DEATH DRAWS NYE

The end of the year, after Christmas, is traditionally a time of death. Very sick or elderly people hang on till the family holiday, then feel like they can let go. This year, with at least half the country feeling doom-laden because of the effects of the election, the pile-up of high-profile celebrity deaths in the last week seems to be feeding ominous emotions.

Less famous people, significant to me, have been passing away quietly all year. Frank Finlay, the best Van Helsing in the best adaptation of Dracula ever, died way back on January 30th. George S. Irving, the voice of Heat Miser, died just December 26th. And completely by chance I found out that an author I've enjoyed for years passed in July and I never heard about it.

Before Christmas I was moving books from one shelf to another, dusting and re-arranging. I took the works of Robert Nye out of a high nook, and was drawn into a volume, The Voyage of the Destiny. Looking for information to clarify a certain point, I learned that he had died of cancer at the age of 77.

Although the consensus was that he would probably be mostly remembered as a poet in the tradition of Laura Riding and Robert Graves, I knew him through his novels, especially Falstaff, which I found in college. I reveled in his Rabelaisian prose (more accurately, the prose of the Thomas Urquhart translation of Rabelais). A juvenile version of Beowulf. Novels on Merlin, Faust, Shakespeare.

There are still many of his works for me to explore, so to that extent I am lucky. If I want another book from him, I have only to go looking. But that is a finite resource. He wasn't a franchise. No one is likely to try to reproduce his style or turn him into a hologram. He was just a writer, crafting unique books of undefinable flavor. And only a small number will note his passing, and some only by chance.

Willy Gris: Favorite Quotes

"The famous Willy Griskin was a Fastolf too. Griskin. It's a little pig. Will's father was taxed out of existence, and he left the young Will this pigling as his patrimony. Of course the boy's contemporaries laughed. The Knight of the Griskin, they called him, Little Willy Gris. So Will sold his pig and emigrated on the proceeds. In France, despite the French, he advanced himself on the back of that pigling money until he was in a position to marry a marriable woman--the widow of a banker. He was rolling in it now, and the more money he made the more the world loved him. This did not escape his notice. Sitting brooding on the fact, he had one room in his house painted and decorated by an artist called Nicholas Pisano. Will kept the key of this room on a chain which he wore around his neck, and he never let anyone in there ever, not even his wife....It was his habit also, whenever he came home from seeing great men, to neglect all other business and go straight to his secret chamber. He'd stay there for hours and then come out to his family with a philosophical smile. Everyone burned to know what was in the room. His wife begged him to show them. At last, thoroughly beseiged, Will Fastolf unlocked the door. The walls of the room were white and the floor was white, but on the cieling of the room was painted the picture of a pigling and a little boy leading it by a string, and the words written:



Willy Gris, Willy Gris--

Think what you was, and what you is!"

--from Falstaff, by Robert Nye.