Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

USA, 96 minutes

Director: Alexander Mackendrick

Writers: Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, Alexander Mackendrick

Photography: James Wong Howe

Music: Elmer Bernstein, Chico Hamilton Quintet

Editor: Alan Crosland Jr.

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Martin Milner, Susan Harrison, Barbara Nichols, Emile Meyer, Clifford Odets, David White, Jeff Donnell

Technically, Sweet Smell of Success probably has to count as a noir, but it’s something of a lightweight one in terms of crime. The corruption runs deep and extends into the police force too, but there’s no particular foul crime—no murders. Instead it’s all about PR and newspaper columns, publicity and celebrity and making it. It’s new enough, and my memory is long enough, that it reminds me a little of scraping out freelance work from magazines and newspapers in the ‘80s. There was a PR angle to everything entertainment journalists did then, and Tony Curtis as press agent Sidney Falco, in perhaps the biggest performance of his career, is a certain ideal of the 24/7 hustler in that world. It's not about money or even power as such there, but rather about fame, recognition, adulation, as only the entertainment industry can deliver it.

I will say my memory is not long enough to remember Walter Winchell, the model for Burt Lancaster’s role as powerful gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, but the point is quickly understood. Hunsecker wields enough clout in his column that he can make and destroy reputations and careers. He has a faint odor too of the right-wing anticommunist polemicist / crank. In this particular case, Hunsecker has opinions about who his kid sister Susan (Susan Harrison) should and should not marry. Her beau, Steve Dallas (Martin Milner, later a cop on Adam-12), is a hotshot guitarist in a jazz group otherwise played by the Chico Hamilton Quintet. But Hunsecker thinks Dallas is beneath his sister and he applies his overbearing influence to breaking them up. There’s the story. Without any obvious motivation beyond pathology, it makes Sweet Smell of Success, as Hunsecker himself notes, basically a story about “shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun.”

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953)

[Previous notes here.]

[spoilers] A discussion of the “anguish, mercy, charity, divine grace, and imitation of God” themes in this famous and much anthologized story by Flannery O’Connor can be found at the Wikipedia article, which also includes points about the author’s formal intent. That’s all well and good, but—though I could well be missing the point—my interest in this story has more to do with how it works as a cunning horror story. As such, it is more along the lines of the conte cruel because there is nothing supernatural or really the least bit spooky about it. Some may even want to classify it as a type of crime story. Certainly it has its improbabilities and indulgences. In the very first paragraph the unnamed grandmother, who is the main character and an exceedingly annoying person, notices a newspaper item about the “The Misfit,” a lunatic madman who has escaped from prison. Then the turning point of this story occurs when she and her family encounter him by random on the road. The family—grandmother, father, mother, two kids, and a baby—is on a road trip from Georgia to Florida but they are in a strange kind of hurry that is never explained. They might be on the run themselves. The mother has almost nothing to say. O’Connor skillfully uses misdirection to keep us from worrying these points too much in a story that moves quickly, but they register unconsciously as points of anxiety. It all feels innocent but worrisome, worrisome but innocent, something is wrong here, which sets us up for the encounter with The Misfit and his gang. But nothing can really set us up for how the encounter goes. The Misfit is already faintly ludicrous with his self-bestowed moniker—cocky and pretentious too, when he starts talking. And he is first seen, like Vladimir Putin, swaggering around bare-chested. It feels like safe literary symbolism and narrative all the way up to the point where the murders start, as the father and older son are taken off into the woods by henchmen with guns. Two shots are heard and the henchmen return with the father’s garish vacation shirt, which The Misfit casually dons. These points are made with no flourishes. These things just happen. But they are so monstrous they almost put us into shock, certainly on a first reading. It’s clear at that point what is happening and what will happen to all of them, including the grandmother. The story carries an unmistakable load of despair and meaninglessness, and it also feels just a little amused by our sickened response. It also has a lot of heavy religious themes, but they’re for digging out with more care on subsequent readings. I understand some people don’t even want to read it a second time.

