BWBC 17: Pushkin!
This week’s story is a gem.
It has ghosts, gamblers, tragic love affairs, and hints of black magic. All that in a short story set against the backdrop of 19th century Russian high society.
“The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Pushkin
Hermann is a young soldier from a poor German family. He is obsessed with improving his station, but lack of prospects, money, and connections. He regularly joins his friends at gambling halls, but he never gambles, because he knows he doesn’t have the money to risk. This, however, doesn’t prevent him from developing a passion for cards. If only there was some way to guarantee he could win every time he played. Enter his rich buddy, Tomsky.
One night after coming back from the gambling hall Tomsky tells Hermann a story about how his grandmother, the Countess Anna Fedotovna, was a great beauty in her youth with a spendthrift gambling habit. When her husband refused to pay her debts, she turned to noted disreputable historical figure Saint-Germain for help. He taught her the three cards that will always win every game. The fact that the old woman now lives in the city makes Hermann concoct a scheme to seduce the Countess’s ward,
Lizaveta Ivanovna, in order to get close enough to the Countess to learn the secret. Lizaveta at first resists, but soon she’s in love with Hermann despite his true intentions. Eventually, Hermann convinces her to let him into the house one night while everyone is at a ball, and while he’s supposed to wait in Lizaveta’s room, he in fact hides in the Countess’s.
There he waits until everyone returns from the ball. From hiding he witnesses the “hideous mysteries” of the Countess’s toilet as the old woman prepares for bed. Finally she retires, at which point out comes Hermann to beg for the secret. The old woman is shocked and refuses to give it to him (is the story even true or simply gossip?). He then gets angry and pulls a gun, causing the Countess to drop dead from fright. Hermann flees to Lizaveta and tells her everything. He threatens to reveal her role in the scheme if she doesn’t help him to escape. She agrees and provides Hermann a key to a secret passage that leads to the street. He flees.
Then comes the Countess’s funeral and the entire town comes out to attend. Hermann goes too, in order to pay his respects to the family and the woman he’s accidentally killed, but when he approaches the coffin, the body appears to wink at him. This makes him have a breakdown and require being carried out from the church. Later as he lies with a fever in his quarters, the Countess appears to him in all the finery of her youth, and she teaches him the three cards that will win every game.
There are some rules that go along with their usage. First, only one card can be played an hour, and second, once the third card is played the player must never gamble again. Hermann agrees to all this and memorizes the cards, eager to try them out the next time his friends go gambling. Of course, everything goes side-ways at the end, because hahaha the Countess’s ghost was messing with Hermann the whole time.
Believe me folks, this story is great, an absolute ride that has made me happy that I chose to read through this book. I’m even excited for the end of the year when I’m done with this project and putting together my highlight list. “The Queen of Spades” will be high upon it.
If you like the yesterweird at all, then search this one out, or one of the movie adaptions of it. You’ll dig it.
BWBC 16: Allegorical Realism and Fantasy
And we’re back!
Two stories today: Italo Calvino’s novella “The Argentine Ant” and John Collier’s “Lady on the Grey”. They could not be more different from each other.
“The Argentine Ant” by Italo Calvino
In a lot of ways this story is a straight realist story about a young couple that moves to a new town and have their hopes of finding an easy life there all dashed by the ants that infest the village. As the couple is increasingly tormented they seek help from their neighbors, all of who have pursued different methods to deal with the ant problem. One builds elaborate mechanical traps, another adheres to a complicated routine of poison application, a third lives in complete denial of the ants’ existence even though they torment her. And that’s when you start to think maybe the ants are a metaphor and underneath the realist veneer this story is an allegory for life.
What the ants represent is open to debate. My take is that they embody unfettered nature that contains pleasure and pain, stability and entropy, and which can’t ever be stopped only accommodated. As the story progresses and the ants become more of a nuisance, the situation deteriorates until the couple finally seeks out the man from the Ant Company. He’s supposed to be exterminating the ants on behalf of the government, but no one trusts him and most people in the district believe he’s in league with the ants.
The only relief comes when the family leaves the neighborhood and goes to the beach where the sight of the waves and the sun break the hold the Argentine ants have over them, but there’s no sense that the couple have escaped, only that they’ve discovered a balm for a time.
Give it a read sometime and let me know what you think.
