Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Each day had been more stormy than the last.

Who was Changed and Who was Dead by Barbara Comyns

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So this is an impossible little book to classify, but it’s one in which tone tone ton tells you what you need to know about it. A little town that has recently been hit with a flood, or perhaps an annual flood gone a little awry. Comyns begins us with a cryptic and wonderful image of someone rowing their way through a house. This opens up our introduction to Ebin Willoweed, the protagonist or at least head of household for this story. We go from there to learn that his wife and mother of his children has recently died, and he’s left raising them alongside his aging mother and a town of kooks. What happens next is a weird kind of medieval morality tale, but for a maybe godless world. So little deaths begin happening around town along with a handful of other more minor tragedies.

Like I said though, the tone is what matters. This book is odd and curious and funny and weird and dark. It’s like the Addams family in a way, it’s like the novelization of an Edward Gorey book of pictures.

Anyway, here’s the poem the title references:

The Fire of Drift-wood

BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
DEVEREUX FARM, NEAR MARBLEHEAD.
We sat within the farm-house old,
      Whose windows, looking o’er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
      An easy entrance, night and day.
Not far away we saw the port,
      The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
      The wooden houses, quaint and brown.
We sat and talked until the night,
      Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
      Our voices only broke the gloom.
We spake of many a vanished scene,
      Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
      And who was changed, and who was dead;
And all that fills the hearts of friends,
      When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
      And never can be one again;
The first slight swerving of the heart,
      That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
      Or say it in too great excess.
The very tones in which we spake
      Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
      A mournful rustling in the dark.
Oft died the words upon our lips,
      As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
      The flames would leap and then expire.
And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
      We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
      And sent no answer back again.
The windows, rattling in their frames,
      The ocean, roaring up the beach,
The gusty blast, the bickering flames,
      All mingled vaguely in our speech;
Until they made themselves a part
      Of fancies floating through the brain,
The long-lost ventures of the heart,
      That send no answers back again.
O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned!
      They were indeed too much akin,
The drift-wood fire without that burned,
      The thoughts that burned and glowed within.

(Photo: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Changed-Dead-Virago-Modern-Classics/dp/0860686779)

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