Masques and Citadels – ten short stories written by Mark Valentine and John Howard, stories where the narrator recounts conversations with his friend The Connoisseur (authors' caps), a gentleman of exquisite taste who has made it his practice to explore the curious and hidden dimensions of literature, music, the arts and aesthetic experience. As to what more precisely is meant here, I will focus on two tales from the collection.
THE BLACK EROS
Upon entering the room of The Connoissuer one evening, the narrator hears the brittle crackle of music coming from a gramophone. The narrator is offered a seat and knows as he watches The Connoissuer stir the fire with his gargoyle-handled poker he is in store for a highly provocative tale.
The Connoisseur reminds the narrator of the sleek Worcestershire art house he helped restore, a building designed as a cross between art deco and abstract art with its large, slanting windows, prisms of light and trapezoidal tables. Well, he had a visit from Julian Griffin, an author of the history of British jazz music and an accomplished jazz musician himself. Julian wanted to come to the art house to perform numbers from those 1920s and 30s British dance bands, music judged a threat to civilization back in the day, "primitive rhythms and hubbub of savages."
Since such bold, innovative music was very much in the spirit of the art house, the trustees were more than happy to put Griffin's orchestra, The Midnight Room, on the schedule. The Midnight Room, so the Connoisseur continues, was a name taken from an infamous 1920s jazz club shut down by Scotland Yard.
The Connoisseur attended the concert, enjoyed the orchestra and Julian Griffon's soprano saxophone riffs on 20s jazz but then the unexpected: Griffon, his crest of golden hair so much like a mythic gryphon, launched into their finale, a piece called "Clandestino," the lunging and halting rhythms building and building, transfixing the audience, when a dark haired young woman stepped forward and performed a breathtaking solo on her violin.
Afterwards, The Connoisseur observed the violinist - "She was exhilarated, her eyes gleaming and a violet vein in her delicate neck pulsing, but at the same time clearly a little dazed, holding the violin limply by its neck, and her gaze quartering the room." Dominica, the violinist, told Griffin it was as if the melody played itself, as if both the audience and the atmosphere of the unique room were willing her on.
Some time thereafter, Julian Griffin paid a visit to The Connosseur and drew out two black disks. One bore a label with a more mature version of the Eros statue in Piccadilly but the second contained a label where "the figure of Eros was differently masked, with a black vizard rather than the ragged band of cloth on the first; also that the wings were darker and gave a suggestion of a floating dark cloak more than the conventional white plumes; and that the set of the mouth was more sullen, almost a leer." And the piece of music on this second disk - none other than "Clandestino."
Griffin concludes there's something definitely off about playing "Clandestino." He proposed the orchestra drop the piece but Dominica became furious at his suggestion, so furious he agreed to perform "Clandestino" one last time. And if the young violinist's reaction wasn't unsettling enough, Griffin confides with great unease his repeated observation when Dominica practiced the piece: "I've noticed that while she's playing she's always staring across at some corner of the room, and when I try to make out what's there . . . well, I just see some suggestion of a figure, a hazy column of black and . . . you're going to think me quite mad, I'm sure, but I've begun to think I see the figure on the label, the same folds of cloak, the same dark eye-mask . . . She just won't talk about it, but I can tell there's something wrong."
The Connoisseur continues his tale, how he attended Griffin's next performance and witnessed a strange series of events: Dominica arriving at the club with a "slender crimson scar which glinted evilly against her white, white face," the opening bars of "Clandestino" where the slim, dark hared violinist performed like a maestro, the frenzy of Dominica as she danced barefoot from the stage to wend her way through the audience "while her fingers and her bow coaxed more and more yelping and imploring sounds in a sequence of shrill arpeggios, from her violin."
The Connoisseur paused before relaying the shocking crescendo followed by Dominica's collapse on the floor and then, stepping from the rear of the room, the appearance of a woman, her face pale and riven, her hair and shoulders covered in a lace scarf, who began sinuous movements in mime as if performing a sombre ritual. She then halted and conveyed her own history of dancing to "Clandestino." What this mysterious woman had to report left everyone present awestruck at the power of the Black Eros.
Recall I noted The Connoisseur explores the curious and hidden dimensions of all things relating to the arts. To this, as is the case here, we can add the dark and chaotic.
MAD LUTANIST
A tale taking The Connoisseur to an oddly constructed tower to investigate a round object having a dial and in the shape of a clock but with "black characters delineated upon it, and none of them a recognisable letter or number."
Once at Horton's Tower located along the rustic coast, turning in for the night turns out to be a memorable experience. As The Connoisseur describes to the clockworks expert he's with the next morning, he heard high thrumming sounds and a sequence of semi-melodious groans as if a human voice on the wind. The clockwork expert, in turn, reports her night on the top floor of the tower was equally hair-raising, seeing a huge "Pickwickian" face on the ceiling leering at her.
What is going on here? The Connoisseur and the clockwork expert receive more of an explanation from a scholar who joins them at the tower and speaks of a peculiar character from a novel authored by Thomas Love Peacock. Ah, literature to the rescue! And from a writer Mark Valentine developed a particular fondness for back in his school days. One of the more provocative twists a reader will discover in Masques and Citadels.
*Note - all ten stories in Masques and Citadels are included in The Collected Connoisseur available from Tartarus Press in either paperback or as an eBook. Link: http://www.tartaruspress.com/valentin...
Mark Valentine
John Howard
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