"The Suitable Surroundings" (1889)

Ambrose Bierce serves up another puzzle story, with nice little self-aware clues and meta details. It’s a short story but perhaps on the long side for Bierce at seven or so pages. The sections appear in this order and are labeled: The Night, The Day Before, The Day After, The Manuscript, and From “The Times.” I note also (thanks to ISFDB) that the story was originally published on July 14 in the San Francisco Examiner and, in the story, July 15 is a key date. An important character in the story, Colston, is a writer whose horror stories appear in a newspaper. He complains that people read his stories the wrong way, in the wrong conditions. The title emphasizes the writer’s point—he says his new story should be read after dark, alone, by candlelight. The opening scene (The Night) shows a boy prowling the woods after midnight who comes upon an abandoned house with a reputation for being haunted. He sees a man in it reading by candlelight. The boy believes he is dead, though the scene is ambiguous. The next day (The Day After) he leads a group of skeptical townsmen to the house and there indeed they find a corpse. It’s not identified by name but is likely Marsh, the man challenged by the writer Colston to read his new story in [story title]. The section called The Manuscript is really where all the action in this story takes place, and the fact that it is practically illegible is exactly what makes it work. The manuscript is a letter written by Colston, basically an open suicide letter addressed to Marsh. One of the townsmen reads it aloud. But he doesn’t read all of it and when he is finished he burns it to ash, against the objections of the others. When this man’s identity is revealed his motivations are more understandable, but he can never be compelled to disclose the full contents of the letter. The last section (From “The Times”) is a newspaper notice that Colston has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane. It’s not clear how Marsh died—presumably of fright, but it’s not even entirely clear the corpse is Marsh. The implication is that something in the part of the letter the townsman refused to read aloud scared him to death. It’s also possible “the suitable surroundings” was a trap and Colston was merely a murderer. Either will do, though there’s no apparent evidence of foul play. Both interpretations are unsettling and mysterious in different ways and there could be more interpretations as well. Pretty neat. I think I like this one at least as much as Bierce’s puzzler from nearly 20 years later, “The Moonlit Road.”

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce
Read story online.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Riddles and confusion. You can see in this strange little novel that Mark Twain has a few scores to settle with the Catholic Church and romance literature, but I'm not as sure about the good old American can-do capitalism. Is that parody, or is it good old American can-do capitalism? I tried this novel when I was a kid, attracted by the time travel science fiction premise, but bogged down. I started over and finished more recently but it certainly does have dull passages. The premise is only a device and there's little here to tickle the imagination about time travel. Mostly the point seems to be that the time traveler, Hank Morgan, is way ahead of the people in King Arthur's time in 6th-century England. It's possible that the point is Morgan only thinks he's way ahead of everybody (human hubris, don't you know), but it appears more likely he actually is way ahead, as he quickly sets up as a tycoon, building factories and getting that backward world up to speed with dynamite, a stock market, and even telephones. Good job! If he is ultimately defeated—because people are sheep, or something—he still knows what's best, and we're probably still intended to agree with him. I know I do, on general principles: democracy is to be preferred over theocracy and/or feudalism. The structure is episodic, per the usual Twain, but these adventures just aren't that interesting. He meets a woman who serves as his guide, calls her the most boring person he has ever known, and sure enough, the whole thing collapses in on itself every time she speaks. And it's not that funny or effective to make your main character a basic egotist. He's not sympathetic and his accomplishments are not at all believable. Some of the things he claims to be doing give some idea how far back in history this is set. He builds a match factory so he can smoke, for example. He might note in passing that smoking is entirely unknown in that time, and really matches should be more impressive to them than just evidence of his peculiar habit (and where did he get the chemicals and facility, etc.). I guess it falls under humor, which doesn't always age well and doesn't always work for me here. Twain obviously has more sympathy and respect for Connecticut Yankees than Knights of the Round Table, which I can go along with to a degree. Perhaps the best part of this book is Morgan's unswerving contempt for royalty and nobility. Huzzah! But a grasping American-style hustler is not much of an improvement. If that's the point, it ends up tiresome.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"The Bet" (1889)

Read story by Anton Chekhov online.

Anton Chekhov's very short and much anthologized story has more gimmicks than I normally expect from him, though I think it works and also has many characteristic notes. It's more of a fable in structure, a thought experiment, and arguably gets twisty toward the end. The bet of the title is between a banker and a lawyer. The banker bets "two millions" (from the Constance Garnett translations) that the lawyer could not tolerate five years of solitary confinement, that no man could. The lawyer cries, "Make it 15 years and you've got a bet, mister," or words to that effect, and they're on. This all comes of a discussion about the death penalty. Neither man is entirely happy with himself about making the commitment, but there's no going back. The banker sets him up in a room and the rules are settled: "It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke." There was a system for exchanging food, books, and letters. If you're anything like me, it doesn't actually sound so bad. Chekhov's imagination feels lively and engaged, as he imagines various changes in approach to living over the years. At the end of the story, a number of ironic events transpire, and various surprises. They seem to be about the characters of the kinds of men who would make a bet like this. My favorite parts, actually, after the entertainment of the premise itself, are their private doubts and misgivings, which we're privy to via the omniscient narrator. The banker paces and agonizes later: "What was the object of that bet? What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two millions? Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life? No, no. It was all nonsensical and meaningless." I love it when Russian writers sound like that (which is possibly Garnett). The lawyer's own sense of the meaninglessness of the bet informs his actions in the resolution, more or less. But more than anything I liked reading about the terms of the confinement, though it was indeed very harsh and strict about human relations. Among other things, there's a good case here that both of them won the bet, and lost the bet, and did so independently of one another. A pretty neat little literary stunt—as I said, a thought experiment more than anything else, but a nicely done and intriguing one.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov