Authors: David Stacton
A Fox Inside (2 page)
From our vantage in 2012, just as many years have passed since Stacton’s untimely death as he enjoyed of life. It is a moment, surely, for a reappraisal that is worthy of the size, scope and attainment of his work. I asked the American novelist, poet and translator David Slavitt – an avowed admirer of Stacton’s – how he would evaluate the legacy, and he wrote to me with the following:
David Stacton is a prime candidate for prominent space in the Tomb of the Unknown Writers. His witty and accomplished novels failed to find an audience even in England, where readers are not put off by dazzle. Had he been British and had he been part of the London literary scene, he might have won some attention for himself and his work in an environment that is more centralised and more coherent than that of the US where it is even easier to fall through the cracks and where success is much more haphazard. I am delighted by these flickers of attention to the wonderful flora of his hothouse talents.
*
In 1955 Faber had a pair of novels by Stacton in manuscript for their publishing consideration, and on reflection they decided to take them as a pair. ‘[B]oth books’, Sir Geoffrey Faber wrote to Stacton, ‘are evidences of your imaginative power and wide range.’
Stacton was to develop a yet wider range in the years ahead, and
A Fox Inside
and its successor
The
Self-Enchanted
might be considered as a diptych of sorts. Both novels draw their strength from Stacton’s assured evocations of the landscape and ambience of the western United States. Both feature brooding self-invented men with shadowy pasts, complex private schemes, and obsessively guarded weaknesses. Both of these men marry women they consider passive and pliable, though in this they are mistaken. Both books feature a mother who is monstrous and domineering, a ‘boss lady’ who has an almost vampiric effect on her offspring. And both also have a sort of Nick Carraway figure: one who is implicated in the main drama yet somehow forced to watch it from one remove, unable to wholly influence events or prevent bad things from happening.
Sir Geoffrey Faber did express a couple of small concerns to Stacton in respect of
A Fox Inside
: firstly that ‘there isn’t a single character in it whom I could bring myself to like’ and secondly that there was ‘perhaps too much promiscuity for our puritanical [English] taste’. Stacton didn’t counter the second objection, perhaps thinking, quite reasonably, that English tastes were in the process of changing; but his response to the second was assured, indeed jaded by experience: ‘The people in
A Fox Inside
are, alas, the people around me in my teens, and very tiresome they all were too, though not without a certain charm … [But]
A Fox Inside
does indeed explain why I don’t care for California …’
If the novel does indeed propose that a touch of evil lurks behind the pleasing façades of the San Francisco Bay area, then this is only one of its accomplishments. Reviewing it in 1954 V. S. Pritchett found
A Fox Inside
‘mysterious and absorbing’, and asserted that ‘as a mystery story with marked psychological perceptions this one grips and pleases’. It is only the first of Faber Finds’ 2012 Stacton reissues; and mystery stories would be only
one of the forms through which Stacton expressed his restless, protean gift. But we hope the reading of it will encourage you to delve deeper inside this quite extraordinary body of work.
Richard T. Kelly
Editor, Faber Finds
April 2012
This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.
To J. McC.
who taught me much as a friend
and more as a teacher
What
we
steal
destroys
us.
Thus
the
Spartan
boy,
proper
without,
but
with
a
fox
inside.
G
ERTRUDE
B
ELL
S
AN FRANCISCO
,
C
ALIFORNIA
, 15
TH
March 1953. The clouds had begun to part, as the
louvres
of an observatory slowly part, to reveal a cold and sparkling sky. There was a crisp snap in the air, so that if you were at a great height you would have seen the world in its separate compartments. Far to the south, beyond the last barrier hills that protected the city, lay the more opulent suburbs, quiet under their trees. The city itself was a drenched grid of red and yellow lights, inimical and strange. North of the city, across the black waters of the bay, and at the other end of the high-
swinging
red lacquer bridge, rose the sullen bulk of Mount Tamalpais, a little legendary in that air. Its foothills fell sheer to the dangerous water.