“The Lady on the Grey” by John Collier
Ringwood and Bates are two roguish fail-sons of the penniless aristocrat sort. They’re hangers-on and leeches, living on modest allowances as they travel Ireland in search of game, be it fish, fowl, fox, or human female. Neither are the letter writing sort, and their communications are done via third persons: mutual acquaintances, train agents, barmen, etc. One day while Ringwood’s wondering at his prospects, a message arrives via one-eyed horse dealer that Bates has gone to Knockderry and if anyone saw Ringwood they should tell him that. Ringwood assumes Bates has come upon something good and sets off for Knockderry at once. Of course, when he arrives there’s no sign of Bates and no one in the village knows where he can be found. No matter, thinks Ringwood, he’ll see for himself what the town has to offer (mostly in the way of farm maids he can assault). As he spies a potential victim, he’s interrupted by the arrival of a beautiful woman on a grey horse and the mangy dog that travels behind her. She initiates a seduction and Ringwood can’t believe his luck, despite how annoying her dog is. He doesn’t care that the dog keeps accosting him. So she tells him to come by her lonesome tower house later that night, and Ringwood goes back to the inn to prepare himself. From the innkeeper he learns the woman is the last of an ancient Irish family, and from that Ringwood’s predatory fantasies blossom.
But, of course, things aren’t as they seem.
This is one of those stories you enjoy not because you’re rooting for the characters, but because you like seeing the trap spread around them. When Ringwood finally gets his, you can’t help but feel satisfied.
Do people still talk about John Collier? I feel like he’s one of those writers no one ever talks about but whom provided the seed-story to a dozen well-remembered Twilight Zone episodes. Like Bradbury, he’s the sort of writer you think you know based on one story or book, but whose work as a whole offers a lot more complexity than you realize. Also, there’s the sheer level of craft on display in his stories. The plot might be predictable, but the joy’s in the execution. They’re perfectly designed little narratives.
If you like the Neil Gaiman/Michael Chabon style you might want to check John Collier out.
Next week, a long one from Pushkin!
BW BC 15: In This the Year of Our Lord Entropy
Among the many unsettling things this year of our lord entropy 2020 has revealed, one that snuck up on me is how much all those weird, surrealistic Eastern European writers from the 1930s are starting to make sense. Case in point, Bruno Schulz.
I know I read Schulz back in university and thought him “weird”, but his full eeriness never quite strike me until I read this story of his “Father’s Last Escape” in Black Water. It’s nothing particular or prescient. It’s simply the fact that as weird as things get, the characters all respond to it with an exhausted numbness that I now recognize all too well.
“Father’s Last Escape” by Bruno Schulz
The cleaning girl has no bones and makes a sauce by boiling old letters.
The fur coat in the hall has become alive and attacks everyone that gets too close to it.
And father has drifted away, first into the wallpaper, and then into something crab-like that scuttles and crawls.
Why? Who knows?
The world is in some mutable state and reality can’t be relied upon to behave as one would wish. Father has dreamt too long and deep, and has been transformed. (Although everyone comments on how striking the resemblance is to when father had a human form.)
Schulz is clear in his nods to Kafka, but there’s that banal note to it all that Manguel favors: All the other characters accept the transformation in stride. Sort of. Eventually fate intervenes, but even then it does so in a dreamlike fugue state.
Reality is no longer fixed. Everything is in flux. Father is retreating into a mythic fantasy world and everything seems capable of changing at a moment’s notice. So much so that we’re all numb to it.
Nothing at all familiar in that…
“A Man By the Name of Ziegler” by Herman Hesse
Herman Hesse brings us back to familiar territory, giving us a tale in the classic genre of Guy Gets High, Guy Loses His Mind.
Here our guy is one Ziegler. A typical specimen of his culture and era, well-dressed and confident in his belief that he exists at the pinnacle of culture. He’s smug, he’s proud, he’s self-righteous, and he has a day off so he’s decided to go to the museum and the zoo. But first, we get a full glimpse at how superior he believes himself to be. At the museum he chuckles at how primitive people were in the past, and the way they believed such foolish things. He’s particularly scathing in his views of fortune-telling and the like. But alchemy was all right because it led to chemistry. So while standing before the alchemy exhibit, he pilfers a small pill on display and stuffs it into his pocket. Later at lunch he gives the pill a more thorough examination, and finds its resin scent pleasant. This leads him to tasting the pill, then swallowing it. And then like all novice stoners, he goes to the zoo.
At which point he realizes the drug has allowed him to understand the speech of animals, and they do nothing but mock and insult all the people who stop by their cages. Ziegler’s particularly incensed by the insults from the lions and gets into a shouting match with them. This of course makes the other zoo patrons nervous, and they call the guards, who arrive and take Ziegler away because in true Reefer Madness-style he’s now insane.
So, don’t do drugs!
Or, maybe, if you do drugs, don’t be a smug prick!
Next week… ants!
BW BC 14: Lady Into Fox
David Garnett’s Lady into Fox is a short novella from 1922 about a woman who turns into a fox and the problems this causes for her husband.
In its day Lady Into Fox was highly regarded, winning awards and earning praise from the likes of Virginia Wolfe, Joseph Conrad, and HG Wells. It’s one of those English fantasy stories from the early 20th century, the same era that gave us Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. But, despite a reprint in 2004, its legacy hasn’t lasted as well as those other books.
Wikipedia calls Lady into Fox allegorical, but if it is I’m not sure what the allegory is supposed to be. The story’s like one of those old movies that is so fraught with possible interpretations you can easily find contradictory ones. You can read it as feminist. You can read it as misogynist. You can read it as a defense of polyamory and an attack upon it. You can read it as one of those books that could only have been written in a society where uptight, closeted gay men regularly married unconventional, heterosexual women in the hopes of satisfying a society that wanted to pretend neither one existed.
Whatever it is, it’s quite good and worth the afternoon it would take to read it. I’ll put a link to the Gutenberg version down at the bottom. That one has great wood cut illustrations in it by Rachel Marshall, Garnett’s first wife.
A word of warning though: this is one of those stories where a dog dies, and that lets you know that no matter how good things are for the characters at any given moment, a dog has died and therefore everyone’s destined for ruin.
Lady Into Fox
One day, Richard Tebrick is walking with his wife, Sylvia, when suddenly she is transformed into a fox. Why? Who knows. The only explanation given is that her maiden name was “Fox” and maybe that pointed to some “feyness” in her background. Whatever the reason, her transformation causes no end of trouble for poor Mr. Tebrick, because he still loves his wife despite her new form.
And at first, at least after he gets rid of the servants and kills his dogs, everything appears like it will be fine. Sylvia remains human enough in mind to wear dresses, take tea, and play cards. In effect she stays a Lady. But in time her more animal nature asserts itself, and as she grows more fox-like and in line with her new nature, Mr. Tebrick grows more miserable. Yet, despite it all he still loves his wife* and increasingly tolerates her growing more and more wild. Even when she takes completely to living in the forest and mates with another fox, Richard overcomes his jealousy by reasoning no true man can be brought down by a beast, and so his love goes on, untarnished. When the kits are born he calls himself the godfather to her litter and takes to regularly bringing them food and playing with them. Never is the man so happy as when he renounces society and embraces the unconventional. At those times, he doesn’t care at all what form his wife takes, nor how she behaves.
But society can’t abide with those who refuse to fit into it and the bark of the foxhound is never far distant. Tragedy is waiting in the wings and as things roll along it’s only a matter of time before that tragedy comes crashing down. After all, a dog died, and in that act the Tebricks doomed themselves.
Like I said at the start Lady Into Fox is a good little book, even if it’s ultimately a downer. It has that richness to it that makes you want to pick away at it while it draws you in and captivates you.
You can check it out for yourself here.
Even if you don’t download it, you should check that out for the Rachel Marshall illustrations.
And here’s the Wikipedia entry for David Garnett. Why does everything I read about the Bloomsbury Group make me believe they were awful people?
And if you’d like to read another review of Lady Into Fox, I quite liked this one.
Next week, Bruno Schultz!
*I didn’t want to distract from my review, but at one point when Mr. Tebrick goes on a self-loathing drinking binge it’s implied that there’s bestiality. Which… if I go with my take that this is a story about a closeted gay man who can’t handle his wife’s sexuality, then there’s your metaphoric ick-factor.
BW BC 13: And Now the Strangeness Starts
Hello, welcome back, I’m glad you could make it.
Three more stories this week: one a flash-length excerpt from a longer story, the other two your standard slightly shorter than average short stories. Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen gives us our flash length story, an excerpt from ”Peter and Rosa”. After that is a bit of decadent literature from Junichiro Tanizaki called “Tattoo”, and a humorous story from Flann O’Brien called “John Duffy’s Brother”.
