Mimpish Monday: Squinny Edelweiss and Purple Prose

[lblanchard]

First, the edelweiss (aka Leontopodium alpinum), blooming weakly in the alpine meadows of South Philly (elev. 36 ft). I think it's remarkable that it blooms at all...



And now, the purple prose. This is from Farrer's second novel, The Sundered Streams, and is an example of why he's a lousy novelist but a fabulous prose stylist. First, the plot summary: Kingston, our protagonist, is married to a dull but dependable woman. He finds himself inexplicable drawn to her very odd cousin Isabel, who is living with them. Through a series of mischances Kingston and Isabel wind up stranded, alone, on a mountain top, where they discover their mutual conviction that their souls have been linked for all eternity. She demands that he run away with her; he refuses, citing the claims of duty and honor, and they are locked in a fierce emotional combat. Finally, they agree that nothing can be resolved that night; she retires to sleep in the primitive summit shelter and he remains outside to pace and fret.

And there the narrative stops dead.

For four full octavo pages, the crisis and fulcrum of the plot hangs in the balance -- while Farrer paints a word picture of the impending dawn atop the peak that I believe to be a stand-in for his native Ingleborough. But such a word picture. One can almost forget, midway through this, that two tortured souls are trying to find a way forward out of an impasse.

The whole air, vibrating with cold intensity, was now of a poignant emerald. In the East it grew keener and keener from moment to moment. Beneath, at his feet, through the milky sea of cloud, the heavy presence of the lowlands began to pierce, and grew from mere darkness into dim husky purples. Against the fierce green of the dawn a few clouds stood out fiercely black against the pure sky. The deep abysmal blue of the night was flying westward, retreating, fading, passing. Now it looked wan and worn; the faint stars staled and grew sickly as morning lamps. Slowly, very slowly, the world began to stir, to reveal itself far down in the valleys and distances. Detail had not yet been delivered of chaos, but gradually the separate existence of hill and hollow showed itself in flat masses of obscurity. And then the tones began to change, to grow sharper, more real. In the first dawn outlines had been clear and hard, the blackness dense and without modification. Against the pale horizon moorland and mountain had stood out hard and stark, as if cut from cardboard. Now the haze of atmosphere began to clothe the new-born world in glamour, faint, mysterious, phantasmal. Along the eastern rim of the darkness stretched the swooping profile of Ravensber, like a lion couchant, flushing now, from a thing grey, cold, and dead, to a living mass of opal. Diaphanous, vague, uniform in colour against the pulsing vividness behind, the far-off mountain came nearer, its azure and amethyst grew every moment keener. At its feet the lower hills still lay dim and indistinguishable, but to them also life was returning; and as the great leonine shape above took warmer and warmer shades, from the first vaporous dimness of opaque blue to the splendours of a transparent jewel, so the intervening fells grew deeper in their tones of violet, more solid, more easily discernible among the faint mists in which the dawn had vested them, and from which they now began to separate themselves, while out of the vaporous films of the sky long trails and volumes of cloud were beginning to condense.

Emerald was now passing into topaz, and the rolling masses of distance seemed every moment a shallower, greener blue. For the oldest and most primeval colours is blue – that vast, profound sapphire of midnight. But as darkness dies before the advance of dawn, each colour recedes westward as its successor presses hard upon it out of the East. Blue gives place insensibly to green – to green, faint at first and tremulous, then growing swiftly more sharp to its note of greatest pungency. And so when the lucence of emerald is at its height, it rises abruptly into yellow – a yellow very pure and thin, and coldly pale. Blue has faded out altogether. The air has the vivid transparency of a topaz. Quickly the clear light intensifies itself, and passes on into richer, angrier tones of saffron and flame. Then, last of all, crimson and scarlet appear, final heralds of the approaching day.

Already, very far up in the shrill green of the zenith, a few feathered clouds were growing pink. The Ravensber, now, was of a rosy blue, and the sky behind it thrilled with gold. The air rippled cool with increasing keenness, and the awakening earth seemed to await an imminent summons. Gradually the details of the earth below could be discerned in blocks of uncertain light and shadow. It seemed as if the day were pausing on its road. The golden east grew increasingly golden, and the green overhead grew pale and melted; but to eyes that had watched the swift advance of the earlier stages this tantalizing moment of suspense seemed interminable. The world now was purple and azure; the Ravensber stood out no longer the phantom of a dream. Life was growing plain and plainer. But still the poignant moment hovered indecisively on its way. The path of the sun was barred with streaks of cloud. Ashen grey and violet in the beginning, they had kindled at last through wine color to an ardent amethyst, and their lower surfaces were edged with rose. As their fluffy masses mounted the sky, their surfaces grew brighter, their purple warmer, till, high overhead, their last faint drifts were now of a uniform glowing pink. Everything was ready for the sun; the earth was clean and fresh from its sleep, the air was vivid and clean and sparkling.

