“How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (1897)

David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, calls this long story by Robert Hichens a masterpiece, comparing it with “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu, and “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions. Hichens is working with a ghost or apparition that shades toward demonic possession (Le Fanu’s “The Familiar” might have been the better comparison, or Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener,” or the movie Paranormal Activity). It’s not a bad conceit but the story is also at pains in a 19th-century kind of way to oppose a spiritual orientation and a rational. Thus the two main characters are a priest, Father Murchison, and a scientist, Professor Guildea. They have an interesting if somewhat mechanically devised friendship. Both are middle-aged and celibate, connected by intellectual interests but even more by mutual temperaments. The connection is cerebral but also meeting the emotional needs of both as they chew things over. Father Murchison self-consciously emphasizes the importance of love, which Professor Guildea rejects. He doesn’t deny its utility for others but it’s not for him. In this story, however, such decisions are not always up to us. A ghost falls in love with him, in fact, and wants to be with him forever. I’m not sure “falls in love” is the way to put it. This presence, which he first sees, or senses, on a park bench across the street from his place, is suddenly with him always and he can’t escape it by traveling either. He doesn’t like it. The thing does not care. It likes him, or something. There’s some nice ambiguity between a sense that he’s overreacting, on the one hand, that it’s all in his head, he’s too isolated in his work, he should relax and open up to others more. Father Murchison seems to think so. On the other hand, there’s the horror of when no doesn’t mean no. It remains open whether this is indeed Father Murchison’s love or something more remorseless—I’m inclined to the latter, of course, like Hartwell. I’m not entirely sold on everything this story is pitching but at the very least it’s a great contribution to the “familiar” style of haunting, the predatory force that randomly attaches and won’t let go. In the end, the priest sees it himself: “Upon the bench something was sitting, huddled together very strangely.”

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

"Peasants" (1897)

This bracing long story by Anton Chekhov was a sensational controversy on first being published. Even Leo Tolstoy thought it was too much, a "crime against the people." Russian censors disapproved its bleak portrait and the report by one (a V. Sokolov), per Wikipedia, makes as good a case as any for the importance of the story, even though he was arguing for cuts and changes:

In the first part of the April volume of Russkaya Mysl there is a story by A.P. Chekhov called "Peasants" which demands special attention. In it the life of peasants in villages is depicted in exceedingly grim tones. Throughout summer they toil in fields from morning till late at night along with members of their families, and yet are unable to store bread even for half a year. Nearly dying of hunger because of that, almost all of them, nevertheless, are engaged in excessive drinking. For this they are ready to part with everything, even their last piece of clothes... Their helplessness is aggravated by the immense burden of taxes which for peasants' families are unbearable. The real curse for these peasants, or rather their families, is indeed their total ignorance. The majority of the muzhiks, if the author is to be believed, do not believe in God and are deaf to religion. Peasants long for light and knowledge but are unable to find the way to them on their own because very few of them can read or write at all. Most of them are seemingly unaware of the concept of literacy as such.

Thus the results to date, in 1897 (if the author is to be believed!), of the liberation of the Russian serfs in 1861, nearly 40 years on. That makes the story important politically and historically, but it also has the usual high polish of Chekhov, if decidedly in the brutal naturalist style, taking a page from Zola and even upping the ante. Chekhov's observant eye and ear are trained on squalor and degraded living conditions. It feels true because it goes so far so unflinchingly. It's not hard to see why people objected and resisted giving it credence—much the way police brutality is treated in the US nowadays. But, as they say, that doesn't make it any less true, and we know now that Chekhov's story is closer to journalism than fiction. But it is fiction, a good story, and as if to prove the point it comes with a tender and bittersweet resolution. Bittersweet with all emphasis on the bitter. The sweetness lies only in futile hope.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

"The Eyes of the Panther" (1897)

