boyish sorrows, and hers was the one redeeming influence that saved and guided him in the earlier days of his turbulent and passionate youth.”

 The account adds that Poe admitted much later in his life that “his exquisite stanzas…were inspired by the memory of this lady, by ‘the one idolatrous and purely ideal love’ of his tempest-tossed boyhood.”

A further revelation is provided by the fact that after Mrs. Stannard’s death and burial in a neighbourhood cemetery, “her poor boyish admirer could not endure the thought of her lying there lonely and forsaken in her vaulted home” and apparently made visits to the grave for months afterwards. “When the nights were very dreary and cold, when the autumnal rains fell, and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest and came away most regretfully.”

21. The Valley of Unrest

Illustration for The Valley of Unrest, Poe’s poem first dated 1831, and doubtless depicting “….The sad valley’s restlessness. Nothing there is motionless — Nothing save the airs that brood Over the magic solitude.” Dulac’s landscape – perhaps less imaginary than Poe’s – reflects that restlessness in the churning clouds that spill over looming crags, the rushing of water, bordered by the contrasting stillness of enduringly rooted trees. The original poem was entitled “The Valley Nis”, and renamed in 1845. This was apparently a companion piece to “The City in the Sea” ( see caption 11), and according to Poe’s unpublished notes, the fabulous landscapes of make-believe and the mind’s eye are bathed in equally fantastical light. Although Dulac’s illustration is recognizably real, it is suffused by that magical radiance, despite the dismal headpiece that echoes the desolation of a now silent and deserted dell.

22. To – Mrs. Marie Louise Shew

A note beneath the title of this poem “To — — —“ identifies the individual as Marie Louise Shew (1821-1877), a close friend and confidante of Poe and his wife Virginia, whom Mrs. Shew supported  during the latter’s illness. It was published in the Columbian Magazine of March 1848. Dulac chose soft and dreamlike tints to portray a romanticized vision of female perfection, placed on a pedestal by the poet.    “This standing motionless upon the golden Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams. Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista, And thrilling as I see, …Amid empurpled vapours, far away To where the prospect terminates — thee only.”

23. Israfel

Published in 1831, the poem Israfel is preceded by a quote beneath the mystical monochrome headpiece: “And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. — Koran.” The opening lines echo this: “In Heaven a spirit doth dwell ‘Whose heart-strings are a lute;’ None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy Stars (so legends tell) Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute.” That artful weaver of stories and enchantments, the aforementioned Andrew Lang (see caption 5), perfectly conjures an association with this poem, by concluding his 1906 essay on Poe with these words: “When all is said, Poe remains a master of fantastic and melancholy sound. Some foolish old legend tells of a musician who surpassed all his rivals. His strains were unearthly sad, and ravished the ears of those who listened with a strange melancholy. Yet his viol had but a single string, and the framework was fashioned out of a dead woman’s breast-bone. Poe’s verse — the parallel is much in his own taste — resembles that player’s minstrelsy. It is morbidly sweet and mournful, and all touched on that single string, which thrills to the dead and immortal affection.”⁶

In a symmetry of sepia tones, Edmund Dulac’s headpiece beautifully interprets the stanzas. His colour illustration defines a much more solid figure soaring heavenward on heavily-plumed wings, amidst what must surely be an example of the  “complication of colour” regretted by The Studio’s critic. Certainly the arcs of colour and cloud that surround the figure of Israfel, whilst suggestive of the aether, seem curiously ill-suited to the surprisingly earthly substance of the angel’s nonetheless elegant form.   

24. Fairyland

Fairyland was published in 1829. On “a mountain’s eminence”, Dulac’s misty-blue and many-turreted castle towers over winding river and dimly visible valley stretching out into the distance of a pale dreamscape below. A flock of tiny, fantastical birds (or perhaps “…those butterflies, Of Earth, who seek the skies,”) spiral “in a labyrinth of light” towards a luminous sun, limning “Dim vales — and shadowy floods — And cloudy-looking woods”. Only the castle lacks the exquisite lightness of touch that characterized Edmund Dulac’s orientalist paintings for folk and fairy-tale, and fails to convincingly evoke the ethereal landscapes of sleep.

25. Dreamland

First published in 1844, this poem appeared (without any form of illustration) in Volume XXV of Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature & Art (embellished with mezzotint and steel engravings, music, etc.). George R. Graham (1813-1894), the proprietor, produced the periodical at 98, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. He shared the editorship with Edgar Allan Poe, whom he hired early in 1841. Poe also acted as the magazine’s literary critic. In keeping with this, an article penned by him, and a separate book review, appeared in the same volume as the poem.

Amidst predominant shades of turquoise and deepest blue, Dulac’s own dream vision of “…an Eidolon, named Night, On a black throne…upright,” enigmatic as a Sphinx, more solid than any mirage, rises over the landscape like an ancient monolith. The rendering in silver-tinged blue-grey, set against the faint glimmer of starlight, lends the figure the mystic and phantasmal allure of some long-forgotten goddess “From this ultimate dim Thule.”

(Had he lived longer, Poe might well have pored over with curiosity, and perhaps been inspired to explore farther horizons, by a publication of Blanchard & Lea, also of Philadelphia. In 1856 An Atlas of Classical Geography, compiled by William Hughes (1817-1876) & George Long (1800-1879), appeared, complete with accompanying maps, and included – in a plate of The World as known to the Ancients – the fabled isle of Thule, located close to the Shetland Islands, surrounded by those stormy seas beyond the northerly tip of Scotland, which must have seemed to be then, most suitably, the very edge of the Earth.)

26. Alone

Dulac’s illustration to the poem “Alone”, published in 1829, is almost a mirror image of The Wanderer Above the Mists, a painting executed circa 1817-18 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Poe may well have responded in spirit to the morbidly beautiful studies of ruined abbeys, ancient graveyards and other haunting visions of solitude set alongside the grandeur of Nature, or amidst crumbling and forlorn human edifices. The drifting clouds shaped into some strange and preternatural bird take the place of the obscuring mists, and clearly represent the last lines of the poem: “From the thunder and the storm, And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.”

