Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons (2013).

I knew I would have to get around to her sooner or later.  It was a question of when, not if.  That's because some authors are good at casting long, and influential shadows, and that couldn't be more the case than with the author I've got to talk about here.  She's been on my radar since perhaps as far back as the late 1990s, when I first ran across a mention of her in a children's book of Horror trivia.  That's where I heard mention of a book called The Haunting of Hill House, and its author Shirley Jackson.  Come to think of it, that was the second time I ran into a mention of her, not the first.  That came from yet another trivia book.  This one devoted a two-page section to a 1963 Robert Wise film.  This time is was titled as just The Haunting.  It was one of those chance encounters, looking back on it.  One of those fortunate accidents that life is sometimes kind enough to toss your way when you aren't looking.  I didn't have a clue who Shirley Jackson was when I picked up these two references collections (one of whose title now escapes me, except for the cover art, which depicted an old mausoleum graveyard painted in shades of light, dusky purple, and blood red).  I was just a young, budding fan with a growing fascination in the kind of fiction that goes bump in the night.  It was at a point in my life which is probably familiar to veteran Horror fans.  It's that moment where it seems like you've just discovered a brand new vista opening onto a hitherto unknown world, one whose landscape is both creepy, forbidding, and somehow wonderful and enchanting by turns.

If you're a fan of this sort of genre and (perhaps to your own surprise) you mean it, then looking back I'd have to say how it's always those first, great, influential years, where you're just starting to get your feet wet by dipping your toes into dark waters, that somehow manage to retain the most importance.  That's the point in life where the sample platters from the genre's table that you allow yourself to enjoy can go a long way toward determining just what kind of a Gothic enthusiast you'll grow up to be.  In my case, everything I watched or read back then tended in the same direction.  For whatever reason, I just kept getting drawn back to the what might be called the Classics of the format.  In my case, it first started out with John Bellairs.  Books like The House with a Clock in its Walls, and Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are what amounted to my introduction to Fear Fiction.  Bellairs was the one who introduced my impressionable young mind to the sense of the Classical Gothic quality that Horror can have at its most sophisticated pitch.  Schwartz and his partner in crime, Stephen Gammell, meanwhile were the one's who gave me my first taste for all the gory details that the genre can sometimes be pretty great at.  The Scary Stories tomes were pretty much my generation's version of the the Tales from the Crypt comic books.  It was all like discovering two halves of the same Creative Idea all at once.  It was the discovery of an entire, Weird world, and for a number of reasons, I was hooked in seconds flat.

If I had to give a reason for why it was so easy for someone like me to find a place amidst the fiction of clanking chains and screams in the darkness, then the best explanation I have is the simplest.  It's because I'd met people who seemed like they kind of understood where I was coming from.  Another way to say it is to claim I'd made some new friends who sounded like they were on the same wavelength as me.  Looking back across the passage of years, what I think I can explain now that I probably couldn't then was that what drew me to Horror must have been some level of subconscious realization that the creators of these books were coming from a place that was at least similar to my own.  You have to have to know what it's like to be scared in order to write like that.  Not just to experience fear, either, but also the frightening sense of powerlessness that comes from being just a kid stuck in a world governed by adults.  One where most of the rules are so difficult to comprehend, and it seems as if the weight of that whole, damned entire world is going to fall on you if you aren't careful.  I'm not talking about anything dire on a personal level, here.  It was never anything like that.  Instead, it's a simple matter of being just five and realizing that it's impossible to get a good night's sleep once your parents have tucked you in, and then made the dumbest choice of their lives by not even leaving you with a simple night light to keep you company, compounding it with trite words of comfort.

Does anyone else remember times like that when you were a kid?  Your parents meant well, yet they could never truly connect with what you were going through in terms of a personal fear factor.  It's disconcerting as hell, and the worst thing about that happening when you're still just a child is that it carries the implication that in terms of handling your fears, you're on your own.  When you're a kid, that's a real mind-bending realization to arrive at in such a young age.  Maybe that's why there might have been this strange yet genuine sense of comfort that came from discovering the work of artists like Schwartz, Gammell, and Bellairs.  On some level, a part of my mind understood that I was running across guys who were no more than a bunch of little kids who still knew damn well what it was like to feel that particular grain of powerlessness that comes with being a scared youngster who can't even turn to the "adults" (so-called) for help.  What made discovering the Horror genre so welcoming (as I can see now) is that it's best described as Art created by people who are, themselves, scared.  That's not meant to be a catch-all description, one person's fear could be another's enthusiasm, or else just a normal part of the wallpaper of life.  It helps to remember that subjectivity has its role to play in the phenomenon I'm talking about.  Yet writers like Bellairs and Schwartz had a knack for zeroing in on the universal fears.

Their works function as both a catalogue and exploration of the things that have both fascinated and frightened them by turns over the course of their lives.  The net result of placing these shared worries down on paper meant they were able to participate in the Horror genre's strangest, yet somehow genuine accomplishment.  They were able to carve out a safe space which, paradoxically, allowed them to examine and in some cases even confront the things that scared them.  Schwartz's now iconic use and recontextualization of world folklore, in particular, offers young readers a great means of exploring tougher themes and subject matter in a way that was surprisingly effective, considering the art style that went along with it.  This creative efficacy was made possible by the fact that one of the points of world folklore is that it is meant to function as a repository of the collective wisdom of humanity.  It's never quite the same thing as moral didacticism, yet the ability to teach a lesson to the audience can be spoken of as part of the natural bells and whistles of the format proper.  As such, it isn't until you return to stories like "Harold" later on, and realize that you've gained an early understanding of real world issues such as bullying and bigotry.  It's just one of the many reasons for why collections like the Scary Stories series have become household items on a level similar to that of the Brothers Grimm (it also doesn't hurt that Schwartz and Gammell are drawing from the same well as their earlier Romantic predecessors).  At least this is as good an explanation I've got for why I became a Horror junkie.

Learning that there are other little big kids out there who went through some of the same fears as you, and needing the format of artistic expression as means of dealing with it, can go a long way toward developing a sense of natural comradery between the writers and their audience.  It's what allowed Schwartz and Bellairs to become my first major influences as a reader.  Pretty soon, things just began to pick up the pace from there, and it didn't take me long to become acquainted with all things Gothic.  Not long after meeting the two authors described above, others soon came along to carry my interests further afield.  Thanks to the efforts of guys like Steven Spielberg and Vincent Price, I was more or less told about writers like Edgar Allan Poe.  It was an old Disney film that alerted me to the efforts of Arthur Conan Doyle, add in a dash of R.L. Stine, Jane Yolen, and Bruce Coville for the middle school years, before graduating up a grade or two to Stephen King, and you've pretty much got my education in all things American Gothic.  At the same time, it's like this is an educational process that's never stopped, really.  Even today, I can't keep from digging further up and in to the realms of Weird Fiction in the hopes of learning more about why I like to read or watch stories of things going bump in the night.  It was somewhere in the middle of all this that I made the acquaintance of Ms. Shirley Jackson.

