Haunting monks and Pepys

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Earlier this month, I drew on the tales of the unnamed monk of Byland Abbey, who collected ghost stories from the surrounding countryside. I imagined the monk, alone in his cell on the quiet, wintry moors, spooking himself as he took pen in hand--so I was pleased to gather some more context for my imaginings last week from Carl Watkins's The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead (2013):

The open country of the Vale of York lies to the south of this place but the moors rise steeply above it to the north. Although modest in height, they attract early winter snows, which make them a world unto themselves when the valley below is green. To medieval eyes this landscape was not beautiful but terrifying. Long before the abbey was built, the Venerable Bede thought these "steep and remote hills" more suitable for "dens of robbers and haunts of wild beasts than for men." Generations later, Bede's successors agreed. The monks who colonised the moors in the twelfth century entered "a place of horror and vast solitude," but they did so by choice, alighting on the place precisely because this was wild country, where minds could be bent to God free from distraction.

The exposure and isolation proved too much even for monks, however, and the abbey was eventually moved from the moor to the slightly more sheltered and accessible vale. But my imaginings of the spooky confines of an isolated abbey seem to have been on the mark nonetheless, at least by the fifteenth century, when the nameless monk began to collect his stories:

The heyday of the monasteries was in the past then. Outbreaks of plague and other epidemic disease had whittled away numbers at Byland and fewer recruits came forward to take their places. By 1400, a dozen or so monks were rattling around the cloisters. It was a good place to tell ghost stories and, as the abbey emptied of monks, the land round about was full of spirits.

And the monk had good reason to write down the stories he heard from the people of the surrounding country:

Stories about apparitions could not lightly be set aside and, since the chronicle of Byland warned that things not written down "slip away and wither as the sin of forgetfulness triumphs," there was reason to commit them to writing.

So the monk wrote, and so we know of a tailor named Mr. Snowball who fought a ghostly raven; and of James Tankerlay, a bad priest who walked after death and "blew out the eye" of his mistress; and of the fact that, as Watkins writes,

A soul detained [in Purgatory] suffered for its sins but could and should be helped through prayer and masses undertaken in its name. To write it off, to forget it, was a terrible thing. It was a sin. It was to rob the soul of the prayers that were its right. When a ghost walked, the living must harken to it. They must conjure it, let it speak, discover what it wanted, for it was likely to be suffering and in need of aid and deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Ghosts, however, change as we change, which makes the thumbnail history offered by Roger Clarke in his A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof (2012) particularly useful:

Medieval ghosts were reanimated corpses or holy apparitions; Jacobean ghosts, demons pretending to be human.

Post-Restoration ghosts returned to correct injustices, right wrongs and supply information about lost documents and valuables. Regency ghosts were gothic. In Victorian times, ghosts were to be questioned in seances, and ghost-seeing became far more associated with women. Late Victorians embraced paranormality, seeing the ghostly as a manifestation of as yet understood laws of nature. The 1930s found the poltergeist.

And today? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's more vague:

In one study in 1999, a group of Manchester women thought that hauntings were more to do with malign presences--in other words, a bad feeling--rather than the soul of someone who is dead making themself known.

Ghosts are no longer souls. Ghosts are now an emotion field.

As for me--still a skeptical enthusiast despite having, I'm told, seen a ghost when I was a boy--well, I think it right to end the month with Pepys. The diarist, Watkins tells us, was

an affirmed sceptic about wandering spirits. But he still relished a good story about them. And his scepticism, under the right conditions, might be a fragile thing. Several times he whiled away a dark evening talking with friends about ghosts.

Watkins goes on to mention a time that Pepys stayed in a reputedly haunted house and managed to spook himself. A bit of digging locates the incident on April 8 and 9, 1661. In his diary entry for the 8th, Pepys tells of traveling to the Hill House at Chatham, where:

Here we supped very merry, and late to bed; Sir William telling me that old Edgeborrow, his predecessor, did die and walk in my chamber, did make me some what afeard, but not so much as for mirth’s sake I did seem. So to bed in the treasurer’s chamber.

Mirthful exaggeration or not, his sleep was not untroubled, as he reveals in the next day's entry:

And lay and slept well till 3 in the morning, and then waking, and by the light of the moon I saw my pillow (which overnight I flung from me) stand upright, but not bethinking myself what it might be, I was a little afeard.

Nonetheless, Pepys, that most earthbound, most familiar, most untroubled of men, is not bothered for long, as "sleep overcame all."

As October closes, howling wind and spitting rain and swirls of blowing leaves and all, would that we all could lay our ghosts so easily.

The pleasures of the midcentury professional genre story

{Photos by rocketlass.}

You who sit in your houses of nights, you who sit in the theatres, you who are gay at dances and parties--all you who are enclosed by four walls--you have no conception of what goes on outside in the dark. In the lonesome places. And there are so many of them, all over--in the country, in the small towns, in the cities. If you were out in the evenings, in the night, you would know about them, you would pass them and wonder, perhaps, and if you were a small boy you might be frightened . . . frightened the way Johnny Newell and I were frightened, the way thousands of small boys from one end of the country to the other are being frightened when they have to go out alone at night, past lonesome places, dark and lightless, sombre and haunted. . . .

That's from August Derleth's "The Lonesome Place," a brief, effective little scary story from 1948 that I read this week. One of the reasons I enjoy my October reading is that it's almost the only time all year that I read any examples of stories like "The Lonesome Place"--what I think of as the midcentury professional genre story. If you've ever read any of the Robert Arthur–––edited Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, you know what I mean: twenty pages or less, written in straightforward, declarative prose that quickly sets a scene and a problem (and, often, a distinct first-person voice), then delivers a satisfying twist at the end. These are the kind of short stories that Ray Bradbury wrote, the kind that inspired the early work of writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, and that they very quickly turned to writing themselves. And they're the stories that mostly disappeared when the magazine fiction market dried up.

While I'm sure there was a lot of dross in the pages of those magazines, the winnowing of time means that when you do encounter one of those stories today, it's usually a good one--otherwise it wouldn't be in the anthology or single-author collection you've picked up. And the good ones are so good. There's satisfaction in the simple professionalism of it all, the idea of the writer sitting down to turn out a compact story that hits certain markers (a crime, or a ghost, or a sci-fi surprise), and simply doing it, month after month. There's no messing around, no extraneous nonsense. These are stories written to fill a need, and they do that: they while away a half an hour and leave you with a surprise you'll remember later.

October always finds me reading anthologies of ghost stories and weird tales, so I end up filing away a number of new favorites. I started this month a bit off target subject-wise (no ghosts), but right on in terms of feel, with Jerome Bixby's Space by the Tale. Bixby is best known for "It's a Good Life," a terrifying little story about a boy with mental powers that became the basis of one of the most memorable Twilight Zone episodes. Space by the Tale is Bixby writing mostly in a sci-fi vein, and while none of the stories contained within it is as memorable as "It's a Good Life", they're nonetheless satisfying, offering the basic pleasure of the sci-fi short story: watching an inventive idea spun out to its logical (if unexpected) conclusion. If you enjoyed the recent NYRB Classics reissue of Robert Sheckley's stories, Store of the Worlds, you should dig up some Bixby.

