Ghost writers

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this month, I wrote about Henry James’s ghost stories, which are among my favorites. But then I started thinking about James as a person—and realized that he’d be one of the last authors I would want to have describe an actual encounter with a ghost. Think about it: he’d circle around and around the visitation, honing his impressions to an ever-finer point, conveying each little nuance of feeling aroused by the ghost . . . and by the end, as in The Turn of the Screw, you wouldn’t even be sure he’d seen a ghost at all!

Which got me thinking: which author would be the best for reporting back on a supernatural encounter? Which of my favorites would I enter into the lists against the ghouls?

So many of my favorites would be, well, useless. Iris Murdoch would get too spiritual about it. Nancy Mitford would be too sarcastically dismissive. Evelyn Waugh would ascribe it to the DTs. Actually, any number of my favorite authors would probably ascribe it to the DTs.

But I think I’ve hit upon a couple who could be relied on to face down an apparition and come back with a satisfyingly detailed and interesting report. Here goes:

1 First, there’s William Hazlitt. If ever Hazlitt saw a ghost, there’s no record of it that I’ve found. But in his writings on English theater, collected as A View of the English Stage in 1818, he did give some idea of what he expected from a ghost.

First, there are the expected Shakespearian ghosts. In an account of a performance of Hamlet at Drury Lane in 1814, he tells us what he expects of a ghost:

We cannot speak too highly of Mr. Raymond's representation of the Ghost. It glided across the stage with the preternatural grandeur of a spirit. His manner of speaking the part was not equally excellent. A spirit should not whine or shed tears.

As for how we should behave in the presence of a presence, this appraisal of Eliza O’Neill’s portrayal of Juliet at Covent Garden in 1814, gives a good idea. O’Neill, he writes, she strikes only one false note: when she screams aloud at the sight of Tybalt’s ghost:

[T]here [is] a distinction to be kept up between physical and intellectual horror (for the latter becomes more general, internal, and absorbed, in proportion as it becomes more intense).

In other words, confronted with a ghost, Hazlitt might be terrified, but he wouldn’t lose his cool.

And an account of another stage ghost, from one of the many long-forgotten plays of the period, Frightened to Death?—a farce about a drunk whose friends, to force him to mend his ways, convince him he has died and is seeing ghosts—tells us something of the line of attack that Hazlitt might take on seeing a ghost:

A very laughable dialogue and duet here take place between the Ghost and the Ghost-seer, the latter inquiring of him with great curiosity about his ancestors in the other world, and being desirous to cultivate an acquaintance with the living apparition, in the hope of obtaining some insight into the state of that state “from which no traveller returns.”

Dignified terror and probing questions: a good starting point.

2 Then there’s Samuel Johnson. Who better than the good Doctor to tackle a ghost? I’ve quoted before—even recently—Dr. Johnson’s take on the subject of the afterlife, but it’s always worth revisiting for its characteristically Johnsonian quality of judicious language inflected by the inescapable force of human emotion:

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

And it’s also worth remembering that, at one of the most fortuitous meetings in literary history, Johnson first appeared, if not as a ghost, then at least with the effect of one. Here’s Boswell, recounting their first meeting, on the premises of Mr. Davies’s bookshop:

At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass door of the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,—he announced his awefi.il approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, " Look, my Lord, it comes."

Johnson, so far as we know, never met a ghost, but it’s not hard to imagine him standing up to one ferociously. I picture him demanding of the spirit credentials—some proof that its existence wasn’t the lingering effects of, as Scrooge put it, “an undigested bit of beef”—then, that established, hectoring it, absolutely unafraid, about the afterlife. Oh, the answers we could get were Dr. Johnson our inquisitor!

3 My final choice will surprise no longtime reader of this blog: Anthony Powell. Unlike the authors above, Powell had at least second-hand dealings with ghosts. The appearance of a ghost, offstage, plays a part in an unforgettable scene from the childhood of Nick Jenkins in A Dance to the Music of Time, as a maid is driven to breakdown by hauntings in the Jenkins family home. In his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling, Powell revealed that the house in Dance was modeled closely on his childhood home, Stonehurst, which was itself home to ghosts: “a whiteish shape, misty, of no great density but some height” that appeared in the bedrooms of successive maids, and a terrifying, paralyzing presence that once accosted his mother as she lay abed. Wrote Powell,

Some parents would have tried to keep all this from a child of seven or eight. My father, left to himself, would probably have done so. My mother, on the other hand, regarded any such concealments as cutting off an essential aspect of life. Talk about “ghosts” was never at all curtailed on my account, and did not in the least disturb me. I have fairly strong feelings about the “atmosphere” of houses, but never, in fact, found that of Stonehurst in the least uneasy.

The choice of Powell, however, reflects less his experience with ghosts than my own sentimentality, and the nature of my preferred way of imagining a ghostly existence: if there must be an afterlife, and haunting, I’d like it to be as much like this life as possible. I want my ghosts to be congenial and chatty, retaining as much as conceivable of the concerns, amusements, foibles, and self-involvement of the living. And who better to engage that sort of ghost than Powell, as unfazed by differences of quickness as he was of rank, ever alert to oddity and humor? Who better to guide us through the land of the dead than the writer who’s done more than any other to guide me through the land of the living?

And for you? Who are your nominees?

Ghosts in court

{Photo by rocketlass.}

On a lovely day back in June, I spent a few minutes wandering the beautifully ornate old library of the Iowa State Capitol . . . and there, with nothing but summer on my mind, I found an odd little ghost story.

It appears in Henry Spicer’s Judicial Dramas, or The Romance of French Criminal Law (1872), whose opening chapter is, unexpectedly, titled, “Ghosts in Court.” The opening lines give a good sense of Spicer’s rather florid style:

Whether or not the defective ventilation of our courts of law be inimical to the subtle fluid of which phantoms are composed, or whether these sensitive essences, oppressed with the absurdities of forensic costume and manners, take fright at the first glimmer of a counsellor's wig, or at the titter that follows a counsellor's joke, there can be no question of the extreme difficulty that has always been experienced in bringing a spectre fairly to judicial book.

The ghost I want to tell you about today comes from the French courts, where, Spicer explains,

questions of ghost or no ghost—and, if the former, what might be the worth of the ghost's testimony—seem to have been permitted a wider range. Counsel has been freely heard on either part.

The back-and-forth of the case can be a bit involved and confusing, especially in the hands of Spicer, who loves digression, but it’s worth working through at least an abridged version in order to get to the punch line.

Spicer’s story concerns a French laborer, Honore Mirabel, who claimed that late one night a ghost alerted him to the presence of a buried treasure of more than one thousand Portuguese gold pieces. And as any fan of crime novels could tell you, that’s when the complications began: unsure what he ought to do with the treasure in order to stay right with the law, Mirabel consulted a local tradesman, Auguier, who said

that the secret should be rigorously confined to those who already knew it, while he himself (Auguier) was prepared to devote himself, heart and soul, to his friend's best interests, lend him any cash he needed (so as to obviate the necessity of changing the foreign money), attend him whithersoever he went, and, in fine, become his perpetual solace, monitor, and guard.

To prevent the possibility of his motives being misinterpreted, the worthy Auguier took occasion to exhibit to his friend a casket, in which was visible much gold and silver coin, besides a jewel or two of some value.

Things, as they do, fell apart, and soon Mirabel was hauling Auguier into court, charging that Auguier had stolen the treasure entrusted to him; for his part, Auguier claimed to know nothing of the treasure and less of the ghost.

Auguier’s lawyer, sensibly fixing on the ghost as his opponent’s weak point, argued against its very existence:

Is it credible (he asked) that a spirit should quit the repose of another world expressly to inform Mons. de Mirabel, a gentleman with whose existence it seems to have had no previous acquaintance, of the hiding-place of this treasure? How officious must be the nature of that ghost which should select, in a caprice, a man it did not personally know, to enrich him with a treasure, for the due enjoyment of which his social position made him so unfit? How slight must be the prescience of a spirit that could not foresee that Mirabel would be deprived of his treasure by the first knave he had the misfortune to trust! There could be no such spirit, be assured.

If there were no spectre, there was, according to all human probability, no gold ; and, if no gold, no ground for the accusation of Auguier.

