Morbid Tales

by Quentin S Crisp

  Morbid Tales

  by

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Tartarus Press

  Morbid Tales

  by

  Quentin S. Crisp

  First published by Tartarus Press, 2004.

  This edition published by Tartarus Press, 2012 at

  Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn

  North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY. UK.

  All of the stories in Morbid Tales are copyright © Quentin S. Crisp.

  ‘Foreword’ by Mark Samuels copyright ©

  Mark Samuels.

  ‘Cousin X’ illustration © R.B. Russell.

  This edition copyright © Tartarus Press.

  For Dad.

  Are you morbid?

  Thomas Gabriel Fischer

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Mermaid

  Far-Off Things

  Cousin X

  A Lake

  The Two-Timer

  The Tattooist

  Ageless

  Autumn Colours

  Foreword

  Sometime during 2001, Matt Cardin, a friend and correspondent of mine in the United States, suggested I contact an author then resident in Taiwan who shared our interest in the works of Thomas Ligotti. I think my first reaction was to ask whether the author’s name was genuine. Doubtless those of you who have bought this book without first being in contact with its author have asked yourself the same question. So to clear up any confusion, this Quentin Crisp is a thirty-one-year-old writer and not the late Quentin Crisp, ‘Professor of Style’ long exiled in New York. Anyway, to come back to the point, I took up Matt Cardin’s suggestion, which initiated a lengthy exchange of emails between Quentin and myself, during which I was fortunate enough to be sent a number of stories.

  I am constantly looking for fiction incorporating the view that the strangest of all planets is the Earth itself. We humans are like ghosts, struggling to come to terms with a futurity that has already decayed, and I was immediately struck by the fact that this sensibility also seemed to be present in QSC’s stories. As I have read more of his work other aspects have become apparent to me. There is a profound limpidity in his prose-style, a clear and crystalline quality, combined with a sense of bewildered fascination and revulsion with local colour (both in Japan and England), with trashy culture and human cruelty. In reading QSC’s work I was reinforced in my belief that what the literary critics term ‘realism’ is not true realism at all. Even the characters in Jane Austen’s books are just like mannequins, lifeless things who are trapped in an artificial world of customs and social graces, quite unaware of the mysteries and wonders of the wider cosmos. The puppet celebrities who appear on television soap-operas and in Hello or OK magazines are their descendants.

  If I were asked to categorise the type of fiction QSC writes, I could not do so. It is too multi-layered, too individual, to be labelled. One can spot influences here and there, a dash of this and a sprinkling of that, but the end result is much greater than the sum of its parts. Rather than making a list of the earlier writers or trends whose influence can be detected, it seems instead more worthwhile to point out that QSC’s writing is predominantly original. His work is quite simply literature of the highest quality.

  Mark Samuels

  London, 2004.

  The Mermaid

  Prelude: Philosophy in the Underwear Drawer

  If you were to ask me, ‘What do you do?’ or ‘What are you?’ I would reply straight away that I am a beachcomber. I have been other things. For a long time I thought of myself as a writer or an artist. Actually, for me the word ‘beachcomber’ has come to mean artist and more. I would rather not talk about those other things I have had to do in this world to survive. I am lucky enough to have disentangled myself from all that. It was a painstaking process.

  I procured the means of buying this coastguard’s cottage, and now I still have enough to support my modest existence without having to deal too much with the world I have escaped. Yes, despite everything I know I am still very lucky. I am so lucky that I am almost never asked, ‘What do you do? What are you?’ And so most of the time I don’t have to think of myself even as a beachcomber. My mind is swept clean by salt breezes until it is as white as the dull and glorious clouds lowering over the cliffs above.

  When I said I was lucky, though, I really had something else in mind. I was referring first and foremost to my story. I believe that everybody has a story. It falls to their life’s epicentre like a meteorite. Even before the story has actually happened the person knows somewhere, with an infallible sense of precognition, what that story is. They predict it again and again in all sorts of ways. They are bound to it by irresistible forces of gravity and magnetism. That is why, knowing they are inevitably taken up with their own story, they feel they are missing something and look to the lives of others with envy. But even those who are envied are enslaved in private by their own particular stories. The hardest part of it all is that stories take place over time. Nothing is revealed all at once. One scene follows closely upon another leaving no gaps, fitting tightly together, slowly and carefully picking out details so that all sense of fulfilment is perpetually in abeyance. And in each new scene we are no longer the same person who wanted the things that scene brings. It is the story of how we age. But if our stories tie us down, make us particular, limit us, they also offer us consolation. In my case, I have tried to escape the sequence of my own story and its temporal limitations by writing more stories, expressing things that I hoped would attain permanence beyond my life. I have learnt, however, that the story in my own life is far more important than any story I might present to the world. Now that it has happened I feel real. Why should I need to write stories when I am a story?

