He sighed, and shook his head. “The world has always been full of magicians,” he said; “they crowd the bookstore shelves, they fill the theaters . . . but they do not do anything with the heart, the way Benét did. They do tricks with cards, with a chicken in a hat . . . It is all sleight of hand, one can buy such tricks anywhere; even in a brothel. The true sorcerer deals with illusion; he does things with the heart.”
Another novel by Robert Nathan, the unjustly nearly-forgotten 20th Century urban fantasist. (He wrote Portrait of Jennie, which I recently reviewed, but he also wrote The Bishop’s Wife, which was made into a movie with Cary Grant and David Niven once upon a time, and more recently re-made with Denzel Washington.)
I’ve decided I’ll try to boost Robert Nathan on this blog. I picked up a later book, the 1967 novel Stonecliff. I wouldn’t say it’s his best work, though.
The narrator is a young writer named Michael Robb, who has gotten a coveted assignment, to write a biography of Edward Granville, a celebrated novelist, now old and beginning to be forgotten. To interview him, Michael drives to Granville’s remote home, Stonecliff, a cliffside dwelling on the California coast.
He finds Granville welcoming enough, but he’s surprised to find that the man’s wife is not present. Instead there is Nina, a lovely young woman who seems to occupy some undefined position in the household. Is she Granville’s mistress? Michael wonders about that increasingly, as he finds himself romantically drawn to Nina, who is distant and seems rather unhappy.
In between interviews, Michael roams the grounds, from the hills above to the beach below. He wonders about a treehouse he finds, where he’s sure he saw a serpent. He also believes he saw a cougar, perhaps – he’s not sure – walking in Nina’s company. His growing frustration and fascination with Nina leads to an inevitable confrontation and a shocking revelation.
I found Stonecliff less delightful than other Nathan books I’ve read. I wasn’t sure what to take away from the story, except that it’s about an artist growing old (a subject generally of keen interest to me). The specter of Merlin haunts this book, with echoes of the legend of Nimue, but Nathan uses that fantasy for his own purposes.
I also found the prose less lapidary than in Portrait of Jennie. There was not as much precise description of nature – though fog is described in a hundred ways.
Stonecliff wasn’t a bad book, but it may be that Nathan was losing some of his magic by that point.