 27 & 28. Tamerlane

Tamerlane, an epic poem written in 1827, when Poe was only in his eighteenth year, focuses on the mighty Mongol warrior from mythic Samarkand, otherwise known as Tamburlaine (1336-1405), or in the Persian tongue, “Taimur-lang”, Timur the Lame. On his deathbed, the Scythian shepherd who was to become a fierce and legendary conqueror, bestriding his empire like a colossus, apparently mourns the mortal emotions of love and loss. Reliving the memories of his fabled life, the formidable monarch who emerged from the humblest of origins recollects first love and the bitter cost of his ambitions. This is one of the aspects of the poem that Dulac chose to illustrate, where the more youthful Tamerlane, arms aloft in ardent aspiration, appears to gaze far beyond the slender figure of a young peasant girl, standing submissively in his shadow. Reflecting on his lifetime, this “diadem’d outlaw” ‘s memories of conquest and power are dimmed by his nostalgia and poignant longing for that pure and long lost love. “We grew in age – and love – together, Roaming the forest, and the wild; My breast her shield in wintry weather –“. Less romantically, in reality the brooding warlord had nine wives, and – concurrently – a number of concubines, throughout the charted course of his extraordinary existence.

The second illustration shows Tamerlane at the height of his historic rampage through the kingdoms that subsequently fell to his merciless campaigns. Dulac’s palette evokes the sciroccan dust of a barren, vanquished landscape, echoing the now harsh and brutal countenance of the mature, battle-worn but victorious warmonger. Even his horse is given a chamfrein that accentuates the look of peculiar ferocity in its eyes. This perhaps calls forth the playwright Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-1593) presentation of  “Tamburlaine the Great”, circa 1587. At the heart of this was one wife, Zenocrate, upon whose death the savage tyrant is said in his torment to have put to the torch the town close to the encampment where she died:

“As I have conquer’d kingdoms with my sword.

This cursed town will I consume with fire,

Because this place bereft me of my love.”

Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, Act Two, Scene 4, lines 136-138.

This could almost be Tamburlaine callously contemplating the cruel consequences of his grief.

In Poe’s own notes to the edition of 1827, he pointed out that: Of the history of Tamerlane little is known; and with that I have taken the full liberty of the poet. — That he was descended from the family of Zinghis Khan is more than probable —but he is vulgarly supposed to have been the son of a shepherd, and to have raised himself to the throne by his own address.” He added further on “………..I must beg the reader’s pardon for making Tamerlane, a Tartar of the fourteenth century, speak in the same language as a Boston gentleman of the nineteenth; but of the Tartar mythology we have little information.”¹⁵

~~~

“I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.”

Edgar Allan Poe – from his essay “The Poetic Principle”.¹³

The merging of that melancholy beauty manifested in Poe’s poetry, with Edmund Dulac’s exquisite mirroring of thoughts and feelings so powerfully evoked in a myriad verses, was perhaps an adventurous decision at the time, especially as a number of earlier illustrators had chosen a more conventional approach to interpreting the poems. But these two storytellers, born at the beginning and end of the nineteenth century, yet bound together by their artistic beliefs, each employed the devices of their distinctive crafts to create a book that still beguiles the reader to this day.

~~~

In preludes to the poetry, Dulac decorated the book with simple monochrome headpieces ~ the sounds of the titular bells given bizarre and hideously distorted faces; the eponymous raven perched balefully on a rock; the haunted gaze of the cadaverous horseman, doomed to search eternally – to seek but never to find; beautiful Israfel, surrounded by heavenly song; Death surveying with grim satisfaction a drowning city lapped by the relentless surge of Stygian waters. These cryptic prologues capture the essence of the poems, and serve to complement the sumptuous detail of those colour illustrations through which the artist breathed afresh a vivid and vital spirit into Edgar Allan Poe’s elegiac visions.

Pen & ink illustrations for The Raven, Lenore and The City in the Sea.

