"Charles Ashmore's Trail" (1888)

This is the third installment of Ambrose Bierce's "Mysterious Disappearances" set of three very short stories, all published in October 1888 in the San Francisco Examiner and worth reading together. "Charles Ashmore's Trail" has the most pathos of the three, and really the best spooky effects too. The first to disappear (in "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field") is a slaveholder, the second (in "An Unfinished Race") a drunk who is prone to gambling, though with remarkable physical strength and endurance. In "Charles Ashmore's Trail" it is the only son of a family and the youngest child, 16 years old. They are also scattered geographically: Selma, Alabama; Leamington, Warwickshire, England; and Troy, New York. Charles disappears when he goes for water from the creek behind the house. It's evening and there is a light snow. (Light snow seems to occur often in Bierce stories.) After Charles has been gone too long the family investigates. They find his footprints fresh in the snow. Nice detail: "The last footprints were as conspicuous as any in the line; the very nail-marks were distinctly visible." Yeah but the kid is gone. They look carefully for more footprints all the way to the creek, hoping to find evidence he turned away for some reason. The father even looks up to the sky where the trail of prints ends. It's a clear night and Charles is not floating around up there. The mother can't believe the news and goes out to look for herself. Here's where the good stuff happens. At the point where the trail ends she thinks she can hear his voice, as if from a distance, but she cannot make out or remember the words. At first the family writes that off (gently) as her derangement from grief, but then they start to experience it. It's quite peculiar really: "All declared it unmistakably the voice of Charles Ashmore; all agreed that it seemed to come from a great distance, faintly, yet with entire distinctness of articulation; yet none could determine its direction, nor repeat the words." By the following summer the voice is never heard again. It's full-on supernatural but sneaks up on you. That's partly because it's grouped with the two others and their dry reportorial style. They are less like fiction—I really wonder what the San Francisco newspaper readers made of them in the day—and more like the work of Charles Fort, the paranormal researcher and writer in the early 20th century, or even the Ripley's Believe It or Not! newspaper cartoon. They feel dispassionate and factual even as they describe impossible events, and they leave you half-believing they actually happened.

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce
Read story online.

The Steppe (1888)

Anton Chekhov characterized his long story (novella, whatever) as "something rather odd and much too original." It does feel distinctly modern now. He wrote it after a journey to Ukraine for his health, rejuvenated by a reacquaintance with the geography of the steppe. I have similar feelings, I think, for the North American Great Plains, the grasslands of eastern Montana and Wyoming and the western Dakotas, which are steppe-like. The story focuses on a young boy, an orphan about 9, who is traveling with his uncle to be placed in a boarding school. It's high summer, hot and sweltering. The uncle has other business in the region and the boy is sent ahead with a group of peasants hauling a wagon train. A priest is also traveling with him. The action is built out of the boy's perceptions of this immense journey and the radical changes in his life. All these characters—a handful of the peasants become familiar to us—are like vivid phantoms flickering in and out of the vision of the boy. Many times he doesn't understand them but we often can even when he is confused. Toward the end he and the wagon train party encounter a giant thunderstorm. Chekhov has a great way of staying inside the boy yet always keeping us aware of the situation outside him too. It alternates between the concrete—the storm is wonderfully done—and the dreamy, as the boy's perceptions are often mixed-up and childlike. We grasp the poignancy of his situation as he will not for years. He's so alone in the world—his uncle accepts the responsibility for him, but he's not cut out to be a family man or father figure (even though he obviously has become the boy's father figure). The story often reminded me in pleasant ways of road trips I've taken across the Great Plains, not just the geography, though that is striking, but the sense of travel as an emotional or even spiritual transition from Point A to Point B. This journey obviously represents a lifetime before-and-after event for the boy no matter what happens next. Somehow Chekhov captures the almost unimaginable hugeness of it.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

"The Lesson of the Master" (1888)

Preparing to embark on what turned out to be an abortive career as a man of the theater in the early 1890s, Henry James devoted much of his work then to contemplations of the artist's life and commitment. This long story may be the truest vision because it is about novelists rather than stage actresses or portrait painters. The master in this story, Henry St. George, is a well-established British novelist whose work has been falling off. I have no idea who it's modeled on, if anyone. James may have intended it to resemble no one in particular, as after all it's something of a failing writer. Paul Overt—what a name—is the student, a promising younger writer. They are introduced by a woman named Marian Fancourt, in whom Overt takes an immediate interest ("falls in love with"). Yes, once again the primary concern of all appears to be who the single characters will marry, but it's used very well here. St. George has some idea his work has diminished, and believes it's related somehow to his marriage, which is a happy one. In the central scene of the story St. George seriously counsels Overt not to marry if he wants to fulfill his literary talent. St. George sees it as nearly a direct exchange—happiness in marriage for artistic accomplishment. Overt immediately accepts his advice and goes to the Continent for two years, spending his time mostly alone and writing a masterpiece. Upon his return to London, Overt discovers various improbable things have happened. I'll let you discover them on your own, as they are something of a surprise, clearly intended to illustrate further the themes of the story. James never married, declaring himself a bachelor. It's also possible he was gay. He seems to understand very well a certain dynamic tension between primary relationships and creative work. It's possible this story is a little too programmatic in the way it outlines the problem, but it also has a very good handle on it, which in many ways I think makes this one of the most important pieces in his career. It's not subtle, but its material is a lot better and more pointed than, for example, The Tragic Muse, which also bears the themes. It may speak well to James that he was so relatively reticent in writing a story about writing stories—that would be more of a 20th-century problem—but it's obvious in this story that writing fiction was the creative life he knew, not theater.

"interlocutor" count = 2 / 63 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Reverberator (1888)

The Reverberator is a short comic Henry James novel. It's not considered to be among his best—the tangles of sentences and monolithic paragraphs only add up to another novel of manners working the matrimonial train, with the now familiar overlay of cultural relations between the Old World and the New. Once again the scene is Europe and all of the most important characters are American. This novel has an annoying tic of making the vigorous and loutish type of Americans frequently use the word "ain't" (though I admit I'm not always sure what's intended, as sometimes some of the very best of James characters use it seemingly without irony). There's also something about Europeans draining American energy—there is sophisticated, and then there is effete. This has one of the most painfully egregious examples of effete in what appears to be our hero, one Gaston Probert, who though bearing American citizenship has never lived there. He makes a sorry, unmemorable character, but no one here is very interesting. In fact, what's most interesting about this tends also to be beside the point. "The Reverberator" is a newspaper that traffics in nascent celebrity culture, for example, such as it existed in Europe in the late 19th century. I thought that was interesting, although as a plot point it devolves into a buffoonish farce. Even more interesting was the consideration of Impressionism. The label never appears, much less any real-life artist names such as Claude Monet, but it's evident from the descriptions of the paintings (and the time period) that that is what James is talking about. Now a favorite of middlebrows on a reasonably permanent basis, with Shakespeare and Beethoven, Impressionism was still relatively new and au courant at the time James wrote this. It's hard to miss his note of dismissal—and thus perhaps, by extension, his potential dismissal of much in art that has followed for more than a century. This is not entirely surprising, as Henry James remains more or less a conservative fuddy-duddy at bottom. Yet it is interesting to see how that plays out with a style of art that has become a favorite (or certainly tolerated well) among the conservative fuddy-duddy class everywhere, who tut-tut as always about what's become of art, music, literature, politics, science, etc. In other words, Henry James in this day and age could well likely appreciate a Monet calendar as a Christmas gift. But we'll never know that for certain. It's only a thought experiment, and has nothing to do with anything in The Reverberator. It's not for James's views on art that we read him, but more for the way he catalogs and arranges modes of perceived conduct, and can do so with a kind of bewitching wordy charm. But even that's not happening so much here. It's short but only for the hardcore.

"interlocutor" count = 2 / 210 pages

In case it's not at the library.

The Aspern Papers (1888)

With the middle period of Henry James full upon us here I found myself thinking less of Jane Austen—though she remains at the heart, to be sure, with all the complexities of Europeanized family relations and especially romance—and more of Vladimir Nabokov. There are clearly antecedents for Pale Fire in "The Aspern Papers" with its oversized lionized hero of a 19th-century poet, Jeffrey Aspern by name, and the literary critic (who narrates the long tale but never once reveals his name) who lusts for some of Aspern's letters, which are in the possession of a broken-down ancient mistress of Aspern's living her latter days in a Venice palazzo with her hapless niece. The various intrigues between the critic and the niece remind me of those between Humbert Humbert and Lolita's mother in that novel too. But the reverberations can be felt elsewhere as well, including one scene that could have inspired significant parts of Susanna Clarke's odd fat fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. James is in full control of his powers here, letting the long sentences and long paragraphs flow like warm water into a bath. One luxuriates in the comic punch carried by a sure-handed narrative momentum. It is funny and fascinating all at once, these ribald adventures of the literary critic, and towards the end there is a flash of the ghost story in a fierce memorable scene when all has unraveled and gone wrong. What I love about stories like this and Pale Fire is how they consciously set out to transform the dreary grinding life of the literary academic (as I imagine it), recasting it as brash and heroic. At the same time it never loses sight of what it is actually about and thus often proves to be very funny for all its sly sense of its own absurdity. What I know about James for myself is that I have a real preference for these middle-period works (e.g., Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady), which are straightforward enough, or anyway with his impulses to shade and dither held in check by his equal devotion to getting a story told. "The Aspern Papers" makes evident that it doesn't have to be a story of great moment at all—no swashbuckling adventures ever, and even the greatest romances puckered by a knowing irony, even cynicism. "The Aspern Papers" is fully engaging, often very funny, and with an ending that only unfolds to even greater depths of implication.

"interlocutor" count = 3/85 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)