The Living Stone: Stories of Uncanny Sculpture, 1858–1948 edited by Henry Bartholomew
(Handheld Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Sculpture is inherently uncanny; the creation of simulacra of human (and other) form, enigmatic and often loaded (says Henry Bartholomew in his introduction) with destabilising fears of otherness. Sabine Baring-Gould’s “Master Sacristan Eberhart” (significantly subtitled “not quite a ghost story”) is an interesting start to this selection. The Sacristan’s reflection, after a statue of a monk has foiled a robbery, warns against what we are so often doing—seeing in these stories and their subjects “reflections of our own selves, our feelings and passions” instead of their artistic truth which might cause us to direct attention away from our selves. It might be argued that Eberhart, in his strange “friendship” with the statue he calls Father Simon, has fallen into precisely that trap!
Many of the stories here focus upon the uncanny relationship between sculptor and sculpted. We should be familiar with the story of the Greek sculptor Pygmalion who carved a statue so beautiful he fell in love with it—a creepy notion; but perhaps even creepier is William Chamber’s Morrow’s “reverse Pygmalionism” in “A Marble Woman”. A man desires to keep the “glorious beauty” of his wife for ever by transforming her into a statue. The narrator’s examination of the interior structure of the statue’s snapped-off arm is thoroughly chilling.
Other stories play upon this disturbing motif of transformation. Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer” explains the changed expression on the face of a statue. We often talk about dedicated artists “putting themselves into their work”. In Oliver Onions’ “Benlian” a sculptor’s project is—or is, according to the narrator—devoted to exactly this. De Roults, forced to hand over his unfinished masterpiece in lieu of a debt of seventy-five dollars, gets his revenge from beyond the grave. Reynard, in Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Maker of Gargoyles”, creates two malignant figures and is said to have “informed these figures with the visible likeness of his own vices”. The story suggests that these scandalised critics may have been right. Hazel Heald’s “The Man of Stone” (one of a number of her stories “heavily revised” by H.P. Lovecraft) has, like “A Marble Woman” living beings transformed into statues when a potion produces a kind of “petrification infinitely speeded up”. The way the villain gets his come-uppance is horrifically effective and may be Heald rather than Lovecraft coming through. Lovecraft himself appears in his own right with the dream-like “Hypnos”. He wrote of the stories of this period that they were marked by “extravagance, floridity, unrestraint”. That may be so, but reading this story of a young man drawn into decadent terrors by an older companion who reminds him of “a faun’s statue out of ancient Hellas” in the context of this collection, one is struck by the vividness of the admittedly “floral” language and the way the ambiguous ending is foreshadowed by the early paragraphs.
“The Living Stone” is something of a mixed collection. Nellie K. Blissett’s “The Stone Rider” is the kind of Gothic one reads once. “The Menhir” by N. Dennett is overblown and wordy in its climax. It has been suggested that Dennett is a penname of Helen Leys, although the multiplicity of adjectives and the crescendo of melodrama might suggest a more amateur writer determined to pull out all the stops. (The story appeared appropriately enough in a 1934 anthology entitled Panic: it seems to have inspired the cover image.) E.R. Punshon’s “The Living Stone”, on the other hand, though containing pretty much the same sort of malevolent ancient stone figure, is lightened by its effective investigative duo of “the Professor” and the “Chief Inspector”. It would be interesting to see more of this team, although “The Living Stone” may be their sole appearance. The title of “At Simmel Acres Farm”, by Eleanor Scott evokes, as Bartholomew says “simulacrum”—representation of an idol which demands, as evil deities do, a sacrifice. Two stories, each entitled “The Marble Hands”, (W.W. Fenn and Bernard Capes) suggest the eeriness of the kind of sculpture which simply presents body parts. While some stories (Scott’s sneering Roman bust is an example) evoke specifically historical sculptures, “Bagnell Terrace” by E.F. Benson is perhaps the strongest placing of ancient sculptures with ideas of cultural otherness, with its Ancient Egyptian artefacts. It does so, however, crudely. At one level it is a story in which someone is jealous because a foreign guy has residence in the best house in the terrace, but it is a strong example of the ambivalence which “Ancient Egypt” inspires in Western culture.
As a collection, however, The Living Stone remains effective. Relatively unknown authors are combined with writers celebrated in the field. Two instances are thought-provoking. Arthur Machen’s “The Ceremony” is a clear previsioning of his “The White People”, written before his masterpiece but not published until twenty years afterwards. It briefly evokes the mixture of unsettling reticence and explicit evocation of “decadent” themes which “The White People” presents more fully. The anonymous protagonist cannot even remember the name of the “grey stone in the wood” which inspires memories and, eventually, the “blushing shame” of participation in “the antique immemorial rite”. It’s a fascinating “trailer” for the longer story. Robert W. Chambers “The Mask”, from The King in Yellow, could have been part of the inspiration for “The Man of Stone” and “A Marble Woman” (here too, living forms are transformed to marble by a “potion”, but Chambers takes further steps into the uncanny). Does its delirious fascination demand, though, that it is best read in the context of the rest of The King in Yellow? Perhaps not the least of the achievements of anthologies like this is that they send us off looking for more.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.