“The Private Life” (1892)

This long Henry James story, as much bantering comedy as ghost tale, almost counts as classic weird in a way, with a pair of cerebral concepts that are a bit didactic and somehow a bit rational too, which undercuts. James never was comfortable with the irrational, which is one reason his ghost stories tend not to be that good. It’s also from the period in his career when James was becoming ever more prolix and abstruse by the year (partly related to dictating his drafts and fussing with the typescripts). On the one hand, here, we have a genial upper-class nobleman, who is a model of poise and charming manners, the popular man who attracts everyone. Then there is the novelist, who maintains two identities: the one facing his friends and the public, and the one facing the blank page. In this story the nobleman disappears when no one is with him, in his solitude, like the unheard tree falling in the woods. And there are two novelists: one who chats it up with everyone, and the other laboring at his manuscript in the dark. I like that detail about working in the dark. Still, overall, the story feels more awkward and heavy-handed than anything. The high concept is not delivered with a lot of clarity and it takes a while to get there. James mocks those at ease in the world as vacuous, hollow, empty, and he lionizes the brooding novelist. No self-interest there (let alone self-pity). So, while taken literally, both apparitions may qualify as weird and also uncanny and maybe other adjectives (strange, mysterious, etc.), they are not really meant to be taken literally. It’s poetic and metaphorical about society and art and stuff like that. If James really wanted to make it weird, really wanted to write a ghost story, he would have had to take out a certain amount of verbiage. It’s about 40 pages as it stands—can you get it down to 15, H.J.? I read somewhere that James was envious of Sheridan Le Fanu and tried to write his ghost stories on approximately that model. Le Fanu could go on and on himself, but the main distinction is that James can’t commit in the clinch to something he obviously feels is ridiculous and beneath him. I like some of his ideas, like the ones here. I just wish James had liked them more.

“interlocutor” count = 1 / 40 pages (“interlocutress”)

Read story online.

The American Claimant (1892)

This short comic novel by Mark Twain treads familiar ground. The Prince and the Pauper might be the earliest and better model, but it's a tired old story rooted in high romanticism tropes, with vaguely medieval trappings, involving mistaken identities and lost lineages of nobility, set into a tiresome context of USA vs. Europe (and/or democracy vs. monarchy). The plot is detailed enough to hold water, and maybe even sturdy enough to sail, but for me most of the elements are merely hackneyed, stale for Twain and in general too. It's got enough to hold interest, especially if you are already inclined toward Twain. I have unfortunately lost some of my enthusiasm by reading more of him, but I am soldiering on. Twain liked to claim this was the world's first dictated novel, using some recording device, so there is that too. Seems legit. But it doesn't make much difference—he likely had a shot at revisions from a transcription, and his literary voice always was garrulous and natural. The jokes are so familiar they tend to be more pro forma than funny—about the foibles of people, the inanity of bureaucracy, and all the hypocrites and buncos cluttering things up everywhere. I can appreciate a lot of it—especially the railing against religion and aristocracy—because I'm generally in agreement with it. But he rambles often beyond my PC limits. At the moment I shudder at every casual use of the N-word I see or hear by a white person and unfortunately it shows up again here too. He is often not funny at all, which I don't have to tell you is a fatal flaw in a comic novel. Another interesting and jarring point of Twain that intrudes here is his fascination with business and making money. His characters often seem to be negotiating complex contracts with business jargon suddenly all over the place. Not surprising, perhaps, given that among other things Twain was also a failed businessman a few times over. The American Claimant is short and charming enough and with enough of his themes that you could package it up with some of his other stuff, as Library of America has, for a decent collection down at his secondary level. Not sure I'm interested in any levels below that, but I still enjoy reading him even when he's kind of an idiot.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic (Library of America).

"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)

Read story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman online.

This story is now a landmark of feminist literature, but I encountered it first as a story in a horror collection (I wrote about it a couple years ago here). It qualified as horror probably because it deals with madness, a recurring theme of horror, along with the institutions that house the afflicted. But it's easy now to see the feminist themes too. The first-person narrator, who remains unnamed (a common device among short stories, I am seeing), has suffered some kind of nervous breakdown. Her husband John is a doctor and orders bed rest for her and a minimum of mental stimulation. She has nothing to read and is forbidden to write—a certain hell for some of us. The story is her journal, kept in secret. With a minimum of outside stimulation, she becomes fascinated and obsessed with the pattern of the yellow wallpaper in the room where she is confined. She tries to analyze the intricate patterns—"I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry"—but she can't. Eventually she believes she sees the figure of a woman moving behind the pattern, trapped behind the pattern, struggling to get out. Eventually she identifies that woman as herself. It's also possible to read this as a straightforward profile of mental illness, when her perceptions go to such extremes—more in the line of conventional horror. But other details tell. She may be confined but she's not exactly isolated. Her husband sleeps there with her at night. She notes frightful details about the room—the wallpaper has been previously torn away in spots, "the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there," and the bed is nailed to the floor. It's all a bit like the movie The Tenant. No one else in this story particularly registers these terrible details, yet they feel more concrete than the delusions of a sick mind and/or feminist allegory of a woman's position in society. It feels more like a chamber of horrors somehow. At the same time, the woman also feels genuinely unstable. Something is wrong with her and also with that room, that wallpaper. The story still affects me strangely. But it makes all sense as a feminist parable too, which is the way Gilman intended it. While we're at it, it's also a good indictment of attitudes toward mental illness that prevail yet today. It's a remarkable story.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)

"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892)

Read story by Arthur Conan Doyle online.

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories brought a strange combination of the hyper-rational and the superhuman to the foundations of mystery stories as we know them today, advancing and developing them in new and better directions. The influence is still basically huge. Most Holmes stories feature at least one scene where the eccentric master detective reels off a series of insights that astonishes everyone within earshot. He's like a magician, but tut-tuts and gives all credit to science and the logic of deductive reasoning. Holmes is indeed observant, a fine trait for any detective, but his amazingly accurate insights are more often a matter of misdirection on the part of Doyle, who is the real magician. Examine closely any of these displays by Holmes, and one is more apt to find a series of lucky guesses. The clues often support other interpretations as well. But everyone in these scenes is amazed, so we go along with it. There's probably some psychological term for this powerful effect, and what the hell, it makes the stories entertaining. The fact is, there's something wonderfully comforting about Holmes and his sidekick / biographer, Dr. Watson, that makes their stories a pleasure. Holmes is a ridiculous superman but at least he has flaws too, and somehow it works. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is a fine example of how it's done. Holmes amazes his clients (and Watson, and us) once or twice, and solves the mystery before any of the rest of us, even as we are all exposed to the relevant evidence at the same time. Amazing! This one is an example of the locked-room mystery subsubgenre, in which a victim is found locked into a room that can only be locked from the inside, with no evidence of any other way out. It's an ingenious dream of a mystery—until, again, we look at it or think about it too closely, at which point it verges on self-parody. I'm reminded of villains in places like James Bond movies, who are never satisfied with simply killing someone, but instead must have elaborate schemes involving fountains, indoor pools, sharks, and floors that recede into walls. Certainly we have a version of that here. But we also have something that's scrupulously fair by the rules it sets for itself, the rules of giant swaths of mystery story writing. We have equal access to the clues, but Holmes is usually the only one who can put them together. I just picked one story for this exercise, but my own experience is that Sherlock Holmes stories are best enjoyed by the handful, meaning you're better off picking up a collection of a dozen or more (why not all of them!) and reading that. It's probably not a bad idea to make sure this story is included.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

"The Real Thing" (1892)

This story finds Henry James once again worrying ideas about reality and artifice in art. The unnamed first-person narrator is a portrait artist, as opposed to landscape. That's what one of his friends does, and because the divisions are all so clear and neat, one day the landscape artist sends along a curious pair of models to the portrait artist (having no need for them in his landscape work, you see). As it turns out, they are impoverished aristocracy—even the word "model" is beneath them. What strange world is this? Still, James appears to have his hands on something here. Not surprisingly, the aristocracy wins his grudging respect, even when they are in such arrears. Or perhaps because of it. Like Jesus and the Doobie Brothers, nobility is just all right with James. But he's also at pains to draw a line between professionals and amateurs. No matter what their origins, class, or taste, the models are to be pitied as amateurs—not "the real thing." The couple, of course, believe they are exactly that, as aristocracy. The narrator even believes it to an extent. But he has such better luck producing authentic work with models from the lower classes. Somehow he can't make it with this couple. "She was always a lady certainly," he writes of attempting to work with the woman, "and into the bargain always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing. There were moments when I was oppressed by the security of her confidence that she was the real thing. All her dealings with me and all her husband's were an implication that this was lucky for me." Which might be another way of saying, "The rich are different from you and me." I like to think the attitude was on the wane in Fitzgerald's time, but it's probably stronger than ever in our own, and certainly Henry James wasn't about to give it up in his time. But here he is nonetheless, grappling with what is real and what is not, with what looks like it should be yet somehow isn't, and vice versa. It doesn't surprise me that the aristocracy appears to have a bedrock of personal power that is mystifyingly empty when examined closely, but that's probably just because the world has moved along an inch or two. Nowadays it's engineers we believe can accomplish anything, fix anything, make anything do anything. We are bitterly disappointed when they can't (see the internet) but paradoxically that only seems to strengthen our faith. My point is that an engineer living the bum's life might be closer to our picture of what James means by "the real thing" here. He's taking on, even addled by his adoration of aristocracy, some of the most baffling mysteries of our lives, judging and assessing the appearance and character of others. In the end, our narrator the portrait artist is reduced to copying out points such as the cut of Major Monarch's trousers, or that "mathematically neat" trim of the back of Mrs. Monarch's hair. Yes, that's their name—Monarch. They aren't butterflies.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 26 pages

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

"The Pupil" (1892)

"The Pupil" is short enough that it's probably more reasonable to consider it a story (or "tale," in the parlance) and be done with it. It's all at once a dense thrust of language and so lucid that its terms are clear from the start: a boy, a tutor, and the mother (and family) who hires the one for the other. Yet it never seems to go quite where you expect, and the ending, which is predictable enough, even so took me by surprise. In fact, a good many things are turned upside down in this. As usual with James it's often very funny, deceptively so. His authorial voice runs along in its eternally studied murmur and suddenly something happens—a turn of events or a turn of phrase—and one realizes he has just made a very sly joke, one that, in fact, is perfectly timed when you go back to look at it more closely. Follow along carefully, for example, with his use of the term "man of the world." But for all that, it turns tragic and effectively sad and moving in the end, simply by the expert way in which he continually turns expectations on their heads. The first—my first, anyway—is that this will be some variation on O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" or maybe something by Booth Tarkington or Clarence Day (all of which would have come after this story, but bear with me), a wry, puckish account of an unruly boy and the adults who try to control him set approximately at the turn of the 20th century. Instead, it turns out to be the boy's family that is the source of problems, to a degree that grows increasingly pathological and less funny (even as the jokes keep coming, but now they sting). As usual, it's 98% Americans cast adrift in Europe, attempting to adapt to the social climes and make them work for themselves, even as they inevitably impose unsophisticated homegrown values one way and another. In the end the boy and tutor are enormously likeable and I found myself coming to hate the family every bit as much as the tutor comes to, a point that is initially baffling when it is brought out early as foreshadowing, before we have any more idea than the tutor what about them could engender such loathing.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 41 pages

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