Nostromo (1904)

The subtitle of this hefty novel by Joseph Conrad is A Tale of the Seaboard. A description I saw called it a rip-roaring adventure story, which led me to a few errant expectations. Nostromo is the name of a person, not a ship as I had assumed. And “seaboard” is not the same as “seagoing,” although perhaps the best part of this shaggy dog is a treacherous if brief sea voyage. The other best part is the treatment of South America’s long history of unstable politics, the colonizers’ greed for riches and lust for power. The novel at large, in fact, seems to be mainly a lampoon (as I take it) of South America’s ludicrous and bloody history, set in a fictional country, or territory. It’s not far from Venezuela, with a shipping port and a silver mine owned by an English businessman. Nostromo is barely present for the first half or so, seen at the edges of the large rotating cast of characters. Conrad is more expansive here, going deep into the backstories of these characters—and new important characters keep emerging beyond the halfway point. It’s a serialized novel and often feels it but Conrad brings it to a solid ending, taking it where it must go according to the richly complex characters. It ends up landing on Nostromo the hardest, as it must with that title. Nostromo, a sort of hapless but brave peasant, gets by mostly on bravado and luck, along with his skills as a seaman. I have to say, even with all the cruelty on display—I see South America’s reputation as a haven for terrible torture goes back at least to 1904—it often feels comical more than anything. The revolutions and patriotic fervor result only in terrible violence and death but still things go on. All officials are at least a little corrupt, some very much so. Part of Nostromo’s appeal is his sincere peasant background. His highest military rank is captain, but he is a man of the people. He has several names, suggesting his status as a legend: Capataz de Cargadores, Gian’ Battista, Captain Fidanza, Nostromo. His background is Italian. I still think Conrad is mostly a chore to read, but patience does pay off. This story ends quite satisfyingly.

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

“Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad” (1904)

Three commas for the title: M.R. James has a nice way of letting his stories unfold, almost conversationally, but with subtly strange structures and digressions along with the twists and turns. I like how golf gets involved with this one and that the third-person narrator is a little put off by it, taking pride in being ignorant of the game. Our main guy, Professor Parkins, is taking some time off to stay in the country, work on some kind of writing or research project, and “improve his game” (that’s the golf). An acquaintance asks him to look into a nearby site while he is there that may have the ruins of a “Templars preceptory.” I had to look up both terms—the Templars were deadly serious knights of the Crusades, and a preceptory was more or less a school for them. Professor Parkins, after playing a round of golf, does look into the site and does find evidence of buried ruins there. He pokes around a little and finds a strange cylindrical object. Can you guess what it is? That’s right, it’s a whistle, and when he gets done scraping away the dirt he sees that it has strange markings on it. Of course we see the danger coming. Don’t blow on that whistle, we really want to tell this guy. But of course he does and then the trouble starts. I like the way James describes the whistle’s tone. “It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, [Parkins] somehow felt it must be audible for miles round.” The wind comes up suddenly and it’s difficult to close the window. The wind blows all night, and he has strange dreams. The next day, when he walks by himself, he has the feeling he is being followed. But when he turns around he sees only a strange figure in the distance that never gains on him. No problems with the golf—in fact, he plays better the second day. Children report that, while he was out, they saw someone in his room waving to them from the window. On his return to the room he sees someone has been using an extra bed there. I should also mention that Parkins is a rationalist who holds no truck with ghosts or the supernatural. His objections are cerebral and almost comic in the circumstances, but he staunchly insists on them. Among other things he is having his mind opened in this story. The ghost—ultimately there is a confrontation in the room—appears to be draped with a sheet (it has a “linen face”). You see the sheet thing a lot in cartoons and TV shows, but not actually so much in ghost stories, where they are usually more like mist if they are visible at all. But there’s an animated sheet here. The illustration above (by James McBryde) was used for a 2005 Penguin collection and is a reasonable approximation of the harassment Parkins endures. Fortunately, a believer is on hand to shepherd Parkins through and play golf with. This guy takes it upon himself to throw the whistle into a deep part of the sea. Problem solved. Or is it?