From “Peter and Rosa” by Isak Dinesen
Did you know that when Isak Dinesen sent the manuscript for her collector “Winter’s Tales” to her publisher it was right at the start of World War 2, and she had no way of knowing if it was received or published until after the war when former soldiers wrote to tell her how much they loved her book? While that story is wild on multiple accounts, I like to imagine what kind of guys these soldiers were who read Dinesen during the war.
An old friend of mine described Dinesen as a writer who readers always feel like they alone have discovered, and I think there’s something to that. When one of her stories clicks, that feeling of some truth being revealed to you and you alone is overwhelming. You might have to read a few of her stories for that to happen, but when it does… mmm, chef’s kiss.
Sadly, the excerpt Manguel includes here from “Peter and Rosa” is not enough to generate that feeling. If anything it gives only the barest hint with its short tale of a ship captain, his ship, and his wife’s jealousy that has all the qualities one recognizes from fairy tales.
All I can say is find yourself a Dinesen collection. She’s well worth the read.
“Tattoo” by Junichiro Tanizaki
I have to imagine that when Edgar Allan Poe’s work was translated into Japanese, they arrived alongside Oscar Wilde’s and Charles Baudelaire’s, making like this stew of decadent weirdness that the edgelordier sections of early 20th century Japanese writers must have loved. This story is direct from that main vein about one Seikichi, a sadistic tattoo artist, being gifted with a teenage girl to decorate as he pleases in the days before she is to start her training as an elite courtesan.
The ick-factor is strong here.
Seikichi starts the session by showing the girl his collection of erotic torture etchings. This terrify-titillates her, leading to an all-night tattoo session that leaves both exhausted. In the morning the artist knows he has reached his peak, but is more alarmed at the change in the girl. She has been transformed from the shy girl into a cruel woman. And as the sun rises, its light appears to set fire to the new tattoo.
And what is the tattoo of? A spider.
That’s it. The end. No moral. No comeuppance. No attack by the suddenly living spider, just a whole heap of decadence with a few extremely vivid images. Which is in no way a bad thing, but maybe not everyone’s cup of tea.
“John Duffy’s Brother” by Flann O’Brien
This is a story about a man who wakes up one day and thinks he is a train. He goes to work and does his job, and says things like he’s a train, then he goes home to lunch and realizes that he is in fact not a train. He’s then mortified by his morning’s behavior, but no one there ever mentions it. In fact they hardly noticed. Beyond a newfound particular-ness with sticking to a timetable, the man hadn’t really changed all that much. But still, those hours when John Duffy’s brother thought himself train would go on to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Initially, this story didn’t make much of an impression, but now a few days later I see it’s quite funny. Like what if Gregor Samsa did wake up one morning as a giant cockroach but nobody cared or noticed? That would be funny.
Next week… more transformations! Or, at least one transformation because it looks like a long story.
Until then, stay safe!
BW BC 12: Days of Future Present
And we’re back with three short stories this week. The first one was my favorite of the bunch.
“Split Second” Daphne Du Maurier
Mrs. Ellis is a fussy widow. She likes everything to be in its proper place and stresses a lot about her adolescent daughter who’s away at school. While taking a post-lunch stroll, a delivery van narrowly misses Mrs. Ellis, and things turn strange after that. As she attempts to make sense of the new world she finds herself in, we, the readers, get a deep dive into a story of paranoia and fear.
Is Mrs. Ellis insane? Has she been an unreliable narrator this whole time?
Why are all the details she gives to prove her identity partially right but partially wrong?
Du Maurier adds layer upon layer of details, and this is very much one of those claustrophobic stories where you wonder whether you could prove your own identity if everyone around you denied you were who you said you were. Not my favorite style of story to be sure, but Du Maurier makes it real and the slow progression from detail to detail makes the escalating tension masterfully done. It’s good, but maybe not for everyone. Du Maurier’s worth tracking down, but she’s a writer that you can’t rush and she’ll take as long as she needs to tell her story.
“August 25, 1983” Jorge Borges
A young man named Jorge Borges visits an old man named Jorge Borges, but they are both the same man and each claims to be dreaming the other. How does this work? Who knows! It’s a Jorge Borges story with a lot of talk of doubles, mirrors, suicide, and who can tell what is real and what is truth and yadda yadda. The whole thing has a masturbatory air. There’s better Borges to read.
