Entering October Country

{Purported nineteenth-century kit for killing vampires, made by a Professor Ernst Blomberg.}

After seeing Stephen King slagging Fox Sports during Friday's Red Sox-Indians game, I decided to honor his forthrightness by reading 'Salem's Lot (1975). Back in high school, I plowed through thousands of pages of King's novels, but aside from The Colorado Kid (2005), the novella he published with Hard Case Crime, which I wrote about here, I hadn't read anything by him for fifteen years. As a teenager, I had found his books terrifying, impossible to put down--even brilliant. But what would I think as an adult?

The verdict? Still frightening. Still hard to put down. And, while 'Salem's Lot certainly isn't brilliant, I'm not disappointed.

King made his name by injecting horror into carefully drawn scenes of everyday life. The nightmares in his novels are frightening precisely because he's locating them in the most innocuous of small towns--but, as writers from Sherwood Anderson on have reminded us, small towns teem with dark secrets. (King even name-checks Anderson and Edward Arlington Robinson--an odd coincidence, since I'd just been reading about both in Edmund Wilson.) He shows how easily an uncanny, supernatural evil can prey on, exploit, or even arise from the ordinary meanness and evils of small-town life. In the case of 'Salem's Lot, that evil takes the form of a millennia-old vampire, the perfect creature, metaphorically, to feed on the late-night, basement, and close-shuttered underbelly of a town.

In the early part of the novel, King depicts a Maine town that despite its 1970s setting seems trapped in the late '50s: boys still build models of Universal movie monsters, teens still hang out at the soda shop, men still live in a boarding house. Yet, as King himself acknowledges in his Introduction, where he admits, "I have always been more a writer of the moment than I wanted to be," the creeping malaise and toxicity of the early '70s are never far from the surface.

King spends a lot of energy and pages establishing the town and its people, and though his dialogue frequently ends up sounding a bit too much like Sheriff Tupper telling Miss Fletcher about the strange doings in Cabot Cove, for the most part his work establishing characters pays off. His creations don't always come to life--the three primary male characters are essentially interchangeable--but when they do they nudge us just enough farther in our suspension of belief to tip the scales from shock to horror. This line from a boy whose father has just been killed is a good example, rendered simultaneously sad and chilling by the fact that we've come to trust the boy's precocious perceptiveness:

It's better this way. My father . . . he would have made a very successful vampire. . . . He . . . he was good at everything he tried. Maybe too good.

Once the action starts, King slathers on the gore, as he is wont to do. But what's much scarier are the quiet moments when fear first enters a room. Take this scene, where a young woman sits in the kitchen of her old English teacher's house, trying to convince him that he had not heard a vampire sucking dry his houseguest the previous night. As they talk, he breaks in:

"Be quiet."
He had cocked his head forward. She stopped talking and listened. Nothing . . . except perhaps a creaky board. She looked at him questioningly, and he shook his head. "You were saying."

Moments later, midsentence,

He ceased again, listening.

This time the silence spun out, and when he spoke again, the soft certainty in his voice frightened her. "There's someone upstairs."

The "soft certainty" of those moments when the trustworthy and rational convince us that it's time we start believing the unbelievable are King at his best.

I was surprised to find that King is also quite good at describing the landscape and the play of the seasons. Though his prose in these passages sometimes tiptoes to the edge of purple, it rarely crosses over, despite his efforts to invest the whole of nature with a human dread. Here he writes of a Maine autumn:

It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white strips with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die--migrate or die. . . . And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

'Salem's Lot gets less interesting as the ratio of humans to vampires begins to fall; it becomes a race to an end that we can see coming--there are only so many ways to kill a vampire, after all. But that's nothing like the galactic disappointment I felt at sixteen at the end of 1,100 pages of It, nor is it a disingenuous abjuration of the very idea of an ending, like he employed in The Colorado Kid, so I won't complain.

But now it's a drizzly, windy October night, and it seems wrong to read something that's not scary. Time to curl up with my well-loved copy of The Oxford Book of the Supernatural and some M. R. James. No sneaking up on me, please.

"These luminosities are too low-burning and evanescent," or, Edmund Wilson Week Continues!