But the other, more supernaturally inclined advocate got his say, too:

Turning on the court the night-side of nature, the spectre's advocate pointed out that the gist of Auguier's defence consisted of a narrow and senseless satire upon supernatural visitations, involving a most unauthorized assumption that such things did never occur. "Was it intended to contradict holy writ? To deny a truth attested by Scripture, by the Fathers of the Church, by very wide experience and testimony, finally, by the Faculty of Theology of Paris ? The speaker here adduced the appearance of the prophet Samuel at Endor (of which Le Brun remarked that it was, past question, a work commenced by the power of evil, but taken from his hand and completed by a stronger than he); that of the bodies of buried saints after our Lord's resurrection; and that of Saint Felix, who, according to Saint Augustine,' appeared to the besieged inhabitants of Nola. But, say that any doubts could rationally exist, were they not completely set at rest by a recent decision of the Faculty of Theology? "Desiring," says this enlightened decree, " to satisfy pious scruples, we have, after a very careful consideration of the subject, resolved that the spirits of the departed may and do, by supernatural power and divine licence, reappear unto the living." And this opinion was in conformity with that pronounced at Sorbonne two centuries before.

So the courtroom see-saw continued. Mirabel produced witnesses who had heard him speak of the ghost, and the gold, but none could definitively speak to Auguier’s involvement.

But, Spicer explains, the consensus seemed ever more that there had been a treasure--and “the scale was inclining, slowly and steadily, to the spectral side”--when things got, well, silly. Auguier discovered a new witness, who testified

that subsequently to the alleged delivery of the treasure into his hands, Mirabel had declared that it was still concealed in the ground, and had invited his two brothers-in-law from Pertuis to see it. Placing them at a little distance from the haunted spot, he made pretence of digging.but suddenly raising a white shirt, which he had attached to sticks placed crosswise, he rushed towards them, crying out, "The ghost! the ghost!" One of these unlucky persons died from the impressions engendered by this piece of pleasantry. The survivor delivered this testimony.

After which Mirabel’s case--and the law’s belief in this particular ghost--rapidly fell apart.

According to Spicer, as of his writing, that was the last case in which the existence of a ghost was the subject of legal and judicial inquiry.

"The licit gratification of certain instincts which we are wont to treat as outlaws," Or, Virginia Woolf on supernatural fiction

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In Volume 1 of Virginia Woolf’s collected essays, her piece on Henry James's ghost stories, about which I wrote last week, is followed by another look at the topic of the supernatural in fiction. It was first published in the TLS a few years before the James essay, on January 31, 1918, as a review of The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, by Dorothy Scarborough. The broader view taken in this essay allows Woolf to spin out some thoughts on the role of scary stories in general, which, though far from groundbreaking, are worth sharing:

Crude fear, with its anticipation of physical pain or of terrifying uproar, is an undignified and demoralizing sensation, while the mastery of fear only produces a respectable mask of courage, which is of no great interest to ourselves, though it may impose upon others. But the fear which we get from reading ghost stories of the supernatural is a refined and spiritualized essence of fear. It is a fear which we can examine and play with. Far from despising ourselves for being frightened by a ghost story we are proud of this proof of sensibility, and perhaps unconsciously welcome the chance for the licit gratification of certain instincts which we are wont to treat as outlaws.

As in her essay on James, Woolf here is primarily concerned with the fact that the objects of our fears--and the susceptibilities that accompany them--change with time. "Although," she writes, "we are quick to throw away imaginative symbols which have served their turn, the desire persists," then, returning to James, she continues,

If you wish to guess what our ancestors felt when they read The Mysteries of Udolpho you cannot do better than read The Turn of the Screw.

Experiment proves that the new fear resembles the old in producing physical sensations as of erect hair, dilated pupils, rigid muscles, and an intensified perception of sound and movement. But what is it that we are afraid of? We are not afraid of ruins, or moonlight, or ghosts. Indeed, we should be relieved to find that Quint and Miss Jessel are ghosts, but they have neither the substance nor the independent existence of ghosts. The odious creatures are much closer to us than ghosts have ever been. The governess is not so much frightened of htem as of the sudden extension of her own field of perception, which in this case widens to reveal to her the presence all about her her of an unmentionable evil. The appearance of the figures is an illustration, not in itself specially alarming, of a state of mind which is profoundly mysterious and terrifying. . . . The horror of the story comes from the force with which it makes us realize the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness; when certain lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the mind, untracked desires, indistinct intimations, are seen to be a large company.

One thing that I find interesting in Woolf's analysis is the lack of any acknowledgment of the Great War, which as she wrote was still inexorably mowing down the youth of her generation and driving unprecedented interest in spiritualism. Though she writes that, "the great increase of the psychical ghost story in late years . . . testifies to the fact that our sense of our own ghostliness has much quickened," she never mentions the legions of war dead, or the way that the war's senseless carnage put paid to any number of tidy narratives about king and country, honor and duty, faith and heaven--or the barrier between life and afterlife.

What's perhaps even more interesting is that, nearly a century on, the approach Woolf describes--the psychological approach--remains the preferred form of the ghost story. Even Stephen King, who is never shy about his willingness to go for the gross-out if need be, roots his horror in the everyday, post-Freud fear that we can never fully know our own minds, and that our knee-jerk response to any supernatural manifestation is that we must be going insane, that it just might be a product of our own disturbed consciousness. And despite all the breakthroughs and discoveries of the century just past, science has neither liberated us from such fears nor provided a newer, more convincing bogeyman to replace them; unhappily awake in our beds at 3 a.m., we are all still our own worst nightmares.

Virginia Woolf on Henry James's ghost stories, or, "Surely there are facts enough in the world to go round."

A pleasant discovery I made while reading Martin Scofield’s introduction to The Ghost Stories of Henry James on Wednesday was that Virginia Woolf wrote on that very topic. A few minutes in the library--faced with that endlessly entrancing shelf of the many, many volumes of her letters, diaries, and essays--and I had it before me: a brief piece written for the Times Literary Supplement of December 22, 1921.

In the essay, Woolf makes many of the same points I did in Wednesday’s post, the obvious ones about the fine line between Jamesian inner consciousness and the bodiless manifestations of the supernatural--but as in all her essays, she makes her points in a forthright, clear, and memorable fashion. So she writes, of a relationship that, in James’s story “The Friends of the Friends,” continues after death:

And yet--does it make very much difference? Henry James has only to take the smallest of steps and he is over the border. His characters with their extreme fineness of perception are already half-way out of the body. There is nothing violent in their release. They seem rather to have achieved at last what they have long been attempting--communication without obstacle. But Henry James, after all, kept his ghosts for his ghost stories. Obstacles are essential to The Wings of the Dove. When he removed them by supernatural means as he did in The Friends of the Friends he did so in order to produce a particular effect. The story is very short; there is no time to elaborate the relationship; but the point can be pressed home by a shock. The supernatural is brought in to provide that shock.

Elsewhere, she outlines perfectly how James--and, for that matter, his contemporary Edith Wharton--uses the supernatural most effectively:

Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts--the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it*; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange. The baffling things that are left over, the frightening ones that persist--these are the emotions that he takes, embodies, makes consoling and companionable.

Those are the benefits offered a writer by the supernatural, but Woolf also dwells on the risks. Ann Radcliffe could scare our ancestors with her Mysteries of Udolpho because

they were our ancestors; because they lived with very few books, an occasional post, a newspaper superannuated before it reached them, in the depths of the country or in a town which resembled the more modest of our villages, with long hours to spend sitting over the fire drinking wine by the light of half a dozen candles.

We, on the other hand--and add nearly a century of advances in communication and in horrors to your reckoning as you read this--

breakfast upon a richer feast of horror than served them for a twelvemonth. We are tired of violence; we suspect mystery. Surely, we might say to a writer set upon the supernatural, there are facts enough in the world to go round. . . . Moreover, we are impervious to fear. Your ghosts will only make us laugh, and if you try to express some tender and intimate vision of a world stripped of its hide we shall be forced (and there is nothing more uncomfortable) to look the other way. But writers, if they are worth their salt, never take advice. They always run risks. To admit that the supernatural was used for the last time by Mrs. Radcliffe and that modern nerves are immune from the wonder and terror which ghosts have always inspired would be to throw up the sponge too easily. If the old methods are obsolete, it is the business of a writer to discover new ones. The public can feel again what it has once felt--there can be no doubt about that; only from time to time the point of attack must be changed.