  I realised a long time ago that I could never find fulfilment in human society. Before, I had believed public acclaim to be the only possible fulfilment. Experience taught me that society is nothing but a sort of party. Those who find anything worthwhile leave early. Only those who are desperate to be in on the event that the party represents stay on until the end, and find themselves abandoned and alone. To live in close proximity to so many other people, in the towns and cities they have built, is to surrender to the mundane compromise of their reality. So many minds crowding close on top of each other create a dismal reality of the lowest common denominator which can satisfy no one. The world is built with thoughts, but these towns and cities, their grey concrete streets paved with dull daylight, are the creation of backward minds who have incestuously reversed this truth. They take their cue only from what already visibly exists and allow their thoughts to be shaped by this world instead of shaping it. I had to flee the hegemony of such mean and contemptible consciousness. This absolute stalemate, this bankruptcy of the imagination, accepting a reality by default, is the road to death. It is death and nothing else. I warn you of this now. It occurred to me that this is why the fairies and the mermaids and all the other beings I have always been so fond of have long since withdrawn from those places where human beings gather. I too had to withdraw. Now I can breathe without tasting the pollution of other people’s opinions, their pathetic doubts, their intellectual vanities, their dull prejudices.

  I ought to state here the two great fascinations in my life, fascinations which, as it will be seen, came to converge. Since childhood I have been fascinated by magic. I do not mean the occult. I mean magic as a child understands it, in its purest form. I am not in the least interested in the kind of magic whose practitioners boast that it is a science whose rules can be understood, like any other. The kind of magic I have always devoutly believed in follows no laws, natural or unnatural, known or unknown. It is the impossible, cartoonesque, and its nature is that of wishes come true
. Feeling is more essential to it than conspicuous defiance of reality, since this magic is the kind which implies by its existence that feeling is the ultimate reality, and everything else is a dream. As a child it was quite acceptable for me to feel the magic of a time, a place, a situation, such as Christmas Eve, and for me it was magic literally. This fundamental love of mine divided into many channels and I developed many incidental fetishes too varied to enumerate. One of them, just one, not at all emphatic, it seemed, was mermaids.

  My second fascination is the erotic. This fascination has been largely voyeuristic, conceptual rather than tactile. After I frankly admitted to myself my outright obsession with sex, I began to collect erotica, pornography, call it what you will. It did not take me long to realise, however, that the more explicit the material, the more jaded I became. I had allowed my tastes to be dictated to me. Reflecting on this I took care to notice where the nuances of my true, unsanctioned tastes led me. I discovered that material was far more erotic to me when it was subtle. Mystery stimulated the imagination. Often I was most captivated by things not intended as erotica at all. I began to collect the erotica of different times, the frontispieces of old, under–the-counter magazines, the lesser-known works of famous writers, all sorts of odds and ends. My weakness for underwear seems of particular significance. Of course, it is what it conceals that makes it erotic, or rather, it is the act of concealment. I learnt that I found it more stimulating, the different colours and patterns, if I even consciously forgot about what was behind it, and considered it an actual part of the female body.

  This is the story of how these two fascinations—magic and the erotic—became one. My interest in mermaids as I have said, was a superficial one, but strong enough to make me pluck a curiously-titled book from the shelves in a friend’s house when I was visiting one day. I will not give that book’s name here; I have grown strangely protective of the path that led me to my current place. It is sufficient to say that mermaids were mentioned. I am an early riser and found myself in the position of being up while my friend still slept. In the quiet of the morning, I sat and read nearly half of the book before my friend finally emerged. It was not a story, but it fed my imagination more than any work of fiction I had read. It was a sober and impartial history of mermaids from mythology to documented encounters. I have always searched for some little known book, some hybrid of the imagination, whose neglected obscurities would change my life. It must have been some personal instinct that told me books were so significant in my life, even though to many, life and books are two separate things. My instinct was vindicated. My friend eventually woke, and seeing me read those fey pages, that had seemed to me then as white as foam and fragrant as a sea breeze, he offered to lend me the book. Apparently he had never read it and did not seem to care much about it. For some reason, I declined. I spent the day with my friend, but I did not forget about the book. As soon as I got home I wrote down the title and author and ordered it from a bookshop the next day. I was both disappointed and oddly pleased to find the book was out of print. It confirmed it in my eyes as a work of true obscurity. I then made use of a company who searched for rare and out-of-print books all over the world. Eventually they found my volume in a different edition to the one my friend had.

  I finished the book and it seemed to me as if a satin curtain had been drawn aside at a musical side-show to reveal something astonishing, a miracle made alluring by gaudy coloured lights and cheap setting. A real live mermaid in a fairground grotto. I had become certain of their existence. My reading habits changed almost overnight. Instead of fiction, I digested phenomenal amounts of works, either scholarly or sensational, that dealt either with mythology or with supposedly true accounts of mythological beings. I began to subscribe to the Fortean Times and other similar but lesser-known publications, some of which only ran a few issues before petering out. There was plenty written on aliens, witches, fairies, ESP, but scant information about mermaids. Still, I became something of an expert, as much as one can be an expert on a mystery. I discovered that the mermaid is an almost universal figure, appearing in the myths of nearly every culture, although the origins of the myth are elusive and the stories themselves curiously incomplete, disparate, as if mere glimpses caught now and then through the rents in a sea mist. For instance, in Japan is a legend that eating the flesh of a mermaid will bring immortality. The Japanese word for mermaid is less sexually biased than our own, translating simply as ‘person-fish’. I was also intrigued to learn of a sort of inverse mermaid referred to by the Japanese as the hangyojin, or ‘half-fish person’. This creature seemed to grotesquely reverse all the enchantment and allure of the mermaid in a way so simple I almost found it shocking. Instead of a person’s upper half and a fish’s tail, this sad, unfortunate creature—or so it seemed to me—sported the head, fins and gills of a fish atop human lower portions.

