Gretchen Mount Reviews The Dark Chamber

Gretchen Mount

I have so far been unable to source this review to its original appearance.  What I have is a four-page typed transcript, made by Cline, and headed "Gretchen Mount: for Detroit Free Press." It probably dates from around September 1927, for The Dark Chamber was published on August 15th, 1927. It is possible that the review was sent in advance to Cline by his old Detroit friend Gretchen Mount (1882-1931), who reviewed regularly for the Detroit Free Press [see here for a previous blog entry about her and her husband, Dick Mount]. Perhaps this review was never published, but it's worth resurrecting here for its insights into Cline's novel by an old friend. In making his transcription, Cline omitted a quotation and a synopsis of the novel, the former marked by [quote], the later by ellipses. I present the review here as Cline recorded it.

Here again (The Dark Chamber) speaks the author of God Head, who, in the opinion of some of us who genuinely admire his gifts, strayed a bit in his second novel. Of course, he is still speaking to a specialized audience—he is not likely ever to be a best seller—but this time his audience is a bit more diverse.

For instance, those who enjoy the Poe of “The Fall of the House of Usher” will find here the same terror and fascination; those who enjoy Huysmans will find here the same so-called decadent cataloguing of emotions translated into sound, odor and sight; those who enjoy Garnet’s Lady into Fox will find here the same fantasy, the same weird intermingling of animal and physical, beast and spirit; those who enjoy Conan Doyle (with especial reference to “The Hound of the Baskervilles”) will find here the same suspense and uncanniness; those who have delved into psychoanalysis, or self-hypnosis, or any other of those cults and beliefs which deal with the subconscious, will find here much material, both intentional and unintentional, upon which to exercise their favorite philosophy.

But above all, those who love a beautiful prose style; those who love phrases and words for their own loveliness, will find here a sensitiveness and a poetical verbal facility which rise above the macabre content of the novel to sing themselves to music and to the natural elements. For music and that thing we vaguely call “nature” have always been mingled in Leonard Cline's personal enthusiasms. The music of the spheres is continuously intelligible to him, and in this book the stars and the trees and the wind are no less important factors than the human characters. Even the opening paragraph bows to the powers of darkness:

[quote]

And at the end the dead body of Richard Pride, lying in defeat beside that dog whose name was death, is no more grisly than the “nest of ferns, crawling, vermiform,” upon which they lay in that “closet of damp shadow.”

Inasmuch as the relator of this grim tale is one Oscar Fitz­alan, a musician whose magnum opus is to be a ballet of the worlds, music is also present on every page—in every tree and hill and rivulet, in every wind that blows and every star that shines.

I am afraid that so far as this book is concerned, I shall have to confess that my vision of the town is a bit obscured by the houses. The haunting beauty of the individual paragraphs and phrases dwarfs for me the importance of the tale. Leonard Cline's prose, in this instance, as in God Head, makes me feel that I do not care what he says so long as he says it the way he does. But, briefly, the story is this:

 ….

In the end Richard Pride is dead with a gaping rent in his throat where the great tusk of the dog Death had ripped in. Miriam Pride is in her grave, and into the soft new loam above her a violet and a broken rock have been crushed carelessly by the spades of the diggers. Wilfred Hough has been found swinging from his chandelier, a black moth fluttering in circles about his dead face. Mordance Hall is looted, empty and leaking; its walls are dank with fungus and mildew; scurrying rats and looping snakes play about its broken floors. And the door of Richard Pride’s secret study is open—“open on those stacks where shelf on shelf were stored the moments of his life—the wind harrying them and sowing amidst them the seeds of mustiness and rot.”

Only Fitzalan and Janet escaped the virulence of this madness. And as I write that I have the feeling that Janet died, too, in those moments after her return and that her supposed depart­ure with her lover under the wings of Helion was only the wish-­fulfillment of a dream in his disordered brain. But that really does not matter.

What does matter is that Leonard Cline has done beautiful work in this tale of terror and death. He has succeeded in implant­ing in his reader’s mind with the first paragraph a sinister apprehension of evil which is never lifted until the end. The whole book feels like a stinking sinkhole with white slimy worms crawling in and out; and if that is, as I take it, the in­tention of horror stories, the goal is certainly achieved. And it is achieved with sentences so beautiful you want to read them aloud to someone; in images and similes so apt that you resolve to remember them forever, and with a sensitivity to scene and sound which arrest your progress in order that you may look once more with the author's eyes or hear once more with his ears.

No one in America today is writing more beautiful prose than Leonard Cline, and if his audience is limited it is because unhappily appreciators of beautiful prose are not so numerous as lovers of sentimentality.