That determination, that confidence in the infinite suppleness and capacity of art to elicit whatever feelings it sets its sights on, makes me appreciate even more the unexpectedly sly humor with which Woolf structured her essay: from that general statement of principles, she moves, story by story, through James’s ghost stories, noting their achievements, deficiencies, and differences (“the enticing game of pinning your author to the board by detecting once more traces of his fineness, his subtlety, whatever his prevailing characteristics may be, is rudely interrupted” by his changes of approach). Then, having convinced herself that James’s ghosts, “remain always a little worldly. We may feel clumsy in their presence but we cannot feel afraid,” she writes,

What does it matter, then, if we do pick up The Turn of the Screw an hour or so before bedtime? After an exquisite entertainment, we shall, if the other stories are to be trusted, end with this fine music in our ears, and sleep the sounder.

Nearly a century later, The Turn of the Screw having lost none of its power, that passage can’t help but make you smile, no? An hour of reading later,

We are afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves. In short, we turn on the light.

Henry James, she writes,

has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Around the campfire with Henry James

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In youth, the dividing lines between them, broadly drawn, and us, narrowly drawn, are relatively simple. They like that music; we like this music. They like those books; we like these books. End of discussion. Adulthood--responsibly conducted--on the other hand, finds such lines much, much harder to draw. As Jean Renoir so heartbreakingly reminds us, "Everyone has their reasons."

But there is one line that may--that, let us be clear, must--be drawn: they ask, again and again, whether the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are real or merely a product of the governess's imagination, while we explain, again and again, that that's not the point.

Ahem. Which leads me to the best $1.00 you could possibly spend this month: the cost of a used copy of the out-of-print Wordsworth Classics edition of Ghost Stories of Henry James, which, as Martin Scofield explains in his introduction,

contains all the stories by James which can strictly be described as ghost stories, in that they all contain an apparition, or at least, in the case of "The Private Life" and "The Jolly Corner," a ghostly "double."

The pleasures found in those ten stories should surprise no lover of James, for no author has had a more firm grasp on the ineluctably individual nature of consciousness than him. Our ghosts are our selves, as often as not, as Scofield writes,

Henry James's ghosts are liable to arise as much from within as from without: whatever their vivid perceptibility, they are often as much emanations from the psyche as visitants from "another world." Indeed, it is precisely the equivocation between the two that gives them their imaginative power.

Which, to press a point, could be said of all of James's writing: it is from the equivocation between internal and external, and the mutual deceptions thereof, that it derives its power.

As you may have divined from these quotations, Scofield's introduction is itself worth the trouble and cost of picking up this book. In addition to drawing the necessary connections between James and Hawthorne, and Henry and his brother William, whose interest in the paranormal took a more scientific bent, Scofield presents fascinating evidence from James's life and letters in support in his attempt to argue for James's own equivocal view of the supernatural. There's James's father's account of an inexplicable personal experience with a

"damned shape," squatting invisibly in the corner of the room where he sat, "beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety and despair, with absolutely no relief from any truth I had ever encountered, save a most pale and distant glimmer of Divine existence," a state of mind that it took him "a good long hour" to get under control

--and which will be familiar, at least in outline, to any reader of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. And there's Henry's own take on supernatural stories, offered in a letter:

A good ghost-story . . . must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.

--and the account he gave of his ghost story "Sir Edmund Orme" in the preface to that volume of his New York Edition in 1909, touching on the note of the

strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy,

and the

indispensable history of somebody's normal relation to something.

--and the reminder that

The extraordinary is most extraordinary in that it happens to you and me, and it's of value (of value for others) but so far as visibly brought home to us.

It's hard to imagine Henry James reading Stephen King, and it's hard to imagine King, bookish as he may always have been, articulating his ethos in quite that way, but that's as good a capsule summary of what King got from the first moment he jumped into the horror game as anything I've seen. What's scary is what's strange; what's terrifying is what's only a tiny bit stranger than what's going on around us all the time.

The Ghost Stories of Henry James won't send you rushing to turn on all the lights in the house the way that King at his best can do, but their insidious questioning of the reliability--and their acknowledgment of the chillingly frequent pathology--of the inescapable isolation of individual consciousness will stay with you for a long, long time.

Quickly, now. There's no time to waste.

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I’ve read but one story, the first, in the new collection of Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud’s short fiction, A Life on Paper, but it’s enough to convince me that this book belongs on any October reading list. Here’s how the story, “A Citizen Speaks,” opens:

As for the blight, we call it rust for its color. In reality, whether mold or oxide, its true nature eludes us. Does it not assail stone and slag alike? Both zinc and bronze? Even woodwork corrodes here. The leprosy spares only living things: a tree will spend ten years unscathed, slowly rising over a path, but let a branch be cut, treated, painted, and varnished—that branch will be disease-ridden in a few months. So unerring is it that old men’s complexions often imitate its taint. That was how my father died: reddish, as though life had singed him.

Less than two pages later, the story is finished, having in that brief extent offered up strange and memorable images; a deep sense of loss, resignation, and weariness; and glimpses of the horror of inevitable, inexplicable decay. It’s a lesson in concision, in the way that allowing a voice to speak to the reader as if we already share a substantial amount of underlying knowledge of his world can allow a writer to cut right to the uncanny details of that world; the flat, matter-of-fact tone that results only emphasizes the strangeness of the situation being revealed. Dread edging into horror in two pages—that's an achievement.



More than anything, “A Citizen Speaks” reminds me of the old Robert Arthur–edited Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, and that sense of hope they convey when you find one in a used bookstore: the hope that on any given page you might discover a real gem of a horror story, long-forgotten, by an author who shared the same fate. Fortunately, Chateaureynaud, while little-known here, is far from forgotten, and I have a whole slim volume ahead, but the feeling persists of having been given a mysterious, unexpected gift, one that in mere minutes wiped away my pedestrian surroundings and injected the day with a quiet, slow-building influx of the uncanny.

"I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud," Or, Stopping off in Sleepy Hollow

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Now this is the kind of place where one ought to spend October:

From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, than an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, that the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots,.and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the night-mare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

You wouldn’t want to spend your whole life there, but a few autumn weeks to set the proper chill in your bones before winter sounds about right.

Even though the story is as deeply burned into my brain as into any American's, I hadn't actually read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" before taking it down from the shelf this week. It was a pleasant surprise, a ghost story that is also a gently wry portrayal of small-town life and the petty, mostly harmless vanities and foibles that thrive there. Like The Turn of the Screw, it leaves the question of the supernatural--was the Headless Horseman really a ghost, or was he a mere prank of Bram Bones?--deliberately vague, if clearly inclining towards skepticism. But unlike James, Irving is out merely for fun, not a deep exploration of the nether reaches of the human mind, so he delivers the climactic chase with great gusto:

An opening in the trees now cheered him with the hopes that the church bridge was at hand. The wavering reflection of a silver star in the bosom of the brook told him that he was not mistaken. He saw the walls of the church dimly glaring under the trees beyond. He recollected the place where Brom Bones' ghostly competitor had disappeared. "If I can but reach that bridge," thought Ichabod, " I am safe." Just then he heard the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied that he felt his hot breath.

There’s so much to cherish in this story's brief extent: the perfectly tuned portrayal of Ichabod Crane’s narcissism and priggishness, the beautifully described autumn countryside surrounding the Hudson River, the way that the battles and heroes of the Revolutionary War remain an active presence in the region--as seen in the Horseman himself, thought to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier--in the days when Irving's namesake was forming the first presidential administration.

Most of all, though, the joy of reading "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" comes from reconnecting with what has become an American myth, a story that symbolizes everything I was thinking of when I wrote last year, regarding the Arrow Book of Ghost Stories,

that New England, and the colonial past it represented, were the home of ghosts. Now that I'm an adult, despite the fact that I know much more about the realities of American history and those dark forests, that's where ghosts and spirits still live for me, and it seems natural to find them lurking in everything from the shadows of Hudson River school paintings to the Berkshire towns of John Crowley.

Even for this life-long Midwesterner, New England is home to America’s ghosts; in the autumn, it’s where I always find myself turning my gaze.

What the ghosts want

{Photo by rocketlass.}

From Expiration Date (2010), by Duane Swierczynski:

”What exactly do you think I am?”

“You’re a dead man.”

“But I’m not.”

