Monday, August 21, 2017

An exchange with Brian Aldiss

I have just learned that Brian Aldiss passed away two days ago, at the age of 92.  I will not recap here his achievements, or wax enthusiastically about his books, though I could, at length.  As a brief memorial, I will post excerpts from an email correspondence I had with him between April and June 2015.  His generosity in answering questions from a reader was exemplary.  Since these were answers to a scholarly inquiry, I feel that their publication here, as an interview of sorts, is appropriate. 

I contacted him through his website.  I was at the time teaching a class on the capriccio, centered on Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's series of prints, the Capricci and the Scherzi.  These prints served as inspiration for Brian in writing his 1976 fantasy novel, The Malacia Tapestry.  One of his sons, who ran his website, found my query interesting enough to pass it on to his father.  I got this message from Brian on April 7:

Dear Andrei Molotiu

I was very happy to see your communication forwarded on by my son Tim, with slight delay for the sunny festival of Easter.

I will be happy to respond to any questions you care to ask about 'Malacia'. It's a long while since I wrote 'Malacia Tapestry'. I had a feeling at the time that England was vegetating and there was an intention that 'Malacia' should echo that aspect of our lives. Tiepelo is another matter, at that time I was just crazy about the final workings of Tiepelo's imagination, when he had retired lavishly decorating grand ceilings of ceremonial buildings all over Europe, to sit quietly in his home town of Venice and create those little cameos which it seems even Italian critics cannot really fathom.

Of course I could say more, and would be happy to hear from you again.

Sincerely
Brian Aldiss
 I will not post here the long, gushing letter I wrote to him next.  Most of my questions can be inferred from his answers.  The only reference that needs some explanation is the one to Hoffmann.  I had noticed some similarities between The Malacia Tapestry and E.T.A. Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla (and specifically in their relation to capriccio prints -- Hoffmann's novella is based on the prints of Callot), and asked him whether this was intentional.  Here is the next email I received from him, on April 13:
Dear Andrei - if I may -
Thank you for your email, and also for your continued interest in the later works of the great Tiepolo.
It is difficult to say more than the little I  have said in the past. For one item, old age has me by the jugular;
I shall reach ninety this August, while next week I  go into one of Oxford's splendid hospitals for a heart-battery operation.

Firstly you ask what I make of these capriccii.  Tiepolo was old and retired after great work on noble ceilings all round EUROPE.
I fancy I have seen his work from Stockholm in the north to Wurtzberg in the south.  Could it be that, retiring to Venice, he said
to himself over a glass of wine, "Damn the lot of them, now I'll please myself..." And  pleasing himself was what he did, creating those
masterly works.  Just out of his head. enjoying himself. Even artists can enjoy themselves; and that may be the meaning of this beautiful late work.

(I AM JUST GUESSING, but I am officially labelled - if for tax purposes - as ARTIST as well as WRITER. I am ancient.  I please myself by writing
(aided by the shade of Tolstoi) a long novel, set in the 18th Century, about a fellow walking from Moscow to the Lena River, which is Russia's  western frontier.
I'm hoping there's meaning here, as well as enjpyment.}

Well, so much for boasting.  Now to your second question.DID i WRITE A CAPRICCIO?  During that period, I was reading Kafka and Zola and almost anyone
whose name ended with A,  I had been in the East, and the confines of the UK wearied me. Echoes of that feeling show up in my Malacian city, I believe. So what am I trying to say?
I  don;t know about HOFFMAN.  Do you happen to have come across the amazing 18th century artist, Thomas Rolandson? ROLANDSON painted numerous rude and randy
- cartoons - often very funny - and also wonderfully delicate and live landscapes.  I'm looking at some now. I had connections with VENICE  through my grandfather's second wife (!),
who was brought up in Venice, and spoke of it always with reverence.

I must finish here.  A dear lady has arrived and will make me tea.   Apologies.... rudeness comes with old age; it was always lying in wait.

REGARDS AND APOLOGIES -
                       from Brian Aldiss
On April 17 he wrote the following, after I had sent him a link to a poem I had written (EDIT: I had previously linked to the poem as published at Exquisite Corpse, but that link, and the entire journal, now seems to be dead, *sigh*) also based on the prints of Tiepolo:

Dear Andrei

Well, Andrei, I much admire TIEPOLO IN ONEONTA  - and indeed basely wish I  had written it myself.
A hundred obligations press upon me.         Here's one - the Folio Society invites me to compile a new anthology of science fiction for them, and I cannot resist.  It does mean that I might tempt them later to create a big tubby volume of all three books of my Helliconia together with beautiful Helliconian musi on disc,  which a musician has newly composed.