I got to know her on a gradual level.  It started with catching just a few choice references in a couple of pop culture trivia books.  Yet I guess that must have been enough, because from there I can recall getting curious enough about the exploits of Hill House to the point where I finally bought a copy of the book.  It took a while to get into, and I recall having some difficulty maneuvering along with the kind skewed, almost schizoid narrative voice that Jackson chooses to channel her entire story through.  In fact, if I'm being honest, then the truth is (say sorry) that I needed to find a good audiobook version in order to help me understand what was going on.  With the help of the talented narration of the late and great David Warner, however, the character of Eleanor Vance and her ghostly encounters soon came to life for me in a way that didn't just make the novel intelligible at last, it also sort of made me a Jacksonian for life.  The Robert Wise adaptation is no slouch either, so as I'm concerned.  It was like going all the way back to where it started with John Bellairs, and discovering that the initial contact point where you fell in love with the genre was suddenly able to take its inaugural hints of Gothic sophistication, and somehow elevate those notes into a higher, more adult voice.  The great thing about Jackson's voice in the novel is that she is able to utilize those same notes to deliver a grand narrative.

There's a great deal to be said later on about Jackson's strengths as a literary stylist, and how she's able to make this work to her advantage, yet for now it will be enough to get to know the author herself, first.  What kind of a personality must a writer have in order to create a setting like Hill House, or the Lottery Village in the first place?  According to her most recent biographer, Ruth Franklin, "Some writers are particularly prone to mythmaking. Shirley Jackson was one of them. During her lifetime, she fascinated critics and readers by playing up her interest in magic: the biographical information on her first novel identifies her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a tarot deck.” To interviewers, she expounded on her alleged abilities, even claiming that she had used magic to break the leg of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, with whom her husband was involved in a dispute. Reviewers found those stories irresistible, extrapolating freely from her interest in witchcraft to her writing, which often takes a turn into the uncanny. “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but a broomstick” was an oft quoted line. Roger Straus, her first publisher, would call her “a rather haunted woman.”

"Look more closely, however, and Jackson’s persona is much thornier. She was a talented, determined, ambitious writer in an era when it was still unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. She was a mother of four who tried to keep up the appearance of running a conventional American household, but she and her husband, the writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, were hardly typical residents of their rural Vermont town—not least because Hyman was born and raised Jewish. And she was, indeed, a serious student of the history of witchcraft and magic: not necessarily as a practical method of influencing the world around her (it’s debatable whether she actually practiced magical rituals), but as a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives. “Rather haunted” she was—in more ways than Straus, or perhaps anyone else, realized. Jackson’s brand of literary suspense is part of a vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James (2-3)".  This ability to tap into the Gothic tradition seems to have had a by now pretty familiar sounding point of origin.  Like a lot of the author's mentioned so far, Shirley was a scared child growing up.

Her parents were wealthy New England socialites who decided to relocate to the West Coast of San Francisco and live among the beautiful people.  It's telling that when it comes to the birth and raising of their only daughter, there remains some dispute over whether she was a wanted pregnancy or not.  "It was not", Franklin tells us, "a warm home.  Even if (Geraldine Jackson, sic) had been pleased to have motherhood thrust upon her in her first year of marriage (and by all accounts she was not), Shirley was hardly the child she had imagined. “The pregnancy was very inconvenient,” Joanne Hyman, Jackson’s elder daughter, says. Geraldine had been groomed to be a socialite...“She was a lady, Geraldine was,” Laurence Hyman remembers. And she tried valiantly to shape her daughter in her image. In one of the earliest photographs of Shirley, the little girl wears an immaculate ruffled white party dress, white shoes and socks, and a giant starched bow nearly the size of her head. But it must have been clear early on that Shirley would not conform to Geraldine’s ambitions for her. “I don’t think Geraldine was malevolent,” recalls Barry Hyman, Jackson’s youngest child. “She was just a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional.” “Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead,” Joanne Hyman says bluntly (23-24)".

Here's where a bit of gear switching is in order.  What Franklin tends to tip-toe around, an earlier biographer such as Judy Oppenheimer chooses to tackle head-on, without mincing words.  That's why the information she passes along in the first ever Jackson biography, Private Demons, seems worth recounting here.  The way Oppenheimer tells it, "Geraldine Jackson was not a tactful woman. Years later, when Shirley was struggling to make sense of her own problems, she told her daughter Joanne a chilling story: when Shirley was an adolescent, Geraldine had informed her she was an unsuccessful abortion. It could have been the simple truth—Geraldine had a tendency to blurt things out around her daughter—or one of Shirley’s intuitive guesses, but one thing was certain. This was the way Geraldine had made her feel, throughout her life. As a beautifully turned-out woman, Geraldine, having resigned herself to maternity, expected at the very least a beautifully turned-out daughter. Fashionable, superficial, and utterly conventional—a miniature version, in fact, of Geraldine Jackson herself, who was a strong adherent of the child-as-jewelry school of parenthood. 

"The fact that the child she gave birth to—exactly nine months and one day after her wedding—turned out to be Shirley seems almost too ironic, one of those quirks of fate second-rate novelists delight in. For Shirley was odd from the start, a restless, high-strung, difficult child; brilliant, messy, torrentially creative, and far from ornamental. “You were always a willful child,’’ Geraldine snapped at her daughter forty-six years after her birth, by mail, and both the sentiment and the misspelling underlined the vast gulf that had always stretched between them. “My most basic beliefs in writing are that the identity is all-important and the word is all- powerful,” Shirley said once. Her mother had managed to malign both in one six-word sentence. A goldfish giving birth to a porpoise, as one of Shirley’s sons described it. But a tenacious goldfish, one who never stopped trying to rearrange her porpoise daughter along more acceptable goldfish lines. Perhaps with a little guile she might have had more luck, but Geraldine was never a subtle woman. Strong-willed, yes; subtle, no. Years after Shirley had left home, married, and given birth to her own children, her mother still sent her corsets in the mail, trying foolishly but persistently to rein in the overgrown creature she had somehow, unbelievably produced. 

"This was no malleable clay, however; Shirley had, as her mother soon recognized, a will surpassing her own. Even as a small child, carefully groomed, her strawberry-blond hair neatly arranged under a large bow, there was a set to the chin, a cool appraisal in the light eyes. Shirley Jackson, born to be a writer, dug her feet in and fought. Eventually she would say no to all of it, to Geraldine’s whole world of proper breeding and grooming and social minutiae, would reject forever the torch of country-club conventionality. She would laugh at it, flout it, rebel against it. But she would carry her mother within her, unexorcised for the rest of her life. Shirley’s children, especially her daughters, grew up acutely aware of the terrible resentment Shirley bore her parents, particularly her mother. “She felt Geraldine had squashed her,” her older daughter said flatly. “Crushed her spirit.”” And yet Geraldine was not a cruel woman, or even an unloving mother—simply vain, foolish, unalterably conventional. No matter how strained the relationship, it was also true that a confused, hopeless love existed between them throughout their lives, right along with the anger, pain, hatred, and lack of forgiveness.  