Read story online. (Library of America)

Pulse (2001)

Clues on the internet suggest the original Japanese Pulse (released in Japan as Kairo) is not particularly high on the list of so-called J-Horror, where Ringu, Ju-on, and Dark Water are more the first titles to be discussed. This is despite the fact that director and writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation) made one of the earliest with 1989’s Sweet Home. Like many J-Horror pictures from the 1990s and 2000s, Pulse got a US remake a few years on, and like many it had mixed results. I’m one who will stump for the US version of The Ring over Ringu, but otherwise the Japanese originals I’ve seen tend to be noticeably better. Certainly that’s the case with Pulse, although I should probably mention my viewing of the remake was on a somewhat sketchy free youtube version with a problem print or transfer. So I was a little hesitant to pull the trigger at all on the original but then I noticed it was available on a channel I’d already signed up for. Scour those catalogs—they’re often skimpy when you look into it—and cancel subscriptions quickly is turning into a way of life. Getting to the point, the Japanese Pulse is quite good. In many ways J-Horror is all slow burn—we learn the premises through the actions and reactions of the characters and the pacing is slow, like playing a 45 at 33. But the sense of dread is somehow thick and the images are carefully conceived and rendered to support specific moods. We are given ample time for the details to sink in like dense pellets of terror and anxiety paste. Things like black stains on walls, or red tape, or the words “The Forbidden Room” on a piece of paper coming from a printer become quite unnerving. More than you might think, or maybe you have to be in the mood and I was. Times being what they were in 2001, the sounds of modem tones connecting are heard often, and in ways they are not meant to be heard. The internet is unnaturally reaching out to connect with our characters. The premise is vague, leaving us to fill in the gaps: ghosts live on the internet like people in the Superman comics live in the Phantom Zone. Do they like it there? It’s hard to say, but they seem to want the living to join them, which the living find depressing if not terrifying. Pulse is one of those movies whose first half is better than the second, which is exacerbated by a longish running time of two full hours. But in that first half it accomplishes for me everything the much more widely celebrated Ju-on couldn’t—that atmosphere of overwhelming numbing terror, like panic-bad dreams, accomplished all with ideas and imagery and not once ever with cheap jump-scare cuts or gore. Worth a look, and maybe I’m ready for another try at Ju-on.

“Two Bottles of Relish” (1932)

I know this Lord Dunsany story is a murder mystery because it was another I found in the 65 Great Murder Mysteries anthology edited by Mary Danby, which is chock-full of murder mysteries however offbeat. In 1932 Lord Dunsany was reportedly trying to break into the murder mystery story market, but I prefer to think of “Two Bottles of Relish” as a parody of Sherlock Holmes, tacking on a gruesome and somewhat obvious twist. Dunsany is otherwise doing his basic witty, whimsical, droll, fantastic, weird thing. The story is told by Smithers (or Smethers), a traveling salesman who “pushes” Num-numo, “a relish for meats and savouries.” He needs to get his sales numbers up. Dunsany always did like a traveling salesman. (Later Smithers will mention he has no idea what savouries are.) “Two Bottles of Relish” is not exactly a locked-room situation but something like it, with the disappearance of a young woman that is probably a murder. But there is no corpse and so no evidence. Smithers tells it with a lot of digressions, with the prolix bonhomie of the salesman at his ease over cigars and brandy. There’s a long preamble about renting an apartment with the Sherlock Holmes character, an Oxford scholar. Smethers is apparently the Dr. Watson around here. The suspect, Steeger, was living with the woman at the time she disappeared along with all her money. Around that time Steeger came into an unusually large amount of money. Other seemingly random clues include that Steeger was a vegetarian—extremely suspicious in this story—and also that he chopped down all the trees on the property apparently for firewood. That seemed to me to be more suspicious than being a vegetarian but what do I know. Smethers does the investigatory footwork for his genius roommate and sleuths out this information, including that Steeger bought an unusually large supply of Num-numo relish shortly before the woman’s disappearance. The twist—I’m going to give it away now!—is that he disposed of the body by eating it. He used the trees as an excuse for purchasing an ax. He only bought vegetables from the grocer because he had a supply of meat at home, which is why he needed the extra relish. I mean, this is all patently absurd as murder mysteries go, hardly the stuff of some ultrarational detective using scientific deduction methods. But it’s a pretty good Lord Dunsany story.

