“I
stabbed her with my dagger
Which
was a bloody knife.
I
throwed her in the river
Which
was a dreadful sight.”
—from Down in the Willow Garden
Reading
Clark Ashton Smith’s The Face by the
River reminded me of this classic bluegrass murder ballad. The song is ancient, probably from England
originally, with numerous versions. Its essential story is timeless and
archetypal. A lot of people have been murdered down by a river. The song and Smith’s story share a number of
similarities: the riverside murder of a sweetheart, a depiction of the murderer’s
troubled mind, and the relentless arrival of justice.
However,
the motive for the crime is different.
In the song, the doomed narrator relates that it was his father who
suggested to him “that money would set me free...if I would murder that dear
little girl whose name was Rose Connally.”
The subsequent murder is premeditated:
he lures her to the riverside, gives her poisoned wine to drink, stabs
her to death, and casts the body into the water.
Circumstances
are different in Smith’s tale. Businessman
Edgar Sylen has been having an affair with his stenographer Elise. But as his interest in her wanes, her demands
for his attention increase. During a twilight
walk by the Sacramento River, she threatens to tell his wife about their
relationship. Sylen impulsively grabs
her by the throat and strangles her—she falls into the water and rapidly sinks
into the darkness. It seems almost defensible as an accidental
homicide except that
Sylen
was not aware of any consuming remorse for his act, in the usual sense of the word. But certainly he had reason to regret it as a
piece of overwhelming and irremediable folly, into which he had been driven by the
goading of some devilish fatality.
In the
third verse of Down in the Willow Garden,
the narrator does experience remorse for
the crime. But it is oddly not for the victim
so much as for his grieving “pappy”:
Now
he sits in his own cottage door,
Wiping
his weeping eye
Looking
at his own dear son,
Upon
the scaffold high.
Edgar
Sylen’s path to justice is much more circuitous and psychologically driven. Soon after the murder he begins to see Elise’s
face everywhere, especially in water, or in the faces of other women. He cannot bear to go near rivers, cannot establish
new relationships, cannot settle anywhere.
He is struck at how all the rivers and willow-lined banks he sees in his
meanderings resemble the Sacramento River.
It is probably no accident that willow trees and water imagery—traditional
signs of the Divine Feminine—figure in both the old murder ballad and Smith’s The Face by the River. The only item missing from this motif the
moon.
Sylen
is increasingly disturbed and obsessed by a pale optical defect or illusion that
persists in the corner of one of his eyes.
It grows and shifts to the center of his view. Soon it is all he can see. This being a story by Clark Ashton Smith, one
can expect the main character to circle back to the beginning, arriving there
profoundly and irrevocably changed.
Clark
Ashton Smith’s The Face by the River
was written in 1930, but not published during his lifetime. (Interestingly, Down in the Willow Garden, though a very
old bluegrass standard, was first recorded in the U.S. in 1927). The story is markedly different from the rest of Smith’s fiction. It takes place on Earth, in a familiar location, (California), during contemporary
time, and depicts events realistically, without any supernatural overlay. The symptoms Sylen experiences can easily be
explained in clinical terms—as the product of a mind under duress.
In some
explanatory notes about Smith’s story, S.T. Joshi quotes H.P. Lovecraft, who
wrote: “The element of relentless Nemesis-pursuit in ‘The Face’ is very
effectively handled—& given a realism too seldom cultivated in tales with
this theme”. It is interesting to
compare The Face by the River to
another of Smith’s tales of psychological horror, Genius Loci (1933). In the
latter tale there is a strong supernatural element at the end, but much of the story
resembles clinical observations of obsession and progressive loss of sanity in
several of the characters. (See
also When Your Genius Loci is a Spiritus Malus).
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