The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895)

Arthur Machen’s early short novel displays his fascination with the occult and also, perhaps, his difficulties in organizing longer pieces. His long story or novella, “The Great God Pan,” published the year before, is another example. The images are striking, the situations unsettling, the language resonantly weird, but the narrative lumbers along like trawling a boggy swamp at night. The Three Impostors is so episodic, in fact, that two of its chapters (“The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder”) (no, not that white powder) have been broken out verbatim and anthologized as short stories, which in turn exercised influence on H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others. But the overall arc of the novel is much darker than either story. The “three impostors” are two men and one woman who belong to an occult society. They are hunting for “a young man with spectacles.” Two more main characters, Mr. Dyson and Mr. Charles Phillips, are middle-aged friends who see one another frequently for cigars and brandy and such. Dyson is something of a spiritual adventurer, or occult detective, while Phillips is a hardheaded proponent of the scientific way of thinking. They enjoy kicking it around. There’s a lot going on in the background of these scenes. The impostors have decided Dyson can help them find the young man with spectacles. They work to meet Dyson as if by accident, win his confidence, and accept his invitation to tell their stories, which include “Black Seal” and “White Powder.” The three plant clues in their stories to manipulate or lead Dyson to the conclusions they want him to reach. I think that’s what is going on here anyway. Machen can be so indirect and allusive about these themes it’s not always easy for me to make out. It’s possible I was missing things. There’s a lot compacted into this. We have no idea how horrifying the opening scene is, for example, until we have finished the novel. Then the opening becomes shocking. What I love most about Machen at his best is the powerful sense that more things are going on in heaven and earth beyond what we can detect or know with our senses. We only get glimpses of these realities, whatever they are, which are almost too awful to let ourselves contemplate. There are levels beyond levels beyond levels in the best of his stuff, which includes this novel. It may be awkwardly constructed, the dense language may hover near maddeningly opaque, but it is still a novel, not an accidental collection of breakaway stories. In a way, The Three Impostors is more like the opposite of a fix-up novel.

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

The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells published this long story—a novella by the technical rules, but many call it a novel—when he was still in his 20s. It’s widely considered his first, based on a story he published in a college newspaper. The Time Machine was serialized, cut off about three-quarters through, and finished later. It's a very early fix-up novel, in a way. It gets credit for launching the time travel branch of science fiction. Many dabbling in the concept still use the term “time machine.” I read it when I was a kid and found the first half thrilling and then got bored with it. Coming back to it more recently I saw how little it actually involves any of the knotty speculative paradoxes more associated with time travel now. It’s an excuse for a moderately interesting fantasy story or allegory based on projecting the specter of class divisions forward. Once our time traveler leaves for points unknown in his machine—I imagine it looking like Fred Flintstone’s car for some reason—he travels a mind-blowing 800,000 years into the future. That’s a long time! It’s amazing anything is recognizable. Even Earth itself would likely have changed radically. That’s where (when?) most of the story takes place, with conflicts (Wells would have us believe) between an aboveground race descended from effete elites and an underground race descended from workers that are notably monstrous. This is from a writer with well-known socialist sympathies. Apparently it’s what society made them into eons on. Later, in the finish that was delayed, the time traveler travels 30 million years into the future to make a significant contribution to the always intriguing “dying earth” subgenre of science fiction. By using such stark geological time spans this way, Wells sidestepped the burden of prediction (seen in utopian and dystopian tales as well as time travel), except in the most general sense, i.e., there will always be class divisions. Most of the problems in this still highly entertaining story are a function now of its century-plus age. H.G. Wells is already an engaging writer, fun to read and full of surprises. I read at least one more by him when I was a kid, War of the Worlds, also worth a look. And I have some ideas of getting to a few more, which I seem to often find enthusiastically touted on booktube (The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, etc.). Fun project if I can get to it.