          Before signing off, I will offer you a few lines from HELLICONIA SUMMER which I believe show I  had not escaped Tiepolo's influence even by 1983, when it seems this novel was written.
+
Queen MyrdemInggala lives in a ricketty palace by the sea.

Close at hand, the white and gold building revealed its shabbiness.  Gaps showed where slates on its roofs, planks from its verandahs, uprights on its railings,  had fallen away and not been replaced. Nothing moved except a herd of deer cropping grass on a distant hillside.  The sea boomed endlessly against the shore...............
A light showed at the top of the stairs, where all was otherwise dark. They looked up to see a woman carrying a taper.  She bore it above her head, so that her features were in shadow.... As she neared those waiting below, the light from outside  began to illumine her features. Even before that, something in her carriage revealed who she was. The glow strengthened, the face of Queen Myrdem-
Inggala was revealed.....
          Her beauty was ashen, her lips almost colourless, her eyes dark in her pallid face,.. She wore a pale grey gown to the floor which buttoned at her throat to conceal her breasts. ....
          That dark revealed itself as seamed with threads of light. The palace was flimsily built of plank -ing. When the sun shone  on it, a skeletal  aspect was revealed. As the queen led the men to a side room, slivers of light revealed her presence. She stood awaiting them  in the middle of a room defined by the geometries of illumination.

Well, that;s enough of that.  Forgive me, but I  must close.  All best wishes,  Brian 
 We exchanged a couple more emails after that, of a more personal nature (for example, I wrote in May to inquire how his surgery had gone, and he wrote back praising "the wonderful quiet and gracious Manor Hotel, here in Oxford" where he had stayed during his recovery) but after a while I felt I should no longer bother him.  However, just a few weeks ago I was discussing with two friends, Ian Balfour and Graham Sanders, a similarity I had found between a passage in The Malacia Tapestry and some lines from Walter Pater.  This prompted me to write him again, which I didn't do until eleven days ago, not knowing the state of his health.  Naturally, I didn't receive an answer, and today I learned why.  For what it's worth, here is what I wrote him:

Dear Brian--

I hope this finds you well.  I was recently in a used bookstore in London, Ontario -- for some reason, London, Ont. bookstores have some of the best science fiction sections I have ever seen -- and picked up a copy of your book, "The Shape of Further Things," which I am reading currently and enjoying tremendously.  Reading your day to day thoughts in it reminded me of our conversation of a couple of years ago, and it prompted me to ask you, if I may, another question about "The Malacia Tapestry" that I've been meaning to ask for a while.  

I was rereading it recently, and was struck by this sentence, and indeed the entire paragraph that follows, from the "Woman with Mandoline in Sunlight" chapter:  "We were never far from the music of water. The old duke's father had employed Malacia's great engineer, Argenteuil, to design fountains, sluices and waterfalls to punctuate the streams within the grounds.  To these light noises was added the sound of strings as we reached the marble stairs leading to an art pavilion." etc.  

I realized the first sentence, especially, reminded me of this line of Walter Pater's from "The School of Giorgione": "But when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far off," and your entire paragraph of Pater's, which continues:  "and in the school of Giorgione, the presence of water — the well, or marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the FÍte ChampÍtre, listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls, blent with the music of the pipes — is as characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of music itself. And the landscape feels, and is glad of it also — a landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain newly passed through the air, and collected into the grassy channels. The air, moreover, in the school of Giorgione, seems as vivid as the people who breathe it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out of it, and no taint, no floating particle of anything but its own proper elements allowed to subsist within it."

Indeed, the entire garden described in the chapter strikes me almost as an artificial environment intended to replicate the effects Pater describes -- and, if I may say so, the formal perfection of the book itself is reminiscent to me of Pater's description of Giorgione's formal qualities.

May I ask you, then, if this echo was intentional, or, if it wasn't, whether there may have been some subconscious reminiscence of Pater in your text?  I also ask because "The Malacia Tapestry" (which, as I have told you before, I adore) is so full of other art-historical references, well beyond Tiepolo -- the names, for example, of Argenteuil, Gersaint, Caylus, etc.  


By the way, how is the anthology on which you were working when last we talked going?

Best wishes,

Andrei 
 


 

No comments:

Post a Comment