65 Great Murder Mysteries, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Listen to story online.

“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901)

I appreciate Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist rant, which reminds me of nothing so much as the most passionate bloggers (on either side, I guess) during the Bush/Cheney era. That’s not exactly a compliment because it’s also acknowledgment of spittle-flecked incoherence and, sadly, more than anything, of powerlessness. Twain may have been able to kick up some fuss about the Boer War, Spanish-American War, etc. But it didn’t change what happened, such as the betrayals of Filipinos. Putting the best light on this piece (and on bloggers from the 2000s too) it may have had some effect on policy going forward. Certainly being right is not worth nothing. But in another era with great depredations occurring and too little to be done about it, Twain’s complaints make me sad more than anything. Terrible things had been going on already for a long time in 1901, and the US was hardly innocent of some of the worst even then. The problem is that he’s so angry he shifts often into sarcasm and invective that does not much help his case. I like this piece as an early example of the blogging style but, as with so much op-ed on outrage, the first draft should be a venting exercise and then set aside or at least carefully cherry-picked. But sometimes you’re just too mad to do even that. I write this as someone prone to such screeds myself—and publishing them too, on my blog and elsewhere if I could. What’s to be done? People are terrible. They are good too but way too often terrible. The Boxer Rebellion in China is also an event of importance in this rant. He roams about among the three—Boxer Rebellion, Boer War, Spanish-American War—and there is plenty to be outraged about, as the modern American foreign policy was beginning to take shape, among other things. There’s always plenty to be outraged about, isn’t there? I like the way this ties Twain to people like Hunter Thompson and Matt Taibbi (in his better days) as ranters of renown. But Thompson and certainly Taibbi—and a lot of those bloggers—aren’t always looking so good these days. Ineffectual, at best, or it’s tempting to look at it that way. For what it’s worth Twain was older than I am now when he wrote this. I appreciate it but have you seen the one I did about Trump and “The Snake”? Some really choice outrage there. And nothing changed. Or very little. I’ll be over here crying now.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over (Library of America).
Read essay online.

Slow Turning (1988)

The Wikipedia article for John Hiatt’s ninth album offers such a basic and even admirably composed microcosm of his career that I am taking the easy way out and quoting at length: “[Slow Turning] provided Hiatt's only significant radio hit with the title track [although it didn’t make any Billboard Top 40]. The single ‘Slow Turning’ was also featured in the 2002 motion picture drama The Rookie which starred Dennis Quaid. ‘Feels Like Rain’ was later covered by Buddy Guy on an album of the same name and was featured in the 2004 Kate Hudson movie Raising Helen. Aaron Neville also covered ‘Feels Like Rain’ on his 1991 album Warm Your Heart. ‘Drive South’ became a No. 2 country hit for Suzy Bogguss in early 1993. ‘Icy Blue Heart’ was covered by Emmylou Harris on her 1989 album Bluebird, with backing vocals by Bonnie Raitt, and was covered later by Linda Ronstadt on her 1998 album We Ran. Ilse DeLange recorded ‘It'll Come To You’ and ‘Feels Like Rain’ on her live album Dear John. During the barroom scene in the film Thelma and Louise, the band is playing ‘Tennessee Plates’ (Charlie Sexton recorded the song for the soundtrack album).” Hiatt has made a career of writing songs that others record and once in a while having small hits with his own recordings of them. The album closer on Slow Turning, “Feels Like Rain,” comes up a lot in the list above and was my favorite on recent visits, moody and beautiful and introspective. But the whole album was a pleasure for me in 1988 and it still is. The album opener “Drive South” is a great start to a road trip and the whole album is a good soundtrack for one too. Take it all the way. I used to go back and forth with a friend over which Hiatt album was best, Slow Turning or Bring the Family. I stumped for Bring the Family, and would still, but there’s no question Slow Turning is another great set and one I have ended up spending significant time with. Half the songs at least have pedigrees of being covered by artists we know, as you can see, and/or finding their way into movies we also know. Don’t be surprised. If you’re going to buy any two John Hiatt albums, make Slow Turning your second. Or let me know if you’ve got any more good ones.

Tabu (2012)

Portugal / Germany / Brazil / France / Spain, 118 minutes

Director: Miguel Gomes

Writers: Miguel Gomes, Mariana Ricardo

Photography: Rui Pocas

Music: Les Surfs, Mickey Gilley, Ramones

Editors: Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes

Cast: Teresa Madruga, Ana Moreira, Laura Soveral, Isabel Cardoso, Ivo Muller, Carloto Cotta, Henrique Espirito Santo, Miguel Gomes, Telmo Churro, Maya Kosa

I have to admit I have never entirely seen the connection (or perhaps the point of the connection) between this 21st-century Tabu by Portuguese director and cowriter Miguel Gomes and the 1931 “docufiction” by director and cowriter F.W. Murnau with producer and cowriter Robert Flaherty, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. Yes, there is the seemingly unusual spelling of the title and, yes, some incidental or metaphorical (but not primary or straightforward) concerns with colonialism. Black and white was still the only way to make a movie in 1931 but Gomes also chose to shoot his Tabu that way, in silvery tones that look far more polished and nuanced.

Looking at these two movies more closely together in recent days I see there is an interesting inversion in the structures. Both are divided into halves, with two parts labeled “Paradise” and “Paradise Lost,” but the order is reversed. Gomes starts his Tabu with the latter, “Paradise Lost,” and then presents a flashback or memory sequence of better times in the second half. And both movies, obviously, involve certain degrees of flouting norms. In the 1931 picture these norms come from native superstitions whereas in the Gomes it’s more a matter of conventional adultery. Taboos are certainly a primary theme in both. More than that, however, let alone why, I have a hard time seeing.

“The Upper Berth” (1885)

If you read only one story by F. Marion Crawford it should be “The Screaming Skull,” of course. But why stop there? He was one of the better horror writers of his time and this seagoing tale is one of his best. It has some of the floridly overdetailed 19th-century approach, with a somewhat unnecessary frame story, but it also has the compressed and more straightforward approach of the 20th century too. The story involves a haunted stateroom in an oceangoing vessel crossing the Atlantic between Europe and North America. The storyteller is a tough bird and veteran sailor who likes the particular ship on which he travels, or did until these ghost incidents. He likes the stateroom he’s given and doesn’t want to give it up even with everyone he meets onboard telling him, with furrowed brow, that he should. On the first night he finds he is sharing the stateroom with a man who stays in the upper berth and later commits suicide by throwing himself off the boat. That makes four suicides on the last four sailings on this ship, all by people staying in that stateroom. There’s also a bad smell, strange noises, and worst of all someone (or something, oh brrr) keeps opening the porthole cover and letting in a terrible draft, not to mention seawater when the ship pitches, a notable safety hazard. So it goes—this is a ghost story and Crawford piles on with detail. He has more facility than many others for keeping things moving along. All the detail continually makes the point that it’s unpleasant more than anything to be troubled by a ghost. It’s also physically dangerous. In some ways, the teller is almost unbelievably heroic, insisting on staying in that stateroom a total of three nights, with others begging him to move to different quarters, before finally throwing it over for a loss. Among other incidents, an actual material corpse appears in the upper berth. All sensations are engaged, including tactile and olfactory. This thing is corporeal more than phantom, a nice touch. I might throw myself off a boat too if I woke up next to that. Definitely an old school tale but redeemed by Crawford’s skill.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.

Riders of Justice (2020)

I never figured out how to set my expectations for this cerebral and somewhat formally comic revenge thriller, which I found on someone’s best-of list. Made in Denmark, set in Estonia, Riders of Justice starts with the death of a woman and others in a train accident. Already it has preoccupations of fate and chaos theory and the butterfly that flappeth its wings, as we see seemingly random events leading to further random events. A comical bunch of academic data scientists is soon on board—one literally a survivor from the death train. Their high-level mathematical stochastic modeling has led them to believe this was no accident but an elaborate and premeditated murder. The widower of the woman who died, Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), is a mercenary soldier with a bad temper and deadly skills. The bumbling academics convince him to help them investigate. Markus is a stereotyped soldier of fortune whose ultra-masculinist outbursts often go too far, but he is trying to be there for his adolescent daughter even as he resists the grief therapy offered to them. He gives her boyfriend a vicious black eye the first time they meet but not long after is seen abjectly apologizing. Investigating with the academics he kills a man in a fit of rage, again humbly apologizing. “It was a mistake,” he says. I appreciated the humor but I was never entirely comfortable laughing along with his violent antics. The academics have their own psychological baggage which is played for laughs and often clever—a little bit buffoonish and a little bit unnerving. There are some nice crazy scenes embedded in this with them. Again, I appreciated the attempt at a lighter tone (in a savage key), but it was also confusing, too easy to take the cutting up as mockery of the tender processes of grief which the film itself introduces. As a revenge thriller it’s pretty good in the first half but then takes some twists and turns that make it more unbelievable and remove us from the trance of revenge satisfaction. I’m not saying that’s bad but it does frustrate expectations and didn’t seem to me to offer much in return. Matt Zoller Seitz, in a 4-star review at RogerEbert.com, might have had the best line on it, writing, “It's hard to imagine the improvisatory, digressive, character-focused filmmaker Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies) making a revenge thriller, but if he did, it might look like this.” That reminds me. I should recommend the 2012 picture The Hunt while I’m at it. It also happens to star Mads Mikkelsen and is vastly superior although not as funny. Make it a double feature.

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (2004)

A quick and dirty internet search does not yield much about Chris Ott, though there is a discernible scattered trail: a youtube channel, some reddit discussions, twitter threads though he no longer appears to be on twitter. To confuse matters, there is also a Chris Ott who plays the trombone. This Ott’s treatment of Joy Division’s first album is one of the first in the 33-1/3 series—#9. Ott was also a contributor to Pitchfork but there appears to be an acrimonious break there. His 33-1/3 deals less with Unknown Pleasures than with Joy Division and its origins, specifically Ian Curtis and his troubled life. Ott sounds like he is from Manchester and was there and aware of the band when they were active, but that might be the research talking. He goes into great detail on all the studio sessions and oddball releases that preceded and followed the album and even gets into Closer a little. I learned the most about Curtis and producer Martin Hannett. It's probably worth the time for any dedicated follower. I felt something was missing here but couldn’t put my finger on it. Ott seems to be speaking with authority from the inside, with direct quotes from band principals Bernard Sumner (I get the feeling Ott doesn’t like him somehow), Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris, plus insights from Curtis’s widow Deborah, which may have come from her memoir Touching From a Distance (now on my list to read), along with assorted studio hands and scenesters. In a way, Ott’s problems writing about Joy Division and Curtis—it’s obvious how much he appreciates them, but it often feels like he is holding back a little—may be similar to those of writing about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. There’s a certain elephant in the room and it’s hard to know whether it’s better to notice it or ignore it. Among the things I learned about Curtis was how serious and debilitating his late-onset epilepsy was, how hemmed in he was by his life and circumstances. I haven’t read much Joy Division literature, so have little idea how much this contributes to or duplicates it. I was hoping for more about the album and not so much about adjacent releases in the time period, EPs and 7-inchers and whatnot. But probably because it is such an early entry in the series inevitably it’s going to suffer some from a lack of definition. It’s certainly worth looking into if you are a JD maniac, but I’m not sure how much it offers to more casual fans of the band or series. I think you might be better off spending the time listening to Unknown Pleasures a few more times.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: F.W. Murnau

Writers: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty, Edgar G. Ulmer

Photography: Floyd Crosby

Music: Violeta Dinescu, Hugo Riesenfeld, W. Franke Harling, Milan Order

Editor: Arthur A. Brooks

Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu, Ah Fong, Jules, Mehao

It would probably be more accurate to give this picture a subtitle like A Story of Star-Crossed Love. “The South Seas” is merely the setting. The story feels much more rooted in Western or even Hollywood preoccupations, a boy-meets-girl romance in a world too cruel for love. Will it ever change? But Robert Flaherty is also on hand as producer, cowriter, and general exotic documentary influence. He directed Nanook of the North in 1922, an important movie in film history several ways, and he brings a sense of sideshow authenticity to this picture, nearly all of which was shot in the South Pacific. It is duly noted, in the opening credits, that “only native-born South Sea islanders appear in this picture with a few half-castes and Chinese.” Wikipedia calls Tabu “docufiction.”

OK, fair enough. The location and native cast bring a lot of interesting texture to a somewhat ho-hum love story, thwarted by rank native superstition and barbarism. Matahi plays “The Boy,” a skilled young fisherman and diver full of high spirits. He feels like one model for the Tarzan movies that would start in 1932 with Johnny Weissmuller. French-Polynesian Anne Chevalier plays Reri, “The Girl.” They are deeply, passionately in love. Life is good and they are full of happiness. Then Reri is declared a sacred maiden by native elders, subject to the “tabu”: “man must not touch her or cast upon her the eye of desire.” It’s quite a predicament. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Counter-Clock World (1965)

In Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World, time reversed in 1986 and in the “now” of the novel things are going in the other direction, timewise, from future to past. People come alive in their graves, are unearthed in systematic capitalistic ways, and then age back to zygotes again—they have to find a willing womb, a woman who completes the process by finding a man to return the sperm to. There are lots of funny and obvious inversions, and some not so obvious. They say “goodbye” when they meet and “hello” when they part. They don’t want to be called a horse’s mouth. Cigarettes start as butts and actually clean the air as they unburn. I saw the movie Tenet not long before reading this. Both deliver a similar sense of disorientation in the ways they portray time moving backward. Dick is pretty good at a rare gothic note too, as many scenes are set in graveyards. His descriptions of the experience of coming alive in a coffin are vivid and a little unsettling. It’s a traumatic experience for them and even for us too reading about it. One thing I missed entirely and had to learn from Wikipedia is “sogum,” which is consumed socially and frequently, the way we take smoke or coffee breaks or eat out. Sogum is waste taken anally via a pipe. Later it is disgorged in privacy as food. The story has a giant shot of Christian religion running through it, but it is the usual busy plot of paranoia and secret forces at work. There’s an interesting race element here as most of the characters are Black people or allied with Black people. There doesn’t appear to be much racial tension that I noticed—it’s closer to a genuinely post-racial world. Libraries are in charge of eradicating literature as time flows into the past and they are fairly brutal and authoritarian about it. People say “food” instead of “shit”—that didn’t immediately register on me. Between Counter-Clock World and Tenet, I must say I see a lot of difficulty imagining and conveying what it looks and feels like to live in time moving the other direction. Could we even understand the language? Neither the novel nor the movie is particularly lucid, but it’s obvious how hard they are trying. This is good for any Dick binge.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Bring the Family (1987)

John Hiatt’s eighth (!) album may or may not be his best—I know I’m not the only one who thinks so—but at least, as Wikipedia notes, “not a Hiatt performance goes by without a generous helping of its songs.” It’s the home of “Thing Called Love” and “Memphis in the Meantime.” It features Nick Lowe once again, though this time not producing, and also Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner. The songs by all accounts were mostly written in the shock of Hiatt’s recent sobriety, sometimes more self-consciously, sometimes less. I realized coming back to Bring the Family the last few weeks that I will never be able to judge it very objectively (though I am trying here!) because it is just one of those albums. It was a kind of lifeline and provided a soundtrack at a notably painful time when I needed to do some soul-searching recovery of my own, going through a separation and divorce and hitting a reset button on my life in a way I never have before or since. There are other albums I associate with those times, which seemed to just float up and became important—Diamond Life, Don’t Tell a Soul, King’s Record Shop, Spike—but none landed quite the way Bring the Family did. I see better now, attempting to judge, how Hiatt often pushes the boundaries of acceptable cliché, in, say, “Have a Little Faith in Me,” or in the album finish of “Your Dad Did,” “Stood Up,” and “Learning How to Love You.” Recovery songs all, they can verge on self-pitying or confessional, the insights perhaps more fuzzy than sharp. But I was fully open to all of it on nakedly emotional levels and it’s not exaggerating to say this set sustained me, often on a daily basis. I started seeing Hiatt in performance when I could during that time. His taste in sidemen, as on this album, always reflected a priority for high levels of musicianship, but Hiatt’s awkward stage manner eventually came to hinder them too much for me. I take Hiatt as a boomer album artist and actually quite good at it when you start paying close attention to them. I may need to look up a few more while I’m at it.

“How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (1897)

David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, calls this long story by Robert Hichens a masterpiece, comparing it with “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu, and “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions. Hichens is working with a ghost or apparition that shades toward demonic possession (Le Fanu’s “The Familiar” might have been the better comparison, or Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener,” or the movie Paranormal Activity). It’s not a bad conceit but the story is also at pains in a 19th-century kind of way to oppose a spiritual orientation and a rational. Thus the two main characters are a priest, Father Murchison, and a scientist, Professor Guildea. They have an interesting if somewhat mechanically devised friendship. Both are middle-aged and celibate, connected by intellectual interests but even more by mutual temperaments. The connection is cerebral but also meeting the emotional needs of both as they chew things over. Father Murchison self-consciously emphasizes the importance of love, which Professor Guildea rejects. He doesn’t deny its utility for others but it’s not for him. In this story, however, such decisions are not always up to us. A ghost falls in love with him, in fact, and wants to be with him forever. I’m not sure “falls in love” is the way to put it. This presence, which he first sees, or senses, on a park bench across the street from his place, is suddenly with him always and he can’t escape it by traveling either. He doesn’t like it. The thing does not care. It likes him, or something. There’s some nice ambiguity between a sense that he’s overreacting, on the one hand, that it’s all in his head, he’s too isolated in his work, he should relax and open up to others more. Father Murchison seems to think so. On the other hand, there’s the horror of when no doesn’t mean no. It remains open whether this is indeed Father Murchison’s love or something more remorseless—I’m inclined to the latter, of course, like Hartwell. I’m not entirely sold on everything this story is pitching but at the very least it’s a great contribution to the “familiar” style of haunting, the predatory force that randomly attaches and won’t let go. In the end, the priest sees it himself: “Upon the bench something was sitting, huddled together very strangely.”

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.