“Right. Sure. You’re not dead. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m a dead woman floating around a sea of living people, only I don’t know it yet. Maybe I’ve been dead since I was a kid.”

“I want to ask you about DeMeo.”

“He’s good to me.”

“What does he do up there? What kind of experiments?”

“You mean you don’t know? I thought dead people knew everything. That’s why you come back. To taunt the living. To show us how smart you are, and how dumb the rest of us are.”

In fairness, I should acknowledge that the man isn’t a ghost. The only ghosts found in Expiration Date are, like those in all good noir, those generated by the secrets of our pasts, come back to haunt us.

But I couldn’t resist sharing that pessimist’s view of what ghosts want from us, especially because it serves as such a good lead-in to this passage from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial:

The dead seem all alive in the humane Hades of Homer, yet cannot well speak, prophesie, or know the living, except they drink bloud, wherein is the life of man. And therefore the souls of Penelope's Paramours conducted by Mercury chirped like bats, and those which followed Hercules made a noise but like a flock of birds.

The departed spirits know things past and to come,yet are ignorant of things present. Agamemnon foretels what should happen unto Ulysses, yet ignorantly enquires what is become of his own Son.

Which leads me to this, from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, picked out by D. J. Enright for his indispensable Oxford Book of Death:

But the calling back of the dead, or the desirability of calling them back, was a ticklish matter, after all. At bottom, and boldly confessed, the desire does not exist; it is a misapprehension precisely as impossible as the thing itself, as we should soon see if nature once let it happen. What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as its grief at not being able to want to do so.

If there's a month to call the dead, October is it--but do you know what would you say? Do you know what you would hear?

Entering October Country

{Photos by rocketlass.}

It’s time.

Time to venture to October Country, which Ray Bradbury, in one of his familiar cascades of definition, described as,

that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain . . .

Time for hot cider and inexplicably cold rooms, for fireplaces and scratching . . . of branches? . . . at the window, for the night closing in so early, so early that you’re unexpectedly home alone for a few hours after dark before your spouse returns . . and the house, creaking and cracking, knows it; and the wind, howling and hissing, knows it; and your cats, suddenly skittish, know it.

October Country doesn’t require belief. If it did, I’d be on the other side of the line, looking in, myself. All it requires is susceptibility, a lack--however temporary--of active disbelief. We’ve all jumped when startled; October Country merely asks us to slow that jump, to savor it.

In the introduction to an anthology of scary stories he edited in 1944, Creeps by Night, Dashiell Hammett laid out what a proper visitor to October Country should bring with him in him:

To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected habits of nature. If you believe in the ability and willingness of surgeons to transplant brains from skull to skull with shocking results, these stories may frighten you, but merely in the same way--though hardly to the same extent--that having to take ether in a strange hospital would frighten you. If you believe in ghosts, you can hope to derive from these stories at the very most a weak semblance of the sensation you would experience on being told there was a bogey-man in the closet, or on having the village cut-up wrapped in a sheet jump out at you. If you believe in werewolves, then it can make little difference to you, except perhaps academically, whether your heroine is eaten by one of them or shot down by a Cicero muscle-man. To the truly superstitious, the “weird” has only its Scotch meaning: “Something which actually takes place.”

The effectiveness of the sort of stories that we are here concerned with depends on the reader’s believing that certain things cannot happen and on the writer’s making him feel--if not actually believe--that they can but should not happen.

Throughout this month, let us choose the position of Hammett’s ideal reader--susceptible to the uncanny precisely because during the daylight hours we believe it has an opposite, that the world can be kenned. For on a dark autumn night, it’s hard to disagree with Dr. Johnson’s take on the topic:

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

Bring on the ghosts.

Beware new months bearing gifts . . .

{Photos by rocketlass.}

From Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss (2010):

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories.

I am giving you this because it is the only one of its kind. I am giving you this because no one else will. I am giving you this because I need you to keep it safe. I am giving you this because I was told to do so. I am giving you this because I have had it too long. I am giving you this because I need you to understand. I am giving you this because of what it does to my thoughts. I am giving you this because I was ordered to do so.

I am giving you this because I need to forget. I am giving you this because I cannot think of any other way out. I am giving you this because that is what must come next in this story.

I am giving you this because it is October, and I need you to be scared.

Heirlooms and stories

Late in The Hare with the Amber Eyes, a memoir of a family traced through the travels of a collection of netsuke, Edmund de Waal writes,

It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina .I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.

The passage could almost serve as a precis of the book, which is nearly as much about de Waal’s quest to learn about his family as it is about what he finds, a balance that wouldn’t work if de Waal weren’t such an interesting, congenial presence with whom to travel. He’s interested in the things we want him to be interested in: the lush details of imperial Vienna; the tiny traces of long-gone relatives that linger in family stories; the elements of his great-great-uncle Charles that went into the making of Proust’s beloved Swann. I can’t imagine any fan of the art, literature, and culture of pre-war Europe not finding something here to cherish.

And then there’s Japan, which, for me, gives the book even more interest. It starts and ends there, the netsuke purchased from there in the early days of the nineteenth-century craze for Japonisme, and it ends there, in cultured evening talks between the college-aged De Waal and his expatriate great-uncle, Iggie. It is in those moments, the interactions with Iggie, that the book comes most fully to life, reminding us of the ways that family relationships can bridge gaps of decades and differences of culture, can offer a comfortable entree for a young person into a world of culture and experience that, associated with true adulthood, has until that moment seemed impossibly remote.

Which brings me to the scene I most want to share. It’s from postwar Japan, the early 1950s--long before de Waal was born--when the country was beginning its remarkably rapid recovery from the war, and forty-something Iggie was just settling in to what would become a lifetime there. De Waal assembles the scene from a clutch of old Kodachrome prints:

Back in the corridor we move through an open doorway, under a Noh mask and into the sitting-room. The ceiling is of slatted wood. All the lamps are on. Objects are displayed on spare, dark, clean-lined Korean and Chinese furniture alongside comfortable low sofas, occasional tables and lamps, and ashtrays and cigarette boxes. A wooden Buddha from Kyoto sits on a Korean chest, a hand raised in blessing.

The bamboo bar holds an impressive quantity of liquor, none of which I can identify. It is a house made for parties. Parties with small children on their knees, and women in kimonos, and presents. Parties with men in dark suits seated round small tables, loquacious with whisky. Parties at New Year with cut boughs of pine trees hanging from the ceiling, and parties under the cherry trees, and once--in a spirit of poetry--a firefly-viewing party.

Don’t you want to go to that party? Knot your narrow tie, button up your nondescript black suit, and swelter through a Tokyo summer day in order to step onto that balcony in the night, cold drink in hand, and start counting fireflies?

"My current works reflect a sort of decadence in me," Or, Borges in conversation

{Photos by rocketlass.}

For the past week or so I’ve been really enjoying a collection of Borges interviews, Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, which was published in Spanish in 1972, in English in 1982, and was republished this year by Paul Dry Books. The interviews are conducted by Argentine writer Fernando Sorrentino, and because of that, and their intended audience of Spanish-speaking readers, they remind me more than I expected of the recent collection of interviews with Roberto Bolano: the conversation between Borges and Sorrentino is peppered with the names of Spanish-language authors, from the familiar (Adolfo Bioy Casares) to the familiar but unread (H. Bustos Domecq) to the completely unfamiliar (Jose Marmol and many, many others). Because the names emerge in the course of ongoing talks about favorites and influences and schools, it’s less a case of name-dropping and more a pleasant reminder of the largely unknown wealth of non-English literatures--and of how Borges always thought of himself as a reader at least as much as he thought of himself as a writer. At a minimum, he's convinced me to give Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros a try sometime soon.

I’ll share one passage that jumped out at me tonight, an act of . . . well, the only word I can come up with, though it sounds too strong, is bravery, on the part of the interviewer, telling Borges what he likes and doesn’t like in his writing, and getting an interesting answer:

F. S. Reader usually believe, unjustly perhaps, that they can demand a particular kind of behavior from a writer they admire. I, who have been dazzled by the stories in Ficciones and El Aleph, take the liberty of criticizing you for having given up, in the stories of El informe de Brodie, those complex plots. How would you answer me?