M.R. James, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
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“The $30,000 Bequest” (1904)

This Mark Twain story seemed a little humdrum and forced to me, although it deals with one of his favorite themes, the comical madness of greed and all the wreck a little bit of money can cause. The two principals here—husband Sally and wife Aleck, gender confusion noted by Twain himself, though not really to what end intended—catch wind that a long-lost uncle will be leaving them money on his death (amount per title) on the condition they never make inquiries of him. As it happens, he dies early in the story, but the couple never learns of it because they know they don’t dare ask after him. This story is about what their fevered imaginations dream up, which ultimately are amusing and harmless. There’s not really any story to this story to drive it home, as in the similarly minded “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” In fact, Sally and Aleck are often charming, if maybe a little pathetic. Another (or perhaps the same) mystifying gender inversion, or maybe not one at all, is that Aleck is the responsible manager of finances whereas Sally only wants to know how much he can spend. Aleck keeps plowing the (imaginary) money into investments, as capital. She starts from the day they hear of the bequest—which, as fate would have it, was only a week before they should have gotten it outright. Over the years she puts the money here, moves it there. And over the years they actually become billionaires, though Twain expresses it rather oddly as “twenty-four hundred millionaires”—as if the idea itself of a billionaire were ludicrous (as out of reach as a trillionaire would seem to be now, perhaps, here in this second gilded age). Anyway, Aleck finally slips up late in the game and loses everything, which, as a fantasy, just isn’t a tragedy. There’s still the real bequest, if they ever hear of it, let alone get it. At story’s end they haven’t, so we’re left at sea about what the story is about. They are greedy but they are also harmless and kind. Perhaps they wasted portions of their lives, but who hasn’t done that and isn’t it in the eye of the beholder anyway? To me, they look like an exceptionally compatible and loving couple, but that’s not what this story is about either.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)
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Letters From the Earth (1904-1909)

Here’s another of those Mark Twain pieces, like The Mysterious Stranger (which I am calling his last), cobbled together after his death from fragments of his writing and notes. The cobbler in this case is the historian and man of letters Bernard DeVoto, who published this in 1962 after one of Twain’s daughters finally relented and gave permission. It’s much like The Mysterious Stranger in many ways—jagged and inconsistent and focused with keen interest on the character of Satan, with whom Twain has obvious sympathies. Not for Satan’s love of evil but for his rejection by such a flawed God. At approximately this stage in Twain's career—call it the 20th century, or date it from the death of his wife in 1904—Twain is consumed and cannot really mask his contempt for God. These fragments boil with rage. This is a side of Twain I only dimly knew even existed, though of course his general mockery of Christianity often surfaced elsewhere. I generally took it as irreverence for effect, but I’m starting to think these issues were more important to him than I knew. He is scathing about the foolishness and contradictions of both Christianity and theism at large. He argues for the capriciousness and petty jealous character of the biblical God, mocking his omniscience and omnipotence as proof he hates us and does us all evil. The letters—barely connected fragments—are from the fallen Satan (lounging on Earth) to his former archangel companions Gabriel and Michael. Obviously Satan has some beef with God, but that doesn’t mean he’s not making good points. He focuses mainly on Adam and Eve and the Fall, and also on Noah and the flood, and a little on the contrasts and conflicts between the Old Testament and New, either one working to undermine the other, and adding up to nothing in Satan’s or Twain’s estimation. I’ve had discussions or arguments with Christians that resemble Twain’s here (like what was the big problem with Cain anyway?). They seem to tend to cite isolated passages in the Bible elsewhere. Twain gives us long passages of extreme violence he dredged from the Bible—I didn’t double-check him but I assume DeVoto did—as examples of God’s hypocrisy and low moral values. My sympathies are all with Twain here, on a cerebral level. But the intensity of his hatred is bracing and can be hard to take. He’s right and he's wrong too, just like those he criticizes. What a world, what a world!

