“The Dead Smile” (1899)

F. Marion Crawford didn’t write even a dozen horror short stories, but they tend to be among the best from the fertile turn of the 20th century. This one features a corpse that keeps escaping from its coffin in the family mausoleum—beheaded, too, and the head self-mobile, harbinger of Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” still to come just a few years later. “The Dead Smile” riffs on “rictus sardonicus,” a term not used in the story but an apt tag on the internet—an exaggerated involuntary grin. The condition generally comes of tetanus but can also suggest strychnine or hemlock poisoning. Ray Russell put it to good use in his 1961 story, “Sardonicus.” In this story, the unnerving grin is associated most with a bitter old man who harbors family secrets. “He smiled, stretching pale lips across discolored teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt.” What’s more, and probably the best effect here, whenever he flashes this grin everyone else in the room starts to grin the same way. It’s the source of the story’s title, with interesting multiple meanings. In the spooky family crypt most of the dead are wrapped in shrouds, except the one that climbs out of its coffin and is usually found leaning against a wall with its head rolled up at its feet. This is all great scene-setting, especially when everyone starts to grin in unison. It’s good, because the story can be unfortunately a little lame and obvious. The terrible old man with the big grin wants to forbid a marriage between his son and his niece but won’t say why (it’s not hard to guess as the story goes along). I note that the marriage of first cousins made me uneasy, but not anyone else here. “The Dead Smile” largely overcomes its flaws by its strange air and details. As it happens, the point of the story, its big revelation, doesn’t have much to do with either the escaping corpse or the rictus sardonicus. There’s also a banshee on hand (in Irish legend, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death), equally beside the point and perhaps the least interesting element of the story. “The Dead Smile” may not be Crawford’s best, but it holds its own.

65 Great Spine Chillers, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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“The Harbor-Master” (1899)

I’m still not sure at all about Robert W. Chambers as a writer of horror (and/or fantasy and/or science fiction). He didn’t do much of it, more inclined to writing bestselling romances that are all but forgotten nowadays. But his speculative stories have an ardent and enduring fan base, which includes Nic Pizzolatto, co-creator of the True Detective franchise. The Chambers gold is found in the first half of his 1895 collection of stories, The King in Yellow, specifically in the first handful or so of stories. The rest are romances, and cheesy. I’m even meh on the ones with all the reputation, such as “The Repairer of Reputations,” and not at all interested in the romances, which I thought took up the rest of his career. And mostly they did, but it turns out he returned to the weird now and then, as with this one. It also exists as the first five chapters of his 1904 novel In Search of the Unknown, the story of a cryptozoologist pursuing monsters and romance. Gutenberg has the novel online and the story is also featured in a 2021 Hippocampus collection of Chambers stories edited by S.T. Joshi, The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers. It makes sense to give this story the honors of the collection title because it’s the best story I’ve read by Chambers yet. It seems likely that H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by it for his so-called “Deep Ones” (off the coast, in the water) in the “Innsmouth” story. It seems likely the creators of the 1954 movie The Creature From the Black Lagoon knew this story too. Lovecraft’s amphibians interbreed with humans, but this “harbor-master,” the nickname the villagers have for it, is more of a brute animal with perhaps a taste for human flesh. He’s certainly a danger. I must say it impressed me, nicely paced, always interesting. The harbor-master is intriguing and scary too—the image of him seen from a distance is powerful. The story is also somewhat oddly funny in places. The cryptozoologist narrator is visiting the remote area at the invitation of a man who claims to have a pair of extinct birds, great auks ... and something more, if there is any interest. Our guy works for the Bronx Zoo, a detail I love. It makes sense given Chambers’s origins in New York City. Halyard, with the auks, is an invalid in a wheelchair who has a “pretty nurse” working for him. Our guy and the pretty nurse take up with one another, described comically as on all fours on the floor looking for a thimble the pretty nurse has dropped. The romance(s?) begin (in the novel)! I count this story as a good one from Chambers. Maybe I’m ready to give him another chance. He is a tough nut!