J. L. B. My answer to you is that I’ve done it deliberately, because since I’ve been told there are other people who are writing that type of literature, and no doubt they’re doing it better than I, I’ve attempted something different. But it’s possible that this is my conscious motive and, for that very reason, not too important. Instead, I believe there is something that has led me to write stories of another type: being tired of mirrors, of labyrinths of people who are other people, of games with time. Why not suppose that being tired of all that, I want to write stories somewhat the way others do?

F. S. Of course, I understand that. But, speaking for myself, I wouldn’t think of reading El Informe de Brodie again, yet I read and re-read El Aleph (I know it almost by heart).

J. L. B. That might be due to the fact that when I wrote El Aleph, the writing was carried out in a kind of literary plenitude. On the other hand, it could be that I’m now in a state of decline and my current works reflect a sort of decadence in me. It would be perfectly natural because it’s biologically understandable. In August, I’ll be seventy-two years old, and it’s only logical for what I’m writing now to be inferior to what I wrote earlier. I think this biological explanation is a pretty likely one.

I love this exchange. Sorrentino is honest and straightforward, at the risk of seeming like a jerk, and Borges takes up his question seriously. And after explaining that he’s tired of, among other things, games with time, he turns to pleading that time itself may be at fault--an answer that is simultaneously sensible, convincing, and, with that final little time-indicting twist, suitably Borgesian.

The long war of the Tolstoys

The new volume of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries that I wrote about back in the summer has just been published here in the States, and the very first entry I saw when I opened the book at random gives a perfect sense of just how crazy the Tolstoys' lives were by the end. Here's the entry for August 31, 1909--which, I should warn you, is pretty horrible:

This morning we had a visit from a 30-year-old Romanian who had castrated himself at the age of 18 after reading The Kreutzer Sonata. He then took to working on his land--just 19 acres--and was terribly disillusioned today to see that Tolstoy writes one thing but lives in luxury. He questioned everyone, seeking an explanation of this contradiction. He was obviously very hurt, and said he wanted to cry, and kept repeating, "My God, my God! How can this be? What shall I tell them at home?" Then a rich deaf mute arrived from Kiev with his friend, a barber, especially to make Tolstoy's acquaintance. Goldenweiser came and played chess with L.N.

The Kreutzer Sonata, with its violent condemnation of marriage and conjugal love, was, as you might expect, a sore point with Sofia. She was embarrassed by the all-too-easily drawn conclusion that life with her had led Tolstoy to that renunciation--a conclusion that, while not inaccurate, certainly doesn't do justice to Tolstoy's own eager part in the long war of mutual cruelty that was their marriage.

And in her diaries, Sofia was writing at least as much for Lev, whom she knew would read them, as for herself, so it's no surprise to find her emphasizing the disillusion of the poor young Romanian. Yet even taking that into account, I'm astonished by how matter-of-fact she is about the man's self-mutilation. My god, he castrated himself because of something her husband had written--and her only real response is a sort of unsurprised snort at his disillusion? And then she just trucks along to an account of the next couple of visitors they had that day?

Here is where--as James Meek pointed out in his fascinating article about the diaries for the London Review of Books this summer--what you want is facing-page dual (and dueling) diaries. We see here what Sofia wanted us to see of this event, and, to some extent, how it affected her. But what about Lev? What is it like to have someone take a fairly unhinged rant of yours so brutally seriously? Surely even Lev, so self-confident and--when it helped him to be--so self-delusional, was shaken by that?

Solomon and the Queen of the Ants

I wrote about one of Solomon’s Arabian Nights-style adventures found in Louis Ginzbuerg’s endlessly entertaining,seven-volume Legends of the Jews on Monday, and before I put the books back on the shelf for a while, I want to share one more. This one, however, which comes under the heading “Lessons in Humility,” reads more like a cross between Aesop’s Fables and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King:

On one occasion, he strayed into the valley of the ants in the course of his wanderings. He heard one ant order all the others to withdraw,to avoid being crushed by the armies of Solomon. The king halted and summoned the ant that had spoken. She told him that she was the queen of the ants,and she gave her reasons for the order of withdrawal. Solomon wanted to put a question to the ant queen, but she refused to answer unless the king took her up and placed her on his hand. He acquiesced, and then he put his question: “Is there any one greater than I am in all the world?”--”Yes,” said the ant.

Solomon: “Who?”

Ant: “I am.”

Solomon: “How is that possible?”

Ant: “Were I not greater than thou, God would not have led thee hither to put me on thy hand.”
Exasperated, Solomon threw her to the ground, and said: “Thou knowest not who I am? I am Solomon, the son of David.”

Not at all intimidated, the ant reminded the king of his earthly origin, and admonished him to humility, and the king went off abashed.

While I enjoy this story for its individual elements--Solomon wandering willy-nilly around the world! Talking ants!--I have to admit that I fail to see how it teaches Solomon a lesson in humility. The ant’s argument about God’s intentions isn’t terrible, but neither is it particularly powerful--and, rather than convincing Solomon, it seems only to anger him. But then she mentions his earthly origins, and that does it? Seems unlikely.

I like to think there’s something missing here: maybe she had her army of ants overwhelm him, but leave him unharmed, to demonstrate the extent of her power? Or she points out that she can speak and understand his language, while he can’t understand a word of hers? An ant in Aesop would, I think, have been craftier.

Jews, legends of the, carefully indexed

A week or so ago, I mentioned what a pleasure it’s been, now that our books have been freed from boxes and restored to their proper places on our shelves, to dip into favorite books--in particular, books that I’d long been used to grabbing for a few minutes’ pleasurable browsing but had been unable to employ for that purpose for nearly a year now.

One of the ones I’ve been most enjoying being reunited with this week is the Johns Hopkins University Press’s seven-volume edition of Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews (1938). It’s not a book I’ve ever felt inclined to try to read straight through--that seems too daunting even for someone as relatively untroubled by length as I am. Rather, it’s for opening more or less at random, safe in the knowledge that you’ll always find some bizarre and fascinating tale.

Today, I opened it to some stories of Solomon. Like this one, which starts with a book--the book, I suppose--tattling on him to God:

When Solomon in his wealth and prosperity grew unmindful of his God, and, contrary to the injunctions laid down for kings in the Torah, multiplied wives until himself, and craved the possession of many horses and much gold, the Book of Deuteronomy stepped before God and said: “Lo, O Lord of the World, Solomon is seeking to remove a Yod from out of me, for Thou didst write: ‘‘The king shall not multiply horses unto himself, nor shall he multiply wives to himself, neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold’; but Solomon has acquired many horses, many wives, and much silver and gold.”

Which, understandably, irks the Lord, leading him to get Solomon entangled with the demon Asmodeus, who went to heaven every day,

to take part in the discussions in the heavenly academy. Thence he would descend again to earth in order to be present, though invisible, at the debates in the earthly houses of learning.

Solomon captures Asmodeus rather easily, but then he lets his curiosity get the best of him:

One day the king told Asmodeus that he did not understand wherein the greatness of the demons lay, if their kin could be kept in bonds by a mortal. Asmodeus replied, that if Solomon would remove his chains and lend him the magic ring, he woudl prove his own greatness. Solomon agreed. The demon stood before him with one wing touching heaven and the other reaching to the earth. Snatching up Solomon, who had parted with his protecting ring, he flung him four hundred parasangs away from Jerusalem, and then palmed himself off as the king.

Note to self: Don’t free demons from chains on request. And if you do free them, at least don’t also give them your magic ring. Solomon does eventually make it back to his throne, after a bit of Haroun-al-Rashid-like incognito wandering, while Asmodeus is eventually tripped up by complaints from Solomon's mother, Bathsheba, and his wives, that

the behavior of the king had completely changed--it was not befitting royalty and in no respect like Solomon’s former manner.

Displaying tact, the tale gives no further detail.

The best part of the seven volumes, however, is not actually the legends themselves: it’s the insanely comprehensive index that takes up the whole of the seventh volume! Almost any page offers a litany of references and sub-references that in themselves are so remarkably detailed that you can’t help but smile. Here’s one example: Balaam and his talking ass, who play a part in Numbers. The ass only figures in two entries, though the second is surprising, at least to those of us most familiar with Balaam’s ass from Wodehouse’s regular mentions of it:

Balaam, ass of, details concerning, I., 83; III., 363, 364, 365; V., 94; VI., 126, 128, 364

Balaam committed sodomy with his ass, III., 365; VI., 128

Balaam himself goes on to figure in another sixty-three entries! One of which, “Balaam, the vices of,” does, as one might expect, cross-reference to "Balaam committed sodomy with his ass.”