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

“How to Tell a Story” (1895)

This short piece is the title essay in a collection Mark Twain published in 1897. It’s an interesting look specifically at the various problems of the humor piece, abstracted as such. He uses a joke as illustration that is actually funny—literally made me laugh. “There are several kinds of stories,” he writes, “but only one difficult kind—the humorous.” He discusses the problem awhile, turning to Artemis Ward for his example (“considered to be America’s first stand-up comedian,” per Wikipedia), along with the joke, called “The Wounded Soldier.” Twain describes his own approach perhaps better than anyone could, which he used all his career: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art [of storytelling].” Then he gets into timing, which he calls “the pause,” a deadly and delicate matter. This leads to “The Golden Arm.” Twain illustrates the utility and technique of “the pause,” but unfortunately indulges dialect in a way here that too readily suggests racism. A 19th-century African-American from Missouri tells the story, complete with the prized pause. “You must get the pause right,” Twain concludes; “and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.” It’s true, and Twain is too modest—which is not really like him—to mention it’s even harder to capture in writing. I’ve been thinking through these difficulties a lot as I go through Twain because his humor is my single favorite thing about his work. He doesn’t always pull off his various gags but his comic instincts always seem solid and I often appreciate even his misses. His humor makes a lot of his miscues worth bearing, though it’s not always easy. Reading across his career, it’s plain that he learned and changed and became reasonably more enlightened in his old age. Indeed, he was probably considered radical by contemporaries. His outrage about things like US foreign policy, however, was not a bit unreasonable. But he may have lost some of his comic instincts then and become more humorless. This piece suggests he spent most of his career knowing well what he was doing as a humorist.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
Read piece online.
Listen to piece online.

"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895)

Mark Twain’s full-throated takedown of the US novelist James Fenimore Cooper is often funny, but nearly as often lame. Full disclosure, I have never read any Cooper. Notable victims of Twain’s attack are The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder, from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series of five novels. I think I share Twain’s sense of Cooper and other early American writers as soporific and a little ridiculous. But mocking old books for being stupid is not a good look and it is a well you can go to only so often. In many ways, certainly by the 1890s, it was running dry for Twain as his stock in trade. He gave the treatment to Walter Scott (many times), Jane Austen, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle, to name a few. This spittle-flecked Daffy Duck indictment of Cooper is funny and bracing, anticipating the rip-roaring style of New Journalists and rock critics, making a lot of hay from the splenetic rant. The piece lurches into a list of 18 points that doesn’t hold up under its own weight. It is fatally lazy in the section criticizing word choice, by never giving us the full sentences where these words live. Giving us 20 or 30 isolated word pairs didn’t strike me as that funny. But compare the section just before that, on Cooper’s exaggerations, which worked well because it did include passages by Cooper. My favorite riff was on twig-snapping in the woods because I remember it as a common recurring element in frontier tales I read when I was a kid. Maybe I have read Cooper! “It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around,” Twain writes. “Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig.” There’s more to this rant, which hits the howling high note of anyone writing at top speed—the nice throwaway “worth four dollars a minute” is the tell in this case. But too often he stumbles again and wallows too long in some bog. His jokes miss at least as often as they hit. Still, I did laugh pretty hard more than once so “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” is probably worth checking out. You just have to put up with the mockery of someone whose own bare ass is sticking out there a lot of the time.

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

"The Repairer of Reputations" (1895)

This long confusing story by Robert W. Chambers is much loved and respected, it appears, showing up in anthologies and treatments of horror as a landmark. I've seen arguments for it as the first or at least an early appearance of the unreliable narrator device. Maybe—it has a lot of things going on. There's a science-fiction premise of a near-future New York City (which in this story means 1920). The US is a military power and has won a war with Germany, at least part of it fought in North America. It has legalized suicide, outlawed immigration, expelled all Jews, and relocated African-Americans to reservations, among other interesting and unexplained radical changes, on which the story feels suspiciously neutral. Our main character is Hildred, who is reading a banned play, The King in Yellow. The play also shows up in other stories in a kind of cycle, although many other stories in the original 1895 collection—which as it happens is also called The King in Yellow—are more like romances. Chambers never really wrote horror again. It's all concentrated in a handful of stories within The King in Yellow collection, which often make reference to a banned play called The King in Yellow. I hope you start to see what I mean by confusing. For further confusion, see the first season of the True Detective TV show, which name-checks random details from this story, like the place called Carcosa, which Chambers himself was name-checking from Ambrose Bierce (and H.P. Lovecraft later name-checked too, as I recall). O what tangled webs. Wikipedia discusses this story as an "anti-story," a classification of experimental literature I'm not sure I know well. Given how much I like stories, I'm not sure how much I want to know, certainly if this is the example. It just seemed like so much random nonsense. "The Repairer of Reputations" might be good for reading groups or even classrooms, all studded with bizarre detail begging to be unpacked. Both times I've ground through it I kept stupidly looking for narrative momentum because I forgot again, even when I knew better—also, the first section is energetic and enticing. But there is no momentum here by design. It's meant to confront readers and keep them off balance. And I haven't had the patience to do the unpacking. Let's consider the title. It's the job title for Mr. Wilde (which in the context of the 1890s brings Oscar to my mind, I don't know about you or Chambers) and it's not really clear what is involved in repairing a reputation, but appears to be related to organized crime, some kind of protection racket. Actually, Mr. Wilde seems like a minor character. The story ends with a note that Hildred has died in an asylum for the criminally insane, and basically that is where the trouble with the unreliable narrator business starts, assuming Hildred is the author. Yet why should we assume that? Next question for the weekly reading group. It's going to take a few months to get through this one. I can't wait to see the whiteboard.

