lizabeth Hand is one of American literature's finest prose poets of the fantastic. Her novels are powerfully lyrical, suffused with visionary agony and dreamlike eroticism; in her hands, myth reattains the nightmare energy of its origins, staining the present and the future with atavistic hues of blood. Dionysus and Apollo clash in manners utterly strange yet deeply contemporary; if the sensibilities of Gene Wolfe and Angela Carter could ever achieve fusion, they do so in the works of Elizabeth Hand.
Hand began her career as a published author in the late 1980s with a number of well-regarded short stories in a dark supernatural vein; her short fiction of that period was eventually collected in Last Summer at Mars Hill (1998), the title novella of which won a Nebula Award. Her first three novels, Winterlong (1990), Aestival Tide (1992) and Icarus Descending (1993), together constitute an extended entropic romance, a panorama of a far-future America decayed into baroque savagery, rendered with a fraught ornate emotionalism. The same orgiastic romanticism informs two major novels concerning the centuries-long supernatural intrigues of the secret order of the Benandanti, Waking the Moon (1994) and Black Light (1999); Glimmering (1997) is an intense and haunting depiction of the millennium as a fateful gathering point for the energies of the dead. Recently, an especially vivid and thought-provoking novel, Mortal Love, has been published by William Morrow, and a quartet of major novellas has been issued in the U.K. as Bibliomancy.
Elizabeth Hand lives in Maine. Science Fiction Weekly interviewed her by e-mail in August 2004.
In your very impressive new literary fantasy novel, Mortal Love, your subject matter is the Muse—how a woman can inspire and obsess creative artists (usually male ones!), eliciting from them both Great Art and lunatic excess. Why this topic? Do you feel that this is indeed the way much Great Art, and art in general, is inspired?
Hand: I think some artists—not all or even most, by any means—do work with, and from, or through, muses. I do, and almost always have. And so on one level I think Mortal Love served as a way of examining the source of my own creative activity, by looking at that of other writers or visual artists.
Female muses have gotten the most press over the centuries, but male muses (and mine are male) are there as well—look at Neal Cassady, who inspired the Beats (themselves men).
I used a female muse in Mortal Love because there was an existing historical and mythological framework to support the story. The whole femme-fatale mythos—well, it's obviously not exactly virgin territory, but it seemed appealing on a lot of levels. And powerful feminine figures tend to intrigue me more than male ones. There are obvious similarities between Larkin Meade and Angelica Furiano, the iconic women in Mortal Love and Waking the Moon; I was interested in looking at the differences between them. And I'll be honest—I like writing about sex and desire. It's not the only thing that interests me, but it's definitely up there in the Top Ten. OK, the Top Two.
Of course, quite a few of your novels and stories center on mythic figures—gods, goddesses, demons, spirits—interacting with contemporary or future human beings, by way of haunting or possession. On a broader level, why this preoccupation? Are you systematically crafting metaphors for how ancestral patterns in our psyches continue to influence us, to drive us?
Hand: I think it would be a stretch for me to say I systematically do anything—I write in a much more organic fashion, which can be messy but I think can also be more emotionally satisfying, the way organic produce can look weirder but taste better than the mass-produced stuff you get in the grocery store. I love mythology—I've absorbed so much myth and folklore since childhood that it's become second nature for me, to use it as a frame for my work. I like to set up mythic correspondences between character and settings, and let a tale unfold from that, so a reader is not necessarily following a standard plot but having more the actual sense of being inside a story, which can be disorienting—but that's the point. For readers accustomed to standard plotting, it can be frustrating, but ideally I hope that it can make for a more emotionally resonant reading experience.
A complex novel, Mortal Love ranges widely in time, from the 1840s to the present. How difficult did you find it to structure parallel Victorian and contemporary storylines, interleaving them, keeping each thread in resonance with the others?
Hand: It took a long time—five years, numerous revisions, an immense amount of research and lot of head-banging. Ultimately, it's still not perfect. Some people find the opening chapters confusing, and I don't necessarily think they're wrong. I wish I had been able to make things clearer from the beginning, but I'm still not certain how I would have done that without sacrificing some of the sense of strangeness that I think is central to the book's power. Still, once you've encountered all the central protagonists—Val, Daniel, Radborne—the story gets much easier to follow, and the mythic parallels between the three of them become clearer and more compelling. A number of people have told me they've read the book two or even three times, which I'm delighted to hear. One reader suggested I provide a sort of concordance to the novel in the paperback edition, so I may do that, or do so on my Web site.