The city seemed to sleep. Only the angry electric eye of the prison island of Alcatraz patrolled the darkness. But to the north, on the other and ocean side of the mountains, the long coastal sandbars were cluttered with week-end shacks. There it was less quiet. Even so, there was merely the restless sobbing of the sea and a few noisy drunks loitering outside the shanty dance pavilions at Stinson Beach. Stinson Beach was lower middle class and sometimes wild.
Farther north, and much more respectable, was the
brackish lagoon of Bolinas, the ocean swirling through a breach in its spit to snap at a dissolving cliff which rose from the surrounding marshes. It was a place that seemed somnolent and forgotten. It had the quiet of old age.
As a township Bolinas was small, being a cluster of weathered wooden villas sprawled along two vacant streets. On the top of the bluff that protected the town from the sea mangy pines contended with the spray. On the land side grey eucalyptus trees rustled, swayed, and dripped with a steady precipitation of ocean fog that fell always on the same disintegrating, knife-shaped leaves, rotten in the heavy suffocation of damp eucalyptus oil. The red and yellow blossoms, like ragged sea anemones, lay wilted on the ground.
An outsider named Shannon had built a summer house along the edge of the cliff, to the right of where the arroyo sloped down to the beach proper. He never bothered to speak to the townspeople, and since he had thrown a high brick wall round the town front of his property, there wasn’t much they could find out about him. He never gave parties and his house was always idle. Only the cold glow of the floodlights in his garden shone over the top of the wall. And those were out now, for it was late at night.
That is what you would have seen if you were at a great height, but Maggie was not at a great height.
*
She was at Bolinas. She turned and went swiftly out into the yard. The gravel path cracked and exploded underfoot, and over that sound she could hear now the steady drip of water from the trees and the snarl of the surf as it lashed at the lagoon on the other side of the
cliff. She did not know anything about Bolinas, and that made these noises ominous to her. She heard them all too well. She went down the drive, whose gravel hurt her bare feet, and stepped over the low chain that held the entrance driveway private.
She did not look round, for she knew that the house lay low and quiet behind her. It seemed to sleep, like the rest of the town. Only on the beach the faint patterns cast by the dimly lighted windows trickled out across the sand. But she did not think that there would be anybody on the beach. Of course she should not have left the lights on, but she had no intention of forcing herself to go back to turn them off, either. She did not dare to push herself that far.
Because the arroyo was narrow and she would have made too much noise backing the car, she had left it up the road a piece, parked in a clump of bushes under the trees. The street she had to walk up was banked by closed-up Victorian cottages, their wood blistered
ash-grey
by the corrosion of the ocean air. She went by them rapidly, having no way of knowing whether or not, from behind their windows, someone might be
watching
her. She hunched slightly forward, ducking her head, concentrating on getting to the car. By the time she reached the clump of bushes she was fighting down the panic to run. As it was she overshot the mark and had some difficulty in finding the car. It was an open convertible and even while she had been away a few of the scythe-shaped eucalyptus leaves had dwindled down into the front seat. Cautiously she threw them over the side, and then, closing the door softly, she leaned back in the driver’s seat and tried to pull herself together.
At last she turned on the engine and eased the car out of the shrubs towards the highway. In the silence of the night the sound of the engine was frighteningly loud, but to her surprise nobody stopped her and the car was built for quiet speed. Speed was something that luxury could understand.
She raced down the deserted road beside the lagoon, in a hurry to get safely past Stinson Beach. She need not have worried. The town was quiet now. Only one or two lights in a kitchen window shone out across the sand. Stinson Beach was a temporary town: anyone might come and go there, and yet not be observed.
As she climbed the mountain she rattled over a cattle guard. At the top, before the last pull, the road reversed so that she could look down through the darkness far into the distance. Even in bright sunshine there was something eerie and inhuman about that strip of shore. It was too savage and too dry. At night it was all the worse. It had been like Charles to go hide himself there. She could only hope that he would remain hidden a while longer.
It did not occur to her to wonder where she was
going
. She was too eager to get away for that. She wanted to become lost in the back roads and suburban alleys of the mountain, under the steady drip of the pines and the redwood trees. It seemed to her that every moment she lingered was a bit of her future in jeopardy. She put her head into the wind, to let the fog-laden air clear it, but nothing seemed to clear it.
When she came out of the yellow adobe tunnel, lined with concrete, and faced the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, she was doing fifty. It was a windy night
and high above the water, under the criminal glare of the vapour lamps, the bridge swayed alarmingly. She had to stop while her toll money was taken. It was
another
danger of being identified. Resentfully, afraid to turn her face away, but also afraid to show it, she drew the car up and fumbled in her purse for a dollar bill. Beside her, on the floor, she could see a paper bag.
The attendant wore a black leather jacket with a fur collar, breeches and boots and a visored cap. He creaked as he moved, and the fog made the stench of leather all the stronger. He took the bill and said good night, but the car had stalled. She got it started again soon enough, but by that time she was shaking. She began to realize she could not get through with this alone. Even if the attendants, huddled up against the fog and impersonal and bored, noticed nothing, she would have to get help before someone did notice something. And she did not know where or how to get it. Charles had always shut her off from any help.
Before going down the wide, barricaded ramp and through the military Presidio, under more of those
glaring
yellow lights, she stared helpless at the shadowy and silent city, closed against her on its hills. She had had friends once. She did not have them now. She had lived here most of her life, but there was no one left for her to turn to. She did not know, she never had known, she now thought bitterly, anyone that she could trust.
From force of habit she turned the car up the Vallejo street hill, angrily shifting gears when the car stalled half-way, and stopped in front of the Barnes-Shannon house. She even started bleakly to get out of the car. But there was no point in going in. She looked at the shaded
windows. She could not use the telephone there, for telephone calls could be traced. And worse than that, the servants had all been chosen by Charles. If they were loyal to anybody, it was not to her. She had not so clearly realized before how even this house was not really hers.
She swung the car down through the wet spaces of the Italian district and into the deserted financial section of the city. In front of the building in which Charles had his office she passed a water truck, slowly spraying the street and sidewalk with a constant hissing of dirty water. There was an all-night Western Union office down there. It was not until she drew up near it that she remembered that if telephones could be traced, a telegram was that much worse. Nor could she linger where she was, for cars were rare in that district at night and a patrolman might stop to ask her questions. She shivered in the fog that smelled of dust and iodine. It was then she thought of Lily. There was no affection between them, but at least Lily was her mother. She always did have to go back to Lily in the end, and Lily, she knew, preferred that it should be that way and liked it so. This time, she thought grimly, she might not like it so much.
With a crooked smile she swung out of the canyon of high buildings and over the slough bridges of the factory districts to get on to the express highway going south, which was the quickest, if also the most dangerous, means of reaching her mother, who lived forty miles away, in the suburbs of Atherton.
It was only then, because of the smell of heated rubber and of hot dust near the tubes behind the instrument panel, rather than because she heard anything, that she
realized that all this time the radio had been going full blast. She could not remember having turned it on. It was playing the national anthem as the station closed down for the night. She did not turn it off, not even after the three long dots that were followed by a crackling, troubled silence on the disused air. Playing the radio full blast in the car had been Charles’s trick. He liked to turn the radio on full and then go about sixty or seventy, on those rare occasions when they had driven together in her car. And it was her car. After two years of marriage it was the only thing she owned outright, and it was five years old. She had lied to her mother to buy it. She had had to have some means of escaping and had known that even in those days.
Escaping in cars ran in the family. Their cars were their life line. Lily had the station wagon and the
Cadillac
, and Charles had a grey Jaguar, because it was smart; and she had the Ford with the Mercury engine. She had it because when she was at college that was the car to buy. She had bought it second-hand out of her trousseau money and now it had to save her neck.