{Side note: I'm beginning to think that Charles Yu may be the heir to the Sheckley/Bixby tradition--and in some sense, to the midcentury professional genre story, period. Whereas Sheckley's stories are almost all about hubris, about our tendency to convince ourselves that we know everything and the bad places that leads us, Yu's sci-fi stories (both his novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and his collection of short fiction, Sorry Please Thank You) are about the opposite: being paralyzed, physically and emotionally, by the knowledge that our knowledge is incomplete, that our actions have unknown consequences, that anything we decide to do will probably be wrong. They're what happens to Atomic Age tales in the post-confidence present, and they're wonderful.}

Two new anthologies have also provided a lot of satisfactions in this genre. The first is suited for October: American Supernatural Tales, edited by S. T. Joshi for the new Penguin Horror line. It covers a broad span of time, but its midcentury American selections are very good--August Derleth, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Richard Matheson all offer sterling examples of the genre. The second you should get and set aside for November, in the wake of the ghosts and ghouls: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, a new anthology edited by Sarah Weinman that collects stories from women writing crime stories whose transgressions are seen from a distinctly female perspective. Few people know crime fiction as well as Sarah does, and she's picked some great stories from Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and a lot of less familiar names.

I'll leave you with a passage from another great example of the genre that's included in American Supernatural Tales, Robert Bloch's "Black Bargain":

That night, walking home, I looked down the dark street with new interest. The black houses bulked like a barrier behind which lurked fantastic mysteries. Row upon row, not houses any more, but dark dungeons of dreams. In what house did my stranger hide? In what room was he intoning to what strange gods?

Once again I sensed the presence of wonder in the world of lurking strangeness behind the scenes of drugstore and high-rise civilization. Black books still were read, and wild-eyed strangers walked and muttered, candles burned into the night, and a missing alley cat might mean a chosen sacrifice.

That's what the midcentury professional genre story does at its best: twitches the curtains in the oh-so-quiet windows of the houses on our oh-so-ordinary street, and gets us thinking again--could it be . . . just maybe . . . what if?

RI(SV)P

{From the window of Shake, Rattle, and Read bookstore in Uptown, Chicago.}

A letter sent by A. E. Housman to Grant Richards on August 24, 1909:

My dear Richards,

I shall be very pleased to dine with you on Thursday, if you are not then dead of ptomaine poisoning, in which case please appear as a ghost and cancel the engagement.

My favorite thing about this letter comes in the notes, where the editor admits to having no idea what put the idea of ptomaine poisoning in Housman's head.

Sergio De La Pava writes of ghosts

I'm re-reading Sergio De La Pava's second novel, Personae, in advance of seeing him this weekend--and this afternoon I was surprised to find that it hadn't, after all, derailed my annual October ghost hunt. To wit, from the bleakly comic play that makes up the middle third of the novel:

CLARISSA But what could be more consoling than a ghost? Proof, as it is, of human transcendence and meaning?

ADAM Credit not its words, though, as death terminates all responsibility to the living and their notion of truth.

Which is an interesting thought. Our instinct is to assume that the dead speak the truth--after all, what now inhibits them? And why would they appear if not fired by an urgent need to communicate--a need that we naturally don't associate with dissemblance? Yet why not? What, as De La Pava's characters point out, could possibly tie a ghost to us so securely that it would adhere to our notion of truth and responsibility? Why would not a person who spread mischief and malice continue to do so after death?

Later, a character asks,

Is there a greater gap we feel than between living and dead? Take an orderly century's progression through life, from bulbous infant to vital adult until ravaged ersatz corpse. The subject may marvel at what he sees in the mirror, the family may gather in secret wish for the release that comes with resolution, but when the wholly expected comes it still shocks in its finality, doesn't it? That so much can instantly devolve into a nullity.

That gap again. Try bridging it but how? Memory's a poor substitute for presence and though I may chant their names into eternity their eyes won't alight, their lips won't curl.

Then am I damned to be both reflective chanter and sole recipient?

Thus we turn, century after century, to ghosts--but not to ghosts as that undeniable gap might create them, wholly different from us, inexplicable and untrustworthy, but rather as pallid reflections of ourselves, comforting even as they frighten. A message from beyond means not only that there's a beyond, but that our here and now is important enough to still matter there. It's a seductive idea as the nights lengthen and the chill sets in, the year draws in with nary an assurance that we'll get another.

A monk hears a different sort of confession

At the start of October, I shared a story that I found in Andrew Joynes's Medieval Ghost Stories, a collection of retellings of accounts found in a number of medieval sources. The one I shared, "The Howling Ghost," from the collection of a Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Byland, reminded me of M. R. James--and it turns out that there's a reason: Joynes reveals in his headnote to that group of stories that James was one of the antiquaries who transcribed the Latin versions of the tales.

Joynes also goes into a bit more detail about the whole collection:

At the end of the fourteenth century, a monk at the Cistercian abbey of Byland in Yorkshire wrote down a series of stories concerning ghosts and spirits which he had been told by local people, and set them in the villages and ales of the countryside around his monastery. The stories were written on a few blank pages in a collection of manuscripts dating from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the anonymous monk must have intended them to be used as exempla in the tradition of Caesarius of Heisterbach.

The monk may have had heavenly intentions, but, as Joynes points out, that didn't keep him from attending to the stories' more earth-bound details:

The monk of Byland seems to have been more concerned to record the eerie, grotesque, and fantastic details of ghostly occurrences than to draw moral conclusions from his stories. In that sense, these fragments of popular legend, written down by the person to whom they were recounted in the neighbourhood where the various spirits supposedly appeared, bear a basic resemblance to the modern notion of a ghost story as an entertaining narrative which can be both frightening and enjoyable.

I just love the image that conjures up: a quiet monk talking with the people of the area, and perhaps the occasional traveler, hearing their stories, asking questions, and then in the wan light of a northern winter afternoon painstakingly writing them out as part of the essential record of the region.

And that night, come the starry winter darkness, amid the silence of the abbey's seclusion, perhaps he found that that writing them down proved to be no banishing force, as they returned to trouble his sleep. "It is said that downy cobwebs hung in strands from her right hand . . . "

Looking devilish

Just in time for October reading, the good people at NYRB Classics have published a new translation of Jeremias Gotthelf's 1842 novel, The Black Spider, complete with horrifying Renaissance waxwork cover art. It's mostly a lurid Christian morality tale: peasants in a rural village in Switzerland, suffering under a ruthless lord, make a deal with the devil, with results that are predictable if pleasantly surprising in their execution. Unexpected, however, is the level of grotesque detail, and even gore: the way the black spider of the title sets about his dark work, you can imagine John Carpenter reading it and immediately getting his creature team on the phone.