The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers, ed. S.T. Joshi

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Heart of Darkness (1899)

Last time through Joseph Conrad's short but exceedingly dense novel I realized how entwined it can be taken in many ways with horror, doing the kinds of things Algernon Blackwood ("The Willows"), H.P. Lovecraft ("At the Mountains of Madness"), and David Lynch (Blue Velvet) before and after it do in terms of animating and super-charging landscapes and setting. I also realized, as Marlow struggles to get the steamboat up the river, how reminiscent it can be as well of Mark Twain's riverboat tales. It is ultimately a grand adventure tale with a necessarily dismal ending. The scene where the boat is stuck in fog—my favorite part—put me in a King Kong frame of mind, which lingered into the encounters with jungle and natives. Conrad's plodding, stultifying language is easier to take with patience (also required for swaths of 19th-century horror so I've had practice lately). I had to laugh early when even Marlow's listeners in the frame story groaned when they could tell he was about to launch into another one. Heart of Darkness insists that you read it slowly, which might account for why so many consider it a novel rather than the long story it is. All the good parts are embedded in long droning paragraphs but they will come to you if you let them. There are manifest problems with use of the N-word and with racism generally. At the same time, it is essentially a parable about colonialism so I'm willing to give it some license. To be clear, the "heart of darkness" is not anything about skin tone. The worst people here are white, which starts with the madman gone native inside his own head, Kurtz, but also includes the "pilgrims" traveling on the steamer, who enjoy taking potshots at natives from the boat, the way 19th-century Americans fired at buffalo from trains. Fans of Apocalypse Now may or may not like the novel (novella, whatever). I don't have much sense of that. My experience was that the Conrad disappointed me after the high-flying hallucinatory impact of the movie, but as I say I have often struggled with it. It is slow and ponderous yet full of insidiously great concrete detail, such as the heads spiked on the fence around Kurtz's house all facing the house. As the tale winds into the interior it finally casts an inexorable mesmerizing spell.

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"The Darling" (1899)

I finally got to Anton Chekhov's version of "The Darling," going about it all ass-backwards and reading the Scott Bradfield demi-homage from 1990 first, a few years back. I like the Chekhov more, perhaps needless to say, though I appreciate Bradfield's stunt work. The stories have parallels but are rather different. Chekhov is more artful and lacerating about the comic aspects of his tale and the main character's strange emptiness. Olenka starts as a young woman whose father, a retired collegiate assessor (whatever that is), is dying. Kukin is a theater manager and impresario who lives at "the lodge" with them. He's always complaining about his business. After her father's death, Olenka falls in love with him and they marry. Olenka discusses the ins and outs of theater business with everyone she meets, and they live happily ever after. Until Kukin dies rather suddenly after a few years. Olenka retires within herself and mourns for several months. Then she meets a lumber merchant, they get along very well, and they marry. Now her conversation is full of remarks like, "Timber gets dearer every year; the price rises twenty per cent." Of course this guy dies too after a few years, equally untimely. And there's another one. On a certain level the psychological realism is remarkably modern, looking forward to Woody Allen's Zelig, Jerzy Kosinki's Chauncy Gardner, and a disorder known as environmental dependency syndrome. Olenka's style is a strange mix of disappearing and consuming. She disappears into her partners yet somehow also seems to be eating them up. Or maybe it's bad luck, or perhaps it's an ironical take. We learn nothing of her mother, which suggests another untimely exit in Olenka's life, another trauma. When we meet her she is losing her father. As a woman alone in the world at the turn of the 20th century, she was dependent on a man for her survival. Women could push against that and did, currents of suffrage and feminism were in the air by then, but the baseline was still dependency on men. Olenka does not seem to push against it—except, perhaps, in a passive-aggressive way—but rather to accept it whole-heartedly. She gives herself entirely to her men. "You darling!" they say. Later in the story, when she is much older and maternal instincts have taken hold, it's a boy. All things must pass, as our strange darling Olenka learns well. The pathos of her emptiness is drawn to a tee.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