“How Wang-Fo Was Saved” by Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman to be admitted into the French Academy. Her novel about Hadrian was a big deal when it came out, as it was an exploration of post-war Europe through characters from Antiquity. As a fan of Graves’s I, Claudius I hope to track it down some day. “How Wang-Fo Was Saved” is her rendition of a classical Chinese tale. Or at least so Manguel says. I have my doubts. My take is that Yourcenar used Orientalism to write fantasy that bordered on the Conte cruel.
Wang-Fo is an itinerant painter and little more than a beggar. Ling is his apprentice and deeply devoted to his master. But before they met Ling was a privileged aristocrat with a beautiful wife and a vast fortune. His life changed abruptly the moment he met Wang-Fo in a tea house and the old man described the world in a way that opened Ling’s eyes to wonder.
However, not everyone is pleased with Wang Fo. In particular the Emperor is more than a little pissed at him. You see all through the emperor’s youth he was kept in seclusion with nothing but Wang Fo’s paintings for company. The Emperor became so enamored with these paintings that when he eventually left seclusion everything in the actual world proved to be a disappointment. Now he hates Wang-Fo. So when Wang-Fo shows up in the city the Emperor promptly has him and Ling arrested.
The Emperor’s arranged a whole sort of punishment for Wang Fo that involves blinding the old man once he finishes an uncompleted painting from his youth. Ling protests and gets killed for his troubles.
Without any other choice, Wang Fo starts on his work, but here a strange thing happens. He paints an ocean and a boat appears on that ocean. In fact the room is now full of water. Inside the boat is Ling and he has come to rescue Wang Fo and take him away into his painting, which he proceeds to do. The End. It’s not a bad story, but Orientalist af.
Next week… more unless there’s less.
BW BC 11: The Misremembered Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Only one story this week because the Du Maurier was longer than expected. That’s okay because I’m slightly ahead of schedule so can slacken the pace a bit. That means we only have Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”.
This is actually one of my favorite Poe stories, but after this reread I have to admit very little of what remembered happening in this story actually happens in this story. And much of the cool shit I like about it is actually either made up whole cloth by my imagination or was from some movie version I saw somewhere.
So, let’s begin with the basic facts about “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”.
Valdemar is an invalid dying of tuberculosis. The narrator, a hypnotist, has convinced M. Valdemar to be hypnotized right at the point of death. There are a lot of descriptions of the sick room, done in that fever pitch purple prose Poe does well and which appeals to morbid teens of varying stripes. The plan goes off without a hitch, M. Valdemar dies, but his mind remains alive due to the hypnosis. There’s a creepy long passage about how M. Valdemar’s tongue lolls out of his mouth and speaks with a monstrous voice that comes from somewhere deep in the throat. It’s grisly. And the hypnotist keeps him in this state for seven months until he decides to see if it’s possible to wake Valdemar and return him to life. This does not succeed and as Valdemar’s tongue bursts with the word “Dead! Dead!” the body dissolves into a liquid mass of loathsome putridity. The End.
Now things I remember that aren’t in the story: the hypnotist has a motive for doing this beyond idle curiosity. He wants to know what happens after death, and his goal is to use the mesmerized Valdemar as a medium to explore the afterlife. Every day the hypnotist asks the corpse questions hoping to discover if the soul was immortal, and everyday the corpse replied that there was nothing, only void. The hypnotist refuses to accept this and continues to question Valdemar for seven months before the authorities force an end the experiment, at which point cue the putridity.
And none of that’s in the story. It might be in the Roger Corman version, but I don’t think it is. That version just has Basil Rathbone using hypnosis to get at Vincent Price-Valdemar’s wife and VPV rising from the death trance before Rathbone can seal the deal.
Maybe, I should write down my version.
Do you all have any story you misremember despite enjoying?
BW BC 10: To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
This week’s stories continue the thread from last week. As in Maugham’s “Lord Mountdrago” we have dreams, dreamers, and doubles. We also get another classic from the Arabian Nights.
We start with Giovanni Papini’s “The Sick Gentleman’s Last Visit”. Papini was an Italian writer active during the early half of the 20th century. As such he oscillated between reactionary and revolutionary politics, coming to rest on Catholic Conservatism and in particular Fascism. So that’s that. Jorge Borges called him “undeservedly forgotten”. Jorge Borges’s politics would likely disappoint me too.