What I'll remember longest, however, is Gotthelf's portrayal of the devil, who appears at the moment of the peasants' greatest despair at their lord's impossible demands for labor:

[A] tall, spindly huntsman, dressed in green from top to toe. Upon his jaunty cap swayed a red feather, a little red beard blazed in his swarthy face, and, nearly concealed between curving nose and pointy chin, like a cave under an overhang, a mouth opened and asked, "What is the matter, good people, that you sit here wailing so piteously as to drive the very stones from the earth and the branches from the trees?"

Then the green man's face grew even blacker, the red beard so red it seemed to crackle and spark like fir twigs on the fire, the mouth contracted to an arrow-like point.

The devil, I think, should be jaunty. And, as he does later in The Black Spider, he should show pity: he sees your plight, and he wants above all else to help you!

All of which calls to mind my favorite screen devil, from the 1941 adaptation of The Devil and Daniel Webster: Walter Huston's Ol' Scratch.



Who could refuse that face?

Dr. Johnson tells a ghost story

I've written before that it's hard to imagine a much better writer to choose for an encounter with a ghost than Samuel Johnson. He has the appropriate mix of openness to experience and inherent skepticism, as well as an unusual (and gratifying) blend of empiricism and belief in the world beyond. (Who can forget his explosive response to the question of what he meant when he spoke of his fears of being among the damned? "Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.")

There are a handful of references to ghosts and contemporaneous ghost stories scattered throughout Boswell's Life, though most of them involve Johnson dismissing an account as lacking sufficient evidence. Skepticism on this front really does seem to have been his mode: though it is barely mentioned in Boswell's book, Johnson was part of the commission that determined that the famous Cock Lane Ghost was a fraud, and he played a role in publicizing that fact afterwards.



{Photos by rocketlass.}

There is one ghost story in Boswell's book, however, that is both more extended and treated with more credulity, and thus seems worth sharing in this ghostly month. Boswell, seeing Hogarth's engraving Modern Midnight Conversation, asks Johnson what he knows of Parson Ford, "who makes a conspicuous figure in the riotous groupe," then mentions that he thought he'd heard that the Parson's ghost had once been spotted. "Sir, it was believed," replies Johnson. He continues:

A waiter at the Hummums, in which house Ford died, had been absent for some time, and returned, not knowing that Ford was dead. Going down to the cellar, according to the story, he met him; going down again, he met him a second time. When he came up, he asked some of the people of the house what Ford could be doing there. They told him Ford was dead. The waiter took a fever, in which he lay for some time. When he recovered, he said he had a message to deliver to some women from Ford; but he was not to tell what, or to whom. He walked out; he was followed; but somewhere about St. Paul's they lost him. He came back, and said he had delivered the message, and the women exclaimed, "Then we are all undone!"

I'll admit to not being entirely sure how to interpret the women's reaction. Are they assuming that the delivery of a secret message to a secret--female--recipient means that Parson Ford had a hitherto unknown illicit life, and thus they are "undone" in a moral sense? Or are they simply reacting to seeming proof of supernatural forces at work?

Johnson, obviously intrigued by this story, goes into the evidence for its veracity:

Dr. Pellet, who was not a credulous man, inquired into the truth of this story, and, he said, the evidence was irresistible. My wife went to the Hummums; (it is a place where people get themselves cupped.) I believe she went with intention to hear about this story of Ford. At first they were unwilling to tell her; but, after they had talked to her, she came away satisfied that it was true. To be sure the man had a fever; and this vision may have been the beginning of it. But if the message to the women, and their behaviour upon it, were true as related, there was something supernatural. That rests upon his word, and there it remains.

Is that Johnson's wife, Tetty, out investigating? It certainly seems like it--and the spunk the story suggests makes a nice counterpoint to the lingering sense we still get of Tetty as an unpleasant invalid.

So chalk one up for the ghosts, sayeth Dr. Johnson. Oh, what I'd give for a whole book of Johnson's analyses of tales of hauntings--imagine teaming him up with John Aubrey's (too credulous) ear for rumor!



I'll close with a line from a story found in Otto Penzler's great anthology The Big Book of Ghost Stories, Joseph Shearing's "They Found My Grave." The story itself has nothing to do with Dr. Johnson--it's about seances and table-turnings in the late Victorian era--but this description of the most prominent of the spirits conjured at the sittings struck me as quite Johnsonian:

"Oh," smiled Mr. Lemoine, rising to indicate that the sitting was at an end. "He is a common type, a snob. When he was alive he boasted about his distinctions, visits to court, and so on; now he is dead he boasts of having seen God, being in Heaven, and the marvels of his grave."

A merciless analysis of character, a hint of ironic amusement, an eye for the power of vanity--doesn't that sound like the good Doctor?

Defoe on apparitions

These days Daniel Defoe is remembered almost solely for Robinson Crusoe--oh, Journal of the Plague Year is in print, which, centuries after its publication, any of us would surely accept as a legacy, but it's read primarily by specialists and students. (Though I recommend it--it's fun!) But he made his living by his pen for decades (with the occasional bonus paycheck for spying; 'twas a good era for spying), and while he's not inexhaustible the way, say, Dr. Johnson or Hazlitt are, his body of work nonetheless offers plenty of pleasures for the browser.

Which is why it perhaps shouldn't surprise us to learn that he is solid on the topic of ghosts, as I learned on a recent visit to Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology, whose modest but satisfying bookshop features a limited edition hardcover of a 1999 reprint of Defoe's 1729 compilation The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed (An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions). There's something rewarding on almost every page. Here, let's play a bit of sortes defoeiana--page 223:

Thus if the invisible Spirits give a due alarm, they do their part; if they jog us and awaken us in a deep sleep, and pull us again and again, and give us notice that something is coming, that some Danger is at the Door; if we will sleep on 'till it comes, if we will go on, happen what happen may, the kind Spirit has done its Duty, discharg'd its Office, and if we fall into the Mischief, the fault is our own, we can by no means blame the insufficiency of the Notice, and say, to what purpose is it? feeling we had due and timely warning, but would not take the hint; we had due notice of the danger, and would not step out of the way to avoid it; the fault is wholly our own.

Two important notes to help you enjoy that passage to the utmost:

1 Remember that in the facsimile of the 1729 edition, every "s" that isn't capitalized or ending a word looks more like a cursive f.

2 Stop for a moment to think about just how uncannily like Javier Marias's inimitable style the back-and-forth run-on of that narrative self-argument sounds.