When the last change came, it came with a blinding abruptness after its delay. The fire of the clouds grew swiftly fiercer, their purple turned to molten bronze, their edges broadened, became red, scarlet, flaming. Kingston saw now the exact spot where the sun was to rise. Down in a cleft of the hills, where far-off Ravensber tailed away into the first slopes of Fell End, there lay the heart of the cloud-drift, and there through its somber curtains, the sun would have to break his way. Crimson and scarlet dominated the world now, throbbing from horizon to horizon. Splashes of infernal sanguine began to streak themselves across the East, growing every moment in number and in violence. The day was hurrying up in a leaping fury of splendor, and the path of the sun was a ladder of flame, leading upward from the raveled veil of darkness between the hills. And then, in a moment, the curtain of the clouded East was gashed suddenly and rent asunder: the earth seemed swept by a blast of blood and fire. The sun was up. Another instant, and his awful globe had leapt free of the broken masses of bronze beneath, and was mounting on its tyrannous way through heaven.

Instantly before his glory all rival splendours faded. Scarlet, crimson, gold, and orange paled and died in the glare of his presence. The magical moment was passed. Clouds, mountains, and valleys were mere clouds and mountains and valleys again; the transfiguring radiance was dead. Only the air was still pervaded by the red glow. The world was torn from dreams to reality again. Calm, clear, definite, it lay below, stripped of mystery, a world of men and women, fears and desires, eating and drinking.

Kingston walked round to where the western edge of the mountain dropped away to the fells far below. Beneath those, again, lay the narrow glen where Ivescar stood. Between the Simonstone and Carnmore it cut its way southward and then sloped down into the great valley beyond. The Vale of Strathclyde stretched softly through the distance, very broad and fertile, to the remote low hills that bounded it on the farther side. From where he stood Kingston could see its whole course mapped out before him, far away, clear and rosy in the fresh daylight. In a swooping curve it flowed westward under the wall of the mountain country, westward from its source away in the east, in the heart of Yorkshire, out to where its last placid ripples passed into the indistinguishable golden glory of the western sea. And there, beyond the low cleft in the woodlands, where a faint smoky haze betrayed the town of Lunemouth, the vast, flat glitter of the bay ran farther and farther out, till it was merged in the bright opalescence of the sky, against whose gleaming softness rolled northward, in dim sapphire, the jutting ranges that passed up into the tangled mountain chaos of Cumberland and Westmoreland.

Trees, steeples, villages, stood up clear and vivid everywhere in the valley beneath, remote and tiny in the depths; but where each river coiled and writhed through woodland, there coiled and writhed across the face of the earth a monstrous sleepy dragon of white vapour. Higher up, again, in the narrower mountain valleys, wherever water flowed, the runnels of its course were filled with a dense bellying mass like pale smoke. From the hills behind, too, from the stern, deep-channeled country of fell and moor, rolled down toward the lowlands of Strathclyde great sluggish remoras of mist, blotting out each hollow in a snowy void, and leaving only here and there a little islet of dark rock or heather in the white swirling sea of their tide, as they lapped and curled round the lesser hills below. As the sun grew stronger, their volume momentarily ebbed and melted, but in the first moments of day the glen of Ivescar brimmed over with their confused currents, beneath the row of the Simonstone, and as Kingston gazed down over the edge, he looked into a blank and woolly vacancy.

At this point, Isabel joins him. The crisis has passed, and they both acknowledge the claims of duty and honor and the dull but dependable wife.

pameladean, I tweeted some pages of execrable dialog from this book earlier. Interestingly, that is the voice Kingston uses when talking to his wife -- that stilted, superficial, early 20th century public school voice of the English gentry. When he speaks to Isabel, it's wholly other -- more genuine, more impassioned. I could wish he had had a stern editor to trim and prune a work that had a germ of an idea, badly handled by someone who's much better at describing landscapes and flowers than at plumbing the human heart.

Comments

[clindau.livejournal.com]

great sluggish remoras of mist

Love this phrase.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

He uses a lot of colour images. I like that!

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

And jewel images, too. Amethyst, opal...others.