In “The Sick Man’s Last Visit” we have another story about a troubled man coming to a stranger in the hopes the stranger can solve the man’s troubles. The Sick Man’s problem is that he’s realized that he’s not alive, but in fact being dreamt by someone else, and he’s desperate to find this individual and wake them up. Things get murky because as the Sick Man explains his troubles you kind of aren’t sure if he’s being dreamt by a human or some immortal being. And the story never resolves that question. Personally I’m fine with that. I like those stories that are just some character recounting some weirdness they saw and saying “Ain’t that some crazy shit?” before walking out the door. Your mileage may vary.
Next story, “Insomnia” by Cuban writer Virgilio Pinera, is a flash length horror story about a man who can’t sleep. After consulting with experts, and attempting all sorts of remedies without success, the man buys a gun and blows his brains out. This kills him, but it doesn’t put him to sleep. Insomnia is most persistent that way.
The other flash length story in this bunch is simply called “A Dream” and it’s from the Arabian Nights. This is another classic where a man dreams that there’s a great treasure in a house in Cairo and sets about traveling there. After many adventures he reaches Cairo and finds the house, but before he can go there, he gets caught in some mischief and arrested by the police. After a beating the police ask him why he was at the house in the first place. When he recounts his dream the chief of police laughs at him and says, “I too dreamt of a great treasure in a certain place, but I’m not a moron who listens to dreams”. Of course the certain place the police chief mentions is known by the first man and is in fact his house back home. He returns home, finds the treasure there as the police chief’s dream foretold, and lives happily ever after.
Last, we have “The Storm” by Jules Verne.
Confession time: this was my actual first Verne. So color me surprised by this story, which I take as being atypical for Verne as it’s more a weird story than a science fiction story.
Here we have a Doctor Trifulgas, who’s your awful miserly doctor. He’s inside while a storm rages outside, and so when a waif comes to his door to ask the doctor to come visit her dad who’s lying on his deathbed, the doctor says no because the man’s poor and the family can’t possibly pay him. After the waif comes the man’s wife, then his mother. Each time they offer more money to Doctor Trifulgas until finally he sees the trip out there as a bargain, and so he goes off out into the storm. The path’s horrible, rain slick and barren. The man’s mother disappears, and the doctor’s left with nothing but a dog to guide his way. He reaches the house, finally, but he doesn’t find the sick man in the bed he was told to suspect. Instead, he finds himself lying there, and things proceed to their inevitable bewildering conclusion from there.
This one surprised me. It was a lot more atmospheric than I expected. If life were longer
I would probably try to read more Verne.
Next week, Edgar Allan Poe and Daphne Du Maurier!
BW BC 09: Death is Your Friend So Get Comfortable With Them
What Ho, Black Water fans!
We have two stories this week, well actually, we have three stories, but the second one’s not really worth talking about much. So let’s talk about that one first!
Jean Cocteau’s “Death and the Gardener” is a flash length retelling of that story where a guy sees Death, and Death sees him, and the guy leaves town, only for Death to say to some other guy, “Funny seeing that guy here, because I have a meeting with him tonight in [whatever town the guy fled too].” It’s not a bad story, but once you know the twist there’s not much else going on with it. The good bit about this story is in the pre-story blurb where our editor Manguel gives us this quote from Cocteau:
“We need Death to be a friend. It is best to have a friend as traveling companion when you have so far to go together.”
Now to the heftier stories.
In 1975 the Times of London hosted a ghost story contest with Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith (!), and Christopher Lee as the judges(!!). Our story “A Scent of Mimosa” by Francis King won second place. And while it’s a bit conventional in plot, it’s fun in its characterizations as it involves writers, literary prizes, and award ceremonies.
We follow Lenore who’s recently won the Katherine Mansfield prize. She’s in France to receive the prize, traveling with a trio of judges, who are all cringe-worthy literary types. Would you like to hang out with the snob, the surly one, or the one who’s always finding reasons to touch you? Congratulations! You don’t have to choose because you’re stuck in a car with all three! As the ceremonies proceed, Lenore finds her life echoing Mansfield’s (the tuberculosis parts) and finds herself drawn to a strange man she encounters while listening to the speeches. The two connect, and Lenore’s fascinated by him, but somehow he’s never around whenever she wants to find him. Of course, he’s a ghost (Mansfield’s brother who died during World War I), but it’s cool because he says he’ll see her soon and Lenore realizes she’s okay with that. Hence the Cocteau story and quote that follows right after.