Anyway, today what I've happened on is the tale of an apparition sent, it seems, to warn James IV of Scotland not to continue to make war on England. The entreaty failed; the outcome was the Battle of Flodden, which cost James his life and Scotland its last real hope of independence. Defoe writes that James was at his palace in Linlithgow when an "antient" man with "Hair the Colour of Amber, (some Accounts would represent it as a Glory painted round a head by the Limners)" forced his way through the crowd, and

came close up to the King, and, without any Bow or Reverence made to his Person, told him with a low Voice, but such as the King could hear very distinctly, That he was sent to him to warn him, not to proceed in the War which he had undertaken at the Sollicitation of the Priests, and in Favour of the French; and that if he did go on with it he should not prosper. He added also, that he should abstain from his Lewd and Unchristian Practices with wicked Women, for that if he did not, it would issue in his Destruction.

Having deliver'd his Message, he immediately vanish'd, for tho' his pressing up to the King had put the whole Assembly in disorder, and that everyone's Eye was fix'd upon him, while he was delivering his Message to the King; yet not one could see him any more, or perceive his going back from the King; which put them all into the utmost Confusion.

After reiterating that the people and the king were convinced that the speaker was an angel because they didn't see or feel him making his way out after delivering his message--which is entertaining because of the way it calls in physical evidence to support a claim for the supernatural--Defoe laments that James ignored the warning, pressing ahead with his army to the Tweed, the traditional boundary between the kingdoms.

But the angel wasn't through with James, Defoe tells us. As the king sat drinking wine "very plentifully" in a hall in Jedburgh, he was accosted by the messenger yet again,

tho' not in the Form which it appear'd in Lithgo; but with less regards or respect to the Prince, and in an imperious Tone told him, he was commanded to warn him not to proceed in that War, which if he did, he should lose not the Battel only, but his Crown and Kingdom: and that after this, without staying for any Answer, like the Hand to King Ahasuerus, it went to the Chimney, and wrote in the Stone over it, or that which we call the Mantle-piece, the following Distich,

Laeta sit illa dies, Nescitur Origo secundi
Sit labor an requies, sic transit gloria Mundi.

I was raised, like Shakespeare, with little Latin and less Greek, so I'm forced to turn to Google Translate for help on the Ahasuerus-style mantlepiece warning:

Proud to be that day, do not know the origin of the second
Let there be toil or rest, so passes the glory of the world.

I'm going to guess that "do not know the origin of the second" really means something like "does not think of the life to come."

Alas, the warning was not heeded: as Defoe writes,

that he marcht on, fought the English at Flodden-Field, and there lost his Army, all his former Glory, and his Life, is also recorded; I need say no more of it.

Defoe goes on to speculate a bit about the spirit's origins, building his speculation on his accumulated store of tales of apparitions:

Had it been a Heavenly Vision, 'tis more than probably it would have laid hold of the King's Hand, as the Apparition of Angels did to Lot, and as it were dragg'd him away, and said You shall not go forward, that you may not be defeated and slain, both you and your Army.

After offering a few reasonably convincing arguments as to why the spirit couldn't be the devil (the devil loves war and death and thus wouldn't send an emissary to prevent them), Defoe essentially throws up his hands: It's a spirit, probably of someone deceased with some sort of stake in the outcome, and we can't know more.

As a fan of Dorothy Dunnett, and particularly of her House of Niccolo series, I can't help but come up with a different answer. The eight books of the House of Niccolo series end in 1483, five years before James IV took the throne. But throughout the series Niccolo spends substantial time and energy on James's father and his dangerously wild siblings and family, trying to instill in him the wisdom and control required of a good king. Is it so hard to imagine that Niccolo, though essentially retired from meddling in affairs of state, saw the disaster of Flodden approaching and came up with one of his typically convoluted schemes in hopes of preventing it?

The Haunted L

Creative writing instructors in Chicago learn quickly that you need to lay down at least one ground rule right off the bat: no stories set on the L. If you don't . . . good god, the stories you'll get of Highly Significant encounters between sensitive twenty-year-olds and representatives of the Other--emotionally charged scenes of cross-racial understanding (or misunderstanding), encounters with the aged or the homeless or the mad, unprompted confessions from the unappreciated wife of a coked-up commodities trader. A young Midwesterner with pretensions to creativity usually finds his first encounter with the forced proximity of the L so bracing that he dive-bombs right at the nearest mountain of cliches, and the casualties tend to be legion.

In fact, until tonight I would have said it's not possible to write a good story about the L, period. Then--as I made my way through Otto Penzler's consistently rewarding Black Lizard anthology The Big Book of Ghost Stories, I encountered Robert Weinberg's "The Midnight El" (1994), which is so good I'll forgive not only the setting, but also his (all too common) misspelling of L.

Like most ghost stories, it depends significantly on surprise, so I won't share too much beyond the premise. Chicago-based psychic detective Robert Taine, a character about whom Weinberg wrote regularly, sets out late one winter night to catch the Midnight El, a perhaps mythical ghost train that picks up dead souls. It starts its run at exactly midnight every night, from the station nearest the most deaths that day. Taine is after the wife of a client, a woman whom he--like his client--is convinced shouldn't be dead. It won't hurt the story if I tell you that the train does arrive, and Taine, having employed a potion, slips aboard, where he finds a conductor who totes an anachronistic pocket watch of unusual powers. Taine appeals to the conductor:

"The Greeks considered Charon the most honorable of the gods," said Taine, sensing his host's inner conflict. "Of course, that was thousands of years ago."

"Spare me the dramatics," said the conductor. A bitter smile crossed his lips.

Who has earned the right to a bitter smile more thoroughly than Charon? I'll admit to not knowing that he was regarded as highly honorable, though it makes sense: for life and afterlife to remain in balance, the ferryman must be ready to accept his due payment, but be proof against bribery or histrionics.

Ultimately, it's the honor of the conductor on which the story turns, used by Weinberg to bring about a resolution that feels appropriately myth-based and ancient, even as the story's trappings are the screeching and rumble of the L. It's a great ghost story, well worth seeking out.

The most unbelievable aspect--in a story built around a train car full of the dead? That the L arrives right on time and operates properly throughout its run. In reality it would be ten minutes late and then run express, leaving legions of reanimated corpses fuddled on the platform to horrify the early commuters the next morning.

October is here!

{Photo by rocketlass.}

It doesn't feel like autumn. It's too warm. The leaves remain too green, as does the grass. The air is damp, but the rain this week has felt more nourishing than punishing, with nary a hint of end-of-life remonstrance. Nature may be in retreat, but she has yet to strike her banners and acknowledge the rout.

But . . . when I was running in the lakefront park this morning at five, the darkness was near total, broken only by the merest sliver of moon, the lake beneath barely grudging it a shimmering reflection. Had I met myself coming, or spied myself going, the encounter wouldn't have seemed out of place. October, with all its concomitant spirits, is here.

