Paul Chadwick's Weblog

Poetry Without Pity

It's Sunday, so it's time for a gloomy poem.

And no poet is gloomier than Joseph Payne Brennan.

DEATH

He was 109 when I met him.
One day we spoke of Death.
He shrugged. "Foolish people
worry about death,
like worrying about sleep
or the changes of the seasons."

I said nothing.
He tapped his pipe.
"Once, I was with the Army.
Arizona. Four of us taken by Apaches.
One tried to escape. Killed him on the spot,
not really intending to,
just acting on impulse.
Later, while two of us watched,
tied up like chickens,
they dug a hole.
They took Wade, the other one,
buried him up to his neck
and built a little fire
right next to his face."

The old man grimaced.
"He screamed for seven hours;
his flesh turned black and fell away.
finally there was just a skeleton's head,
still, somehow, screaming.
At last his eyes gushed out,
liquified. And then he died.
Do you think he welcomed death?"

I didn't answer.
After a time he filled his pipe.
"I can still hear him screaming
after eighty years.
I hardly ever think of Death."

As an afterthought, he added,
"They took so long with his torture,
troops rode in and rescued us.
Killed four Apaches, captured the rest.
When they found that blackened skull, though,
they butchered every one."

He shrugged.
"They got off easy."

Not Recommended as a Career Path

At Norwescon last month I ran into my old friend Mark Ferrari, an illustrator who has become a celebrated fantasy novelist.  Apart from his always having an itch to write, just how the transition occurred I didn’t really know.  I hadn’t talked to Mark in years.

Mark shared his tale: he was run over by a truck while bike riding.  While he recovered fairly quickly, considering his injuries, he found he had lost the ability to render in colored pencil, which was integral to his painstaking technique.

So the time was ripe for following a different dream.

That sounds a bit pat, so let me emphasize the cold horror of this.  Mark lived every artist's second most dreaded catastrophe -- the loss of the use of his hands for creating art.  Only blindness could be worse.

Brr.

I never got to ask the question that occurred: has Mark ever had the chance to commiserate with Stephen King?

Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein

I visited Dark Horse Comics in Milwaukie OR recently.  I was pleased to see the place thriving, despite the economy.  In the rush of each day’s news, it’s easy to forget the economy doesn’t sink equally everywhere.  Some parts do okay while the car and construction industries flatten like pools of astronaut gore on the surface of a cold, hypergravitational neutron star.

Mike Richardson showered me with books, and I was pleased to see a beautiful, redesigned reissue of Bernie Wrightson’s masterpiece.  Throughout the seventies he issued portfolios of illustrations to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.  Finally, in1983, Marvel published the novel with them all.

It was a disappointment.  I suppose it would have to be after the beautiful oversized portfolios, which by their  scale did justice to Bernie’s hyperrendered artwork.  He was in thrall not only to his early influence Graham Engels, but also to Golden Age Illustrator Franklin Booth.

Booth grew up in the country and didn’t realize the intricate woodcut engravings of artists like Gustav Dorè were actually done by artisans reproducing, through cut lines on the endgrain sides of dense hardwood blocks, based on Dore’s paintings.  He thought they were drawn right off by the artist in pen and ink.  So he taught himself to render as finely as the dollar bill in your pocket.

Anyway, things came together for Wrightson then.  He’d done his outstanding journeyman work in comics, was still without family responsibilities (I think), and living the art for art’s sake life.  He must have put in thousands of hours and so created a work for the ages.

But, as I said, I was disappointed with the Marvel book.  The design was perfunctory, even hostile to reading.   Small type and narrow margins created  too much text on each page – it made a difficult, meandering story a slog that quite defeated me, even when I tried to read it again last year.  

Presumably Dark Horse hasn’t tightened up Shelly’s maddeningly indirect tale (she was nineteen, after all, when she wrote it – and who am I to complain, it’s a mythic classic!).  But I can unreservedly recommend this edition.  The new book is much more readable, with some classy design touches and plenty of air in the layouts. 

It contains one of my favorite quotes: “Nothing so contributes to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose.”

A steady purpose.  Not a bad mantra.