The social scientist and economist Thorstein Veblen was born in Wisconsin and educated at Yale. His most enduring and famous contribution is probably the term "conspicuous consumption," which is explained at great length in this short book. His language is dense with minute logical connections and repetitive social science jargon of the time. Some of his favorite words include "invidious," "emulation," "reputability," and "honorific." I'm not sure I can exactly recommend The Theory of the Leisure Class, because it's kind of a slog, but I will say Veblen is capable of undercutting the stuffy tone with a lacerating wit. In his social science way he is a student of the Oscar Wilde school of paradoxical statement. "The ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive effort is to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men.... The walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure.... The possession and maintenance of slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher wealth and position." The latter nugget, for example, is a de facto explication of field slaves and house slaves. The book is rich with observations such as these. One of my favorites is an anecdote about a king whose servant inadvertently places him too close to the fire before hurrying off on other duties. His Majesty must suffer the pains of burnt feet because it would be undignified for him to get up and move the chair himself. I first read this book in the early '80s. Coming back to it throws things into relief. Now that we are deep into the decadent phase of this second Gilded Age, which was only starting then, it's more obvious how much these issues of economic inequalities were driving Veblen's thought—and his contempt. The interesting thing to me about his greatest hit, "conspicuous consumption," is that I suspect it needs no explanation whatsoever to anyone in the US who hears it. Everyone knows it intuitively and has their examples. Mine is the Rolex watch—or perhaps diamonds. At any rate, this book is more exactly about two types of conspicuous consumption: conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. But it all amounts to the same thing. The wealthy are entitled to use a lot of resources doing silly and/or reckless things, because they can—and you can't. It explains a lot about the way we live, and incidentally takes the caustic bitterness around the bend into a few dark night laughs. And the ethnic Norwegian name notwithstanding, it's as American as Wisconsin apple pie.

In case it's not at the library.

"Paste" (1899)

In case you ever start to worry about Henry James's humanity—which you shouldn't, but it's understandable if you do—this story may provide a tonic. A young man with an interesting name, Arthur Prime, has recently lost his father, and then, only a few months later, his stepmother. His cousin Charlotte is with him to help with things—she grieves her aunt too. Arthur asks Charlotte to help him sort a last box he found wedged into a corner of a closet, out of sight and nearly inaccessible. In it are paste jewelry (as in title) and other souvenirs of her past as an actress. As the second wife of a (widowed, of course) clergyman, Arthur's stepmother forever left and disavowed her theatrical past, an occupation that is scandalous enough even in her past. Charlotte expects the pearls she finds there, at least, are real. But Arthur furiously denies it. He appears to hate even the idea of this part of his stepmother's life. He felt closer to her even than to his own mother, lost to him young. He's so adamant about it that Charlotte accepts its truth without question, but asks if she can keep them and the rest of the contents of the box as a keepsake of her aunt's. Arthur obviously thinks that's crazy, but assents, glad to be rid of it all. You can maybe guess where this is going, especially if you know a story by Guy de Maupassant called "The Necklace." A friend of Charlotte's clues her in later and swears the pearls are real. It's the story's resolution that's surprisingly warm and insightful, turning the whole thing into a sharply observed character portrait. It frankly surprised me, given all the artificialities of the last I'd read by him (The Awkward Age) still ringing in my ears. "Paste" is anything but artificial. The title is just an interesting play on the themes. Of course, this has its sources in James's interest in the theater and theater life (not to mention Guy de Maupassant). But I'm struck even more here by his interest in character studies and portrait painting. He dismissed Impressionism as a fraud, and at least two of his characters extol the virtues of portraiture as the one true art. I have some sympathy for the view, though I think it holds more interest in photography than painting (at least until the selfie era). "Paste" is a character study illustrated in words, and a really nice story too.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 17 pages

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

The Awkward Age (1899)