The entry for “Plague” is much shorter, though perhaps more rich in the pleasures offered by the fractured syntax of the index style. I’ll leave out the page numbers here and just give you the finely delineated entries:

Plague, Reuben afflicted with the,

Plague, a punishment for adultery,

Plague visited Israel in the desert,

Plague raged in Palestine during the visit of the spies,

Plague, incense a remedy against the,

Plague, Phinehas’ attempt to ward off,

Plague destroyed the tribe of Simon,

Plague, inflicted on the Philistines,

Plague, the punishment for taking a census,

Plague in the time of David, the cause and duration of,

Plague, Cain afflicted with a new one, each century,

Plague pacified God’s anger at Israel,

Plague, stopped by Zadok,

Plague, the Angel of Death traverses the world with one stroke in the time of,

Plague struck the Gentiles who refused to permit the disinterment of Ezra,

How can any bookish type not marvel at that list, and at the obsessive dedication that went into its making?

{Also: am I alone in feeling bad for Cain here?I know he did wrong, but good god, isn’t being “cursed from the earth” and told that “when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” a pretty harsh punishment without the surprise addition of a new and different plague each century?}

Ronald Firbank

The primary reason that Harold Nicolson's Some People is remembered at all today is because of the barely veiled portrait it features of Ronald Firbank, a writer of campily decadent novels and stories that were popular and influential among aesthetically inclined writerly types in the early part of the century, and have remained favorites of a small, but passionate group of readers ever since.

Anthony Powell, who was a bit too young to have known Firbank--whom he described as a "talented, painfully shy, lonely, tipsy, ailing homosexual" in a review--was a fan, and Firbank's influence, like Hemingway's, can be seen in the clipped dialogue of Powell's early novels. Michael Dirda, whose enthusiasms have been drawing me, from one to the next, all week, has described Firbank's spare style nicely:

He discarded leisurely descriptions, stripped dialogue of its "he saids" and "she saids," subordinated plot to language, and made his characters, those absurd and ingratiating puppets with names like Mrs. Shamefoot and Madame Wetme, into vehicles for social satire and joyful, imaginative extravagance.

Dirda quotes Firbank--echoing Scott Fitzgerald's stated willingness to scrap a whole story for the sake of one good sentence he could use elsewhere--saying, "I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph or even a row of dots."

Nicolson's depiction of Firbank, as the title character of the story "Lambert Orme," is so good that it's easy to understand why it's lasted:

It would be impossible, I think, to actually be as decadent as Lambert looked. I split the infinitive deliberately, being in the first place no non-split die-hard (oh, the admirable Mr. Fowler!), and desiring secondly to emphasise what was in fact the dominant and immediate consideration which Lambert evoked. I have met many men with wobbly walks, but I have never met a walk more wobbly than that of Lambert Orme. It was more than sinuous, it did more than undulate: it rippled. At each step a wave was started which passed upwards through his body, convexing his buttocks, concaving the small of his back, convexing again his slightly rounded shuolders, and working itself out in a backward swaying of the neck and head. This final movement passed off more rapidly than the initial undulations, with the resulting impression of a face upturned generally, but bowing at rhythmic intervals, as if a tired royalty or a camel marching heavily along the road to Isfahan. . . . He dressed simply, wearing an opal pin, and a velours hat tilted angularly. He had a peculiar way of speaking: his sentences came in little splashing pounces; and then from time to time he would hang on to a word as if to steady himself: he would say “Simplytooshattering FOR words,” the phrase being a slither with a wild clutch at the banister of “for.”

Firbank's works are available here in the States from New Directions, but back in the early 1930s it was Powell himself, while he was working at Duckworth, who was responsible for getting them back into print in England. In Messengers of Day, the second volume of his autobiography, he wrote,

I also pressed the claims of Ronald Firbank, whose novels at this period were all out of print. The directors showed no overwhelming enthusiasm for Firbank, but, in consequence of making enquiries as to where the "rights" lay, it was disclosed that Firbank had left a sum of £800 to be devoted to guaranteeing the republication of his books at some future date.

There's a lesson here, authors: attend to your wills!

I've only barely read Firbank: I gave him a half-hearted try several years ago and wasn't quite convinced. But Powell's enthusiasm, Nicolson's amusement, and Dirda's claim that, "In the right mood they are very nearly the most amusing novels in the world," have convinced me to try again.

The Fingers of M. Stambuloff

Michael Dirda's recommendation of James Lees-Milne having proved good recently, I decided last week to follow him once more, this time picking up Harold Nicolson’s odd little book of semi-fictionalized tales of friends and acquaintances, Some People (1929). It's a strange book, a bit too deeply involved in the ephemera of interwar upper-class English culture for me to be able to recommend it to too many people, but it had plenty of charms nonetheless.

One passage was so grotesquely entertaining that it's worth sharing despite its being much longer than what I’d usually quote here. It comes in “Miss Plimsoll,” a story about the woman who was Nicolson’s governess when his family lived in Sofia:

The hostility latent in our feelings towards each other would not, I think, have reached the surface had it not been for M. Stambuloff’s fingers. I am still glad that in this connection I behaved so badly: I suspect also that Miss Plimsoll, when she has a tea-party at Southsea, will to this day recount the incident with gusto. But at the time my action led to serious trouble. M. Stambuloff had been murdered in the street: they had attacked him with yataghans, striking him on the head: he had put his hands up to protect himself, with the result that his fingers were severed and fell upon the pavement. They were picked up by an admirer and given to his wife. After the funeral she put them in a large bottle of methylated spirits and placed the bottle in the window of her dining-room, so that passers-by could see. I was told of this by Zachary, the chasseur of the Legation, and I begged my father to take me to see them. He refused. On the following day I asked Miss Plimsoll to come for a walk. She was pleased at this and we started off briskly, talking about the British Navy. M. Stambuloff’s house was near the Club, and as we approached it we saw a little lot of loiterers gazing in at the dining-room window. I steered Miss Plimsoll in the same direction and we came to anchor in front of the window. It was a very large bottle, and the eight fingers floated dimly in it like little pickled cucumbers. Miss Plimsoll took so long to realise what they were that I was able to enjoy myself thoroughly. When at last she did identify the contents of the bottle she gave a little sharp scream like a shot hare, clutched me by the forearm, and dragged me violently away. She called a cab and drove back to the Legation: she began to sob a little on the way, and when she got home she burst into hysterics. I for my part was sent to bed.

The next morning I received a full-dress scolding. I was scolded by my father. I was even scolded by my mother. Miss Plimsoll called me into her bedroom and told me to sit down. She then explained to me that my action had not only been heartless but also disgusting. Things, she said, could never be quite the same for her again: all her life, she said, she would be haunted, yes haunted by those fingers. Did I realise how cruel I had been? I said I was very sorry, I would never, never do it again.

The guilt with which these upbraidings weighted my soul developed, in the weeks that followed, into panic fear. I also became haunted by the fingers of M. Stambuloff. . . . Night after night the fingers of M. Stambuloff would appear in my dreams, enormous, clustering--not in the least like cucumbers, having circles of bleeding flesh and shattered bone around their base.

Horrible, no? Nicolson's promise "never, never" to do it again is a bit hollow, even if meant: how often does a boy get the chance to introduce such a horror? And ultimately Miss Plimsoll shows herself, as expected, the bigger person: rather than leave the boy to stew, she sits up with him night after night until he can sleep.

Dirda says that Nabokov once claimed that he had been fighting against the influence of Some People all his life, "like a drug," and the grotesquerie of this passage, allied to the balanced, precise, assonant prose of the rest of the book, makes such influence easy to imagine.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Back into the desert

On Friday I wrote that perhaps only Charles Doughty’s loving, detailed, ornate descriptions of the desert could convince me, a lifelong Midwesterner, of its charms and enchantments. But moments after I posted that, I remembered that I’d recently encountered another writer who had done nearly so well at that task: Dorothy Dunnett.

