“If you're a singer, you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.” — Mickey Spillane


That insightful quote by Mickey Spillane was never more on display than in this late-career masterpiece of romantic fantasy by Robert Nathan. For decades he had written about love as being everything. His tales were often ethereal, sometimes supernatural, and many, like Portrait of Jennie, were unforgettable. He sprinkled his stories with a tender magic which touched readers’ hearts so deeply his words remained there forever. He never seemed to care about page count; most of his finest works were short stories or novellas. Finally, near the end of his long and illustrious career, this magnificent writer turned inward, and gave us one of his most beautiful pieces of fiction.

In the novella, Nathan seems to be placing a mirror not only in front of himself, but every writer like him, writers who live and breathe their stories of love to the point where their characters become so real, they intrude on reality. Like all of Nathan’s work, Stonecliff has a gentle, otherworldly atmosphere, and is laced with great insight into the human condition. In this brief and terribly beautiful story, Nathan ponders God and the universe, and time and dimensions beyond our understanding in an intimate way, telling a love story for the ages that is both fantasy and science fiction. Or is it?

Michael Robb, an aspiring writer, has come to Stonecliff, overlooking the sea. He is there to interview the aging Edward Granville, whose entire career has been built on beautiful, ethereal stories of love, in which the message is always the same — love is everything. Michael finds Stonecliff enchanting:

“The air was cold and moist, the heavens clear and starry overhead; the sea moved in deeper darkness below us; and again, as from the window of my room, I smelled the over-sweet fragrance of jasmine.”

But Edward is enigmatic, and his wife Virginia is away at the moment. A Mexican woman who runs the house, and a breathtakingly beautiful young woman named Nina are the only two people around as Michael remains to get background from Edward about his life, his work. It doesn’t take long for him to sense that Edward’s characters are more to him than just figments of his imagination:

“I felt the loneliness of the evening, the emptiness of the land...and I thought of all the brave, sad, lonely, merry people of Granville's stories, the loving girls whose ghosts must roam those cliffs and haunt the gardens of oak and cypress in which they had lived their insubstantial lives…”

And it takes him even less time to begin falling in love with the fresh and enchanting Nina. But what is she to Edward, and where is Edward’s wife, Virginia? There seems to be something strange surrounding Edward and Nina’s relationship Michael can’t quite grasp. There is also something strange about the grounds of Stonecliff. Michael hears Edward having a conversation about his book with someone in a treehouse, only to discover no one is there. A fog-shrouded cougar and a snake which is only a rope have Michael wondering — and trying to shake off the unfathomable notion — if in some half-world of illusion, everyone, including himself, might be living in the current story Granville is writing. As Michael and Nina begin falling in love, the tale becomes more mysterious, and fraught with danger:

“It was as if powers were at war beyond the reach of my senses, beyond nature…unreal phantoms, coils of fog, primeval shadows…”

More and more Nina tries not to fall in love with Michael as he has fallen in love with her. Edward Granville’s heart seems to be in just as much turmoil as Nina’s, as he ponders his life’s work, wondering if, as he’s always espoused in his stories, love is all. Before the secret of Stonecliff is finally revealed, Robert Nathan treats the reader to so many lovely moments there isn’t enough space for them here. In essence, this is a writer nearing the end of his literary career, looking inward, showing us love through the eyes of youth, and the aged.

There isn’t much that Robert Nathan wrote which isn’t worth reading, yet in modern times his stories are too seldom mentioned, and even less seldom read. It is sadly ironic that in this beautiful piece of fiction, he has Edward ruminate on a writer’s legacy; how some are remembered and live on, while others sleep unremembered for eternity. Some of Nathan’s stories, such as Portrait of Jennie, are masterpieces. Stonecliff is just as memorable. It might take modern readers a few pages to get into Nathan’s older style of storytelling, but they’ll find the read richly rewarding. Stonecliff is one of those stories which no reader with a romantic heart will ever forget. ( )