In the NY Times this week, Alexandra Alter has a very interesting profile of Susannah Clarke. Clarke gets my vote for the most creative fantasy writer of the 21st century, and, yep, she's pretty crazy.
Clarke burst onto the scene with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), which sold 4 million copies and was widely proclaimed a truly great work of fantasy. I was ambivalent. On the one hand, it is full of wonders; one of my favorite bits describes ancient fairy roads that still run across northern England, now mostly abandoned and choked with trees and brush, never mentioned by the people who live nearby. The British tradition includes many stories about people who join fairy balls and don't return for a century; Clarke describes such a ball, conveying both the beauty of it and the unspeakable weariness of a party that never ends. I devoured these details, and transcribed half a dozen passages into my commonplace book. On the other hand, I disliked the plot and found one of the two main characters (Norrell) to be one of the most irritating people in the history of fiction. So I didn't love it like many others did, but I did recognize it as a remarkable achievement.
From the moment it appeared there were rumors that Clarke was working on a sequel, but somehow it never emerged. Most fans only learned years later what had happened:
Not long after the novel’s release, Clarke and her husband were having dinner with friends near their home in Derbyshire, England. In the middle of the meal, she felt nauseated and wobbly, got up from the table, and collapsed.
In the years that followed, she struggled to write. Her symptoms — migraines, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and fogginess — made working for sustained periods impossible. She wrote scattered fragments that never cohered; sometimes she couldn’t finish a single sentence. At a low point, she was bed-bound and mired in depression.
Clarke stopped thinking of herself as a writer.
“It became a problem of just not believing that I could write anymore. I just didn’t think it was possible,” said Clarke, who was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “I just thought of myself as this ill woman.”
Clarke eventually recovered enough to write seriously again, but she abandoned her first world and wrote something completely different instead. Piranesi (2020) is the story of a man trapped in a labyrinth with no end. Part of what traps him is the weak state of his own memory, his inability to recall who he used to be and how he became what he is. I loved it, read it straight through from beginning to end. But when you think about it, the story transparently springs from Clarke's experience with her mysterious illness, and Alter confirms this:
The philosophical puzzle at the story’s center reflected some of Clarke’s preoccupations: The narrator, Piranesi, lives largely alone with seabirds and stone figures, but instead of feeling lost or lonely, he sees the halls as a place of infinite wonders.
Clarke had nearly finished the novel before she saw the parallels between the fictional labyrinth and her illness.
“I was subliminally aware that I was writing about someone in a fairly isolated position, but who was able to find a huge amount of meaning in that,” she said.
Which is an amazing example of making lemonade from lemons. It also connects back to what may the second oldest trope about art, that it has roots in pain and suffering: the sadness of life is the joy of art. If Susannah Clarke's illness birthed Piranesi, doesn't that raise the question of whether her suffering was ultimately a bad thing?
Should artists have to suffer so the rest of us can read books like Piranesi, or enjoy paintings like the ones Van Gogh did in Arles?
But I want to get even broader than that. Alter finds that Clarke seems to be recovering from her illness, but she remains a strange person:
In her lap she held a stuffed pig, with a stuffed fox nestled beside her; both creatures play a role in “The Wood at Midwinter.” She likes to hold her stuffed animals when she’s working, to help her think, and as a talisman “to ward off, I don’t know what, something or other.”
“Some people do things as a child, and then when they grow up, they put off childish things,” she said. “I’m not very good at that.”
Glancing down at the pig, she added, “I don’t really see the point of growing up.”
Which gets us back to where we started. What if it is true that to be a great artist one must be crazy, or at least strange?
Or, to get more personal, have I generally failed as a fantasy writer because I am simply too sane, too happy, too rooted in this world?
Clarke's troubles don't seem to have broken her spirit, and she is forging ahead with new plans:
Along with the new novel set in the world of “Strange and Norrell,” Clarke is also working on another book, set partly during the Industrial Revolution in 1840s Bradford, where she lived as a child. Clarke described it as an “anti-horror” novel, with a fantastical premise that reflects her belief that something sublime is hidden within the mundane.
Clarke is still drawn to the idea of magic. For her, magic isn’t something otherworldly and distant, it’s “the idea of something elemental, something transcendent” that exists all around us.
“I feel very strongly that if you could see the world as it really is, if you could get further beyond your ego and the sorts of ways in which we trap ourselves, if you could just see the world beyond, every moment would be miraculous,” she said.
She’s come to believe that the limitations imposed by her illness haven’t made her any less of a writer. She’s a different writer now, but no less ambitious or inventive.
“Somebody said to me, pray the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to, and I think it’s the same for writing: Write the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to,” Clarke said. “I’ve only ever had any success by doing my own weird thing, following the path that’s in front of me.”
2 comments:
The British tradition includes many stories about people who join fairy balls and don't return for a century; Clarke describes such a ball, conveying both the beauty of it and the unspeakable weariness of a party that never ends.
What an incredibly odd way to interpret the "don't return for a century" aspect of such stories. I don't think I've ever seen it's sort.
The eeriness of the fae is in the fact that they and their realm don't follow the same rules, and are thus often unpredictable to humans. And the idea is that time itself doesn't even follow the rules in their realm - you go to the fae realm for a single evening's revelry, but upon returning you are horrified to learn that much, much, much more time than a single evening has passed in the human world - be it days, weeks, years, or a century.
And it's not just strictly "fae" stories where you see this - other cultures, with their own comparable spirits living "beyond the veil" in a mystical realm, also exhibit many of the same qualities of eerily existing outside of the rules of the regular world, up to and including the speed at which time passes in their realm versus ours. The Japanese tale of Urashima Tarō is a classic example, which tells of a fisherman who is rewarded for his kindness to a turtle by being spirited away to the undersea palace of the Dragon King, where he spends several days in the company of the beautiful princess Otohime, but finds upon his return to the mortal world that he has been gone over a century.
Beyond that, to instead imagine that the fae specifically are locking themselves away in interminable and miserable century-long balls and parties is not just surprising, it also doesn't make sense. The fae are capricious, fickle, flighty, ever-changing. It goes against the very nature of the fae to steadfastly carry on with a single task for any considerable length of time - doubly so for any task that has become monotonous and boring.
Yes, incredibly odd, nobody ever did it that way before, but when you read it, wonderful. That's the strangeness of Clarke.
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