Henry James's whirl at writing plays earlier in the decade has full hold in this novel and the previous one, What Maisie Knew. Both are full of scenes, with dialogue and some stage direction but very little that helps us below the surface. It is all surfaces here, and James feels almost giddy with them. We are plunged into each scene with little to help us except what the characters say, and they are often hiding things from one another, or speaking subtly. It can be maddening—who and what are these people talking about? What are the things they say supposed to mean? These questions arise continually. Gradually a story is discerned, about a young woman, Nanda, who has reached the marrying age, and so must be married. She has two eligible suitors—one she loves but he cannot make a commitment and the other who loves her. Also there's a strange old guy hanging around who once loved Nanda's grandmother, detests her mother, and now has a thing for Nanda, though no one misses the age difference problem. Anyway, there are some clues for you. Good luck. As usual, I enjoyed reading it despite my confusions and misgivings. James's duty to his craft pays off well in many ways. Most surprising was how funny he can be, casually mocking certain figures of society. The title doesn't just refer to Nanda's post-adolescent time of life, you see, but also to the broader times in general, as the 19th century was turning into the 20th. Particularly some of the sideline women characters are funny in ways that sneak up on you. Their desperate ploys to maintain poise and dignity actually warranted giggling fits hours later as they floated back to mind. There is also something of the feel of a generational stamp to The Awkward Age—the "Fin de siècle" Generation, or some such. Van, the one who can't make a commitment, even when he loves, and Mitchy, the one who goes off and marries a harridan because Nanda told him she thought they'd make a good match, are lost soul frat brothers, comfortable in tails and keeping a bright face to the painful realities. At the finish the novel attempts to strike a note of pathos, which I think might be asking too much, given the generally wicked and gossipy narrative that holds sway. At the same time it's all wound up pretty well. I liked it on balance but you have to be prepared for a certain amount of confusion—"ambiguity" is the operating conceit, and James is often laying it on with a trowel. You're going to have to live with that to get through this. No doubt all the subtle dialogue accounts for the unusually high usage of "interlocutor" in this one.

"interlocutor" count = 25 / 402 pages (includes "interlocutress")

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

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899)

I was surprised on checking in again with Mark Twain's great long story to find out he was in his 60s when he wrote it. It has all the acid of an old man, that's for sure, but it proceeds with the clarity of a child's tale. That does make it a little programmatic on one level, yet the implicit faith in the corruption of the human soul is so complete as to render that a feeble objection. Twain simply sets up the ten-pins of the pious hypocrites and throws stones down the alley at them. Of course they fall—all of them. That's the fun of this. Another detail I like is that we never learn the original offense that motivates "the stranger" to his elaborate revenge. This story has some parallel in Poe's "Cask of Amontillado," which similarly presents a daydream of revenge. I call them daydreams because they go so perfectly, as if honed and burnished by a feverish mind over weeks and years of imagining them. In Twain's story, there are some hiccups. One family of hypocrites is spared through the secret actions of the Reverend Burgess, who bears his own stain as sinner. Yet even this resolves ultimately to the satisfaction of the revenger, more evidence for the daydream. I am always impressed by how boldly and neatly the man in the title accomplishes the corruption. One or two swift actions takes care of it. (Compare Osama bin Laden and 9/11.) It depends on a base but simple understanding of human psychology, along with the devilishly clever plot. I see by Wikipedia that some have attempted to connect the story with a real-life incident involving Twain and the town of Oberlin, Ohio. It might be so—didn't Stephen King do something similar, perhaps with obnoxious fans generally, in Misery? It would not surprise me at all to find there was a town in Ohio that resembled Hadleyburg. But it's also a little reductionist, and even beside the point. The reason this story is still read today—and should be!—has more to do with its take on human nature than any real town in the past. Yes, it's something of a harsh story, and makes me a little sad for the sense of Twain's growing bitterness toward the end of his life. At the same time it reminds me of the joke about not being depressed means you're not paying attention. I have sympathy—and at the very least the story shows again what an extraordinary writer Twain was.