Our third story is Somerset Maugham’s “Lord Mountdrago”. It’s about a Doctor Audlin who uses his powers of being very boring to become a therapist. You see he’s so boring he can hypnotize people by the power of his monotone voice alone. One day a new client shows up, our titular Lord Mountdrago, and he’s a conservative politician in parliament and a horrible snob. His trouble is that he keeps having dreams where he keeps running afoul of rival politician, a Welsh Labour MP named Owen Griffith. He fears he will go mad if these dreams aren’t resolved, but when Doctor Audlin suggests a simple cure, Lord Mountdrago refuses to do it, as it requires too great a sacrifice to his pride. And of course that choice ends in disaster.
Like the Francis King story, this one provides some rich characterization. The dreams where Griffith taunts Lord Mountdrago are funny because they’re banal junk described by a person who believes himself superior to such dreams. And the feud between the two men is less ideological than something out of an elementary school classroom. Maugham goes down deep into the particulars to suggest the universal. It’s an enjoyable ride, so vivid in its depiction that even ultra-boring Doctor Audlin gets a rich interior life. Although, by story’s end he’s had a shock that forces him to question everything he thought he knew about the world.
No joke. These are some good stories. And so far this anthology is one that I’m happy to have managed to track down.
Next week… a literal Fash, a little flash, and Jules Verne!
May we all be here to read it.
BW BC 08: Haunted Before the Fact
We have two classic stories of the ghost’s appearance heralds an approaching death sort: Charles Dickens’s “The Signalman” and Pedro Antonia de Alarcon’s “The Tall Woman”. Both also employ the tried and true “let me tell you a story” and the “f*** you and your explanations” techniques.
“The Signalman”… wandering narrator wanders to some remote spot and sees a lonesome signalman beside the train tracks. At first the Signalman is spooked by the sight of the narrator, but after some time he calms down and the two start a conversation.
Dickens in the early portion really digs into the atmosphere and paints the landscape around the tracks in hellish shades. You’d think you were walking into Dante’s Inferno and not some lonesome railway cutting in the English countryside beside a tunnel. Then when the Signalman starts to explain why he was so startled by the narrator we get his story about the strange apparitions he’s seen at the mouth of the tunnel, the appearance of which have always heralded some train-related death. Now a third apparition has appeared, and the Signalman’s in a bind because he knows a third death approaches, but can’t warn anyone without them thinking he’s mad. The narrator urges him to go see a doctor, and the Signalman agrees to do this, except fate intervenes and things reach their inevitable conclusion.
“The Tall Woman”… English readers might not be familiar with de Alarcon. I wasn’t. And Manguel in his introductory blurb doesn’t really sell him as a writer to track down, saying he’s most famous for writing the book someone else made a famous opera from. Elsewhere online, however, someone has called “The Tall Woman” the quintessential Spanish ghost story. I don’t quite know what to make of that, but as a story goes it’s creepy.
A bunch of guys go on a picnic. One of them tells a story about a deceased friend who told him a story about how he (the now dead guy) lived in terror all his life of meeting a woman alone at night. He knows the fear is illogical, but can’t help feeling it, and some strange things have happened that to his mind make the fear justified. You see on certain occasions, usually when he’s in some bad straits, he’s encountered this woman who has stalked him through the streets. The woman as described is something straight out of Goya’s Black Paintings: a gigantic toothless crone dressed in the ill-fitting costume of a much younger woman. It’s not so much a ghost as some demonic entity. Each time the man encounters her some tragedy befalls him, and he feels justifiable fear that she will appear again.
Of course she does, and once again the inevitable happens.
De Alarcon goes deep into classic creepypasta territory. We are in “there’s a knife wielding maniac right behind you, so close their hair is practically touching your collar, but they won’t kill you unless you turn around” territory. What’s spookier is the fact that the guy is haunted without cause. There’s no curse or past crime that he must atone for; there’s just this thing he’s been told to fear. The specter’s a sort of meme that can only haunt people who know about it. And now that the story has been told to an audience, the same creature will now haunt them too.
Creepy.
On a side note, what do you think would be the quintessential English-language ghost story? Not simply folklore ghost story, but written and published ghost story that everyone either knows or should know?
Leave your answers in the comments below.
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