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

"The Mezzotint" (1904)

This M.R. James story is full of the fussy little complications I'm starting to like about him. The story's setup puts the most fantastic stuff at least at thirdhand account, for example, though you don't particularly notice. He uses such devices to distance and blur, as a kind of misdirection, even as he maintains a lucid if slightly stiff academic tone. The characters are stuffy people who work in libraries and museums along with the dealers they rely on. Our main guy is in charge of procuring topographical drawings and engravings for a university museum. One of his dealers alerts him to a mezzotint, a print using a technique that gives it a distinctive lustrous tone, all in silvers or sepia. The dealer thinks it may be of interest, but it's expensive. Send it over, says our guy. When it arrives, he is disappointed. He doesn't find it remarkable. It is only a lackluster image of a mansion with information about it missing. Later, a visitor likes it more than he does, pointing out the image of the figure entering in the foreground from the side. Hmm, our guy had not noticed that before. Even later, a third person has a strong reaction to it. Now the figure is on the lawn of the estate, creeping on all fours. The drama of the mezzotint proceeds from there, with our guy and his crew checking it regularly and getting a narrative out of what they see. Some minor flaws: at some point I for one would have sat and look at that mezzotint like I was watching TV—our team tries it late but it doesn't seem to change when they're watching. They also construct a big narrative out of the changing scene, as if that's the point, when in this situation I think the simple fact that it is happening would be sufficiently alarming or at least intriguing. Wouldn't we be getting the print into the lab for analysis of the ink and such? The changing picture is the really freaky thing here, not the story it is depicting, as satisfyingly horrible as that is when we learn more about the mansion and its history. Still, I have to admit James can cast a spell and I end up liking how fanciful some of his premises are—they're both playful and uncanny and they often work. The academic setting where art is prized is a nice one too. The mezzotint exists to be beautiful or informative or both, but there is also something disturbingly wrong with it. It's a good tension—good story.

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"Count Magnus" (1904)

I admit M.R. James has been something of an acquired taste—he has felt consistently oversold—but stories like this are bringing me around. He has a strange dry way of telling them, ruminative and circling main points, though the details and violence as reported can be ferocious. They are often in the vein if not indeed classics of one of horror's favorite devices, first-person tales by librarians, scientists, and other researchers whose work introduces them to curious mysteries that deepen into the uncanny. "Count Magnus" is built out of documents found hidden in a house that has been purchased and demolished for new construction. I should say spoiler alert because this latter point is reserved as a reveal for the end. But it's only an empty formality, as it adds little to the foregoing. James sets up basically a historian's approach to assembling knowledge, summarizing and editing original documents (judiciously, we trust). This cerebral and sober distance can work to make fantastic events more believable but also less immediate; paradoxically, the impact is more strained but also more insidiously unnerving. You feel the spook later and it doesn't necessarily go away quickly. So there is our narrator, puzzling over details from the found documents, and there is Mr. Wraxall, a freelance writer who sold light travel pieces and created the documents—notes, mostly, for his pieces. The story involves Wraxall's experience in a region of Sweden where he died and specifically one estate, where his body was found. The local inquest rules it death by "visitation of God." "Count Magnus" is ambiguous enough in its details that it may be considered a ghost story (as Wikipedia and the Penguin collection above has it) but others take it as a vampire story—most horror writers of the day had at least one or two of them, the way all garage bands in the '60s covered "Gloria." The story has some great effects with various hideous deaths. Count Magnus is shown to be a cruel lord of the manor in the feudal times when he was alive, severely punishing the peasants on his estate for the smallest infractions. As Wraxall investigates, we see evidence that something is affecting him. He begins to have blackouts and periods of missing time and confusion. At one point he reports: "[I] found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I believe, singing or chanting some such words as, 'Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?' and then, something more which I have failed to recollect." This clouding minds business to me puts it squarely in the vampire realm, though we are spared any overt blood-sucking, purple lips, etc. You have to wonder what an inquest jury is getting at with the "visitation of God" ruling. Our narrator does not know because he only has the documents to go on, and Mr. Wraxall has long since been dead and unable to tell the rest of the story himself.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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"The White People" (1904)

The Welsh mystic Arthur Machen has a fair amount of stature in horror and fantasy circles, perhaps best known for his long story, "The Great God Pan," published in 1894, which set off a goat-god theme around the turn of the century that many contemporaries worked with in the same way they did vampires and werewolves (that is, probably for commercial reasons). Stephen King apparently has "Pan" on his short list of the very best. I admit I struggled with it, but this story is something else. Because we need to make the point in a realm dominated by H.P. Lovecraft, the story has nothing to do with race. These white people are more like silver and glowing when they are seen at all, which is rarely, and they are mysterious to the bottom (note the Penguin cover interpretation above). There's a critique to make about sexism, misogyny, and fear of women here, yes, but in many ways I think this strangely stirring story might get past that in certain ways. It comes in two parts—a frame, at beginning and briefly at end, featuring a colloquy between two intellectual men on the nature of sin, and a long middle section, a diary of an adolescent girl, a document one of the men passes to the other to read. The frame is necessary as it articulates the themes and sets expectations for the main narrative, notably the idea that sin is not transgression of moral laws but of physical ones. People who flout laws and norms must be dealt with, of course, but the argument is they are not truly sinners. The second man is intrigued and would like to subscribe to the first man's newsletter. He gets the diary to read.