Pen & ink illustrations for Eldorado, Al Aaraaf and The Valley of Unrest

Pen & ink illustrations for Israfel, The Coliseum and Tamerlane.

~~~

Footnotes.

^{1.Information for this and various other facts and dates found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica ↩}

<sup>2.“It was early in the summer that he one day called and complained that he 
had to write a poem, but felt no inspiration. Mrs. Shew persuaded him to 
drink some tea in a conservatory whose open windows admitted the sound  
of church-bells, and gave him some paper………(she) then wrote, “The Bells, by E. A. Poe”, 
and added, “The bells, the little silver bells;”………(and after this) 
“The heavy iron bells,”………Poe….headed it, “By Mrs. M. L. Shew” and called it 
her poem.”  Quoted – and purportedly derived from Mrs. Shew’s diary – in
Edgar Allan Poe, by George E. Woodberry. The American Men of Letters 
series, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York, in
1913. Chapter VII. “The End of the Play”. Page 302. ↩</sup>

^{3.The Genius of Christianity; or, The Spirit and Beauty of the Christian 
Religion. Translated from the French by Charles Ignatius White (1807-
1878). Published by John Murphy & Co. Baltimore, and J. B. Lippincott
& Co. Philadelphia. 1871. Part the Fourth. Worship. Book I. Churches, 
Ornaments, Singing, Prayers, etc. Chapter I. Of Bells. Pages 479-481. The
Alarm bells referred to remembrance of the French Revolution. ↩}

^{4. See footnote 2. Edgar Allan Poe. Ibid. Page 303:
“Il nous semble que si nous étions poëte, nous ne dédaignerions point 
cette cloche ‘agitée par les fantômes’ dans la vieille chapelle de la forêt, 
ni celle qu’une religieuse frayeur balançoit dans nos campagnes pour 
écarter le tonnerre, ni celle qu’on sonnoit la nuit, dans certains ports de 
mer, pour diriger le pilote à travers les écueils. Les carillons des cloches, 
au milieu de nos fêtes, sembloient augmenter l’allégresse publique; dans des 
calamités, au contraire, ces mêmes bruits devenoient terribles. Les cheveux 
dressent encore sur la tête au souvenir de ces jours de meurtre et de feu, 
retentissant des clameurs du tocsin. Qui nous a perdu la mémoire de ces 
hurlements, de ces cris aigus, entrecoupés de silences, durant lesquels on 
distinguoit de rares coups de fusil, quelque voix lamentable et solitaire, et 
surtout le bourdonnement de la cloche d’alarme, ou le son de l’horloge qui 
frappoit tranquillement l’heure écoulée?” (From an edition published in 1836
by P. Pourrat Frères. Paris.) ↩}

^{5. Encyclopaedia Britannica. ↩}

^{7. Taken from verses* by the present-day poet Dannie Abse (b. 1923), unexpectedly apposite in the unusual context of past poetry, painting and song? * “Two Voices. I. A Woman to a Man.” Originally published by Hutchinson of London in Poems, Golders Green — 1962. ↩}

^{8. Excerpt from the memoir printed as a preface to Poe’s Poems, published in the 1890s by The Henneberry Company of Chicago & New York.  Several memoirs of Poe appeared in posthumous publications of his poetry, this one – sympathetic in tone – was apparently the work of his fellow writer and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867). The volume included an essay on “Death of Edgar A. Poe”, also penned by Willis. See also captions 13 & 20. ↩}

^{9. Excerpt from the brief introductory note to an edition of Lenore published in 1886 by Estes & Lauriat, of Boston, and illustrated by the acclaimed Canadian artist and photographer Henry Sandham (1842-1912). ↩}

^{10. Sarah Helen Whitman (née Power, 1803-1878). A poet, Spiritualist, and one of Poe’s romantic interests. As the above excerpt illustrates (see caption 13), she apparently corresponded with a number of his biographers ↩}

^{11. Quoted in “Edgar Allan Poe”, by George E. Woodberry. The American Men of Letters series, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York. 1913. Chapter VI. “In New York”, page 214. ↩}

^{12. In notes for The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Killis Campbell. Published by Ginn & Company, Boston & New York, in 1917.  The verse by Spencer Wallace Cone (1819-1888) is taken from “The Proud Ladye”, (stanza III, verse 1), and verse 2 continues in like vein:
“To the dark grave we go, 
Bearing the proud and great, 
Where quick decay will know
 Nor title nor estate…..” ↩}

^{13. Excerpt from Poe’s 1848-9 lecture, “The Poetic Principle”. Reproduced as an essay in a number of posthumous publications, but taken here from The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe: With Three Essays on Poetry. Edited by Reginald Brimley Johnson (1867-1932). Humphrey Milford. Oxford University Press. London. 1919. ↩}

^{14. See Footnote 11. Ibid. Chapter III. “Wanderings”, page 48. ↩}

^{15. Notes on Tamerlane taken from The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Collected, Edited, and Arranged with Memoir, Textual Notes and Bibliography by J. H. Whitty. With illustrations. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York. 1917.    ↩}

I am sorry to have been so much out of touch these last few years; working in a fantasy universe in a country which is already quite fantastical to many people, perched as it is on the lower rim of the Antipodes, it is hard to keep up with life as I used to know it.

With such fabulous landscapes, it’s hard to even keep a sense of self; the tendency is to disappear into the cloud and mist, so to speak, or to be swept away by the wind (which can happen here physically as well as metaphorically, and one is often left hanging on to handholds with both body and spirit).

I also seem to spend a lot of time wandering along the edges of things. Here at the edge of the world, it seems there are edges everywhere, where all you can do is hold on to your hat and peer out (in a few cases, trying to hold onto my lunch as well in particularly bumpy helicopter rides}. I find myself clinging to a lot of rocks watching waves crash at my feet – and on my feet, which usually entails a long slog in damp jeans back to my vehicle, which is invariably parked miles away (and usually uphill). I climb a lot of slopes and scramble up tree trunks, and haven’t dropped my camera. Yet.

P.S. I hope you got all the postcards

Dear X,
This is the place; the cliffs and waterfalls are unmistakable. Most definitely at the foot of the pinnacle where Asgaard stands in the high mist. Can you imagine Svadilfari hauling great blocks of rough-quarried stone up there for the Walling?  I hope I can find a way up one day, I know that the first ramparts are just out of sight in the cloud.
Writing this in some haste, as the helicopters have started warming up. We are off to search for Beorn’s abode, which quite frankly seems a little risky to me. Doesn’t he turn into a bear after nightfall?

Dear X,
The Shire at last! I can’t make out any Hobbits from this height, but they are quite small and apparently terribly good at hiding. I’d certainly scurry for cover if five red helicopters suddenly buzzed overhead. I think our approach should be more discrete, but the producers say my suggestion we go by pony is too hard to organize.

Dear X,
I guess I spooked them, and suddenly they lumbered off into the sea. (I’m guessing Behemoth, I don’t think Leviathan has legs.) Gave me a fright, though! I was lucky to get this photo before they got to deep water. I consulted Blake’s bestiary when I got back home. Very clearly he has seen them as well. (You stumble upon this kind of thing quite a lot when you wander along the Apophenian shores.)

Dear X,
Doesn’t it look like a suitably tulgey wood for a Jabberwock to whiffle and burble? I particularly like the fact that it goes back in there forever, even when I can see the skyline all around. An antipodean Ryhope Wood. I was tempted to go in and see what mythagos might appear. (I went in anyway; no mythagos, but found some lovely photos.)

Dear X,
Well, it WAS there. So naturally I had to climb it. And several others in the vicinity. People keep hollering at me to get back down. I keep trying to explain I’m on the lookout for Warg riders, but nobody takes me seriously. Something about crying Warg, or am I getting my fables mixed up? But honestly, don’t you think these are what would’ve happened if Henry Moore had raised statues on Rapa Nui? (Alien assistance optional, of  course.)

Dear X,