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

"The Lady With the Dog" (1899)

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Anton Chekhov's late story fits neatly enough into the 19th-century European realist version of adultery, with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. It's shorter, obviously, so somewhat abstracted, but no less potent. It focuses more on the mutual attraction between lovers, not just the woman's, though she gets pride of place in the title. (Translation note: The title has been variously rendered as "The Lady With a Dog," "The Lady With the Little Dog," "The Lady With the Small Dog," "The Lady With the Pet Dog," and "[The] Lady With [the] Lapdog." The literal translation from Russian is "Lady With Dog." I'm working with the Constance Garnett translations.) She's an eligible woman in a bad marriage. He's a banker also in a bad marriage. They meet on vacation, and have a brief affair. The story is told third-person, mostly from the point of view of the banker, who expects it will be a fling that soon fades from memory. But it does not. He can't stop thinking of her. Eventually he tracks her down and finds she feels the same. They begin a long-term, long-distance affair. The story's tone is not particularly judgmental, though it notes the inconvenience and meager rewards of their behavior. It's neither a glorious romance nor a doomed one. It simply exists more or less as a condition of life—a welcome one, in many ways, and an annoying one too, in many others. It's hard to envy them, but also hard not to sympathize. It feels very much like modern life as we understand it—or, more accurately, as we don't understand it. I like the way it moves along a spectrum of illicit relationship, from objectified sexual conquest as a kind of hobby, to the indignities of love. The story feels modern partly because it's so obvious that divorce would do nothing to change anything. Indeed, a modern version could well include both divorcing and then marrying each other and still come to a similar bittersweet conclusion. I'd like to take this place to raise my objections to the admonitions of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, in their Elements of Style book, against using the term "the human condition." They—or Strunk, with White evidently concurring a few decades on—view it as a self-evident cliché or banality. But some things seem to fall squarely in the camp of exactly "the human condition"—that impossible paradox of desire and "reality" (I insist on the scare quotes). Among those things are a good many of the people and situations found in Chekhov's stories, not least this tale set in Crimea of inexplicable human passion. By the way, if it's any help, the dog is a white toy Pomeranian.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

The Awakening (1899)

It's not hard to figure out how Kate Chopin's short novel has earned its reputation as a landmark of feminist literature, for the timing of its publication, on the brink of the 20th century, as much as for its subject matter. The "awakening" of the title—interesting to note Chopin's original title was A Solitary Soul—is not just sexual, though it's that too, but more generally a revelation about the limited choices a woman has in society as conducted. Edna Pontellier, our hero and more or less a fine figure of Southern womanhood, is in her late 20s at the time of the story, married, the mother of two, living out the life of the genteel Southern upper middle class in and around New Orleans—a housewife, by which is meant a sanctioned kept woman. On a summer vacation she falls in love with a man not her husband, who feels the same toward her, and accordingly he flees the scene because he has no prospect to "have" her—by which is meant, explicitly, more than sex. He wants, in the parlance, her to be his. A sexual fling alone will not do. Edna can't get her head around this and therein lies the still resonant crucial conflict. Ultimately she makes herself sexually available to him, but it's not good enough. She realizes she has little choice in giving herself up to any man. They are the only terms she is offered, she comes to realize. Her only choice is which man, which she gave up anyway when she married (and certainly when she had children), and by the way it was a very limited choice in the first place. She pushes at these strictures on herself, taking up artwork and distancing herself from her children (Raoul and Etienne by name), but the strictures only tighten. I had some problems following Chopin's language and way of telling the story, which tended toward rote and droning and was often unclear about what was going on in basic terms. In that way, and only that way, it hasn't dated so well. There's a kind of inevitability to The Awakening—if Chopin hadn't done it someone else would have, and indeed the flood of novels, plays, and movies about women coming to just such epiphanies followed all through the 20th century. There are better examples, more coherent and urgent, but Chopin's occupies a unique historical vantage, not least for being so harshly reviled and shunned in its time.

In case it's not at the library.