"Not that it helped. In fact, a complete break between these two utterly unlike women might well have been the best thing that could have happened. Instead they remained entangled for life, even though they were separated by the entire country for the last seventeen years. “Who is looking over my shoulder all the time?” Shirley mused to herself months before her death, wondering at her inability to confront certain parts of herself. It could only have been the worried, disapproving, unrelenting specter of Geraldine Jackson (14-15)".  Remember what I said earlier about encounters with moments of anxiety in childhood?  Those early experiences with an overwhelming sense of otherwise normal enough (I suppose?) fear is one of those things that can determine vital aspects of what will later become the young child's adult character.  This process seems to have ended up as no different when it comes to an author like Shirley.  As a little girl, she seems to have been prone to those same outsized experiences of a terror that seems so personal that it can sometimes be difficult to make the grown-ups around you understand just where it is you're coming from.  I was lucky in that sense.  At least I knew I had parents who care about me.  It's always possible that Shirley never had even that luxury to fall back on.  Whatever fears she might have experienced as a child, she ultimately had to face them alone.

She seems to have survived, which is good news.  Yet it's those vital moments in youth that have a way of molding the outlook that determines one's character in later years.  In that sense, perhaps Oppenheimer got it just a bit wrong.  There was a certain level of malleability in Jackson as a child, yet the crucial thing is that this is something she seems to have realized on some basement level of her mind.  Thus even if she never had much of a clear idea of whatever issues she might have been dealing with as a child, she still had the sense coupled with the necessary amount of tenacity to ensure that whatever molding process she was undergoing as she matured, it would be as much to her own welfare as she could manage.  Feel free to debate how successful she was on that score in the long run all you want.  The point for me is that at least she was able to plant some sort of personal flag for herself at the end of the day.  That's got to matter more than all the trophies you could give in a single lifetime.  The way Shirley managed to handle her own fears was via a process that seems to be a recurring pattern in writers of the Gothic.  Like a lot of kids with artistic talent, Shirl soon developed a knack for reading that quickly translated into a desire for the written word.  Here's where the vital influences came in.

According to Oppenheimer, "There were few books in the Jackson house, although there was one curious collection: (Jackson's grandmother, sic) Mimi owned the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which occasionally read aloud to the children (just the thing to quiet an anxious, impressionable child). But for most books, Shirley had to look outside the home; she became an early, voracious library user (23)".  This is all that space that Oppenheimer devotes to this key bit of biographical detail.  What makes this particular instance of brevity so frustrating for a reader like me is that I'll have to swear Judy passed over a crucial part in the development of the artist's mind, without giving it the proper bit of attention and analytical unpacking that it deserves.  This goes doubly so in the case of an author like Jackson, as it is within the field of Horror fiction that her greatest legacy now resides.  With this in mind, learning that one of her first encounters with the genre came through an early exposure with one of its foundational architects sounds like an essential puzzle piece that shouldn't be just mentioned in passing.  Instead, it is possible to speculate on how this exposure to the works of Poe might have both fueled and helped Jackson's own experiences with fear.  This can be shown with a bit of theoretical, yet reality based supposals.  It's possible to conjecture the effect that Poe's words might have had on her.

It is not, for instance, too great a stretch to imagine Shirley as a little girl first horrified at the tales her Grandmother tells her.  Then, perhaps to her own surprise, that initial sense of terror turns to curiosity, spurred on by nothing more than the inherent artistry contained in Poe's ornate and Arabesque style and narrative description.  From there, a process of mental and Imaginative development begins.  Shirley goes from being curious to, as Oppenheimer likes to say, "voracious".  Entertain conjecture of a portrait of the author as a young girl first begging her Grandmother to read more Poe's stories to her, and then picture Shirley mastering the complexity of the Gothic writer's ornamental prose to be able to read him like a primer.  Thus it is possible to establish a working picture of where a taste for the macabre might have all began for Shirley.  Like with many young fright fans, a lot of her later enthusiasm for the genre could have been grounded in an inherent sense of kinship between kindred souls.  In reading Poe's fiction, she might have soon begun to recognize the telltale signs of yet another fellow little kid who went through something similar to her.  She might have been able to recognize the words of a man who, even as an adult, still knew what it was like to be afraid of the dark.  In that sense, it does not seem so far-fetched to me to theorize that Shirley saw Poe first as a friend, and later as something of a mentor, and maybe even, on some level, a posthumous parental substitute for her own peripatetic household.

Even if this is all just conjecture, what isn't is the net result of early exposure to the modern Horror story at such a young age.  It's here that the commentary of scholar John Tibbets is useful in describing Jackson's ultimate achievement.  He's talking about the books of Peter Straub, yet what he has to say functions so well as a description of what Jackson is up to in her own work, that it's worth utilizing and paraphrasing them here.  Jackson's "frequent implementation in" her "stories of the works of the great 19th-century Gothic practitioners...calls for close attention".  She "not only draws upon them, but...imaginatively transforms them and gives them fresh breath, in effect. Of particular importance here are those 19th-century literary architects of what is recognized as a distinctively American Gothic, whose forms and expressions were congruent with New World attitudes and ideas. Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Herman Melville claim pride of place...Yet, it seems that very little criticism has explored in any detail their connections with" Shirley's "work. Clearly, there is a deeply shared kinship that borders on identity". Jackson's "stories establish" her "not just as their artistic and spiritual heir, but as their standard bearer toward a modern American Gothic (26)".  This is the basic gist of Shirley's fiction, and there's a lot more waiting to be explored.

As you might expect, it's impossible to unpack all of her artistry in the space of just a simple review.  The best this article can do is to lay down an idea of the basic foundations that undergird all of Shirley's writings.  The best description I've ever had on that score comes from the pen of Prof. John Gordon Parks.  He's best described as a now obscure commentator on Jackson's work, yet we'll have plenty of reasons to circle back to him later on in the critique.  For now, his summation of the whole point that Shirley was driving at is enough to go on.  According to Parks, "Shirley Jackson's fiction is part of the American tradition of the gothic romance or tale of terror, and her relation to such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, and Flannery O'Connor, among others, is shown throughout the study. With these authors she shares a dark view of human nature. But through the use of gothic, terror, and the grotesque, Jackson's fiction not only explores the inner experience of contemporary life, but also suggests that the recognition and confrontation of the evil in man may be the first step in transcending it (v)".  I knew that sooner or later I would have to try and find the right entrance way that would allow for the best possible beginners discussion of an author who contains the sort of multitudes described above.  The trick is how do you manage to talk about a writer who is one of the grand architects of the Gothic genre?  Because that's who Shirley is, or at least what she has become, at the end of the day.

She is, in many ways, like the Tigris and Euphrates of the modern Horror story.  Her writings managed to turn her into one of the foundation layers for the genre's modern voice, and my biggest fear these days is that the nature of that voice, and the value it holds for the sophistication of the contemporary Gothic format is in danger of getting lost.  So that I meant I had to try and find the best possible starting point which would allow for the beginnings of an intelligible enough conversation about her words.  It took some bit of digging, yet after a quick search, I think I might have found the best place to start.  It's with an unpublished short story of domestic chills known simply as "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons".

Force of Evil (1948).