For the seventh year, then, I'll turn this shop over to the ghostly for October. Today, a quick visit with a surely long-laid ghost, found in Andrew Joynes's Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies (2001). Many of the tale Joynes recounts have their roots in religion: tales of saints and saintliness, or of pagan tradition forced into the Procrustean bed of Christian belief. But Joynes tells a number that are more straightforwardly uncanny, tales from which no teaching can be extracted, no moral adduced. The following, adapted from the fourteenth-century tales of the Monk of Byland, in Yorkshire, is one:

This is an account of how another spirit followed William of Bradford crying out "how how how" on three successive occasions. And at about midnight on the fourth night he was returning on the road to the new town of Ampleforth when he heard a terrible voice shrieking a long way behind him, as though it was on a hill. A short time afterwards it shrieked again, but closer to him, and on the third occasion he heard it calling at the crossroads ahead of him. Eventually he made out the shape of a pale horse. His dog growled briefly but then retreated and hid itself behind its master's legs, whereupon, in the name of the lord and by virtue of the blood of Jesus Christ, William forbade the spirit to harm him and obstruct him on his journey. When these words had been spoken, it fell back and took on the appearance of a square piece of canvas with corners which flapped and rolled about. All of which might lead one to believe it was a spirit in dreadful need of recognition and help.

Or might lead one to conclude that one was reading an M. R. James tale, no? Small surprise that the M. R. James Newsletter says that Joynes's books is "strongly recommended."

Speaking of James, he will of course be appearing soon, as will his many confreres. Don't bother checking your locks, folks. Our friends this month need neither burglar's tools nor keys to get to where they can be reading this over your shoulder right now!

Westlake on Hammett and The Thin Man

The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany began with a single essay, "The Hardboiled Dicks," which Westlake originally delivered as a talk at the Smithsonian on May 13, 1982. It's an extended look at Westlake's chosen genre--interestingly, at a branch of it that he barely bothered with a writer, the detective novel--and it reveals Westlake to be a careful, attentive reader and a thoughtful critic of his fellow writers. Even now that it's been surrounded by another 65,000 or so words of Westlake's writing in what will eventually become the book, it remains a standout, full of history, analysis, and opinion, all backed up by extensive quotations from the writers in question.

Over the weekend, while I was making my final edits to the manuscript before turning it in, I found myself particularly drawn to Westlake's thoughts on Hammett. No writer was a more obvious influence on Westlake's style in the early years, which makes his acute analysis of Hammett's relationship to his material, as seen by reading between the lines of The Thin Man (1934), particularly interesting.

Westlake's essay traces the movement of hardboiled fiction from its roots in some sort of actual experience through its increasing stylization and eventual shift into ritual and pastiche. (Had Tarantino been making films in 1982, Westlake could have used him as an oblique example.) Hammett he locates at that point on the arc when experience (which Hammett had with the Pinkertons) was beginning to give way--and his argument is that Hammett knew it and didn't want any part of it. The Thin Man, he claims, is Hammett's exhausted riposte:. After quoting a scene where a low-level hood gets beat up for no explicable reason, Westlake writes,

This sequence doesn't come out of anything, and it doesn't lead to anything. Its only reason for existing at all is to show that Nick doesn't know what's going on any more, he's become a visitor to the scene he used to live in. And when I say Nick, I mean Hammett.

Hammett was a major writer, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that the texture in his writing comes so very much from himself. Writing inside an action genre, where subtleties of character and milieu are not primary considerations, he nevertheless was, word by word and sentence by sentence, subtle and many-layered, both allusive and elusive, delicate and aloof among all the smashing fists and crashing guns. He put himself in his writing, and that makes The Thin Man a very strange read, in that singular way that The Tempest is strange; inside the story, the writer can be seen, preparing his departure.

As Hammett's own experience of hardboiled characters faded into the past, Westlake argues, he was unwilling to take the next step, into the baroque and ritualistic and stagily imitative--that would be left to Chandler. (Whom Westlake never thought much of.) In the Library of America edition of Hammett's novels, there's a quote from an interview tucked away in the notes that backs up Westlake:

I stopped writing because I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

Westlake sees the result--which he elsewhere included among his ten favorite books in the genre--as an unusual thing for the genre: not a disappointed, or cynical, or world-weary book, but a sad one:

You notice also the passing reference to literature that will or will not last. The Thin Man is a very sad book, made even sadder by how bravely and smilingly the narrator hides his sadness. Hammett is not leaving the hardboiled detective story. The genre is leaving him.

My interest piqued, I re-read the novel for the first time in a dozen years. And whereas the first time I read it, I saw it as a slightly cockeyed comedy, a slightly less fizzy kin to the William Powell-Myrna Loy version, this time I couldn't help but see what Westlake saw: it's a novel about confusion, where everyone expects Nick Charles, returned to New York and (reluctantly) to detecting after seven years away, to step right in and be the detective he was, to know things the way he used to know them . . . while all around him is oddity and incomprehensible behavior and incompetence and uncertainty. Friends aren't friends, while enemies aren't even worthy of the name; the closest Nick comes to camaraderie (Nora aside) is when a gangster he once sent up the river insists on reminiscing a bit--at least those memories are honest.

This is what good criticism does: it makes it hard to read a book the same way you read it before you encountered the critic's take on it. I would have read The Thin Man again eventually, but would I have seen in it the sense of dislocation and loss that Westlake showed me? The book ends with the expected closure, but it's closure rooted largely in conjecture, which Nora finds frustrating. She wants to know for sure, and she wants to know what will happen to the people left behind by the murders. Nick replies:

"Nothing new. They'll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn't round out anybody's life except the murdered's and sometimes the murderer.

"That may be," Nora said, "but it's all pretty unsatisfactory."

The first time I read the book, I took that as one final joke, an expression of Nora's ever-amused, ever curious arm's-length relationship to Nick's work, and to crime itself. Now I read it as Westlake did: as a hand waved in irritated farewell. How can I not?

If you like Westlake, you're going to like this book, folks. I'm really proud of it, and I'm champing at the bit. A year. That's all we've got to wait now!

Visiting Japan with Dr. Johnson

In 1772, the year before their tour of the Hebrides, James Boswell mentioned to Samuel Johnson that he was thinking of buying St Kilda, the most remote island of that chain. "Pray do, Sir," Johnson replied. "We shall go and pass a winter among the blasts there. We shall have some fine fish, and we shall take some dried tongue with us, and some books." To which Boswell, who, one suspects, had mentioned the prospect more as a form of boasting than in seriousness, answered, "Are you serious, Sir, in advising me to buy St Kilda? For if you should advise me to go to Japan, I believe I should do it."



{Photos by rocketlass.}

I read that passage on a thirteen-hour flight home from Japan earlier this month, and all I could think was how sad I was that Dr. Johnson--perhaps hoping to rid himself of the presence of Boswell, who, much as their friendship seems to have been genuine, surely was nonetheless an irritation at times--failed to order his friend to hie himself to Tokyo posthaste. What would Boswell have made of eighteenth-century Japan, utterly foreign to British sensibilities? I realize the journey's not truly to be wished, for it could only have come at the cost of the Life of Johnson, but that doesn't stop me from imagining a parallel universe Boswell visiting temples in Kyoto, telling tales of his bravery in support of Corsica (then explaining what and where Corsica is), and picking up ladies in the seedier districts.