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

"The Altar of the Dead" (1895)

Henry James addresses an interesting life condition in this story—the deaths of friends. There is a typical James plot to go along with that, with the usual odd and suggestive ambiguities. But I wish he'd stayed with the friends a little more, and the sense of loss. James was in his early 50s when he wrote it, and our hero, George Stransom, is 55. His most painful loss was a fiancée, but there are many other friends as well, including one, Acton Hague, who offended Stransom so deeply he never forgave him. One day, mulling these matters the way James characters will, Stransom wanders into an unfamiliar church, has a strange inspiration, and wins permission from the church to dedicate one of their candlelit alcoves to his friends—all except Hague. Soon enough a woman is involved, who often sits in silence with Stransom at his altar of the dead. Years go by. Slowly Stransom and the woman warm to one another and finally speak and find personal connections. By an amazing coincidence (what a small town London can be), it turns out the woman not only knew Hague but he was important to her. She beseeches Stransom to add a candle for Hague, but Stransom can't do it. The never-specified wrong was too great. In the end, the story and Stransom bend toward forgiveness, but it's left fraught and ambiguous. Because the sin is never specified the situation becomes overly abstract. Sin is sin and forgiveness is supposed to be absolute, but really there's more nuance to it. It's hard to feel too much for or against Stransom without knowing the reason for his break with Hague. But I did like the sense of watching and even standing vigil as friends (and family, not discussed here) inevitably begin to die. The story has some access to the experience of living on with friends even after they have died. For example, a friend of mine died in June 2001, and I often wonder how he would have reacted to 9/11 and all its aftermath. But that kind of thing is not for James. The closest he gets is the loss of Stransom's fiancée, which is so much more intense than a pal they're barely even comparable. But it's a nice idea, and the scenes at the altar of the dead are notably beautiful.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 36 pages

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

"Master and Man" (1895)

Read story by Leo Tolstoy online.

We've encountered a few severe snowstorms in the stories for this project so far, but Leo Tolstoy's could well be the best, or worst. Again, perhaps the biggest surprise in this project has been discovering how much I enjoy these harsh nature stories. In this one, the master Vasili Andreevich is eager to close a business deal and insists on traveling through a snowstorm that day to do so. He takes along one of his servants, Nikita, who sets up the horse and sledge, and away they go. Goodbye. The horse, of course, soon becomes equal partner among the three, in terms of personality and affect. For better or worse, my heart always goes out to these animals. It's obvious Tolstoy has lived with harsh winter conditions because his descriptions are detailed and telling. For example, the squeaking of the sledge's runners against the snow is a sure indication of extreme cold. The storm is fierce with extremely poor visibility. Even so, Master wants to take a shortcut. Before long they lose the road, and not long after that they are completely lost. The more that the horse and the servant are left to make decisions, the better off they are. They travel in circles and finally arrive at a village, where they are amazed by how far off the track they have traveled. They stop for directions, and to warm up. At that house they are invited to stay for the night, and Nikita is in favor of it, but Master is impatient to conclude his business. Again they lose their way, and then they lose the light. Caught by darkness, they must shelter in place for the night, knowing they are lost. When morning comes it turns out they are not far from shelter, but this story is more about the night, in which two of them die. Only Nikita survives, because of the noble actions of Master, although when it comes to that they are all three deranged by the conditions and hypothermia and it's hard to say with complete confidence that his actions were truly selfless. But the results are, and what counts most in this story are the characters, who are rich and complex. Well, the horse is a horse, but that's all he has to be. Andreevich and Nikita and their relationship turns out to be intricate, beautiful, and not at all predictable, though entirely believable. Great story.

Master and Man and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy