Re: Shall 2024 be the Eldritch Year of George MacDonald (born 1824)?
Posted by:
Kipling (IP Logged)
Date: 14 July, 2023 06:12PM
Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Sawfish, as many times as I've read "The Dreams in
> the Witch-House" and Lilith, that possible
> connection never has occurred to me -- but it
> seems very plausible. I like it!
>
> Kipling, to put my remark about rereadings of the
> two romances in perspective, I've read Phantastes
> three times -- perhaps with increasing
> appreciation. But I've read Lilith seven times
> (plus the first draft once). So these are both
> among my favorite works of fantasy over about 55
> years of reading such books for adult readers.
Okay, Dale, I see your point of comparison as partly subjective. The friend who gifted me the book has read Moby Dick 3 times, but at 8 readings you surely hold the record for rereadings of LILITH. If I read two novels by the same author twice, I'm unlikely to be rating one as significantly better than the other (At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for example). Although the plot of the latter is given away by that misplaced prefacing quotation.
Sawfish, there's a bloated rat with human features in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's tale, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street", so Lovecraft borrowed from Le Fanu, yet failed to include any discussion of him in his otherwise excellent study "Supernatural Horror in Literature". Curious. An anti-Irish bias, perhaps, which is funny when you consider how Irish authors loom so large in the history of English literature-- maybe that was it. HPL also borrowed from Bierce, consciously or not, in his very minor story "He", but that was composed spontaneously in a New York park. Such tracing of influence led one commentator, I forget who, to describe his fiction as "too redolent of the Lamp". You can't say that about Smith!
Dale, regarding C.S.Lewis's introduction to the 1964 edition of the two MacDonald romances, I think Lewis talks out of both sides of his mouth here: "The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad lulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly novels), sometimes an over-sweetness picked up from Novalis" ("Introduction" pg.8). Lewis and Lovecraft had something in common as critics, methinks.
jkh
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 14 Jul 23 | 07:00PM by Kipling.