On our trip, we took no dried tongue, but we did have some fine fish, and of course I took some books. Last time we visited Japan, four-and-a-half years ago, I read The Tale of Genji, which was a very good choice as reading material, but, at nearly four pounds, a lousy choice of a physical object to lug around. So this time I chose more wisely: I packed a similar number of pages, but spread across more books--among them books that I could leave behind when read, including a couple of disposable mass market paperbacks, a galley, and a copy of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, which, fortunately, I can always get again at the office.

Young Men and Fire, which I was re-reading for the first time since it was first published, in 1992, was my company in Kyoto, and its quiet, meditative tale of loss and attempts at understanding it suited that ancient city. And finishing it there allowed me to improve the meager bookshelf in the Shunkoin Temple guest room, which, when we arrived, looked like this:



That's a Lilian Jackson Braun cat mystery; John Gardner's novelization of the Bond film Goldeneye; Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, a fine book but not exactly a vacation read; Less Than Zero; a forgettable thriller; and--the one book in the stack that would be a pleasure to find in a guest room--Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising. May Maclean find a new reader among the Americans and Aussies who seem to be the bulk of the temple's guests; may they be surprised to find a lost little bit of Montana in Kyoto.

Our return to Tokyo for one last night was the occasion of the trip's other book-related venture: meeting an online literary pal. Julian, one of three people behind the Only a Blockhead blog (its name keeping nicely with the Johnson theme), is an Englishman who's been living in Japan for decades, and I've been enjoying his thoughts on Japan and books both for years now, but this was our first actual meeting. He led us to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, high above the city, where he was kind enough to buy me and rocketlass drinks while we all talked books. It was a sheer pleasure, especially talking favorites and trading recommendations. Take my advice and meet your Internet friends, folks: I've yet to find that anyone I like through their online presence doesn't live up to that impression in reality.



{Note the book that Julian was reading when we walked up to him on the street: Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity!}

We three--worn by late-summer heat, dressed casually for travel--didn't exactly reach the elegant heights of the 1950s Tokyo party described by Edmund de Waal in a memorable passage in The Hare with the Amber Eyes (a favorite shared with Julian):

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.

But the drinks were splendid, and the fellowship of books was with us, so what more could one reasonably ask for?

Elsewhere in The Life of Johnson, Johnson assures Boswell that "he never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat, were an angel to make the proposal to him." Having closed my trip by experiencing something along those lines in a peculiarly modern way, arriving home on a Saturday morning two hours before we'd left Tokyo, I can understand Dr. Johnson's sentiments. But two weeks in Japan to live again through the agency of an angel? Well, it would be hard not to be tempted.

Beware of the lions!

My computer has been returned to me safe, sound, and much cleaner than before. But this week finds me yet again scrambling for time, so, with an eye toward late-week equilibrium, I'll offer just a short extract today from Priscilla Napier's charming 1966 memoir of growing up as British national in colonial Cairo, A Late Beginner:

"Can we go round by Kasr-el-Nil? Can we go round by the lion bridge?"

Foam from the horses' nostrils blew back at us in the river breeze. "Please, lions, can we come on your bridge?" Any neglect of this formula would of course have caused the huge bronze lions at either end to descend from their pedestals and devour us. When nothing frightening is happening it is sometimes necessary to invent something frightening that might happen.

I'm reading Napier's book in one of Slightly Foxed Editions' lovely, small-trim hardcovers, and it's a perfect Slightly Foxed book: a charming, funny, minor memoir of an English childhood. One couldn't think of a more narrow niche, nor a more reliably rewarding one. I've pretty much committed to buying every book they publish in this series; I've not been disappointed yet.

McGee and Maqroll?

I was all set to jump right back into blogging this week after a lovely two-week holiday in Japan . . . but then my computer broke. So while the fine folks at Apple are busy restoring it to life, I'll just share one thing, this brief passage from John D. MacDonald's tenth Travis McGee novel, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper:

He wanted a confidential errand done, for a fat fee. He said he had been involved in a little deal abroad. He said it involved options on some old oil tankers, and some surplus, obsolety vehicles, and all I needed to know about it was that it was legal, and he wasn't wanted, at least officially, by any government anywhere.

I don't know about you, but it sounds to me like Travis McGee just ran into Maqroll el Gaviero.

J. F. Powers makes the effort

I'm a bit pressed for time today, so I'll just share a passage I like from Suitable Accommodations the new collection of J. F. Powers's letters, which I'm enjoying very much. This one closes a letter of June 11, 1956, to Father Harvey Egan, a friend and literary patron:

I took a bath tonight and put on a clean shirt and drove own to the Press Bar for a glass of beer. It was formal like that, and something I've never tried before. Bless me, Father, I was trying to give St Cloud a chance. I was in the mood, Father, and I was prepared to take a certain amount of pleasure in it. The choice was Cold Spring or Pfeiffer's (Schmidt's), because I wanted no bottle beer in my mood. I wanted it from the keg, or ex cathedra, if you understand my meaning here. Well, I drank the bitter draughts and departed after one glass, returned home, and that, I'm afraid, was, and is, it. The Press Bar was dark pink inside, and I was alone at the bar.

Alone
Jim

It's such a compact assemblage of Powers's good traits as a writer: wry humor, self-deprecation, an ability to turn a phrase--and, especially, to turn the phrases of the Church to new, amusing ends--and a satisfactory melancholy suitable to a fallen world.

Pity Him Afterwards

In my slow attempt to read all of Donald E. Westlake's novels (and thus catch up to Ethan Iverson), I recently made it to Pity Him Afterwards (1964). Westlake's fifth novel, it's interesting but still feels very much like journeyman work--oddly, it's not as well-conceived or executed as his excellent first novel, The Mercenaries (available now from Hard Case Crime under Westlake's preferred title, The Cutie.) Nonetheless, for a novel that starts as unpromisingly as this one ("The madman clung to the side of the hill"), it's far from uninteresting: a crazed killer, escaped from an asylum, attempts to hide within the newly assembled cast of a summer stock theater, and the mix of actors, local officials, and the remote setting all offer pleasures.

Westlake knew summer stock from his first wife, an actress who spent at least a couple of summers at upstate theaters like this one. The speech the theater's manager gives a hungover new arrival seems likely to have be lifted from reality:

I want to get you interested in this theater, and I want to get you interested in this season. I want total commitment from you, Mel, for the next eleven weeks. We have an impossibly tough schedule here, a new play every week. You'll have a major role in only four or five of them, but you'll be working in all of them. You'll be a stagehand, or you'll run the flies, or you'll work props. You'll help build sets, and you'll help strike them. You'll work a seven-day week, and you'll work a fourteen-hour day most of the time. You can't do that and last the season if you don't give a damn about what's happening here.

