Just hours before Cora arrives at Ygenta, Harmon sets off on his quest to find the Nadna. Had Cora not been despoiled by a tribe of Yetis in the last lap of her journey, she might have arrived at the hospital in time to see her husband restored to full health. As it is, Cora rushes to Harmon’s hospital room, feverish herself from various ordeals, to find an empty bed. She assumes the worst — what else might she believe? — and falls over in a faint. No one disabuses her of her misapprehension and she returns home (a minor weakness in the plotting) fully convinced that Harmon has died of his hereditary disease. She grieves for two years, surrounding herself with sundry morbid artifacts of her lost husband. Bill Wall looks after her during this period, limiting his practice to local detections. Cora becomes a recluse and develops eccentric habits. After a while, Bill Wall prevails upon her to marry him. Although, as she says, she must remain faithful to her “one great love,” she agrees to live with Bill and look after him, more like a nurse than a wife perhaps, for as long as he wants her.
Harmon returns to the States, unrecognizably altered, his face covered with a scraggly beard. He has become a poor man by choice, has given away all his money to the Nadna and tends to proselytize on street corners, living on money thrown at him by strangers. One day, the inevitable confrontation takes place. Cora passes his beat and hears him talking with “dazzling eloquence” about the work of the Nadna. Something about him, at once familiar and unfamiliar, moves her and she offers the street preacher ten dollars. Harmon declines her gift. Cora comes back the next day, thinking she has been refused for giving too little, and offers Harmon ten times the initial sum. He refuses her again. The next day when Cora comes to his corner — she is prepared to offer him a blank check — the street preacher is not there. She comes back day after day, looking for the unaccountably familiar holy man without reward for her efforts. His health is bad, she realizes, and by asking around she tracks him to a cold-water flat in one of the most desolate areas of the city. He is on a rug on the floor when she finds him, among lice and roaches, dying, the old disease has recurred — and she looks after his needs still not knowing who he is. “I’ve suffered too,” she says, and she tells him the story of her quest for her dying husband (Lovelady goes on a bit too long here, recapitulating old materials) and how he was dead before she reached him to tell him that she loved and forgave him.
“Had he known that,” Harmon says, “his life might have been different.”
The room is dark when he says this but she sees something in the shadows of his face that “unearths a terrible recognition.”
“Different in what way?” she asks.
“Oh Cora,” he says in his ghostly voice. “What fools we’ve been.”
“The way you say my name,” Cora says. “It’s as if you’ve known that name and used it for a long time.” Gradually, she realizes who it is, the disguise of Harmon’s beard falling away as if it had been shaved before our eyes, and they embrace with, as Lovelady puts it, “inexpressible excitation.” They talk of a future together, plan it in painstaking detail, but the reader knows that there is not much hope — Harmon will probably not live out the night — and the novel comes to an ambiguous and touching end.
I have recounted the story here (and not all of it by half) to give some indication of the range of Lovelady’s narrative invention. If this 946-page book could be said to have a fault, and what of human hand is without, it is in its occasional longueurs. Lovelady has an obsessive’s penchant for letting a good thing go on beyond its maximum advantage. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that Lovelady’s effects tend to accumulate and that the weaknesses and strengths of this book are at times interchangeable. In our literary moment when fragmentation and absurdist disjunction are the fashion, the modern reader might find Lovelady somewhat derriere garde. There are few of the fashionable modernities here, just the organ music of recognizable lives played out in a story rich with alternation and surprise. Story, one needs to remind oneself, in the raison d’être of the novel, and THE SWAN FLIES AT MIDNIGHT’S FALL is in the grand tradition of storytelling. When the last page is read and the book is shut, the swan that is Cora continues to fly in our recollections, indomitable, tarnished and forever innocent, salvaging the prodigal Harmon Stores in us all.
The Adventures of King Dong
The trip to the island takes longer than one might expect. The head of the expedition, a famous impresario down on his luck, keeps a journal of the voyage. Nothing much happened today, he writes each day. At night he is unable to sleep, made anxious by the dark, tormented by impotence. His dreams of failure waft like smoke before our eyes. Apparently, no one knows of his affliction, not even his beautiful assistant, the touching and vulnerable Lola. A run of unseasonably bad weather, most of it fog, puts the expedition a week behind schedule. Bad omens are in abundance. The rats leave in an unprecedented hurry. There is talk of mutiny among the crew, savage whispers of discontent.
Pages and pages of journal are written before the island is sighted. It is none too soon. The journal entries have become increasingly bleak. Rations are low, Commander Buck writes in his journal. We are reduced to eating the bread of affliction. And then the fog lifts to reveal the uncharted island Hong Dong (“Mysterious Expanse” in English) like a small black cross in the distance. That night, the impresario calls a meeting of the crew to reveal the mission of the voyage. “I’ve kept you buzzards in the dark for a reason,” he says. “We’ve come to Hong Dong to bring back the thirteenth wonder of the world.”
There are some murmurs of disbelief, but as one of the crew, an old-timer, mentions, Commander Bill Buck has a reputation for unearthing the inexplicable.
That night there is an unanticipated full moon. A muted eeriness pervades the restrained shipboard celebration. Nothing out of the ordinary happens except for three separate attempts by drunken crew members to interfere with Lola, who, as it happens, is the only woman aboard. She is saved from these unwanted attentions by the intercession of the handsome First Mate, who has appointed himself, for whatever reasons, her protector. Lola, at this point, seems indifferent to rapists and protectors alike.
The island is just as we imagined it, an ominous and impenetrable place, majestic and uncivilized. There is something erotic in the very atmosphere. Lola remarks on it to Commander Buck, who says that there is a legend to that effect. The deeper one penetrates into the heart of the island, says Buck, the more potent the erotic influence.
One of the party is bitten in the leg by a snake, and Lola, who has had some training as a nurse, draws off the poison with her mouth.
Lola and the First Mate embrace in soft focus behind the screen of a waterfall. “I don’t want this,” says Lola. “This is not what I had in mind.”
“Sometimes we answer to a power larger than ourselves,” says the Mate.
Moments later, the entire expeditionary force is surrounded by a band of savage pygmies. The pygmies speak a primitive squall, a dialect (explains Commander Buck) that has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Buck converses with the group’s leader, mixing language with gesture to make himself understood. The diminutive savages are intent apparently on taking Lola as their white queen. A queen of opposing color has been a long-standing tradition in their country. Odd growling sounds like some monumental indigestion seem to come from behind the high walls of the fortress and send tremors of fear through the populace.