A blog like this is all about archaeology in one sense.  I don't mean it's concerned with the literal practice of digging through ancient ruins in order to see if its possible to gain a better understanding of the past.  At the same time, there is a sense in which the mission of The Scriblerus Club shares some overlapping with the kind of folks who like to dig up the past for a living.  The one thing we have in common is a desire to broaden the picture, and hence the outlook that a more expansive awareness of what's gone before can grant the careful student of history.  Like the actual archaeologists themselves, I can't seem to help this interest I've got in trying to see if looking at the artistic artifacts of a bygone age can help gain a greater understanding of the present moment I'm living in (whatever that should turn out to be).  What that means in practice is that every now and then, I'll go mining for any book or film of yesteryear, in the hopes that I'll stumble upon some lost and valuable nuggets of gold.  The big difference in my case is that somehow Art seems to have proven more reliable than any rare and yellow metal that can be found in the Earth.  Apparently there's something constant in the human need to tell stories that makes more of a permanent fixture of life in general than the fleeting nature of fortune.  Riches come and go, the only permanence that money might be able to have for itself seems to lie less in it's value as currency, and more in the kind of fables that storytellers are able to spin out of the desiring, getting, and spending of fortunes.  That subject proves to be very pertinent to the hidden gem of a picture that I was able to excavate by pure accident.

I'd never even heard of a film like Force of Evil until I stumbled across it by accident.  I first ran across a mention of it in passing, while watching an old documentary on the history of American Film Noir.  That's where I got a chance to watch none other than Martin Scorsese recall the kind of aesthetic impact that the genre left on his Imagination as an impressionable young cinephile.  "As I was growing up", the director of Goodfellas tells us, "these films were a part of my reality, day by day.  In other words, I didn't analyze them.  I was infected by them.  I related to them emotionally".  The creator of Travis Bickel makes no bones about the reasons why these types of films were so easy to relate to.  It was because all they ever did for him was to reflect back, for the first time ever, the kind of life he knew, heard about, and sometimes even saw growing up as this poor nothing kid on the Mean Streets of old New York.  What Scorsese had to say next is the point where this whole article got started for me.  "The first film that I can remember that had to do very clearly with what I knew on a daily basis, growing up on the Lower East Side was...Abe Polonsky's Force of Evil.  It was about the Numbers Racket, and it was about two brothers.  It portrayed a world that I hadn't seen on film before.  In a very honest way, too".  As the filmmaker of Raging Bull is telling us all this, the documentary is busy showcasing clips from the film in question.  The first time I ever saw it was as snippets playing over Scorsese's words.

If I had to give my initial response to an introduction such as this, then the reaction I had is best described as one of piqued interest.  Here was an intriguing case of a hitherto unknown piece of classic cinema, and it must have been given the right sort of introduction, from the kind of authoritative source that would make you want to stop and listen to what amounts to an onscreen viewing recommendation.  The makers of the documentary must have done a good enough job at it too, because the net result was that I gained an interest in hunting this film out and seeing what it amounted to for myself.  The results have left me with what I hope are a few thoughts interesting enough to share here in this review.  In order to get things started on the right foot, I'm going to turn the job of emcee over to the work of scholar and Noir cinephile Eddie Muller.  The following pieces of relevant starting background information are provided by Muller as part of the Noir Alley segment of Turner Classic Movies.

"Today's film takes us from the shrouded margins of New York's underworld (it's Vice Dens and Bookie Joints) and into the upper reaches of Wall Street; America's Bastion of Big Business.  The two territories have a lot in common in Force of Evil, released by MGM on Christmas Day, in 1948.  Now Metro Goldwyn Mayer distributed the film, but didn't produce it.  It's the work of Enterprise Productions.  An independent studio created by actor John Garfield in 1946, after his contract with Warner Bros. expired.  Garfield's first film as an actor for Enterprise was the 1947 hit, Body and Soul.  Which earned multiple Oscar nominations and remains one of the best boxing pictures ever made".  

Let me just pause the commentary here to note that it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scorsese might have taken a (so far as I know) unacknowledged bit of Inspiration from this other obscure Garfield film when it came to telling the story of Jake LaMotta.  There's a further interesting bit of trivia that Muller recounts which further links Body and Soul with Raging Bull.  Much like De Niro's searing portrait of the price of reckless fame, Garfield's own ring picture was also drawn from the life.  "Body and Soul was made from an original story by Abraham Polonsky.  The screenplay earned Polonsky an Oscar nomination for its gripping, but grim story of a boxer loosely based on lightweight champ Barney Ross.  Who struggles to keep his integrity while slugging his way to the top of a profession ripe with corruption.  Now, flush with the critical and box-office success of Body and Soul, Garfield set up Polonsky to write and direct his next picture for Enterprise.  Polonsky, essentially, returned to the well (web)".

Casino (1995).

Martin Scorsese seems to be doing pretty well for himself so far, these days.  He's got a ton of great films to his credit.  His work is, in general, of such a quality that it has allowed him that rare achievement which is granted to few artists.  He's managed to become a household name not just within critical, but also the pop culture circles of average moviegoers.  Even those who rarely catch any of his cinematic efforts have some sort of name recognition of the guy.  This can be seen in the way so many moments, characters, or lines of dialogue have kept turning up in the most unlikeliest of places.  Despite the guy's notorious reputation for his unflinching look at the history of violence in America, somehow none of this has stood in the way of, say, the makers of kids TV shows from taking the three main characters from Goodfellas and turning them into a bunch of animated talking pigeons.  Not making a word of that up, by the way.  You want to know the strangest thing about a piece of pop culture osmosis like that?  I'll bet you anything it's from shows like this that 80s and 90s kids like me first had any inkling that films like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull were out there, somewhere.  And the one thing they all had in common was that they were directed by this small looking guy with the somehow memorable name.  I got around to him eventually, yet it took some time.  Nor would it surprise me to learn that the process at which I arrived at Marty's cinema is a route that's been traveled by others of my generation in a similar way or fashion.

It didn't start out with Scorsese, for me.  It began with Francis Ford Coppola.  You know what, come to think of it, a better way to say it is that it's all Marlon Brando's fault.  Looking back, I think I can say he's the one who got this whole aspect of my movie-going life rolling.  It even began thanks to the same show that parodied Goodfellas.  I saw another episode of Animaniacs that parodied the fictional figure of Don Vito Corleone, and I guess the animators must have done at least something to capture the gravitas that the actor was able to give the character in the original film.  Because after a few repeat viewings I got curious about what it was the Warner Bros. (and the Warner Sister) were going out of their way not just to lampoon, but also highlight what I somehow knew, even as a kid, was something they clearly thought was important.  I mean, yeah, they were having a laugh at Brando's most famous roll and all that crap.  But it's like, at the same time, there was no way the guys who made that show could hide the fact that the only reason the parody was there in the first place was because they felt that here was a character that deserved respect.  It wasn't like how things are now.  These days, if you want to parody or satirize something, you've only got one goal in mind.  To tear the target a new one, and leave them in a ditch somewhere for the scavengers to finish off.  With this guy, it was all different.