Here I am halfway up Yggdrasil! (If I’d known it was going to be such a climb, I’d have packed a more sustaining lunch.) There’s a LOT of non-native wildlife up here: a squirrel, a couple of ravens, I even think I saw a stag! Nary a weta, a tūī or a kākāpō in sight, though. Hope I can find a post office. Hope they have stamps.

Dear X,
Yes, it IS a dragon, no mistake. A sea dragon, of course. I nearly walked right by without noticing, which would have been foolish, as they are so rarely seen. Even this one looked nothing like a dragon from any other angle. Isn’t it strange how well things hide in plain sight?

Dear X,
The trees here are VERY strange. Perhaps it is the Coriolis effect? I haven’t tried the experiment of seeing which way the whirlpool forms in the sink, but the trees do seem odd.

Dear X,
This is the path to Tír na nÓg; walk out to sea on the path of the setting sun and you can reach the OtherWorld, or maybe the Fortunate Isles. This is the path that recedes but does not narrow, passing between dimensions, and therefore between worlds. Mirage, rainbow, all illusions that situate us at one distinct point are signposts to the other side. Unfortunately, the path sinks with the sun so I decided not to risk it. Echtrai and imramma are best dreamed about from the safety of shore, watching the deepening dusk.

I confess that everything caught up with me, and what I had planned as a short break from newsletters turned into a rather longer one. Work continues unabated, and given that I have been doing a little moonlighting as well, finding enough hours in the day has been difficult.

Additionally, this newsletter isn’t really one, more just  a sign of life than anything else, and the opportunity to rekindle my own energy and continue on with them as before. This said, I haven’t been wholly idle, and have done a few illustrations for board game covers, as well as a very exciting little project for a London publisher, a preface for a book, and several interviews for web sites and magazines, all of which quickly make weekends and evenings disappear with surprising ease.

Here is an interview with the wide-ranging cultural site Sound Colour Vibration. The others will follow when they go on line.

Gormenghast is one of the novels I most admire, so when Sophisticated Games asked if I would consider doing a cover for a board game based on Mervyn Peake’s astonishing universe, I hope my haste to accept didn’t appear unseemly. My only regret was not being able to work in a wide landscape format, and extend the square illustration as much again to both the left and the right.

The Gormenghast Boardgame

Additionally, I’d like to thank all who shared links and helped promote the sale of a sketch that Alan and I did for Robin’s Relief. The sketch has been sold, with a winning bid of US $3650.00. Thanks everyone.

Things are very busy at the day job, and equally busy once I get off work, so I hope you will pardon the brevity of this blog entry.  Once I sketch my way out of my current corner, I’ll be picking up themes and subjects temporarily abandoned before the Christmas break,  and hopefully packing my camera and getting out for more weekend treks.

So, all in all, lots going on, and the perpetual scramble to keep up. But, I’ll be back. See you next month!

We’ll be starting at 5 p.m., and hopefully will be able to do at very least a signature for everyone. Twenty tickets will be handed out for drawings, so best reserve yours quick.

See you there!

Dédicace, 25 janvier, 2013

The following text was written last August in Wellington, for Gary Raymond’s “3-Minute J.R.R. Tolkien: A Visual Biography of The World’s Most Revered Fantasy Writer”, published by Ivy Press. It is reproduced here with their permission.

MYTH-MAKING FOR THE MODERN MAN

Clearly, we humans need myths. Every age of humanity has created them, to recount, to remind us of those things which carry meanings so crucial to our survival as a species. But, as we progress, we leave myths by the wayside and we find others that contain new versions of the truths we require. In our scientific age, we no longer “believe” in myths, we have other explanations that suffice. Science and technology, reason and psychology; we have many explanations and much knowledge to tell us who and where we are in the universe.

But we still carry myths with us. We create them ceaselessly – from historic concepts of noble savages to last week’s urban legends. Ideologies are mythologized, we bust myths, we refute them, we dissect and collate them, we consign them to scholarly seminars and children’s books. We dutifully display them, as truthful “untruths”, in the non-fiction section of our libraries.

Mythical tales are never untruthful, they reflect the irrepressible desire for things as they should be, they are stories that allow us to be reconciled with the human condition, with death, with our forever-lost origins and other unanswered questions. (Science and religion adamantly provide explanations, but they demand the rejection or qualification of other answers.)

But we don’t tell myths any more. We feel we’ve grown out of them in a way, and that meaning must be explicit to be understood. Naturally, we are wrong, because the “truth” of myth is never signposted. It is cloaked and encrypted in symbol and allegory, it is linked to etymology and history, it is not an itemized set of reminders or a simple cautionary tale.

A century ago, T. E. Hulme qualified Romanticism as “spilt religion”. Today, he might well have said the same of modern fantasy and our appetite for it. Much fantasy is more form than substance, but occasionally an author redefines the genre with an enduring and personal revisiting of those themes that have been ever-present in myth since they began being told.

Myths are stories from which time has stripped much meaning. If we are dutiful readers, we know the symbolism of each character, who personifies the seasons, how earth-diving creation myths came about, which pagan gods have become saints. We can follow the threads from culture to culture, but while it does inform us, it does not necessarily take us on a journey. But it is undoubtedly on a journey through myth that J. R. R. Tolkien invites us. The underlying density of his tales is built on those things he did not invent but which he spent a lifetime diligently mapping. And, as with all true myths, we are caught up in the story, swept along by the narrative, and reach the end with the odd sentiment that we have understood something, although we cannot put our fingers on it. And nor should we.

Our grasp of the meaning of Middle-Earth should be intuitive, as instinctive as the author’s need to weave those meanings into his narrative. But our connection with the mythology of this fantasy landscape need not stop there. Tolkien’s work can be seen as an open door into an invigorating and eternally relevant world vision; it can help us understand the worlds of those who created the myth cycles we all know in far drier and more scholarly or comparative forms, to make them magic again. Tolkien invites us to imagine being swept away in the depth and breadth of a telling and to blink at the sudden making of sense that has come unawares.

Enchantment is not simply entertainment, it is an opportunity for deeper understanding of the world and humanity’s place in it.

We need myths. We would do well to listen attentively when they are told so well.

3-Minute J.R.R. Tolkien: A Visual Biography of The World’s Most Revered Fantasy Writer 

 by Gary Raymond 

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Ivy Press
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1908005831
• ISBN-13: 978-1908005830

A visual biography of the world’s most revered fantasy writer.  As Peter Jackson’s cinematic hobbits set forth, 3-Minute J.R.R. Tolkien celebrates the enduring influence of the world’s most revered fantasy writer. It offers a readable, absorbing structure, dividing J.R.R. Tolkien’s life and cultural contribution into 60 neat portions, every one digestible in a mere three minutes: 20 mini-sections each on Life, Work and Influence. From a childhood inventing new languages in the sylvan landscape of the Severn valley, through a First World War that saw him witness the horrors of the Somme, to academic success founded on a passion for Old English tales, we trace Tolkien’s life and look at the way in which it informs his creation of imaginary worlds so intricately mapped that modern readers, writers and artists continue to explore them in a quest for their myths, monsters and meaning.

The book will be published December 15, 2012. More about it here.

IMAGINE FX

The latest issue of ImagineFX is out, with a very good article on a couple of concept artists… It’s available from all good newsagents, or directly from the publisher via download.You can also see more of the artwork here.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

Well, there isn’t a lot of other news, to tell the truth. The last few months have been so very busy that I look back and wonder how on earth everyone involved managed to get everything done… I had thought that the production had been busy – scrambling to keep ahead of the set builders and the two film units – but it turns out that post-production made that period feel like something of a vacation. But, three years and eight months to the day after stepping off a plane in Wellington airport, the movie is finally out. One down, two to go…

Right now, having a bit of a break, and a change of pace and subject, writing a little, working on other illustrations and projects. While I’m not entirely sure that there will be a newsletter in January (though it never pays to say never), I will do my best to continue on with them as  regularly as possible from February on.

All the very very best and most heartfelt wishes to you all, and see you next year!

Thanks to all the fans who lined the red carpet, many of them there since the early morning just to get a spot. Their enthusiasm was matched only by their volume.

It’s easy to forget that without a public most forms of art and spectacle would simply not exist. Most sincere thanks to all those people who were there. I hope you remembered to bring sunscreen.

Here are a few more photos, courtesy of 111Emergency, who clearly had a good spot, a quality camera and a fine eye:

On another note, I didn’t manage a newsletter for November, like some suddenly rudderless ship, it hit the Deadline Shoals and sank without a trace in the Sea of Notenoughtime…. Things have been very very busy, especially of late. I have been keeping notes, though, these last three and a half years, so perhaps one day I’ll be able to write a proper account of it all.

In the meantime, things have calmed down a little, so I am hoping to resume newsletters as usual very shortly.

The timeless tale of Don Quixote is a voyage within a voyage. Like all journeys, the spiritual and physical are interwoven, entwined, inextricable. Misadventures, detours, predicaments; all with such a noble heart that “quixotic” was already an adverb by the 18^th century. So much has been written of Don Quixote in general that you won’t find me embarked on such a foolish quest. Instead, I’d like to concentrate briefly on one small episode: the Ingenious Hidalgo’s Imaginary Flight.

 At a ducal court (we are not told where), Don Quixote makes the acquaintance of the Countess Trifaldi, known as the “Duenna Dolorida” – the Distressed One – on account of her unfortunate and rather bristly beard. This curiously afflicted Countess relates to Don Quixote the tale of an extraordinary steed, a wooden horse capable of flight and great speed, governed by turning a peg in his forehead. Property of the magician Malambruno, workmanship of the sage Merlin, this wondrous steed’s name “is not Pegasus, as was that of Bellerophon ; nor Bucephalus, as was that of Alexander the Great ; nor Brigliador, as was that of Orlando Furioso ; nor is it Bayarte, which belonged to Reynaldos of Montalvan ; nor Frontino, which was Rogero’s: nor is it Boötes, nor Pyrithous, as they say the horses of the sun are called; neither is he called Orelia, the horse which the unfortunate Roderigo, the last king of the Goths in Spain mounted.” He is none of those; his name is Clavileño the Winged,  “which name answers to his being of wood, to the peg in his forehead, and to the swiftness of his motion…” Clavileño “neither eats nor sleeps, nor wants any shoeing, and ambles such a pace through the air, without wings, that his rider may carry a dishful of water in his hand, with- out spilling a drop, he travels so smooth and easy...”

And even more extraordinary, Clavileño is about to arrive, courtesy of the mage Malambruno, and would Don Quixote dare take flight on his back? His success, he is assured, will rid the Duenna Dolorida and her ladies of their uncomely beards, product of a sortilege cast by the same Malambruno. And the horse arrives, pushed forward into the torchlight by wild men garbed in leaves.

Naturally, Quixote is eager to depart, he will not even bother to wait for “either cushions or spurs, so great is [his] desire to see [her] ladyship and these [her] unfortunate friends shaven and clean”. Sancho Panza, on the other hand, would prefer to leave the Dolorida with her whiskers and stay with his feet firmly on the ground. Nevertheless, both mount, are blindfolded, and the extraordinary flight begins.

Of course it is a farce. Neither rider dares peek under the mask, Quixote because it would not be noble manners to distrust his hosts, Sancho because he is of a prudent nature, always torn between the desire to believe his master’s fantasies and his down-to-earth peasant nature. He contents himself to hold tight, just in case.

The celebrants make a rushing wind with a bellows, they singe the riders with torches, Clavileño rocks and bucks and finally explodes when the fireworks that stuff his innards are lit. The two intrepid travelers are hurled to the ground. They pick themselves up, remove the blindfolds, and see the assistance lying dazed on the ground as well, clearly mazed by the fabulous landing. When they come to, Quixote recounts his adventure, and thanks to his bravery, the Dolorida and her accompanying Duennas’ beards have indeed vanished. (Along with their owners it seems; typically gallant, Don Quixote had not thought it strange, or at any rate he was too well mannered to remark, on originally meeting the Duenna, that she had “a voice rather harsh and coarse than clear and delicate”. Gustave Doré himself depicts rather masculine-looking “ladies”, to say the least.)

The episode is quickly concluded, it is tempting to chalk it up to Don Quixote’s noble credulity and unbridled imagination as a caricature of the heroic adventure, but a closer look brings fascinating facets into focus.

The first is Clavileño (literally “wooden peg”). His fabrication credited to Merlin is of course invented by Cervantes, but magical wooden steeds had already made their appearance in literature.

A similar horse, controlled by a wooden peg in the neck, although more exquisitely carved in ivory and ebony, according to the tale, once belonged to a mysterious sage from the Indies, and was displayed before the King of Persia during the festival of Nowrouz in the eternal city of Shiraz. Astride the marvelous mount, the Prince of Persia, Firouz Schah – rescues the Princess of Bengal and returns to Shiraz, all in the space of a single night and a day. The tale comes to us from the Thousand and One Nights. The original stories (like Aesop’s Fables, the archetypal corpus was much augmented with successive retellings and publications) come from 12^th-century Persia.

The Enchanted Horse also appears in “The Squire’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer, though this time he is made of brass.

“This same steede shal bere yow evere moore
Withouten harm, til ye be ther yow leste,
Though that ye slepen on his bak or reste;
And turne ayeyn, with writhyng of a pyn.”

(This self-same steed will bear you evermore
Without least harm, till you have gained your quest,
Although you sleep upon his back, or rest;
And he’ll return, by twisting of a pin.)

EDMUND DULAC (1882-1953). From: The Story of the Magic Horse. Stories from the  Arabian Nights. Retold by Laurence Housman ~ with drawings by Edmund Dulac.

Published by Hodder and Stoughton. London. 1911.

~~

Thus Clavileño’s flight path most probably begins in the Indian subcontinent, with a stopover in Shiraz, a possible detour to the British Isles, to finally land in Spain. (Cervantes is well au fait of his folklore; the horse Bayard is a local legend from the Ardennes in northern France, though he includes Boötes amongst the four horses of Helios, perhaps a confusion with Bronte.)