The chapters of Mortal Love set in the mid-to-late 19th century focus on the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and artists belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Of all artistic movements, why does Pre-Raphaelitism support your theme of the Muse so particularly strongly?
Hand: Those guys—Burne-Jones and Rossetti in particular—they were like the poster boys for Artists With Muses. And their models—Lizzie Siddal, Maria Zambaco, Jane Burden—they were the original poster girls!
The members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood wanted to paint directly from nature, they wanted to capture the visionary intensity of Blake's poetry and painting, they wanted to embrace the clarity and purity of the early Italian Masters—Giotto, Fra Angelico—and throw off the formalism they felt had hobbled European painting since the Renaissance. From our perspective, they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and a lot of late Pre-Raphaelite work falls prey to exactly the kind of mannered, insipid, sentimental haute-Victorian artistic impulse they initially rejected. But in their time they were considered radical, and they were certainly modern in the way that they mythologized themselves and their models in their work. The aesthetic influence of William Morris, for one, is everywhere now, from Pottery Barn catalogs to American Bungalow Magazine. I just love their over-the-top quality—they had a gift for romantic, self-involved melodrama that feels very contemporary, this real daisy chain of love affairs. They were very conscious of using their models as muses—"use" is the operative word here—and it got very messy, and ended tragically for some of them: Lizzie Siddal in particular, but also Maria Zambaco, Burne-Jones' great muse and the model for Evienne Upstone in my book, a young woman who was an artist herself and who in another era might have been very successful, but whose talent and impulses were essentially sacrificed to her lover's success.
And, of course, this is all preserved and reflected in their paintings and poetry. Not all great paintings or great or even good poetry, but still fascinating as artifact. Oddly, Swinburne—the most over-the-top, wild and wild-eyed of them all—comes across as having been a very decent man, a loyal friend and surprisingly clear-eyed about his confreres' foibles and their often callous treatment of their wives and mistresses and models. I was never a huge fan of Swinburne's work, but he ended up being the one I would most like to have met.
Most especially, Mortal Love's Victorian passages draw on the life and work of the "mad" Victorian visionary artist Richard Dadd. Can you say something about Dadd's personality and background, and how he fed into your character Jacobus Candell?
Hand: Dadd (1817-1886) was an extremely promising young English painter, a student at the Royal Academy and a member of a sketching club called "The Clique" that in some ways prefigured the Pre-Raphaelites. His early works are conventional mid-Victorian portraits, but by 1841 he was painting Shakespearean fairy scenes (a popular subject of the time)—"Titania Sleeping," "Robin Goodfellow," "Puck," "The Fairy's Rendezvous," "Fairies Assembling at Sunset to Hold Their Revels," "Come Unto These Yellow Sands." These paintings, like his portraits, are well executed, but they fall pretty squarely within the tradition of Victorian fairy painting.
This all changed in 1842, when Dadd went on an extended Grand Tour to the Middle East with a wealthy patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. Phillips wanted Dadd to make sketches of what they saw, and to be an "amiable" companion on the journey. Instead, the young painter went mad. Almost certainly there was a strong family disposition towards mental illness—Dadd's brother also went insane—and the rigors of travel, the unfamiliar climate and intensity of what he saw triggered what would now be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. Dadd was tragically aware of what was happening to him—he wrote to a friend: "I never passed six more miserable days ... I am perfectly ignorant of—the cause of the nervous depression that I experienced." In Cairo he wandered the city with "the most unaccountable impulses ... streams of new sensations ..." He also began to read about Egyptian mythology, and seems to have conflated ancient gods and demons with the all-too-mortal people around him. When he returned to England, friends and family diagnosed his illness as sunstroke.
On Monday, August 28, 1843, Dadd ate dinner with his father in the Ship Inn, then went for a walk in Cobham Park. There, under a delusion that he was the god Osiris, Richard Dadd "slew him [his father] with a knife, with which I stabbed him, after having vainly endeavored to cut his throat." Dadd was arrested and spent the rest of his life in hospitals for the insane. He was sentenced to Bethlem Hospital, and in 1864 was transferred to Broadmoor. He continued to paint, encouraged by several forward-thinking hospital directors; and it's these intensely strange, obsessive works that he's known for today, namely "Contradiction: Oberon and Titania" and "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke." The paintings really d