A the end of the week, I'm in the same spot where I began it: still reading through the first of the two new Library of America volumes of Edmund Wilson's literary essays. I'm enjoying reading Wilson as much for his style as for his insight. He writes long sentences that perpetually shift and redirect themselves, subordinate clause leading to subordinate clause—perhaps interrupted by an interjection—leading to another clause until, at the end, the reader emerges from the thicket of thought to see, just ahead, clear and shining and difficult to dispute, Wilson's point.

Here, for example, is his somewhat arch take on Hart Crane, from the May 11, 1927 issue of the New Republic:

Mr. Crane has a most remarkable style, a style that is strikingly original--almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was, not merely not applied to a great subject, but not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all.

Not to appear to claim too much for myself, but if you've read much of this blog, I think you'll see why I find Wilson's prose congenial. It might even seem that I've used him as a model, but much as I enjoy his writing, I discovered it long after I'd discovered (and begun to abuse) the comma, semicolon, and all the glorious constructions they enable.

However, just as Wilson is sometimes wrong in his judgments, he is also sometimes guilty of an offense with which Stacey frequently charges me: he writes sentences that, however clear, are just too damned long. Take this monstrosity, from earlier in the piece quoted above:

Mr. E .A. Robinson's Tristram has been extravagantly admired in some quarters; but, though it is undoubtedly more easily readable than his other Arthurian poems, though it contains a better story more energetically told and though it is by no means poor in those flashes of moral vision that make the weaker poems of Robinson more interesting than the strongest of many of his contemporaries, it seems to me that these luminosities are too low-burning and evanescent to justify the whole of a long narrative that reads at its worst like a movie scenario and at its best like a novel of adultery of the nineties, full of long well-bred conversations of which the metaphysical archness sounds peculiarly incongruous in the moths of the heroes of medieval legend.

There really ought to be a break for cocktails in there somewhere around "moral vision"; otherwise, it seems cruel to ask anyone to endure the forced march that follows "low-burning and evanescent."

Those overstuffed nightmares are relatively rare, however, and more than made up for by lines like these further comments on Hart Crane, which benefit from Wilson’s habit of delaying the payoff:

His poetry is a disponible, as they say about French troops. We are eagerly waiting to see to which part of the front he will move it: just at present it is killing time in the cafes behind the lines.

None of this would matter, however, if Wilson weren’t an interesting and acute reader of literature. The conclusion of his “Poe at Home and Abroad,” for example, both situates Edgar Allan Poe and notes the sources of his power:

It was Poe who sent out the bridge from the romanticism of the early nineteenth century to the symbolism of the later; and symbolism, as M. Seylaz points out, though scarcely any of its original exponents survive, now permeates literature. We must not, however, expect that Poe should be admired or understood in his capacity of suspension across this chasm by critics who are hardly aware that either of its banks exist.

Earlier in that piece, which is from the December 8, 1926 issue of the New Republic, Wilson writes:

[T]he real significance of Poe’s short stories does not lie in what they purport to relate. Many are confessedly dreams; and, as with dreams, though they seem absurd, their effect on our emotions is serious. And even those that pretend to the logic and the exactitude of actual narratives are, nevertheless, also dreams.

Who knew that Wilson could write like Borges?

As interesting and thoughtful as Wilson’s piece on Poe is, it’s still not as pithy or unforgettable as this dual description of Poe and Twain by V. S. Pritchett, who these days may be my favorite critic:

Everything really American, really non-English, comes out of that pair of spiritual derelicts, those two scarecrow figures with their half-lynched minds.

Though "spiritual derelicts" is satisfyingly apt, I will admit to being a bit vague about what Pritchett means by “half-lynched minds.” But the phrase does possess a certain emotional power and rightness not unlike that achieved by the best of the aforementioned Symbolists, who, as Wilson explains:

contrive[d] to communicate emotions by images whose connection with the subject and whose relevance to one another we may not always understand.

Pritchett’s description stands in the shadow of Hemingway’s mannered, six-words-too-long assessment of Twain’s greatest book:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Hemingway's line is such a commonplace now as to have lost any force it might once have had, but Pritchett’s, eerie and sidelong, retains its power. With one sentence, he changed forever how I will approach both Twain and Poe. In my reading so far, Wilson hasn't delivered any judgment quite so stiletto-sharp, but he's opened up new ways for me to think about writers I enjoy. To a critic who can do that, I'll gladly raise my glass; it's what all of us who write about books aim for, and any day in which we succeed can surely be counted a good one.