Ambrose Bierce had a way of getting in the grill of things to come in the 20th century. Here he's paying his respects to the werewolf strain of 19th-century horror (strictly speaking, the werecat, or more specifically the werepanther), acquitting himself competently as usual with ingenious twists of perception and expectation. In 1930 Val Lewton wrote a story inspired by it, "The Bagheeta," and a decade later produced the movie Cat People, which feels much like this story. A man wants to marry a woman but she won't have him because she says she is insane and it wouldn't be fair to him. She explains herself with a story about the accidental death of her older sister, smothered by her mother who was in a panic because of a panther stalking them from an open window. Nobody, including we the readers, understand why this makes her insane, but that's the story. Later, in the formal twist (heads up, spoiler-phobes), the man is menaced by a panther, or the eyes of a panther, in his window. Exercising his Second Amendment rights, he riddles it with bullets to death. Actually, he only fires once. It turns out to be the woman. The way I read the story first, blissfully unaware and unthinking of the "were" implications, I took her as insane to think she was insane. Stuff like that happens. People think weird ways, especially in horror stories. Then I thought, OK, well maybe the insanity is some paranoid compulsion thing that has turned her into a kind of stalker. I did catch all the foreshadowing of feline attributes, notably the glowing eyes, but took it literally, as descriptive. And it can be read that way! This is the real connection with Cat People. We don't know in either case that these haunted women actually turn into panthers (the specific feline in the movie too). They might just think they do, prowling the night as insomniacs. A further twist has been articulated by the critic S.T. Joshi, arguing the man knows it's her when he fires his gun. He kills her for spurning him. Hey, that works too. And don't forget it also works as a mystical story of a werepanther (as does the movie). There's something deceptively slight about Bierce, but the more you read him the more you can feel him operating at these deeper multiple levels with a good deal of skill. He was willing to be heartless (some called him "Bitter Bierce") and he often worked within the disciplines of the twist ending, which tempt gimmickry. But don't be fooled by the horror gewgaws. There's usually a lot more going on in Bierce.

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

What Maisie Knew (1897)

Behind all the typical crosshatchings and shadings of language in this Henry James novel is something at once so homely and such an example of social realism that it's almost hard to believe he wrote it: the story of a girl who only serves as one more item to fight about between two divorced parents. It's surprisingly modern too, given that widespread acceptance of divorce would not begin to occur for the better part of another century—even maybe a little daring (or "European"). Somehow, James manages to pack some humor around a tale that is otherwise nearly appalling. It's funny and tragic and stupefyingly complex, as relations between the parents shift from fighting about who gets to have Maisie to fighting about taking her off one another's hands. Over the course of the narrative, each takes multiple lovers—indeed, at one point, former lovers begin to be involved with one another, and sometimes they have responsibility for Maisie awkwardly thrust on them. Governesses come and go, loom large, depart, return again. Maisie grows from a toddler to adolescence. She is so guarded and low-key it's hard to see the effect of all this, except that she is so guarded and low-key. We rarely see her in notable pain, but the litany of detail piles quite high, forcing us to consider, how can she not be in pain? It's impressive all the things James manages here, keeping the focus on the child's-eye view, the way cat and mouse cartoons only show the knees, shins, and shoes of grown-ups. Yet the madness swirling around her could not be more apparent, as we repeatedly see adults lying or exaggerating to the child for their own gains. It's impossible to miss how much harm and damage are being done over and over. The best here are weak, the worst unspeakable. Maisie is merely an innocent cipher. It's true James might have had more open compassion for her—as an element in this story, it's notably missing. The humor derives from the painful clarity of each adult's particular style of weakness, their vanities and repeated foibles, with all their transparent psychological sources. Ultimately these laughs, such as they are, provide no relief from the situation. But as nothing is much of a relief here—again, perhaps the problem of the missing compassion—one is grateful for the light even as the downward spiral only worsens by the page.

"interlocutor" count = 3 / 272 pages (includes "interlocutress")

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

"An Outpost of Progress" (1897)

Read story by Joseph Conrad online.

Joseph Conrad has typically been tough for me to read. He can be ponderous, and in many ways, perhaps, this story shows the problems. The first paragraph alone covers most of the first two pages. But the story is on the long side for a short story, nearly 30 pages, which allows space to set a narrative rhythm that slowly but surely becomes riveting. It's set in colonial Africa, where two white European men, Kayerts and Carlier, have just been delivered to the outpost of progress in the title, an isolated fortification on a river, in a jungle, 300 miles away from the nearest office of the company that has installed them there. Though the story stays close to these two men at the outpost, the omniscient narrator occasionally shifts away to provide helpful information. Kayerts and Carlier are there for the sake of their careers and have little interest in Africa or the natives beyond what they need to minimally meet their duties. They don't do much. They talk to one another a lot. They discover literature. A third company official, described by Conrad in his blunt and dated manner as "a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price," is more the one running things there. Late in the story, after Kayerts and Carlier have been there five months and are expecting to see again soon their company official superior, who originally accompanied them there, things take a dark turn. Armed revolutionaries show up and stalk around the camp. Price—whose real name is Makola—meets with them and keeps Kayerts and Carlier out of the talks. From there, things begin to go wrong in bad ways quickly. It's a story we've known for some time, which is that little good comes of powerful white Europeans put in charge of natives in foreign lands. Conrad's story takes time to get up to full speed, but its power becomes immense. It goes in many directions at once, like a bomb exploding, and with shrapnel too. It's remarkable. Conrad's universe is a uniquely bleak place, and this story (which he considered his best) is a clinic in how he does it, starting with those long, long paragraphs that transport you inexorably to the interior.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine