Word: unseen
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David Stacton's sourly excellent historical novels are like chess games of long-dead masters, replayed from dusty notes. The author moves the pieces for both black and white, knowing the outcomes, musing on strengths and weaknesses unseen by the players. It is to catalyze these dark musings, not to commemorate the players, that Stacton restages the old battles. Not surprisingly, his novels lack the painted scenery and speeches in all-purpose King James dialect that clutter other historical fiction. In A Signal Victory, the ironically titled tale of the Spanish conquest of the Maya civilization, there...
...nervous breakdown." Recuperating with his grandparents in Memphis that summer, he wrote his first play: Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!, about two sailors who pick up a couple of girls. He had never seen a sailor. In the next few years, returning to St. Louis, he churned out scripts about miners (unseen), munitions makers (unseen), prison convicts roasted alive (unseen) and a flophouse (visited). A quasi-bohemian theater group called the Mummers staged them...
...that inflict suffering, confided to the House of Lords that he and his wife kept their home free of rodents entirely through friendly persuasion. The technique, Lady Dowding later explained to newsmen, involves stealing up on the beasts after dark and cooing: "I am glad to have you as unseen pets, but you are causing me some difficulty." Then, "after I have said this, they understand the situation and leave of their own accord." The one hazard, conceded Lady Dowding, "is that anyone listening would think I was crazy...
...Unseen Monsters. Far more important to the surrealists was Odilon Redon, who was born in Bordeaux in 1840. Probably no child lived in a world of such frantic fantasy, and almost all of his works in later life have their roots in his childhood. Shortly before he died, Redon visited the town where he grew up, and reported, "I have completely understood the origins of the sad art I have created. It is a site for a monastery, an enclosure in which one feels oneself alone-what abandon! It was necessary there to fill one's imagination with...
...book all this horror, like a walking death, is veiled in a ghostly winding sheet of luminous Jamesian language. Nothing is clear; anything is possible; evil like a serpent glides unseen beneath each gliding sentence. In the film, necessarily, the spectral prose is replaced by spooky images and scary noises. Some of them are eerily effective: Sheffield Park, the gorgeously rotting old Georgian mansion in which the film was mostly made, is a demon's dream house, and Director Jack (Room at the Top} Clayton, sensitively seconded by Cameraman Freddie Frances, has filled every coign and corridor with...