ROB HOLDSTOCK, 1948 – 2009
Two weeks ago, Robert Holdstock died from an E. coli infection, in just over ten days. We were following his progress daily, when on the 27th, his condition, which had been improving or optimistically stable, suddenly worsened. He died at 4 a.m. on November 29th. He was 61 years old.
You can easily find all the details of Rob’s career and books on Wikipedia, so I won’t bore you with that here, and homages will abound, as they do, but I’d like to add a few thoughts.
Dear Rob,
These are some of the things I wish I had said.
I first picked up one of your books off a paperback rack in a drugstore in Zermatt, on a ski vacation. By what serendipitous miracle your book ended up there I can only guess, but I was in the mood for something to read, and was turning the rack in desultory desperation when I spotted a book called Mythago Wood.
The cover was intriguing, but only in a way, not really my cup of tea, but nevertheless it did its job and I picked it up, read the blurb on the back cover and took it to the checkout counter. After that day’s skiing, found a comfy corner, opened it up, and didn’t put it down until it was done. (I wrote down the date inside, but can’t remember and now can’t check, as you’ll see, but it must have been one of the early editions, in 1984 or ‘85.) But most of all, my mind was crazy alive dancing with images, so many that the best ski slopes in Switzerland just passed in a blur. My mind was backtracking in Rhyhope Wood.
Of course, I did some catching up as soon as I got within range of an English-language bookshop. I mail-ordered Lavondyss (cover and illustrations by Alan Lee) and religiously bought everything you wrote over the next two decades.
So, you’re to blame for a spiriting-away, of making my imagination a bright patchwork tattercoat caught on the thorns and brambles of your bewildering woodscapes: the Urscumug, Glanum plunging like Leviathan through the landscape, Kylhuk folding the woodland around his motley doomed cavalcade, the madship Argo, Thalos and dozens more. Too many pictures, it would take a lifetime to paint them all.
I never thought I’d actually get to meet you (you had a curiously annoying habit of going to major festivals the year before I attended, and I could never seem to catch up). When my London agent, bless her, said, at the end of a long day of appointments, “Shall I ring Rob?” we ended up on your doorstep at 10 pm, and left only around midnight. Though our paths did somehow manage to cross a few times after that, those two hours were of a warmth I can still feel. Bless you and your wonderful partner Sarah for so graciously for taking an illustrator in out of the cold.
Few authors could see so clearly into the deep well where stories are floating quietly, waiting for a face to peer over the parapet. Few authors were so fully in touch with Story as you. Few had such a grasp of Gnārus and Glamour. You wrote in images, never contrived or circumstantial, those ur-images that as an illustrator, I spend my time searching for, usually in vain, but doggedly, because I know they are there. I know they are because you seem to have glimpsed them, I should be able to also, so I’ll keep trying. But then there was something of the shaman in your way of side-seeing, so maybe it’s a vain hope, but even vain hopes are okay if you need to make do.
So why did it take your words to make them come to life so vividly? I can only put it down to coincidence, when you suddenly find yourself with a deep-felt resonance, and something strikes that chord that nothing else stirs. I felt that with your work, and I’ve only felt it a handful of times, once standing so close to swinging bells hundreds of feet up a cathedral that they whooshed past inches away, deafening bronze thunder, once when standing on the west coast of New Zealand, near Hokitika, looking out over the night ocean, listening to the urgent surf. So thank you for that. I should have said that long ago, but that’s how it is isn’t it, there’s always next time until there’s no time.
I drive to and from work these days with a CD of Italian Baroque as loud as it will go, because only an Antidotum Tarantulae seems right these days. It’s a bit wild and a lot sad, it’s just right.
I’ve often read modern writers who revisit myth, and over the years, have ultimately found them profoundly unsatisfying. (There’s no shortage of them either, so the dissatisfaction is large and varied.) We can’t believe in myth any more. We’ve grown up to another view of the world, so we not only no longer truly understand myth; we think we don’t need it any longer. People like you remind us we are wrong, because you are telling stories for those reasons that escape the rest of us, but are likely closer to whatever truth they once held upon a time. We can study myth all we like, intellectualize, analyze, scrutinize, but only storytellers can help us grasp at that truth that only comes without thinking about it. Like myth-images, on the edge of vision, just out of reach. Thank you for doing your best to help us see.
I always wanted to ask you why it was you wrote the stories you wrote, why the worlds of mythago (now there’s a word that should be in the OED if it isn’t already) were where you felt at home. I guess I was hoping that it would give me a clue as to why similar worlds could be so important to me. But you’re gone now, so I’ll look in the books you wrote, maybe you slipped answers between the lines.
Rob, I don’t have words, they don’t come easy, even in the best of circumstances. I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few days, and have no words to describe yours. Words aren’t something I do well, I just do pictures, and for many of those, I owe their quickening to you.
I wanted so badly to see your work on the big screen I must have sent a copy of your book to Peter every couple of years, hoping he’d snap up the rights. I even sent that copy I bought in Zermatt, so I sent a part of my memories of that first magic moment of discovery with it, and now will never remember the date I first read one of your stories. It still hasn’t come to anything, but now that you’re not here any more, I’m not giving up, for what it’s worth.
I did manage to illustrate the covers of a couple of your books, as you of course know, and when you said how much you liked my depiction of Guiwenneth, I have never so much appreciated a comment by an author. I felt I’d found a Grail, that I’d seen the ninth wave. That’s how much it meant. I’ll carry on making pictures for you, if you don’t mind, in a sketchbook, there are still so many of your words that need to be made into pictures.
Rob, I have a few questions, but they have to do with things like Gates of Ivory and Horn, about what the runes on Sleipnir’s teeth really say, about which eye Odin sacrificed, about the cornerstone of the Spiral Castle and what Urðr says when she speaks out of turn. But they can wait. Don’t need answers, just need to ask.
Rob, I don’t know where people go when they die, but if what you’ve written is true, and I suspect it’s as true as anything else, then you’re wandering in a wood somewhere. If you are, then that’s where I’m headed too, one day. I’ll bring that sketchbook along, and you can tell me if I’ve gotten any of them right.
John Howe
Wellington, December 5, 2009