Here you could tell they liked whoever this character was under all the laughter.  It was like being made King for a Day, even as they were poking fun at you.  I don't think I'd ever seen a show where the glories of cinema's past got that kind of respect.  It was like being introduced to a foreign language that you already knew how to speak on some level so fundamental you didn't even know it was there.  Once you were in it, however, it was like you always knew the lingo by heart.  It was like discovering this whole new, little world, and it was all meant for you.  "It was like mainlining adrenaline, and I was hooked in seconds (web)".  So basically I'm just going along, you know.  Hanging loose and enjoying all the pleasures that 90s kids culture has to offer.  All that good stuff we used to have and do.  Then as happens, I get to remembering that guy the Animaniacs celebrated a while back, and I kind of start to wonder if maybe I shouldn't check out the original source material.  Why not, I mean that's what the show was best at.  One of the good things to be said about a show like this was that its pop culture and movie parodies were often good enough to make you want to go and hunt down the original films they were referencing.  That's how good they were.  It was satire as a form of sharing your enthusiasms with others in a way that made your audience want to learn more and the history of a film they lampooned.  

Or at least that's what happened to me, anyway, so far as I know, looking back.  That show might have been the main reason I became a film junkie in the first place.  I'm don't just mean an interest in whatever the hell is the latest releases from the next BS streaming service, either.  I'm talking about watching a bunch of cartoon version of Scorsese characters as they somehow end up as extra's in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and the whole damn thing is so funny that I finally allow myself the chance to go and watch one of the groundbreaking pictures in the history of Horror genre.  Can you even name one show for kids that grants them that level of an education?  I mean for real.  Anybody?  Didn't think so.  That's how good we had it back then.  Anyway, the way the road to Marty's films worked is I'm shown the character of Don Corleone.  He's always there flitting around in either the front or back of my mind, like this odd figure of mystery that part of me wants to figure out.  However I don't do that yet.  Instead, what happens is I'm in this now old, and defunct video store, the kind where they used to have wall mounted TVs that would run a constant loop of old movie trailers.  And one of them comes on starring that Ferris Bueller guy, and who do you think is sharing the spotlight with him?  That's right.  It was that guy from the Animaniacs mobster episode.  Or rather it was the original guy they were making fun of.

He looked just like his characterization from the TV show into the bargain.  It was like watching a cartoon character come to life.  The whole thing was surreal and fun at the same time.  What made it even better was that here was Brando clearly having a good time while parodying himself, for all intents and purposes.  It was just a trailer for some obscure 80s comedy called The Freshman that I'd never even heard about until just that moment.  Yet I knew the moment I saw the damn thing that pretty soon I would going to watch all of it from start to finish.  I mean, I don't know about you, but there was never any question in my mind.  So I watched the Matt Broderick flick, and pretty much got to laugh my ass off.  Like, for me, it was getting to watch a cartoon you used to enjoy as a kid take on the qualities of flesh and blood.  I have no clue how many others out there were this lucky.  That was sort of the whole deal, though, right?  I mean all Steven Spielberg did was create a kids show that gave you an interest in being a film buff.  The whole setup was that simple, and it paid off like gangbusters where I was concerned.  So after I watch The Freshman I'm ready to gear myself up to watch the flick that started this whole thing.  I finally sit down and take in The Godfather, and the rest is pretty much history.  

You got to understand, this wasn't my first introduction to what's now considered Classic Cinema.  Hell, Brando wasn't even the first movie star I was familiar with.  That honor went to guys like the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers.  That's just how my childhood was, okay?  It was the strangest freaking thing.  Where other guys were busy with the Ninja Turtles, or the Masters of the Universe, I'm over in my little corner learning about these classic Hollywood tough guys like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.  So you just know that shit's going to put a particular slant in your mind.  There I am, barely nine years old, and already I'm turning myself into a temporal anachronism.  The kind of guy who will grow up with aesthetic tastes that are always going to be somewhat antiquarian by the standards of the rest of the world.  Yeah, maybe it means I'm always playing catch-up.  None of you mooks still have a clue what you're missing, and it's a sentiment that guys like Scorsese are pretty much committed to.  I don't think I've ever run across someone with so much knowledge of the cinema of bygone days.  I mean this guy here is like a walking encyclopedia.  He can tell you who directors like Powell and Pressbuger were.  Or give you an archeological rundown of where the Blues music genres comes from. 

My point is that while I'm a late-comer to Scorsese, it still didn't take me long to figure why this guy was such a big deal.  He's just plain good at his job; that's the point.  I mean think about it, here you've got this poor street punk from NYC.  He's got a good home, and yet he lives in a rough neighborhood, and one of the only escape routes he can find from all that crap is the local movie theater.  It's not the only place where Marty got his education, but it is where the rest of his professional life was determined for better or worse.  Take your pick on how you want to look at an outcome like that.  Not much difference from any other roll of the dice, so far as I'm concerned.  He just became one of the few who, first made it out of the ghetto alive, and then made a name for himself as a movie artist.  Last I checked, he's still one of the most well regarded filmmakers of either the 20th or 21st century.  Someone who to this day is still worthy to stand among the giants.  I mean to hear some people tell it, this guy deserves to have his own spot up on Rushmore, or something.  At least that's what they all say in all the old critics circles.  When you take that same reputation and apply it to the rest of us in the aisles, that's where things can get interesting.  For instance, I swear, it's difficult to tell just what kind of reputation any of the classic director's of yesteryear still have in this day and age.  That applies even to those who are still with us, like Marty, George, or Spielberg.  See, back in the 80s, these guys were all like titans.

I'm serious.  These they had it all down so cold.  When I was still just a kid if you heard that somebody like Lucas or Scorsese was releasing a new film in theaters, that in itself was pretty much considered something of an event.  Anybody who could make to the premier of a film like Goodfellas was considered one lucky bastard.  And the rest of us all had to just sit and bask in the other guy's gloating privileges.   Oh yeah, and we also happen to learn along the way about just how good the picture was.  That was way back then, however.  These days there's no telling what kind of reputation any artist has got, even if you've got a flick like Raging Bull or Raiders of the Lost Ark on your resume.  It's all like, "Big deal", now.  Take you number and get the fuck back in line.  At least that's how things seem to shake out to me, anyway.  If all these morbid musings should ever turn out to be the case, then all I can say is guys like Marty Scorsese from Queens is always going to have at least one champion in his corner so far as my neck of the woods is concerned.  Anybody's got a problem with that, take it to someone who gives a fuck.  I'm here to appreciate artists at work, ya get me?  At least, that's what I'm normally up to here, more or less.  Then I went and watched a film called Casino, and the credits rolled I came away with one simple question on my mind.  Can geniuses even geniuses have their off days?

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855).

I've been following a breadcrumb trail for a while now.  I guess you could say that's what I've been trying to do, anyway.  For the past month of two I've been not so much obsessed, as curious about something to do with Stephen King's Dark Tower series of books.  I'm not sure if it's correct to say I'm interested in figuring them all out.  This seems less of a question about "What does it all mean"?  Nor is it a matter of making the usual judgment call on the overall quality of the books as a whole.  Besides which, I've already done the latter in a myriad number of ways, and all of it amounts to the same thing.  There might have been some kind of Inspiration going on in the basement level of the writer's mind when he got the idea of taking Sergio Leone's Man with No Name and placing him in a Gonzo Western version of J.R.R. Tolkien's landscape.  However, even if that's the case, then the final results speak less of Inspired revery, and more of the quiet desperation of an otherwise talented mind grasping at whatever secondhand glimpses of the original Creative Idea he can rescue from the murk of his inner workshop.  Because of this, the final result remains one long slog of invention as opposed to anything approaching Inspiration.  When a writer like King is Inspired, you'll know it when you read it.  It's what allows imaginary small towns like Salem's Lot or Derry, Maine to feel like real, lived in places.  He's able to bring these pictures in his head to such vibrant life that it's now reached a point where Derry has become a character in it's own right.  Why else do you suppose Hollywood of all places would be trying to make a TV series out of it, otherwise?

That's a good example of King at his Inspired best.  With the Tower books, you're seeing the author caught in a desperate struggle to work the story fossil out the ground, and it's difficult to tell if the darn thing is too deep in the ground excavate, or there's even anything there at all, and the author has spent all this time doing no more than mining for the mental equivalent of Fool's Gold.  In other words, the story of the Last Gunslinger in a World that has Moved On never manages to be one of Kings best.  The funny thing is how they're also kind of fascinating to think about.  I don't mean they're interesting in terms of overall plot, but rather of the scattered hints of themes, ideas, and other Inspirations that went into the composition of the Gunslinger's patchwork secondary world.  If I had to point to where this interest came from, then a lot of the credit their probably has to go to a scholar named Robin Furth, and the contents of essay she wrote once upon a by for The Complete Dark Tower Concordance.  That essay, Roland, the Quest, and the Tower, seems to have contained just enough thematic richness to it to act as a lure for any online nobody with an interest in hunting down bits and pieces of forgotten and obscure literary esoterica.  A lot of Furth's thoughts on the Tower seemed interesting to me.  I thought I recognized some of her words as being reflections of statements King himself had made elsewhere.

Specifically, it was phrases like "As Above, So Below" that recalled to memory several smatterings of commentary that King had made in Danse Macabre about how "Modem horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it (422)".  It's the kind of statement that has no choice except to come off as obtuse to most folks in the audience, unless you happen to be a self-made fan of Renaissance era literature.  In which case statements such as those will tend to activate some kind of internal literary allusion detecting antenna.  It's the same reaction that knowledgeable fans used to get from any halfway decent episode of The Simpsons, back in the day.  The only difference is a mind attuned to references and words drawn from the Age of Shakespeare.  I can't say that I ever made a deliberate choice to end up like this.  It's just the way that King and other writers like him were able to mold me.  Who knew?  In any case, it was statements like the one above from non-fiction books like Macabre, coupled with the author's use of antiquarian terms like Microcosm and Macrocosm, and the ability to realize that these two words helped the ending of the novel version of It to make a greater deal of sense that got me interested in learning more about the internal storehouse that King draws upon for his own artistry.

So I decided to see if it was possible to discern any pattern to the bric-a-brac in the King's workshop, and down the rabbit hole I more or less went.  If of all of that backstory proves anything, then I guess the lesson is...it pays to grow up as a fan of the Horror genre?  I don't know, you're guess is as good as mine.  Anyway, I went source hunting for, not the key or heart of King's Imagination, let's be clear about that.  I think his general essence as a writer is basically that of the Romantics at its core.  He's one of the lucky few who was just born with a natural talent for tapping into Jung's Collective Unconscious and (nine times out of ten) bringing one of them up to the surface, and getting a pretty good read out of it, more often than not.  Everything else is just so much bells and whistles, really.  His maxim has always been "The Book is the Boss", and it's something he appears to have spent his entire life living up to.  It's just that the writer's notion of Horror as a form of Renaissance literature for the modern age is yet another idea that he keeps returning to, though he never makes any big deal out it.  It's just another part of the general ingredients that are always "on the table", in a manner of speaking.  If the narrative he's working on has a use for such notions, into the Cauldron of Story they go.  If not, neither harm nor foul.  It really does all seem to be just part of another day at the office so far as Steve King is concerned.

What makes the Tower books fascinating to think about (as opposed to reading) is that the entire series has a way of acting as an accidental manifestation of the contents of King's inner storehouse, both in terms of his Inspirations, and his thoughts about the nature of writing.  So, I guess that might explain why I'm sometimes drawn back to examining these particular sets of books.  The Dark Tower books (along with their sister novel The Stand) are able to do double duty as the closest thing to a palimpsest or mappa mundi of King's creativity and thinking.  It's like stumbling upon a treasure chest full of hidden of sources that, when taken together, create an outline of King's artistry.  What I'm interested in for the purposes of this article is to go back to the major literary source that author has cited as his main Inspiration for starting the whole peculiar mess.  He says he got it from a poem.  "The idea of writing this dark fantasy series came from...Robert Browning’s “Child [sic] Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” King quickly warms to his story: “Browning never says what that tower is, but it’s based on an even older tradition about Childe Roland that’s lost in antiquity. Nobody knows who wrote it, and nobody knows what the Dark Tower is.  “So I started off wondering: What is this tower? What does it mean? And I decided that everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find.  “They know it’s destructive and it will probably mean the end of them, but there’s that urge to make it your own or to destroy it, one or the other. So I thought: Maybe it’s different things to different people, and as I write along I’ll find out what it is to Roland. And I found that out, but I’m not going to tell you (web)".

It's King's mentioning of what he terms "The Tradition of Roland" lost to antiquity that jumps out a me the most.  I suppose the reason why is because it telegraphs that it wasn't just the experience of reading Robert Browning's poetical obscurus, but also the knowledge that the poem in itself was a pointer to some long forgotten volumes of quaint and curious lore that seems to have acted as the extra bit of creative enticement to see what he could do with the whole thing.  When it comes to the Tradition that King mentions in passing, I think of all the critics I've read, it is Michele Baum who has done the most to provide us the closest summary of what that Tradition is, and how it has been use in an artistic sense down through the years.  "...Stephen King describes how Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” was  his inspiration for Roland the Gunslinger. But Browning’s knight also had his predecessors, such as Orlando in the sixteenth century Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, or Charlemagne’s knight in the eleventh century Song of Roland. The genre and heroic conventions change across these four texts but despite the different contexts, we can see similarities in the construction of the hero (66-67)".

I've devoted an article a piece on this site to at least one of the texts that Braun talks about in the pages of Patrick McAleer's Stephen King's Modern Macabre, and one other that seems to have escaped everyone else's radar.  In doing so, I've done no more than to satisfy my own curiosity about where this lifelong oddity in King's career might have come from.  At last, I think, I've reached the clearing at the end of this particular path.  I'm going to devote this review to studying where it all started for some then unknown student at the University of Maine in Orono.  It's time to take a look at Robert Browning's Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and see what it can tells us as King's main Inspiration.

Sergio Leone and the Orlando Furioso.

According to Bev Vincent, "When Stephen King started working on the first story of the first book that would become the Dark Tower series, his intentions were nothing grander than to write the longest popular novel in history. Now a grandfather in his late fifties, King looks back with sympathy and understanding at the youthful hubris that gave rise to such an aspiration. “At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant. . . . Nineteen is the age where you say Look out world, I’m smokin’ TNT and I’m drinkin’ dynamite, so if you know what’s good for ya, get out of my way—here comes Stevie.”  The Lord of the Rings inspired King, though he had no intention of replicating Tolkien’s creations, for his inspirations went beyond that epic quest fantasy to embrace romantic poetry and the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. After graduating from college, he decided it was time to stop playing around and tackle something serious. He began a novel “that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against [director Sergio] Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop (275)".  Earlier on in the same book, Vincent elaborates a bit more on what has to remain the quirkiest idea that ever occurred to the still reigning King of Horror.  "The story that would become" The Dark Tower series "had its genesis almost a decade before the first" installment "appeared in F&SF, when King and his wife-to-be, Tabitha Spruce, each inherited reams of brightly colored paper nearly as thick as cardboard and in an “eccentric size.”  

"To the endless possibilities of five hundred blank sheets of 7" x 10" bright green paper, King added “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning, a poem he’d studied two years previously in a course covering the earlier romantic poets. “I had played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel, embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem.”   In an unpublished essay called “The Dark Tower: A Cautionary Tale,” King says, “I had recently seen a bigger-than-life Sergio Leone Western, and it had me wondering what would happen if you brought two very distinct genres together: heroic fantasy and the Western.”   After graduating from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, King moved into a “skuzzy riverside cabin” and began what he then conceived of as a “very long fantasy novel,” perhaps even the longest popular novel in history.   He wrote the first section of The Gunslinger in a ghostly, unbroken silence—he was living alone—that influenced the eerie isolation of Roland and his solitary quest.  The story did not come easily. Sections were written during a dry spell in the middle of ’Salem’s Lot, and another part was written after he finished The Shining. Even when he wasn’t actively working on the Dark Tower, his mind often turned to the story—except, he says, when he was battling Randall Flagg in The Stand, which is ironic since both Flagg and a superflu decimated world became part of the Dark Tower mythos many years later (7-8)".  That's the closest I think anyone's ever come to granting a basic outline of how King contrived his most erratic narrative.

It's a story that both Vincent and the author himself have related time and again over the years.  There's nothing very new to be said about it, as of this writing, except perhaps for one overlooked element.  It has to do with, of all things, not any famous literary text (or at least, maybe not directly) but rather a filmmaker.  I'm talkin specifically now about an Italian filmmaker named Sergio Leone.  However strange this may sound. it kinda-sorta turns out he's one of the key components that King used in constructing his grandiose, yet somehow forever incomplete secondary world.  He's yet another part of of the tale Vincent and King have to tell about how the Tower had its genesis.  Ever since catching a fateful viewing of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at a local movie theater in about the year 1967-8 (web), King has made no secret of the impact that the artistry of Leone has had on his own work as a writer.  This appears to be one of those deep influences for the author.  Something that has been allowed to become at least part of the artist's personal storehouse of potential Inspirations.  In his 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, King even devotes a few pages to Leone and his filmic creativity.  As is typical of the author, he brings Leone up in the course of discussing the art of the Horror genre.  To be specific, he's contemplating how a work like Frankenstein can become its own modern form of myth?

"The most obvious answer to this question is, the movies. The movies did it. And this is a true answer, as far as it goes. As has been pointed out in film books ad infinitum (and possibly ad nauseam), the movies have been very good at providing that cultural echo chamber... perhaps because, in terms of ideas as well as acoustics, the best place to create an echo is in a large empty space. In place of the ideas that books and novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotion—the young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himself— the film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head... or run over by a train.  

"There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way from Birth of a Nation to Annie Hall. But until a few years ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the cinema “new wave” that broke in Europe from 1946 until about 1965), and these movies have always been chancy in America, playing at your neighborhood “art house” with subtitles, if they play at all. I think it’s easy to misread the success of Woody Allen’s later films in this regard. In America’s urban areas, his films—and films such as Cousin, Cousine—generate long lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls “good ink,” but in the sticks—the quad cinema in Davenport, Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—these pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear.  It is Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters on the prowl.

"Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone, to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want. What Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and most grandiosely in Once Upon a Time In The West cannot even properly be called satire. O.U.A.T.I.T.W. in particular is a huge and wonderfully vulgar overstatement of the already overstated archetypes of American film westerns. In this movie gunshots seem as loud as atomic blasts; close-ups seem to go  on for minutes at a stretch, gunfights for hours; and the streets of Leone’s peculiar little Western towns all seem as wide as freeways (57-58)".  A page or two later, while still discussing Frankenstein as an example of a new modern Myth, King once more brings up the significance of Leone's achievement.  The funny thing is that he does so by pairing up the Man With No Name alongside King Kong, of all characters, saying, "Like Eastwood in Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Kong is the archetype of the archetype (61)".  It might not seem like much to go on, yet perhaps King has left his readers with some interesting food for thought when it comes to a good starting place for unpacking Leone's particular brand of artistry.  To start with, King makes a distinction between films of Ideas, and what I'm going to call a reliance on modern Emblems.  It's a phrase I'm borrowing from scholar Michael R. Collings, and his 2001 book Towards Other Worlds.

In the course of a chapter with the stimulating title of Stephen King, Richard Bachman, and Seventeenth-Century Devotional Poetry, Collings theorizes that the author of books like Carrie and The Regulators has taken the Renaissance concept of the Emblem, and "transferred it into an appearance that renders appropriate and acceptable to modern audiences (150)".  While the imagery of a book like The Regulators "belongs largely to the world of prose", it is the writer's ability to take the "Cultural icons of suburban Middle America" and treat them as a form of Modern Emblemology, that makes King able to bridge the gap between Idea and Image mentioned above in Danse Macabre.  What's interesting to note about Collings take is that the cinema of Sergio Leone is able to fit into King's rubric of modern Emblems (149-50)".  I think Collings efforts need to be highlighted here, because unless that happens, the full significance of his words will get all too easily overlooked.  What he's saying in this chapter is that not only does Stephen King's artistry owe a great deal to the literary practices of the Age of Shakespeare, he also goes a step further by perhaps leaving room for applying the same consideration to the work of the director of Once Upon a Time in the West.  Collings only mentions Leone just that one time, in passing, while keep his focus solely on King.  The idea that a guy who writes a book like Christine might be a literary heir to the practices of Elizabethan Drama is a hard sell for most of us.

What are we to do with the notion that the same Renaissance dramaturgy applies to a man who makes films in which Dirty Harry runs around filling most of the cast full of lead?  I'll have to admit it's more or less impossible to believe that films like A Fistful of Dollars amounts to anything like a Story of Ideas, as King calls them.  At the very least, this has not been any major part of the reputation that Leone has garnered for himself, whether among critics or audiences.  Very few of us can see any reason to take a film like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, seriously.  And so one day I ran across a book about Leone, and somewhere very near the beginning of the text, I made a discovery.  It counts as no more than one of those minor revelations tucked away in an otherwise passing comment.  Yet I'd argue that if we zero in on it, it might be possible to discover an interesting reason for considering the creator of the Man with No Name as having perhaps a greater integral relation to Stephen King's Dark Tower Mythos than has previously been assumed.  Even the most dedicated Tower Junkies assume that films like TGTB&TU amount to little than jumping-off points, something like a simple yet necessary puzzle piece that was required to unlock the door to the artist's Imagination.  However, if the work and scholarship of Sir Christopher Frayling is anything to go by, then there might just be a more vital yet hidden connection between Sergio Leone, and the various tales told about the character of Roland. 

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594)

All I knew was that Tolkien hated it.  That's how it was for the longest time.  Sure I'd heard of the play in passing, here and there.  I even knew who had written it (and no, there is no confusion or open question in my mind on that subject).  Hell, I'd even learned how to become a fan of his long ago by the time I checked out this particular work for myself.  I first made the acquaintance of the Bard of Avon in what now amounts to not just another time, but also something of another world, in many ways.  I think I might have been a high school freshman at the time I'm thinking back on now, yet it's difficult to be precise about things like this, even if you're not old.  What I now know for certain (after a bit of rummaging around in the old memory banks) is that the first time I ever had a personal encounter with the writings of William Shakespeare was way back in an old English class.  The play we were given to study is often cited as the writer's major breakout success.  It's the one with the line that askes, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo"?  That was also the first time I ever got a chance to study Elizabethan Blank Verse for myself.  It sounded a bit strange, at first.  Like listening to a foreign language.  At first, it was like trying to to pick up fragments of just discernable meaning scattered amidst the pages of a new and peculiar dictionary.

Perhaps the strangest thing to come out of pouring over one of the key moments in the development in the history of English Literature is that it is possible to say I came away more or less impressed.  I'm not sure I can call Romeo and Juliet my favorite of the Bard's works.  At the same time, there's got to have been at least something of value in this early, energetic effort.  It was enough to get my attention to the point where I began to get interested.  It let me be curious enough to want to ask, just who was this curious sounding, yet somehow entertaining scribbler from Stratford, England?  Not long after that, I happened to catch an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where none other than Hamlet was the feature attraction.  Fans of the show complain it's not the best entry in the series, but I didn't come away just amused.  Somehow, the Best Brains behind that production turned me into a Shakespeare fan.  Looking back on how it all happened now, the whole thing seems to have been one of those gradual processes.  Somehow, all the right choices were made that were required to first get my attention, then my genuine interest in the one the writer who bears the most responsibility for the shape and nature of modern fiction.  I'm sure it's not an isolated incident, by any means.  Odds are even the brief bit of backstory I've just told is the sort of thing that's been replicated more than once out there.  What makes my case almost unique is that it happened in a classroom setting, which is not a normal occurrence.

If there's any thing like a good rule of thumb when it comes to engaging with the Classics of Western Literature, then one of the few hard and fast rules, for the most part, seems to be to avoid any first introductions that involves a school curriculum setting.  This is something Stephen King once talked about in a now almost obscure essay.  He was writing about the difference between the texts that naturally caught the attention of the reader, versus those that our school system at least tries to get us interested in.  King defines these semi-related phenomenon under the helpful rubric of "Wanna Read", and "Gotta Read".  Each amounts to no more than what it says on the label.  Wanna Read applies to all the works of fiction (regardless of medium) that have won your heart, and introduced you to the world of the life-long fan.  Gotta Read describes the literary equivalent of the grown-ups telling you to eat your vegetables.  I feel like I should step in here to note that King does present one caveat to the problem of Gotta Read.  Sometimes it is possible for teachers to make the right choice, and assign you a genuine work of art that can win over the audience.  It is possible to see the beauty of the fiction of Jane Austen or the Bronte Sisters.  However, it seems like making them "important" isn't the way to do it.

It takes something else in order to allow works like Pride and Prejudice to plant the right hook in the readers mind; the one that is able to reel them in as a new catch.  This is something that any well told story can do on its own steam.  I think part of the problem that a lot English 101 teachers have trouble with is understanding how that is, and what's the best way of passing on that sort of enthusiasm to all their young charges.  Whatever the case, the usual results are just as King outlines.  "As a high-school student I found Edgar Allan Poe a prolix, leather-lunged bore who was about as scary as the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks; I condemned Robert Frost as a pedestrian hick; considered Hemingway a macho jerk with an elephant gun where his heart should be; felt that John Updike's first book of short stories, Pigeon Feathers, was one of the most boring things I'd ever read in my life.  I felt like demanding an EEG after finishing it, just to make sure I wasn't brain-dead.  Now...years after high-school, I still feel exactly the same way about Pigeon Feathers...The others?  We-elll...that's a different story.  Hamlet?  Tremendously exciting.  A study of madness and obsession that probably has no peer.  And a darn fine ghost story, in the bargain...and if Hamlet is the greatest play ever written in English, then Great Expectations may be the greatest novel (356-7)".  This is just one example among many others.

It's a testament to the staying power a writer like Shakespeare can have so long as he's given either (1) the right sort of classroom environment, or better yet (2) the best level playing field possible for the Stratford Bard to shop his wares to the audience.  At least that's what happened to me, anyway.  It's even gotten to the point where Shakespeare's Blank Verse "house style" no longer sounds strange to my ears at all.  It just flows like well tuned music.  The trick on that score is the realization that all the Bard has done is to take the rhythms and cadences of ordinary Elizabethan conversation, raised its diction up to the level of Poetry, and then bracketed it in the kind of structure that is nowadays more typically reserved for the composition of song lyrics.  It's an outmoded way of writing so far as any of us are concerned today.  However the fact that someone a long time ago was able to be so good at it that we've kept him around has to be just one demonstration of the level of talent involved in writing a work like Hamlet.  Still, it's like I say.  In all the time that I was broadening my outlook on all things Shakespearean, a play like the Midsummer Night always remained something of a periphery concern.

At last, one day, I decided to knuckle under and set aside some time to taking a look at this bit of Elizabethan Fantasy for myself.  The result is worth talking about.  As I think I can say I've found some..."interesting" elements of the play.  They may definitely be worth commenting on.  I'm just not sure I ever imagined I would have to talk about it all the way I'm about to now.  Here's a bit of fair warning for the reader going forward.  What I have to say next is going to be a bit tricky or delicate to discuss.  There's a lot of heady and hot topics to talk about with a story like this.  These subjects can include what happens when a play ends up brining up questions about what makes a healthy relationship?  Or whether or not an artist can be forced into writing against his best interests?  It might go all the way up to including what happens when an artist is forced to perform his art in a fundamentally toxic venue?  If all of that sounds like a tall order for a play that concerns a couple of run-ins with the Fair Folk, all I can say is these are the questions and discoveries that the final results of Shakespeare's Woodland drama first forced me to ask, and in looking for the answers, to arrive at a picture that somehow proves it's possible for real life to be more confused and messed up than any piece of fiction the best can conjure up.  With fair warning, this is my look at A Midsummer Night's Dream.