And what of Don Quixote’s vivid description of the heavens? Cervantes mixes medieval notions with the discoveries of Brahe, Kepler and others.  (In passing, I’m much surprised that Tycho Brahe’s extraordinary island observatory of Uraniborg has not found its way into more film and fiction.) Aristotlean and Copernican universes mesh and overlap, in the same manner that we can conceive of the heavens and of space, both somewhere above our heads. (Likewise, the Earth’s core and Hell are somehow contiguous beneath our feet.)

Of course, references to travel in the heavens or in the sky abound amongst the earliest myths, but they do not corporeally project the listener into orbit. When Icarus flies too close to the sun, we the readers are no closer to space than is a moth approaching a light bulb just above our heads. Gods are forever thrusting people and creatures into the sky to become constellations, but it is a curiously summary gesture that in no way evokes breaking free of Earth’s gravity. Only with the notion of the infinity of space does the fictional journey aloft venture truly beyond our limited sphere of experience. Mythological flights in space have little of the metaphysical journey, they are curiously pedestrian, as if to truly achieve the subliminal we must have somehow familiar surroundings. Until we were able, with the universe expanding under the gaze of astronomers, to truly imagine ourselves physically beyond the earth, the senses were in no way solicited.

Even in the scientific age, we are at a loss to describe things which are beyond our experience. Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, gives a description of his flight not dissimilar to Don Quixote’s. Lacking points of reference, language becomes lyricism, and simple words acquire a poetry of their own.

‘… I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear Earth…The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots…When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the Earth’s light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.’

‘…Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich.’

Roerich, who was one of H.P.Lovecraft’s favourite painters, and whom Lovecraft admired for the same striking palette, painted mystical landscapes, many at altitude in Tibet and the Himalayas whilst embarked on an enduring quest for Shambhala. Perhaps what Lovecraft glimpsed – from below – and Gagarin surveyed from above and recalled in Roerich’s paintings was the shared passion for the subliminal experience. The link is of course as fortuitous as a book chanced upon – or missed – but imagery requires a focus and a language; its path through literature is never linear.)

Don Quixote does his best to describe the wild ride through the heavens, but his senses mislead him. He feels the wind of the bellows and the heat of the torches, and imagines himself high above the earth.

“Don Quixote now, feeling the wind, said: ‘Without all doubt, Sancho, we must by this time have reached the second region of the air, where the hail and snows are formed: thunder and lightning are engendered in the third region; and, if we go on mounting at this rate, we shall soon reach the region of fire; and I know not how to manage this peg so as not to mount where we shall be scorched.’”

Sancho wishes to “un-hoodwink” himself and see, but Don Quixote admonishes him. (Sancho nevertheless peeks, or afterwards claims he did, but his account is so confusing and his explanation so garbled that no one lends it credence.) Finally, the firecrackers in Clavileño’s belly are lit and they make their rude landing.

Other touches are pure Cervantes: Don Quixote, instead of having a voluptuous and grateful princess hold tight to his waist and rest her pale cheek on his shoulder – Merlin had lent Clavileño to Peter of Provence, his previous rider, to carry off  “the fair Magalona”, also depicted clinging to him for dear life (by Doré and others) earlier in the Duenna’s story – has her caricature in the portly Panza, who nevertheless is constrained to mount sidesaddle. Rather than elevating his vision, Sancho’s resolutely terre-à-terre imagination reduces the Pleiades, from daughters of Atlas and the nymph Pleione, to seven little she-goats gamboling in the aether, following rural Spanish folkore. (Apparently the Pleiades are vulgarly called in Spain “the seven little she-goats”. Questioned as to whether there were no he-goats among them, Sancho replies they may not pass the horns of the moon, astral allusion to cuckoldry that would certainly have been appreciated by Cervantes’ audience.) Sancho may indeed travel the heavens, but his heart is anchored firmly to Mother Earth’s solid bosom.

Nevertheless, it is proto-science-fiction, and possibly one of literature’s first attempts to recount space travel, disguised as it is in the colourful vestments of farce. Don Quixote’s vision of space is in perfect harmony with the scientific notions of the times, and even more importantly, it is the premise of the very idea of relativity, coined by Galileo in 1632, nearly three decades after Cervantes’ death.

The simple enough yet fundamentally revolutionary idea, first hinted at in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, that such immutable things as time might well not be so reliable as we think, that time and space might be malleable, that subjective notions of time – what one feels or experiences – and objective time – as measured by precise instruments – might not always be the same, finds its complete expression only in 1916, with the “Theory of General Relativity”.

Of course this is not to say that Einstein in any way owes a debt to Cervantes, even though Don Quixote was his second-favourite novel,* but it’s tempting to think that Clavileño might have appeared briefly in his musings, like a comet flashing through the sky.

Finally, though, there is a last facet of the Imaginary Flight: its depiction in illustration. Naturally a popular scene, few artists who have undertaken the rambling odyssey of illustrating Cervantes have left it out; it brings us neatly full circle (or orbit) to relativity once more.

The vast majority of early depictions of the scene insist on the farcical nature of the evening’s entertainment. We are given the best seats amongst the sniggering spectators, invited to mock the lanky knight and his credulous squire and revel in the cruel prank. Such uniformly partial and limited perspectivism of vision ignores the pure fantasy and rapidly expanding scientific universe hidden within the tale. We have a thigh-slapping good time at the brave hidalgo’s expense, but we ignore Quixote’s vision. We do not take flight.

1. Unknown illustrator. The History of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha. Published in 1719 by R. Knaplock, D. Midwinter, J Tonson et al. London.

2. After the designs by Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694-1752). Illustrations for Don Quixote. Published in 1725 by Gerard van der Gucht. London.

3. Illustration copied after Diego de Obregón (active 1658-1699). Vida y hechos del ingenioso cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha. Published in 1735 by Antonio Sanz. Madrid. 

4. Illustration by Luis Paret y Alcázar (1746-1799) and engraved by Juan Moreno Tejada (active 1780-1810). El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Published in 1797-1798 by Gabriel de Sancha. Madrid.

5. Illustration by Célestin François Nanteuil-Leboeuf (1813-1873). Don Quijote de la Mancha. Published in 1855-1856 by Francisco de P. Mellado. Madrid.

 6. Steel engraving by Luis Ferrant y Llausas (1806-1868), one of a number of illustrators for an edition of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Published in 1880 by Biblioteca Ilustrada Espasa. Barcelona.

7. Attributed to José Luis Pellicer y Fener (1842-1901), for an edition he illustrated with Ricardo Balaca y Canseco (1844-1880). El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.  Published in 1880-1883 by Montaner & Simón. Barcelona.

 8. “Don Quixote and Clavileño”. William Strang (1859-1921). A series of thirty etchings by William Strang illustrating subjects from “Don Quixote”. Published in 1902 by Macmillan. London. Reproduced in William Strang; a catalogue of his etched work. With an introduction by Laurence Binyon. Published in 1906 by J. Maclehose & Sons. Glasgow.

~~

 

Only with the first steps of the space age, with the idea of aeronauts, balloons and like contraptions inhabiting the popular imagination, do illustrators finally take Quixote’s side, and try to imagine what his eyes were seeing, and to illustrate his extraordinary flight. It is a shame illustrators in the 17^th and 18^th centuries chose not to do so; how they would have translated the notion of a jaunt in space as conceived at the time would be a valuable complement to the science of the early astronomers.

But could they indeed have? It is as though the potentiality of experiencing flight and perhaps outer space itself was necessary to liberate Clavileño and his riders from the gravity of convention and launch them into the aether. Until Copernicus, the infinite was the realm of myth and religion – only God could be infinitely anything, only the gods could be immortal – and largely outside personal experience, despite tales of the dislocations of time involving sojourns in the realm of Faerie, which are also inevitably underground. As the universe around the Earth began to become infinite, from the blue-painted globe of the heavens on Atlas’ shoulders to a real place inconceivably immense, it is as if imagination acquired a dimensionality that it had heretofore lacked.

1. Illustration by Apeles Mestres (1854-1936). El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Published in 1879 by Juan Aleu y Fugarull. Barcelona.

2. Illustration by Gustave Doré (1832-1883). El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Volume II. Published in 1892 by L. Tasso Serra. Barcelona.

3. Illustration by L. Palao. (C19th-20th) El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Published in 1931 by Ramón Sopena. Barcelona.

 4. Illustration by Carlos Vázquez (1869-1944). Ibid.

 5.. Illustration by Enric C. Ricart (1893-1960). The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha. Published in 1933 by Limited Editions Club. New York. Printed in Barcelona by Oliva de Vilanova.

 6.. Illustration by William Heath Robinson (1872-1944). The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha. A children’s edition from the translation by Charles Jarvis (1675-1739), published post mortem* in 1953 by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. London; E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc.. New York.

*Heath Robinson had apparently completed several coloured illustrations before his death, complementing his black & white work for the 1902 publication.

7. William Heath Robinson. Ibid.

~~

While scientific knowledge and rationality can be held to put us out of touch with the irrational and the imaginative connections to our own mythology (goodness knows I’ve said it enough myself), such an evolution does indeed beg the question as to the very nature of the mechanics of the imaginary. Could Cervantes have written episodes such as the imaginary flight (Don Quixote and Sancho make an equally intriguing and extra-temporal voyage in an enchanted boat) a century or two earlier? Observers don’t begin to see UFOs until humanity is potentially capable of fabricating space vessels (see C. G. Jung’s Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1958), would it have been possible for painters to imagine space before it existed?

In closing, certainly no illustrator has bridged science and fantasy as adeptly as Cervantes’ countryman José Segrelles. Segrelles produced 105 colour plates and 126 black and white illustrations for Don Quixote over a long period (the first images were published in the Christmas edition of the Illustrated London News in 1929); they were finally united in a lavish commemorative edition entitled “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha” published in 1966 by Espasa-Calpe of Madrid. But, Spain’s finest modern illustrator was not only a creator of classics of history and legend, he was a passionate follower of man’s efforts to reach the Moon and to conquer space. His depictions of the Moon, initially done by careful observation of the craters in old bread, have an element of fervent fantasy and bold vision that make them more than science, and certainly more than science fiction, which is usually devoid of the atmosphere on which fantasy thrives so readily.

José Segrelles painted one last image of Don Quixote in 1959, one that is not included in the book. We see the fearless hidalgo, bony knees clamped to Clavileño’s rigid flanks, Sancho Panza hanging on for dear life behind, plunging directly down towards the cratered face of the moon, in the same trajectory Eagle must have taken. José Segrelles died on March 3^rd, 1969. Three and a half months later, the first man landed on the moon. Curiously, Neil Armstrong failed to mention the hoof-prints of a wooden horse, but Cervantes would certainly have approved.

From left to right: A misty morning in Hobbiton, a window in Bag End (the study, I believe) and a modest Hobbit dwelling.

THROUGH WILDERLAND

It’s easy to get lost in Wilderland.

Professor Tolkien had us all fooled; he’d given us a map but certainly knew very well we might not be capable of reading it.

Fooled into believing it is a children’s story, knowing full well that we have lost the grasp of symbol and language, and read words at face value. The Hobbit is a bedtime story, but like the tales gathered by the Brothers Grimm, it is a “true” tale in that it speaks, disguised in the colourful and exotic cloaks and trappings of fantasy, of very real things. Bilbo’s forgotten pocket-handkerchiefs are those careful daydreamt plans we make, the ones that dissolve in the face of sudden decisions.

And that is only the beginning of his adventures.

Nor do the dwarves, despite a century and a half of wandering, have an easy time of it. Once Thorin’s resolve sets them firmly on the path to Erebor, they are continuously captured, trussed up and imprisoned; indeed half of the book seems to happen underground or in the gloom and dark. And finally, when we reach the climactic denouement, we too are in the dark, only to wake up on the deserted battlefield with Bilbo, and to learn the fates of Thorin and his nephews. It is a reminder of how small we are in the scheme of things, but an affirmation that personal resolve and determination can count for much even in circumstance most dire.

The Hobbit is a story and a statement. The world is not polarized: good and evil, black and white. Peril is everywhere, but with it, colour and wonder and a sense of the merveilleux that must remain even when grown up and wise to Wilderland’s ways. It is a story for children, and a simple reminder that our horizons should not grow smaller as we grow up.

“Wild” is an ancient word, one which has roots in all the northern European tongues. It is a word that situates Bilbo’s journey beyond comforting borders, in the realms of danger and the unknown, far from the warmth of the Shire. It is the Perilous Wood of myth, the Tangled Realm, the far Marches on the border of the known world, where all is unfamiliar – and sometimes deadly. While we journey with the dwarves, who have been wandering for a century and a half, we really see it through Bilbo’s eyes. We are indeed in Wilderland.

Wilderland is inhabited by creatures of the kind that we imagine under our beds as children – long-armed grasping goblins, spiders and bats. It is also inhabited by the denizens of our dreams: soaring eagles, doughty dwarves, mysterious and alluring Elves.

Oh, and of course, there’s a dragon as well. It never does to leave a dragon out of one’s calculations.

Many of these inhabitants will be found peering (or leering) from the pages of this calendar, in imagery done over two lifetimes of imaginative peregrination through Wilderland. Alan Lee and I had many maps as well, to help us find our way around New Zealand these last three years. While they are rather more prosaic, it was tempting to imagine the margins filled with wondrous and strange creatures, like on medieval mappamundi, or scribble in “hic sunt draconis” next to “turn left after the railroad bridge”. Fantasy is always a journey. Whether on printed page or in 3-D, it’s always about the stories told.