  During my search of the fringes of human credulity, I noticed that the erotic and the fantastic are often found together. Cellars full of science fiction paperbacks and collectors’ comics would frequently contain publications concerned with sexual fantasies, often of the most bizarre kind. This search, however, whilst increasing my collection of obscure art and writing immeasurably, seemed to lead me no further to my ultimate goal of finding a real mermaid. So barren was my quest that I even became excited following a trail which I knew from the start to be false.

  This trail began with an advert in a very roughly bound magazine printed on poor quality paper. I could not understand why the advert should be hidden away like that, almost as if the person who had put it in was being deliberately secretive. Someone was selling a ‘genuine’ fake mermaid, a creepy hybrid of taxidermy that had been put together by some ingenious charlatan over a hundred years ago. There was a scratchy little illustration showing a skinny monkey with a stiff-looking fish tail in place of its legs. The thing should have been in a museum, and I suspected privately that the owner was selling it in such a furtive manner because he considered it cursed. I was peculiarly unbothered by this notion, and, as the reader may judge, not because of any natural scepticism on my part. This trail led me, incredibly, all the way to Japan, where such was my enthusiasm, I bought the horrible item in full knowledge that it was fake, using up most of the funds I then possessed. This was unprecedented extravagance for me. The mer-monkey, as I have christened it, seemed to me to symbolise how the treasure of our dreams, sparkling in the distance, often turns out to be worthless fools’ gold. I could picture people long ago paying to see a real mermaid, imagining a creature of otherworldly pulchritude, only to find the ‘real thing’ to be this shrivelled-up specimen, this wretched freak, about which there was something sinister, almost as if its claim to existence had given it a peculiar life of its own. It did not live up to legend. It was a disappointment. Yet, I was not disappointed with it, and for me it became a legend, a dwarfed romance in its own right.

  Eventually, I returned to the text of the book I had originally read and decided to investigate for myself one of the localities mentioned as the place of a sighting. By this time I had reached the conclusion that if I was to tread the world I longed for, the world where mermaids are more real than you and I, then I must act as if I were already there. I must, so to speak, come out of my closet, let people think me eccentric or mad if they must, but never hesitate in speaking about mermaids, never waver in my faith, never show any doubt.

  My first reconnaissance of the small, curiously named village impressed me strangely. The British Isles are small and yet they still contain secrets and surprises, enclaves of a history whose merest tip—that too deceptive—is visible to us in the present. I was not struck suddenly or forcefully by the antiquities of the village, rather, an atmosphere seemed to steal over me silently like the smell of the ocean spray. I was pleased by the calm, narrow roads, many bordered by hedgerows of a light green freshness and tangled shagginess that made them seem as if they were sloping silent and dreamlike into a neglected past. The street
signs bearing names suggestive of local folklore, the small, dingy post office, the old red telephone box with weeds growing round it, everything seemed subtly in keeping with the vague story I had read of the place. That the story had taken place in the sixteenth century and had thus had the impact of its original credibility dulled by time did not seem to matter. When I made my first excursion down unbelievably steep streets to the small, stony beach, I knew immediately that this was the kind of shoreline a mermaid would naturally haunt. I felt the spume blown from the tops of the waves lightly caress my face and stood for a long time watching the waters swirl around the romantic, grey rocks, the foam appearing as white and hard as granite.

  Walking back up into the village from the beach I noticed a chandler’s, its windows as mysteriously gloomy as portholes, and decided on the instant that this was the place to start asking questions. The cold interior, with its rough, gritty, uncarpeted floor, was quieter than any library, and the only light was that grey and sullen daylight that crept over everything like gooseflesh. There was something brisk and briny in the atmosphere of the place, and just looking at the lanterns, the coarse ropes, candles, nets and buoys, gave me a strange, brittle feeling, like light twisting slowly inside me, ordinary as clouds and glassy as a mirror. The proprietor was a silent, red-haired man wearing a thick jersey, as was necessary in this shop with its one inefficient gas heater in the corner. Stubble was just beginning to show on his face. He acted quite as if I was not there, as if he had far more important business than tending to customers and his was largely a private occupation. I had no real reason to suppose that anyone in the village would be informed on that most obscure fragment of their history that concerned mermaids, in fact, I expected ignorance. But I remembered my resolution and did not let the proprietor’s surly appearance deter me. I approached the counter and, lightly as possible, feeling almost like a practical joker, I asked my question.