“Amour Dure” (1887)

This long story by Vernon Lee is epistolary, presented as a series of diary entries by one Spiridion Trepka, starting in August 1885. I’m calling it a Christmas story because that is when—and that is how—it climaxes, with a finish that may fairly be called stunning. Trepka is a poor young Pole, an art historian with a burgeoning enough career to be able to travel to Italy on a modest grant to pursue his studies. He’s keenly aware of his native country’s relatively lower cultural position in the scheme of things. His research leads to his discovery of a historical figure (fictional, I’m pretty sure—I hope), Medea da Carpi. Her motto, emblazoned on her jewelry: “Amour Dure – Dure Amour.” “Hard love” seems the best and most apt translation. This story is long and very slow, especially in the first two-thirds, Part I, where we are brought along as Trepka discovers this woman in the historical literature, learns details of her appalling life, and falls in love with her. Spiridion, we hardly knew ye. Medea da Carpi’s story is riveting, a notorious woman emerging slowly from the mists of history and fragments of the documents Trepka examines. There’s a good payoff for all this in Part II. I love the complications of Medea da Carpi’s life, which is full of intrigue and seduction as she pushes herself into high social position purely by the power of a ruthless will. She betrays and murders or sees murdered a series of increasingly powerful lovers. It takes place in the 16th century or so, some 300 years before Trepka reassembles the story. But one day, now getting into December in the diary entries, Trepka receives a note signed by her. He recognizes her signature and handwriting from the documents. It’s a short note—she wants to meet him late at night at a church. Trepka had seen this church in town before and thought it abandoned and unused. But he finds a gathering and a service taking place when he gets there at the appointed time late at night. If you think this is heading for some bad end, you’re probably right. Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget, a prolific essayist and feminist as well as fiction writer. As with E. Nesbit and Margaret Bowen, it’s the gender-based rage and sense of oppression that fascinates me most in Lee’s horror stories. “Slow burn” is a reasonable enough way to describe “Amour Dure.” It required a fair amount of patience. The language is relatively straightforward, but the revelations are slippery to trace, only come into focus slowly, and then the story hits very hard.

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"The Kiss" (1887)

This story by Anton Chekhov is lighthearted in its premise, almost sitcom material in a way, yet the yearning for connection, pathetic or otherwise, is where it somehow finds a strange fascination. It focuses on a small event that is improbable but not unlikely. A lot of us might have stories like it. A traveling brigade of soldiers puts up in a small village and the local land baron invites them to tea. It's mostly a matter of social obligation on both sides. The retired General von Rabbek is entertaining others as well at the same time and his hospitality is perfunctory. The officers briefly meet the general and his wife and then they are on their own. Ryabovitch, our hero, is young, shy, and inexperienced. He can't stand the crowd and follows some others to the billiard-room, where he is ignored. It is still some time before supper will be served, so he wanders off, exploring the mansion. He enters a room so dark he can't see. Then he realizes someone else is there. It's a woman. "At last!" she says, embracing and kissing him. Then she realizes her mistake, shrieks, and Ryabovitch leaves the room. He never sees her face or dress or anything that can identify her. He remembers everything about the moment—the lotion she wore, a drop of peppermint oil on his cheek, the sense of her presence. He will live on this experience for weeks, though he has no idea who she is and knows well she was in the room to meet someone else. Yet he spins out a life of happiness and marriage with her. It is a boost of confidence to a very shy man. He fights with his rational self for the meaning of the incident. In the end, when he returns weeks or months later to the village, his rational side appears to have won. But we also know how hard it is to vanquish the irrational. I like how Chekhov isolates the desire in such a hopeless situation. Not only does Ryabovitch have no idea who she is, but he already knows she's likely a philanderer. But he remembers her in his arms, kissing him, the lotion and the peppermint oil. In spite of everything it augurs hope and promise.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

"Man-Size in Marble" (1887)

I first knew of E. Nesbit as a children's author when I was a kid, by way of Edward Eager novels, but I never found any of her books (the E is for Edith) when I looked for them at my public libraries in the '60s. I never knew anything about her. I didn't know she was a woman. I wasn't even sure she was real. I barely understood she also wrote horror fiction though later I remembered her name in anthologies—it rang a bell, that was all. I never made the connection until recently. Her biography suggests her wide-ranging interests and the wild intellectual churn of her life, as she wrote continually for money, cofounded the socialist Fabian Society in England, bore three children and adopted others her husband had by another woman (who also lived with them), and collaborated with others as well as writing her own fiction for children and adults, horror stories, memoirs, and poetry. This story is one of her first and may be her most famous among the horror stories (with "John Charrington's Wedding," which is at least as good). "Man-Size in Marble" is remarkable not so much for its tale, more competent than inspired, but for some of the details and especially for its voice, which is deceptively easygoing yet bracing, seething, almost caustic when read in a feminist frame. She's an obvious source for Shirley Jackson. "Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe it," she begins. It's a man's voice—a newlywed, in fact—but the clear-eyed feminist revolutionary writing the story obviously understands the painful ironies of social double standards, signaling from behind over his shoulder. Many Nesbit horror stories feature relationships between men and women but they are rarely this happy. He is a painter and his wife a writer. They are bohemians, for all their youth, bright and sophisticated but unable to afford London. Their requirements for a cottage in the country—sanitary and picturesque—take some work but are finally met in a small village in the marshy southeast of England.

I say the story is uninspired but that's not exactly true. The premise is unusual—it would be interesting to learn Nesbit's genesis of it. There's a church in the village, and in the church are two statues, about which there is an extraordinary All Saints' Eve legend. The couple's housekeeper, Mrs. Dornan, refuses to be there for the occasion, quitting her job if she has to but saying she's happy to return the week after. The narrator is more focused on the inconvenience first and then on his amusement at the way Mrs. Dornan expresses herself. He refers to the statues in the church as "effigies of the knights in armor" but she has another way of putting it: "'I mean them two bodies, drawed out man-size in marble,' she returned, and I had to admit that her description was a thousand times more graphic than mine, to say nothing of a certain weird force and uncanniness about the phrase 'drawed out man-size in marble.'" The narrator also likes, when Mrs. Dornan gets to the legend itself, how she says they "sits up on their slabs, and gets off of them, and then walks down the aisle, in their marble." I like how actively he misses the point (and the danger) and yet how understandable that is—it's classic horror stuff. We know perfectly well this is heavy foreshadowing, that it's a horror story and these things will happen. And as ridiculous as they are, Nesbit finds a new way to drive home the perversity of horror (and her rage) with an ice-cold voice that verges on brutality in the recounting and a strange detail that only unfolds in its terrible implications. In a hand of the dead woman, the narrator's wife, is a finger from one of the statues which is found in the church next day broken overnight. By the evidence, the thing was raping her in its marble. And she fought.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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