This is a basic of "weird" fiction, a subset of fantasy and/or horror, distinct by its treatment of the unknown. We may have a fear of the unknown but weird fiction, if I'm understanding, wants to focus more on the unknown than the fear. If you're scared you're on your own, because that's how it is in the irrational world. Weird fiction merely continues to catalog the details. And so to the girl's diary. The critic S.T. Joshi has my favorite observation on "The White People," calling it "a masterpiece of indirection, a Lovecraft plot told by James Joyce." The diary is the longest part of the story but it doesn't have many paragraphs. It's not run-on but lucid and artful, with numerous digressions and embedded stories. It's easy to get lost but not hard to find oneself again, much like the action in the story, a kind of Alice in Wonderland journey through a copse. It's studded with made-up words and terms (Lord Dunsany for one had to be a fan), used so naturally they effectively suggest enormous worlds just beyond. I will say I'm glad I read this with an inline dictionary because that helped separate the made-up from the historical. Historical verity might be in the minority here, but it is here. This girl's adventures with magic and the irrational are practically hypnotic by the rhythms of the language and narrative, with stories within stories within stories, churning well known strokes out of the Bible thrown up like debris, across an unknowable landscape that becomes second nature. In the end her story has nowhere to go and in the end it gets there, abruptly cut off when the diary ends. But the world it details does linger on. My favorite character is the girl's nurse, who the girl remembers but who has disappeared at the time she writes her diary. Nurse taught the girl a good deal when she was younger, even as an infant. The suggestion of these White People, living in their White Lands, is deceptively simple, and penetrating. It somehow turns everything upside down.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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The Golden Bowl (1904)

Henry James's last novel is one of those books I suspect many people read (or don't but say they did) for the sake of saying they have. I know I might have! It is an often overwhelming thicket of delicate nuance, most often dwelling inside its characters and their complex relations. Maggie Verver has married the Prince, a charming Italian fellow. She is the only daughter of her widowed father, the industrial baron and art collector Adam Verver (not to be confused with Adam West). Something about the family that verves together—swerves together? Lerves together? Adam and Maggie (now the Princess) are close, but she knows her marriage threatens their intimacy, and she fears he will be sad and alone now, like the father at the end of Late Spring. So she works with a woman improbably named Fanny Assingham to find him someone. That turns out to be an American woman of about the Princess's age named Charlotte Stang. By amazing coincidence, or not, Charlotte has a history with the Prince, which is rekindled after Charlotte's marriage to Adam. It's quite a predicament when the Princess figures out what is going on. But stop for a second to consider the situation in terms of James's familiar themes. Here, starkly, are European elites preying on American naifs. But it's not quite so simple. The Ververs are not that naif. They hold the cards of wealth and know it, and the Prince knows it too, and they know he does. Within these interior machinations, it's often a matter of what each one thinks or believes, which of course James keeps ambiguous (now a valued corporate trait). There's also the matter of the cloudy areas of who knows what and when do they know it. But it's all so cunningly conceived for balance you almost feel like you could put The Golden Bowl on top of a garden stake and it would just sit there spinning. If the Prince and Charlotte behave licentiously—and they do, think about it—I'm not sure the Ververs end up that much ahead of them morally. No one is talking about incest, only a kind of American clannishness that is not hard to recognize. For all the difficulty of James's language, and it often requires patience, it seems in the service of something subtle but real. The best scenes are when combinations of the four interact. The title conceit, a real object in a pawnshop, is obtuse, and as a plot device jarring, a blaring circus in the middle of all these restrained beiges and grays. But he had to call the book something. For the dedicated only, as you may have suspected.

"interlocutor" count = 6 / 518 pages (includes "interlocutress")

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