Mel Daniels, the actor to whom this speech is addressed, feels like a prefiguration of Grofield--a Grofield whose straight life is his only life, and who hasn't yet figured out just how good he is with women. On his way to the theater, he enters a diner:

The little man in the white coat came over and asked him what he wanted. He asked for coffee, and then changed his mind and asked for iced coffee. The little man said, "No iced coffee. Iced tea."

He was going to go into a Hemingway routine from that--repeat everything the little man said, and ask when the Swede came in for dinner--but he didn't have the energy. And the little man wouldn't get it, he'd figure Mel for a smart aleck. So he said, "All right, iced tea."

Westlake's other characters include an actress with ambition to direct, a vigorously rude director ("shaped like a bag of lard, soft and sagging, with a petulant jowly face and pudgy hands"), and a self-doubting police chief who spends his winters as a college professor. It's a promising cast, and--the problems with crazed killers aside--an effective plot structure, as Westlake contrives to prevent the reader from knowing which actor is actually the madman for most of the book. But ultimately the book is less than the sum of its parts: after all this set-up, Westlake rushes to the end too quickly, and since we're less interested in the madman's fate than in the characters he's threatening, it's unsatisfying.

Westlake explained in a couple of interviews that Pity Him Afterwards was the quickest writing he'd ever done: start to finish, it took him something like fifteen days. And while it doesn't feel in any way slapdash--did Westlake ever write anything that did?--it does feel like a book the more mature Westlake would likely have continued poking away at until it opened up into something bigger and better.

I'll close with a couple of notes that tie in to particular interests of this blog. First, an explanation of the title. It comes from Samuel Johnson, via Boswell:

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

And, finally, one more indication that Westlake at this point in his career was just getting his feet under him: the book includes the first of what would be many uses of Sydney Greenstreet as a point of comparison (Huzzah!) . . . but he's not quite there yet:

He was a stocky man who looked to be about thirty, five foot, ten inches tall, with a heavy face that could become Shakespeare's Falstaff or Hammett's Casper Gutman with equal aptitude.

Within just a few years, Westlake would cut to the chase, moving beyond Hammett's character straight to the actor who played him, and the universe of similes would never be the same!

Once more into notebooks--but this time Fitzgerald's!

I mentioned the abundance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks in Wednesday's post, which of course meant that I had to go pull them off the shelf and spend some time with them. Fitzgerald's notebooks differ from Anthony Powell's not only in their extent, but in their substance: in addition to single lines and ideas, they include many more developed thoughts, often running to a paragraph or more of prose. This one is fairly typical:

779 I went on one of those Armistice Day bats and the girl I was with drove my car into a hotel lobby and knocked down a major. He really wasn't hurt but he was shocked and they put me in Leavenworth to see whether he'd die or not. Only a couple of months--the girl's father was a big man in Kansas and they acted very well about it.

I won't quote extensively from Fitzgerald's notebooks the way I did from Powell's on Wednesday; I'll instead simply say that if you enjoy the form, and Fitzgerald, you'll enjoy this volume.

I do, however, want to share three entries that jumped out at me today as being reminiscent of Powell:

627 His old clothes with their faint smell of old clothes.

992 Family explained or damned by its dog.

1491 "Why, she's your wife--I can't imagine touching your wife." Having heard this said to a husband ten minutes before the most passionate attempts to maneuver the wife into bed.

I realize that some of what I'm reading as similarity of thought is simply the nature of the form, but even so, don't those seem like lines Powell would have enjoyed?

All of which leads me to not be able to resist closing with Powell's description of Fitzgerald, whom he met while on his brief, unsatisfactory sojourn there as a screenwriter. It's found in his memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling:

He was smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit, light-coloured tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs--seen for the most part years later--do not do justice to him. Possibly he was one of those persons who at once become self-conscious when photographed. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, which, anyway at that moment, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was at once aware of an odd sort of unassuming dignity. There was no hint at all of the cantankerous temper that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface. His air could be thought a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described in this period, in the least brokendown. When, years later, I came to know Kingsley Amis, his appearance recalled Fitzgerald's too me, a likeness photographs of both confirm.

More amusingly typical of Powell is the following observation, made before he'd managed to meet Fitzgerald:

One could not fail to notice the tone in which people in Hollywood spoke of Fitzgerald. It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of some doubtful promise as a screenwriter.

Later, Powell shares a charming note that Fitzgerald sent him in thanks for a copy of From a View to a Death. Noting the manners and courtesy indicated by Fitzgerald's having taken time to send the note, he offers this aside:

I discovered only much later that a lot was happening in his own life which would have excused forgetfulness.

And thus is a Powellian plot built: in life we only learn later, and often at second-hand, what furies were secretly driving our friends and peers to distraction even as we were attempting to outpace the furies on our own tails.

Anthony Powell's notebook

I drew on Anthony Powell's A Writer's Notebook for Monday's post, and today I can't help but go back to it. As my love of writer's letters attests, I'm a sucker for extra-canonical work, the fragments and effluvia of a writing life. Powell's notebook is easily my favorite.

No small part of that, of course, is because Powell is my favorite writer, and the notebooks are full of thoughts about characters and situations that would find their way into A Dance to the Music of Time. But I suspect they'd be fun for anyone who enjoys dry English wit, aphorisms, and disconnected lines of dialogue and character description that suggest a whole world.

Herewith, some examples!

A man sits wrapped in gloom after conversation with a bore.

"As to baths, I shouldn't think he overdid it."

Women have a way of saying "Oh yes," when a man's name is mentioned, indicating that they have slept with him.

Although unintellectual people should not be allowed to be rackety, rackety types have a link with people of the intellect.

I am an only child, accordingly there has always seemed to me something rather sinister about large families.

Different Opinions (Book title).

A man in the Secret Service, who is writing a novel in the style of James Joyce, which is stolen by foreign agents.

"She kept a tame rat." "How typical."

Man Traps for Womanizers (title for a book of short stories).

A woman who memorises phrases from reviews, and brings them out in conversation.

"Like good morals, one likes some people to have them, even though one may not want them oneself."

"His mentor proved a devotee of Bacchus."

I could go on all day. My only complaint about the book is that it is so brief, only 169 small-trim pages, which seems a pittance if, as the flap copy indicates, the notebook was kept up for sixty years. There's none of the abundance of Fitzgerald's notebooks here, sadly. What we do have, however, is a pleasure, and I'm grateful for it. And gratitude, writes Powell, "has some claims to be regarded as the rarest of human virtues."