In Scales of Gold (1991), the fourth book of her House of Niccolo series, Nicholas and his friend, Umar, a former slave who is Nicholas’s great friend and has been his host during a journey to Africa, head north through the desert from Timbuktu towards Arawan with a caravan of some two hundred and fifty camels and three hundred or so people. They set out:

There are few wells in the Sahara, and the journey between them depends on navigation as exact and as strict as that employed by a captain at sea, venturing out of sight of his port, and into waters unknown. In time of clear skies, the Sahara caravan makes its way as the birds do, and the captains: by the sun and the stars, and by whatever landmarks the sand may have left. But the winds blow, and dunes shift, and the marks left by one caravan are obliterated before the next comes. And so men will wander, and perish.

The guide Umar had chosen for Nicholas was a Mesufa Tuareg, and blind. For two days, walking or riding, he turned the white jelly of his sightless eyes to the light and the wind, and opened his palpitating black nostrils to the report of the dead, scentless sand which was neither scentless nor dead, but by some fineness of aroma proclaimed its composition and place. At each mile’s end, he filled his hands with the stuff, and, rubbing, passed it through his brown fingers. Then he smiled and said, “Arawan.”

“Umar,” Nicholas said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Though Dunnett doesn’t underplay the risks that face the caravan--like any good adventure novelist, she takes full advantage of them--at the same time she portrays the quiet of the desert, with its cool nights and tapestry of stars, as a potential healing force, drawing Nicholas, for once, away from the constant plotting and battling that have engulfed his life:

To begin with, they spoke very little. With the rest, they walked through the first night and part of the day, halting rarely. Sleep was brief, and taken by day. During the worst of the heat, they lay with the camels under the white, shimmering sky, and ate, and rested. . . . On the long transit to Taghaza, walking under the Andalusian vaults of the stars, there was time to talk again now and then--and a need. The clarity of the desert demanded something as rare; demanded truth, vision, honesty of those who walked in it.

T. E. Lawrence, in his introduction to Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, which I quoted from on Friday, makes much the same (admittedly essentialist) point:

The desert inhibits considered judgments; its bareness and openness make its habitants frank. Men in it speak out their minds suddenly and unreservedly. Words in the desert are clear-cut.

I know that in my heart I’ll always prefere the decadent ease of an early autumn day in the northern forests over that harshness, but don’t they make it sound at least a bit tempting?

Finally, since I’ve been wandering the desert the past couple of days, I figure I might as well link to the commonplace book–style piece I put together for the New York Moon a couple of years ago on the topic, in case you haven’t seen it. The Moon’s editors got some great illustrators for it, and the result, I think, is a lot of fun. Pour yourself a tall, refreshing glass of iced tea and enjoy!

Put the book back on the shelf

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Having given up, for now, our plans to sell our condo and move to a house possessed of a garden, we spent last Friday night unpacking and reshelving our eighty-plus boxes of books. Friends helped--we owe @santheo and @joegermuska drink after drink after drink--and the work went well, a gradual unearthing of old familiars. For a year, we’d been reduced to one bookcase, a carefully selected group of the unread and the perennial, and I think we did reasonably well in our choices. In his strange and charming Anatomy of Bibliomania, Holbrook Jackson wrote of the sort of enforced paring we’d endured:

Many have speculated upon which are the best books, and it is no easy matter to come to a conclusion where there are so many claimants; especially it is difficult to decide upon what books, or book, were we confined to one, we would choose for an imprisonment, or if marooned on a desert island.

Andre Gide, he reveals, “as a youth made out such a list every quarter”--and never included a single novel.

But as book after book emerged, I realized that, while they’d not been forgotten, they had been relegated to a strange spot in the memory, a sort of vault of denial--remembered, yet locked away, inaccessible. So in the past week I’ve enjoyed diving back into old favorites. Tonight, it’s Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888). The two-volume Dover edition I have, which, sadly, is out of print, features an introduction by T. E. Lawrence, in which, while praising Doughty, he classifies the adventuring sort of Englishman:

We export two chief kinds of Englishman, who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit. To fit themselves modestly into the picture they suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge the people among whom they live into strange, unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again. The other class of Englishman is the larger class. In the same circumstance of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their immunity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the peoples among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an ensample of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.

Doughty, explains Lawrence, was a member of the second group:

His seeing is altogether English, yet at the same time his externals, his manners, his dress, and his speech were Arabic, and nomad Arab, of the desert. . . . His record ebbs and flows with his experience, and by reading not a part of the book but all of it you obtain a many-sided sympathetic vision, in the round, of his companions of these stormy and eventful years.

And on this quiet, cool, autumnal Friday night, it seems right to bid the summer adieu with a passage from Doughty:

The lingering day draws down to the sun-setting; the herdsman, weary of the sun, come again with the cattle, to taste in their menzils the first sweetness of mirth and repose.--The day is done, and there rises the nightly freshness of this purest mountain air: and there to the cheerful cup and the song at the common fire. The moon rises ruddy from that solemn obscurity of jebel like a mighty beacon:--and the morrow will be as this day, days deadly drowned in the sun of the summer wilderness.

I think it would be impossible for me to grow to love the desert; the upper Midwest is too deep in my bones. But if anyone could set that hook, it would be Doughty.

Oh, it's good to have these books back at hand.

James Lees-Milne

Michael Dirda’s piece from the Barnes and Noble Review in praise of the diaries of James Lees-Milne--which I wrote about briefly here--led me happily to Lees-Milne’s brief memoir, Another Self (1970). Described by Dirda as “hilarious, half-true, half-fantastic,” it is a wonderfully entertaining little book, full of stories of upper-class strangeness--especially involving Lees-Milne’s parents.

Lees-Milne’s father carries shades of the Mitford sisters’ father, Lord Redesdale: unpredictable, slightly tyrannical, and dismissive of his unmanly son, while his mother is flighty, flirty, and vague, characteristics that infuriated the father when they appeared in the son:

”What on earth d’you suppose you two would do, I would like to know, if you found yourselves alone on a desert island? In the Indian Ocean?” my father once yelled at us during a picnic He was incensed by our inability to open a box of preserved fruits. “Rot,” my mother answered with a little smile. “It isn’t,” he snapped back, misunderstanding her meaning. “I asked what would you do?” To which she languidly repeated, “Rot. We would just rot.”

My favorite portrait in the book, however, isn’t of one of Lees-Milne’s parents, but of the crammer they hired to prepare him for Oxford, Reverend H. B. Allen. For a one-sentence description, Lees-Milne quotes Herbert Asquith’s diary, which would be hard to better:

At a very advanced age, he was a testament to the preservative powers of whisky and a firm believer in free love, and continued in a chronic state of insolvency because of the kindness of heart which led him to maintain a retinue of sick horses and donkeys.

From there Lees-Milne builds a picture of a gentle, preoccupied old man, obsessed with the classics, which he imagined played about him on the Cotswolds:

Hopelessly unpractical, improvident and vague, the Priest was a dedicated classical scholar with an ability to instill enthusiasm into his pupils. . . . He would sit on the window seat of his study with his arms round the neck of whichever pony happened to be grazing on the garden bed outside. In between kissing the pony’s nose and stuffing its mouth with carrots he attended to us. Hesitant and giggling, slushing and adjusting his ill-fitting false teeth he would recite and translate for our benefit the Idylls, Eclogues, and Metamorphoses from beginning to end.

Unexpectedly, this strange performance was effective: Lees-Milne wrote that he and the other boys fell completely under the Reverend’s spell, enchanted by his obvious love of his material.

If those passages amuse you like they amused me, you’ll enjoy Another Self, as its gently meandering narrative is full of them, alongside thoughts on architecture, Oxford, and growing up, and a strikingly vivid account of a bad night during the Blitz. The only wrong notes in the book come when Lees-Milne regrets not having been brave enough to go fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Lees-Milne was a staunch conservative and anti-communist, and anyone who reads about the Spanish Civil War knows that neither side was anything like blameless, but it’s rare these days (or even, I suspect, in 1970) to encounter someone who openly laments not having put his life on the line for Franco.

Fall is here, and, as always, it brings Fall issues!

Once you've finished packing away your seersucker and your white pants for yet another dark winter, I recommend that you hop over to the Quarterly Conversation, where the Fall issue has just been published. As usual, there's plenty of good writing there to help you while away a work week.