~~~

The 2013 Tolkien calendar is published by HarperCollinsPublishers and can be tracked down here. Main text reproduced with the kind permission of the editor.

Naturally, I didn’t get as far as I wished, in fact, not very far at all. As usual, ambition is all very well, but I’m already struggling to keep pace with a company of decidedly determined dwarves; aspirations of other kinds must necessarily be set aside until suitable opportunities for straying off the path present themselves. (More prosaically, the day job is quite intense and the inclination to wander away with other quests in mind often reluctantly needs to be postponed.)

Nevertheless, I spend a good deal of time walking. Usually along the edge of the sea, principally because that’s where wind waves rock and tree do their long dance. Principally because that’s where instant and eternity have the best chance of being juxtaposed.

There are so many images in a landscape, my mind has trouble holding them all, because when you go out walking, you have to take your pictures with you, pack them, along with the water bottle and lunch. Tucked away in the pack is an imaginary catalogue of paintings, engravings, stories and visions, a guide if you like, a vademecum of possibilities.

Now, I’m not trying to fill an album, like those stamps you stick down over a halftone vignette until each page is completed. I’ve not got a list I’m checking twice, I just want the opportunity to seize those coincidences of light and form that evoke inspiration. It’s a way of connecting the dots in reverse. We don’t see things as they are, but as we are.

You see, it’s all about entelechy. Or maybe apophenia. Unless of course, it’s pareidolia. At any rate, it’s about packed lunches. And seeing things.

Sepulcher in Pale and Porphyry

Had Aubrey Beardsley had time or inclination to dabble in colours, I’d like to imagine that he would have chosen suitably sepulchral shades, and perhaps painted a dark and opaque lake, symbolizing the end of magic, as once-shining Excalibur disappears beneath its surface, magic leaving the world.

“Excalibur being reclaimed by the Lady of the Lake”. Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) for the Dent edition (1893-4) of Caxton’s imprint “Le Morte D’Arthur”. 

Low land east of White Rock towards Dolphin Bay.

˜˜˜

All the paintings I store in my head are myth-landscapes, idealized backgrounds imagined for the purposes of drama and narrative. As such, they are not real, but imagined, inspired in part perhaps by real places, more likely inspired simply by a working knowledge of their elements – sea, sky, forest and field – to create new landscapes unlike any to hand.

And why on earth in New Zealand, which has no real history attached to the land beyond the rich myths of the Maori? Well*, because few countries have acquired simultaneously – and so suddenly – both a real and a mythical presence in the eyes of the modern world. If the spectacular landscape of New Zealand lends itself so perfectly to the unfolding of Bilbo’s adventures and Frodo’s epic journey through the majestic panoramas of Middle Earth, there surely follows a moment to muse on the enduring existence of other enchanted realms, steeped in saga and sorcery, perceived through the prism of a photographer’s lens and an artist’s eye.

Or something like that. Please bear with me. Applied Apophenia and Practical Pareidolia are relatively new disciplines.

All the Wood’s a Stage

The forest is almost a deus ex machina, a stage effect destined to abolish distance by silhouetting itself against the sky, and placing impenetrable depths in front of the horizon, that same distance that separates the hero from other men, that make the difficulties he faces insurmountable for all but a hero. The distortion of space is extraordinary, an infinity can be contained in the dark under the forest eaves. This is of course not measured in miles, but in eons, the perilous wood so dear to modern mythmakers like Robert Holdstock.

“Lancelot approaching the Castle of Astolat”. Illustration by Gustave Doré (1832 – 1883)  for The Story of Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat, published by E. Moxon, London c. 1879

Woods south of Pukerua Bay

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The links between mythology and landscape are particularly strong (to the apopheniac’s perceivably dysmorphic eye) in the peculiar shapes of branches, roots and boulders contorted by fierce winds and torrential rains, twisted and eroded over time. The resultant fanciful associations with ancient lore and legend, often beheld fleetingly from the corner of one’s eye, or at least in a certain way of looking or seeing – the unusual angle, the unexpected approach – offer a more appealing interpretation of their origins than the prosaic explanations of science, although no doubt geologists would disagree. They would be well inspired to; this is about eidos, not erosion; about phantasmagorical structures and sources of legend, not the history of the Earth’s formation.

I’m looking forward to the “outing” – naturally, it will be imagery gleaned over three years of a diligent dilettante’s searching (longer if Peter suddenly decides a tetralogy is more appealing than a trilogy), but I’m hoping that my thoughts will follow my feet not only into real landscapes but into mythical ones, and that the bridges between the two, and the rapprochement with the visions of long-vanished artists (the world in their eyes) will become clear, like the clouds that part, suddenly revealing an unexpected vista.

However, I’m a pertinacious pilgrim. Nonetheless, the day job only leaves weekends free (for now at least) but the signposts are materializing along hitherto trackless pathways, and through the tangled and brambly wilderness of thought and memory a discernible trajectory will eventually emerge. I hope.

I’ve packed a lunch at any rate.

*Well, because I happen to be here, and it is an extraordinary landscape on which one’s own fantasies seem effortless to transpose.

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With thanks, as ever, to Ann Carling, for her diligent research and editing.

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AND SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY

I recently did a stint as contest judge for a digital art community (which was, happily, right up my alley, as the subject was one I enjoy: dragons).

The contest and the results, with my comments, are here. I’d like to thank the organizers for inviting me to take part, and above all, all the talented artists who must have stayed up very very late finishing such lovely work.

Sketchbooks…

I recall my very first ones; they had spiral bindings, red or orange covers. I scribbled in them furiously, took them to high school art class, and hauled them out to do wholly unsatisfying sketches outdoors – but mostly I sprawled on my tummy on the floor of my room (purple shag carpet; yes I chose it, yes I was in my teens, yes it was the 70’s, yes I think I should be excused on those grounds alone) dutifully doodling in pencil.
I recall my first real sketchbook, a gift from my colleague Alan Lee during a sojourn in the Antipodes and in Middle-Earth. When I mused how hard it was to start a first sketch in such a lovely – and so crisply pristine – object, he advised: “Just open it anywhere in the middle, that way if the first sketch isn’t so good, it won’t be the first one in the book.”
I recall taking the stage in Toronto at IdeaCity 2006 in front of 500 people, and ad-libbing a presentation about the advantages of low-tech hardbound A3 acid-free “laptops”, with notes hastily scribbled in my Daler-Rowney A3 Bluewave.

Photo: Claude DUSSEX

I recall seaside vacations and hammocks, sketchbook perched on my knees, listening to cicadas and drawing whatever crossed my mind, a sketch a day. I recall staring in mild dismay at the contents of my pencil case and realizing that I had forgotten to sharpen 12 hours worth of pencils before stowing my utility knife in my checked luggage – and undertaking a series of, well… rather dull sketches.
A lot of your life can go into a sketchbook.
Come to think of it, mine probably has…

Thus, I’ve become a fervent advocate of the sketchbook, with all the truly subjective and categorical qualifiers ranging from the dithyrambic to the dismissive. For all these reasons, as well as for a goodly number of more objective ones, and prompted by the suggestions of a member of the forum, we’ve decided to undertake the creation of a special section dedicated to the very existence of sketchbooks: their history, their fabrication, famous sketchbooks through the ages, the artists who used them, where to buy them now and what best to use to draw in them.
And of course, YOUR views and thoughts and experiences.

Welcome to the Sketchbook Appreciation Society