The humiliations of Widmerpool

Recently while flipping through Anthony Powell's A Writer's Notebook, I happened across an entry that can't believe I hadn't noticed before:

Someone pees on Widmerpool and Fettiplace-Jones, during an army exercise. ?Sunny Farebrother

There are a lot of Dance-related snippets in the notebook, many of them kernels of characters or episodes found in the books, others eventually discarded. But this one seems to me easily the most interesting of the leftovers.

If you know A Dance to the Music of Time, then as soon as you read that entry you can instantly picture how Powell would handle it, and how it would work into the unfolding of Widmerpool's character. The scenes in training camp do a great job of revealing character anyway, as Jenkins encounters both new people and a number of familiar figures from his life who are now thrust into new positions and new relationships. And the training exercises in particular, their complexity and pointlessness guaranteeing they'll be cock-ups, push characters beyond their usual limits. It's during a training exercise that we see Nick, quietly and subtly, come as close to losing it as at any other time in the series. So to imagine a series of mistakes that would lead Sunny Farebrother to pee on Widmerpool isn't difficult. And it would surely have appealed to Powell's love of echo, calling to mind the night that Jimmy Stripling attempted to play a trick on Farebrother with a full chamber pot.

More important, such an incident would also fit with the pattern, observed as early as school, of Widmerpool being physically assaulted in a humiliating fashion . . . and seeming to take masochistic pleasure from it. At school, it's a banana thrown by the cricket captain, an "over-ripe" banana, Stringham says, that "burst all over his face, knocking his spectacles sideways." Stringham continues:

Do you know an absolutely slavish look came into Widmerpool's face. "I don't mind," he said. "I don't mind, Budd. I don't mind in the least." . . . It was as if Widmerpool had experienced some secret and awful pleasure.

A few years later, a similar occurrence at a formal dinner--involving a girl Widmerpool likes pouring a caster of sugar on his head--results in Widmerpool looking

beyond words grotesque. The sugar sparkled on him like hoar-frost, and, when he moved, there was a faint rustle as of snow falling gently from the leaves of a tree in some wintry forest.

Instantly, Nick recalls what Stringham called Widmerpool's "slavish" look:

There could have been no better description of his countenance as he shook off the sugar on to the carpet beneath him. Once again the same situation had arisen; parallel acceptance of public humiliation; almost the identically explicit satisfaction derived from grovelling before someone he admired; for this element seemed to show itself unmistakably--though only for a flash--when he glanced reproachfully towards Barbara: and then looked away. This self-immolation, if, indeed, to be recorded as such, was displayed for so curtailed a second that any substance possessed by that almost immediately shifting mood was to be appreciated only by someone, like myself, cognisant already of the banana incident; so that when Widmerpool pushed his way between the chairs, disappearing a minute later between the doors of the supper-room, he appeared to the world at large, perhaps correctly, to be merely a man in a towering rage.

An additional scene of Widmerpool's physical humiliation--and, presumably, his largely concealed pleasure in it, would seem to fit with Powell's aims. As described in the notebook, it would have the added benefit of enabling us to see Widmerpool's reaction in contrast to that of a minor character. Surely Fettiplace-Jones would have responded with anger, unleavened by any more secret feelings.

But then there's the simple fact that the scene involves urine--and the inextricability of that from sex. Oh, urophiliacs may be few and far between, but nonetheless it would be hard to write a scene in which Widmerpool adopted a "slavish" look in the wake of being peed on without putting the reader in the mind of unusual sexual preferences. I suspect that Powell decided, therefore, that the scene (whose comic potential can't be denied) was a step too far: for while he did eventually want us to realize that Widmerpool's love of humiliation extended to matters sexual (remember Pamela's taunting him about voyeurism in the presence of a painting of Candaules and Gyges), to have made it explicit that early would have risked altering our perception of the arc of Widmerpool's life. Instead we learn of his sexual humiliation at the very moment that his life is crumbling around him, his power revealed to be to some extent a mirage.

So in the end, Powell left the scene out, and in fact kept Widmerpool out of the training camp section entirely. It isn't until later that Nick is assigned to his staff, where he discovers that Widmerpool's ruthlessness and eye for power are perfectly suited to the military structure, with its need to deny men their individuality even as it needs some of them to retain enough of it to facilitate the denial of the rest. (As Powell wrote in his notebook, "The Army is at once the best and the worst place in the world of egotism," and elsewhere, "The Army is of necessity the world of the will; if the will is weak, the Army is weak.") Sunny Farebrother is there, too, and it turns out that he's Widmerpool's bureaucratic foe--but while there is pissing, it's metaphorical, and the person who gets the worse soaking is, sadly, Sunny.

Javier Marias

Javier Marias's new novel, The Infatuations, opens like this:

The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met, a woman with whom he had never exchanged so much as a single word. I didn't even know his name, or only when it was too late, only when I saw a photo in the newspaper, showing him after he had been stabbed several times, with his shirt half off, and about to become a dead man, if he wasn't dead already in his own absent consciousness, a consciousness that never returned: his last thought must have been that the person stabbing him was doing so by mistake and for no reason, that is, unremittingly, with the intention of erasing him from the world and expelling him from the earth without further delay, right there and then. But why do I say "too late," I wonder, too late for what? I have no idea, to be honest. It's just that when someone dies, we always think it's too late for anything, or indeed everything--certainly too late to go on waiting for him--and we write him off as another casualty.

And on and on it goes: the first paragraph takes up more than a page.

I first encountered Marias via his collection of opinionated, amused mini-biographies of writers, Written Lives, which I'd recommend to any fan of the brief life. In the years since that collection was published in English, Marias's reputation has only grown: his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, adventurous and dramatic and rich in ideas, is one of the great achievements of our era. A new Marias novel has become a reason to rush to my local bookstore.

What I'm looking forward to, more than anything, is those sentences, to sinking into their extravagance. No other writer writes like that; no one else is so profligate with commas, so unashamed about repetition, so interested in offering slightly different perspectives on every thought, like a fly's eye turned into prose. It's a stylized representation of thought, to be sure, but it's an effective one once you surrender to it: at times reading a Marias novel feels almost like reading a single, inconceivably long sentence from a mind whose turnings we can't help but recognize. Marias spins out thoughts like no one else, giving them the space, obsessive and repetitive, that we accord them in our own minds, and the effect is hypnotic.

Fortunately for new readers, if the passage above tempts you, there's an easy way into Marias's work: pick up Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, a 57-page New Directions Pearl that I think is among the best things Marias has written. It presents the themes and questions that animate all of Marias's books: questions of action and responsibility, fate and death, the unknowability of the future and the mutability of the past, and the power of narrative to control, rearrange, and change our idea of what just happened--especially when that narrative is deliberately used to deny, explain away, or shift culpability. And, as Marias is one of those rare non-genre writers who has characters appear in different roles in multiple books, Bad Nature offers the bonus of featuring a character who appears in other books, including The Infatuations.

Marias is a gem, folks. Give him a try.