Chrysanthemum Under the Waves

There is something about trying times that brings out the best in some artists. Historically and contemporarily, war, disease, loss, turmoil, and uncertainty can be a great silencer, but in some people, it is just as great a focuser. With the entire world coming apart, what is there to do but close yourself off to everything but your work and the processes and circumstances that inspire it? Olivier Messaien may have been confined to a Nazi prison camp, but it resulted in the creation of the Quartet for the End of Time. Art should not demand suffering, but the creation of art is as valid a way to cope with suffering as any other and has the added benefit of reaching out to someone other than the sufferer.

Such is the case with Maggie Umber’s first self-published work, Chrysanthemum Under the Waves. Produced at a time when the creator of Sound of Snow Falling and Time Capsule found herself facing significant personal grief over the dissolution of both her marriage and her career, as well as incipient arthritis and the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Her response was to produce Chrysanthemum, her first collection of original material and her first foray into publishing her own work. It’s a book that comes from a place of great agony and unsureness, but it’s also incredibly confident and direct in the way of someone who knows exactly what they’re trying to say.

“Say” is used advisedly here; Chrysanthemum Under the Waves is entirely wordless. Comprised entirely around the theme of the "demon lover" – one of the most enigmatic and mysterious of the Child Ballads, which has inspired other great art that in turn inspired this book – Chrysanthemum collects nine stories, many of which are interpretations, extrapolations, and inspirations for Umber’s own work. They’re framed here in an attractive volume with instructive background information that nonetheless cannot prepare the reader for what comes next. It’s an impressionistic and dreamlike collection that takes you into the far fringes of storytelling in a way many artists attempt but few truly succeed.

The first, “Those Fucking Eyes,” pays tribute to the poet Sylvia Plath’s “On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover.” Illustrated in a style that is equal parts Cindy Sherman’s black-and-white cinematic self-portraits and the painter Francis Bacon’s rough, terror-filled work, it begins in meditative calm and immediately explodes into sexually charged and fearful imagery suffused with overtones of Greek mythology. It’s the best possible introduction, despite its brevity, to what is to come later, keeping itself at a remove from direct narrative but staying thematically precise and strong.

“Rine” is next, a visual riff on Elizabeth Bowen’s influential short story “The Demon Lover.” Drawn in an entirely different but equally confident style, it uses hatched and piped line drawings reminiscent at times of Bill Sienkiewicz to tell a tale, like Bowen’s, of a woman returning to a great country house only to be visited by the spirit of a departed husband. It's intense and with a sense of the quiet terror of the story. Faces are never seen, obscured by objects or simply frightening blanks, with fear and absence felt through suggestion and implication, and with flowers replacing their usual mood-lifting quality with a disturbing sense of concealment.

The next piece, “Intoxication”, is one of the most curious: drawn in a looser, more comic-art style resembling New Yorker cartoons, it appropriately takes place at a fancy-dress party in high pre-war style. (The feint of making what are timeless stories seem to take place in a specific time and place is much more effective than contemporary storytelling might have been.) It shows a couple drinking from a well-supplied punchbowl before stealing off for an intimate moment; they seem to blur into one another before they are interrupted by the arrival of another guest. The "reality" of the story, as with all the demonic visitations from the ghostly "James Harris" figure of the vanished lover, is frangible and forever lacking in permanence, which only heightens the intensity of the images.

The most direct reference to the Child Ballad (although it also contains elements of the Quebecois folktale “The Legend of Rose Latulipe”) is “The Devil is a Hell of a Dancer”, and it’s the only story in the collection with words – direct excerpts from the ballad rendered in striking block letters in service of the tale of a woman, seeking her lost lover at sea, only to learn that he is the devil made flesh and the ship is only going one way, and it’s straight down. It’s one of the more straightforward works in the collection, but no less effective for that; its inky, blurred quality even suggests the remnant of a document recovered, waterlogged, from a shipwreck.

“Chrysanthemum” is Umber’s most direct retelling of the Daemon Lover story, this time drawing its inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s short fiction of the same name. It’s the most "realist" in its drawing, and its storytelling unfurls like the flower, layered but unified, almost in the style of a silent film if their heyday had ended in the late 1940s instead of the 1920s. It has an almost noir quality, both visually and thematically, up until its striking conclusion, and is followed by the almost poetic “There is Water,” with another infusion of lyrical text illuminating its brief clash of images. It’s hard to pick a favorite from such a strong collection of pieces, but these two may be mine.

There’s much more to Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, including the gloomy, atmospheric gothic horror story “The Witch” and another Jackson adaptation, “The Tooth”, drawn in a detective-story style with deep black ink and raw power, as well as the enlightening endpapers. But while some stories will resonate more than others, it’s an extremely worthwhile collection that overcomes the challenges it sets for itself and blends its internal diversity with an overall coherence that is an incredible accomplishment. I wouldn’t want Umber to have to relive any of the pain that led to the creation of the book, but its existence means that it was not all in vain – not for her, and not for any of us.

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