Notes (II)

How long has it been since I last looked at that page? I couldn’t help but cringe seeing my own post there—“the crystalline constraints he hewed to for most of Chesscourt proper”? I’m not sure it’s possible to cram “I need a life” into fewer words. Although absolutely anything I write tends to look pretentious to me once more than six months or so have passed. I’m sure the same will apply to these very notes! But at least in this case, there will be no one but me to read them and find them wanting.

It’s funny seeing Marsh’s post there, too. I had actually forgotten that he was so skeptical so early, indeed right here at the very beginning. I had imagined Marsh as a laidback observer, watching the proceedings with a blissed-out smile in some Hawaiian-shirted, highball-in-hand vision of the good life, before finally breaking down when Aaron’s theories became so strange and strained they harshed even his formidable buzz. But then, that’s hindsight for you. I’ve met Marsh, now, and Aaron, and the rest. They aren’t quite the way they seem on the page, but then, who could be?

I should probably just force myself to re-read all these threads before I do anything else. I’m clearly mis-remembering things.

Of course there’s also scaffolding work to be done on the background side of the report—who I am, and who Salby was. Maybe I could kill two birds and intertwine the two. Say, grow something upon the following skeleton:

There are two kinds of Salby readers. No, wait, back up, that’s a horrendous cliche. Let’s say: those who first read Salby in childhood tend to be different, as a general matter, than those who first read him in adulthood.

Salby starts from the comfort zone of a prepubescent fantasy reader and builds from there. In that he’s akin to Tolkien or Lewis or any one of their progeny. But what Salby builds into is not maturity, per se. He does not “grow up” with the reader. He doesn’t aspire, as Tolkien did, to pastiche of any existing form. He does not write a saga or an epic or a cosmogony or any such thing.

He grows, but in a new direction, perpendicular to all those familiar ones. Encountering this as a child, one simply takes it in stride: each step up the stairway is the logical consequence of the preceding step, and before one knows it one is all the way up, saying “yes, I suppose this is where I should be.”

To an adult reader, though, it comes as a shock. The characters do not mature, except in the sense of casting off some of the cloying vocabulary that marred A Thornbush Tale (their “golly”s and “gosh”es and “darn”s). Aging is implied to occur, but sex and romance are absent. Nor do the characters “come of age,” either in the sense of being initiated into the adult culture of some surrounding society or in the sense of striking out boldly on some self-determined path.

Instead, the trajectory is one of increasing moral weight. In A Thornbush Tale the siblings Tom and Sally are aghast to discover that their seemingly harmless frolics among the thornbushes are, by occult linkages, wreaking havoc back at home, at the Manor. This is revealed to them in a singular, quite stunningly vicious monologue by their older cousin, Charles, at this point an ominous figure of sinister aristocratic grace. Tom and Sally are chastened and vow to make things right.

This episode seems to have kindled a fire in Salby’s brain that only blazed brighter and brighter as the years passed. The siblings (along with Charles, who becomes a benign companion at the start of Chesscourt Manor) are faced again and again with situations full of subtle linkages which render the most innocuous actions weighty. Tirelessly, almost robotically, the children strive to remain moral actors within this subtle matrix. They do not complain about their burden, even as their burden grows larger, and stranger, with each passing book.

I came into Salby as a college student, one hazy delicious summer, at the recommendation of my then-girlfriend, a Chesscourt fanatic. I read the first few books half-distracted. They went down easy and it was easier to continue than to stop (especially with the girlfriend’s approval hanging in the balance). But by Nautical Dusk I knew something was changing. By that point, the matrix is beginning to strain under its own weight: the children’s exploits have saved lives and societies, yet have left them complicit in a web of implications, wherein simple actions produce cascades of responses at home and abroad, which play into numerous power-games running concurrently between amoral, acquisitive forces. At this point in the series it is not uncommon for Tom or Sally to deliver a page-long monologue speculating about the precise consequences of some hypothetical choice. In some ways, it is just the logic of A Thornbush Tale scaled up—but the quantitative can reach the qualitative if dialed up far enough. Whatever I was reading, it was different.

Salby’s publishers, around this point, began to complain. Other Mirrors, the next installment (the titular “mirrors” being, yes, yet more long-range forces to worry oneself over), caused Salby a great deal of trouble with his editor. Did the long moral deliberations need to be trotted out again and again? Wasn’t this all getting very confusing, if indeed it even made sense in the last analysis? Salby, who did not appear to depend on writing for basic living expenses, was adamant: he had a way, and it would be followed.

The editor grudgingly agreed in the case of Other Mirrors, but The Sea of Glass broke him. This new novel, 100 pages longer than the already long Other Mirrors, left behind a number of hanging plot threads to focus almost entirely on one of the aforementioned power-games. Salby refused to change its basic structure, the editor refused to publish it unless the structure was changed, and at last The Sea of Glass was self-published, 775 pages of unedited glory headed by the logo of a shady-looking imprint I’d never heard of. As a college student, I was riveted. This was a man sticking to his guns; this was a principle taken to its logical conclusion; this was art. (I was, let me remind you again, a college student.)

Marsh and Jenny and Aaron and many of the others, on the other hand, read these mad monuments when they were too young to find them madder than anything else in our mad world. I wonder what that must have been like.

That was pretty good—might keep a lot of it in the final version. Should go read through some of Aaron’s threads now. Maybe pick out a bit to display in the report. Something to stand in for the way Aaron’s ideas and Marsh’s skepticism grew in parallel, like the growth of the Chesscourt series itself. (Metaphor too pat? Think over later.)