I'm in there writing about John Beer's The Waste Land and Other Poems, a book whose deliciously daring name was enough to make it stand out from the morass that ever threatens to claim review copies. Patrick Kurp invites fans of Kay Ryan to check out Marianne Moore, and vice versa. Carrie Olivia Adams covers Julie Carr's new book, Sarah--Of Fragments and Lines, while Ron Slate tackles Ken Chen's Juvenilia. Barrett Hathcock draws a line from John Updike to David Foster Wallace . . . via one of my favorites, Nicholson Baker. Jeff Bursey reviews Steven Moore's fascinating-sounding The Novel: An Alternate History, Beginnings to 1600.

And much, much more. Officially, you have no excuse for being bored at your desk this week.

Yours, A. Chekhov

If I were a professional blogger, and thus obligated to post something (or, god forbid, several somethings) every day, you'd see me have recourse to Chekhov's letters much, much more often. They offer the joys of any good letter collection: a familiar, conversational voice and a pleasant hodge-podge of topics and tones, from the quotidian details of ordinary life to the lasting questions of art and culture. But what raises them above the works of other writers of letters is the sense they give of Chekhov himself, and how it jibes with the sense of the man that comes through from his fiction: a kind, affectionate, man who didn't let his remarkable perceptiveness sour into harshness. As Lillian Hellman writes in her introduction to a selection of Chekhov's letters that she edited in 1955,

Chekhov was a pleasant man, witty and wise and tolerant and kind, with nothing wishywashy in his kindness nor self righteous in his tolerance, and his wit was not ill-humored. He would have seen through you, of course, as he did through everybody, but being seen through doesn't hurt too much if it's done with affection. . . . Such an nature is rare at all times, but it is particularly remarkable in a period when maudlin soul-searching was the intellectual fashion. . . . Anton Chekhov was a man of balance, a man of sense.

Any collection you can find will reward your time; I've almost never turned to a page of Chekhov's letters without discovering something of value.

And even better, for a blogger, is that they're all available--and searchable--online through Project Gutenberg! So a busy blogger can search the letters for, say, the word "book," and from the fifty-five instances returned, find passage after passage worth sharing.

Having done so, I'll share two before I turn you loose on your weekend. First, this self-critical account by the twenty-eight-year-old Chekhov of his literary production to that point, sent in a letter to his publisher and friend, Alexei Suvorin, on October 27, 1888:

To tell the truth again, I have not yet begun my literary work, though I have received a literary prize. Subjects for five stories and two novels are languishing in my head. One of the novels was thought of long ago, and some of the characters have grown old without managing to be written. In my head there is a whole army of people asking to be let out and waiting for the word of command. All that I have written so far is rubbish in comparison with what I should like to write and should write with rapture. It is all the same to me whether I write "The Party" or "The Lights," or a vaudeville or a letter to a friend--it is all dull, spiritless, mechanical, and I get annoyed with critics who attach any importance to "The Lights," for instance. I fancy that I deceive him with my work just as I deceive many people with my face, which looks serious or over-cheerful. I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written. I am vexed that the rubbish has been done and the good things lie about in the lumber-room like old books. Of course, in thus lamenting I rather exaggerate, and much of what I say is only my fancy, but there is a part of the truth in it, a good big part of it. What do I call good? The images which seem best to me, which I love and jealously guard lest I spend and spoil them for the sake of some "Party" written against time.... If my love is mistaken, I am wrong, but then it may not be mistaken! I am either a fool and a conceited fellow or I really am an organism capable of being a good writer. All that I now write displeases and bores me, but what sits in my head interests, excites and moves me--from which I conclude that everybody does the wrong thing and I alone know the secret of doing the right one. Most likely all writers think that. But the devil himself would break his neck in these problems.

A bit overplayed, perhaps--it's hard to imagine that even at his lowest point Chekhov really thought his stories no better than "a vaudeville or a letter to a friend," but regardless, I love the image of the characters grown old in his head, waiting for him to get around to writing their story.

I also very much liked the following passage, from a letter of January 21, 1900 to his medical school classmate G. I. Rossolimo:

Dear Grigory Ivanovitch,

. . . I send you in a registered parcel what I have that seems suitable for children--two stories of the life of a dog. And I think I have nothing else of the sort. I don't know how to write for children; I write for them once in ten years, and so-called children's books I don't like and don't believe in. Children ought only to be given what is suitable also for grown-up people. Andersen, "The Frigate Pallada," Gogol, are easily read by children and also by grown-up people. Books should not be written for children, but one ought to know how to choose from what has been written for grown-up people--that is, from real works of art. To be able to select among drugs, and to administer them in suitable doses, is more direct and consistent than trying to invent a special remedy for the patient because he is a child.

I doubt that the past century's remarkable blossoming of children's literature would have changed his mind, given the relative inflexibility implied by his medical metaphor, but I do like imagining him reading the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, say, and appreciating how their gentleness might perfectly suit a child.

Renewing my acquaintance with Iris

After a decade or so of reading and rereading Iris Murdoch regularly, I’ve spent the past few years away from her, reading nothing but From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, a fascinating collection of interviews. But you can’t ever escape an author who so dominates your youthful reading, and this week I turned back to her, re-reading The Nice and the Good (1968). And while much of the book--Murdoch’s style, the plot--was familiar, the time away had unquestionably been salutary: I took renewed pleasure in the density of Murdoch’s prose, the way she worried away at her philosophical themes, and the sheer pleasure she obviously took in putting her often slightly silly characters through their self-inflicted paces.

The Nice and the Good concerns a typical group of Murdoch characters: educated, upper-class Britons living in slightly too close intimacy while still holding secrets, dissatisfied with life but unsure of why or how to change it, and prone to being swept up, however temporarily, by the transformative power of love. I know of no other writer who so skillfully combines philosophical themes with such rich plotting--Shakespearian in its deployment (and enjoyment) of misapprehension, eavesdropping, and misplaced, shimmering eros--and an ability to describe physical action. The Nice and the Good, like The Sandcastle and, if memory serves, The Book and the Brotherhood, has as its climax a scene of breathtaking physical danger, so palpable and full of tension as to be difficult to read--a forceful reminder that all the preceding talk of emotion and duty and goodness ultimately boils down to fragile physical bodies in a harsh universe.

And while Murdoch often allows her characters to be overwrought--in fact, I realized fully for the first time in this reading, to be downright silly, even self-parodying--even as they agonize over decisions that ought to be simple, or freight their feelings with outsized importance, they nonetheless continually get at something about our relationships, to others, to the good, to ourselves. Take this scene, for example, which finds John Ducane, who reflexively thinks of himself as a good man, trying to break off an unsuitable relationship:

Ducane said to himself, human frailty, wickedness in me has made this situation where I automatically have to behave like a brute. She is right to say why kill love, there is never enough. Yet I have to kill this love. Oh God, why is it so like a murder. If I could only take all the suffering on to myself. But that is one of the punishments of wickedness, perhaps the last and worst one, that even if one wills it one cannot do it.

Few characters ever get it all quite right--and those who do tend to be at a remove from the world, often damaged by it before the novel opens. But nearly every character gets some of it right, some moment of insight, and the cumulative effect is that, while Murdoch leads us through the twists and turns of her plots, we think, and we learn, and we know ourselves better.

In addition, here and there she allows herself a straightforward passage of philosophical reflection, delivered in a questing, but assured, voice that is familiar from her straight philosophical writing. Here, for example, the narrator reflects on Ducane:

What Ducane was experiencing . . . was . . . one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely that in order to be good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue; although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence.

These passages, while interesting in themselves, also serve to teach us how to read Murdoch’s book, what sort of self-deceptions--her greatest theme--we are to look for in her characters.

And for all her reputation for chatter and wordiness, at times she offers up a thought that approaches the concision of aphorism:

This is perhaps the saddest experience in the demise of love: to come to know that someone who loved you once now regards you as boring and annoying and unimportant.

Once in a while, she even allows her characters such moments of crystalline insight. The Nice and the Good offers one particularly amusing instance. After the thoughtful, reserved Willy Kost has offered forcefully expressed intellectual and spiritual comfort to the discarded mistress of a friend . . . and then immediately, gently, seduced her in that same friend’s bed, she turns to him:

Jessica said, softly, not anxiously, but curiously, “What are we doing, Willy, what is this?”

“This is sacrilege, my Jessica. A very important human activity.”

What a sheer pleasure this re-reading was--the closest comparison I can make is to spending a long night talking with a friend you’ve not seen for years, but with whom you instantly slip back into rhythm and accord. The mind was familiar, but newly fresh, fully invigorating. You can’t ask for much more from a re-reading.