A Room With a View (1908)

I did not end up liking this E.M. Forster novel as much as I thought I might. It got the Merchant-Ivory treatment even before Howards End, which is much the better novel. A Room With a View the novel is under heavy influence of Henry James and Jane Austen, with a novel of manners about one Lucy Honeychurch. The narrative is a little smirky. The names are ridiculous, for one thing—Lucy Honeychurch. Miss Lavish, a shallow writer and feminist. Cuthbert Eager, a clergyman. Lucy’s wrong choice for a husband is Cecil Vyse (vice as in the gripping tool, I take it, and not as in the moral weakness). Her best bet is telegraphed quite clearly and then it’s just a matter of getting there. Half is set in Italy, the second half in England. There’s a suitably quirky cast of characters. I thought I might be reading a first novel but it’s more like Forster’s third. A lot of it is clumsy and feels inexperienced. My sense was that Forster wanted to write a Jane Austen novel, but also felt above it and thus wanted to mock it a little. The names, for example. Some of the characters are stock devices to make the plot work, such as an older fuddy-duddy cousin who is annoying. Others are unique and strange, such as the father and son Emersons (which I suspect may be allusion to Ralph Waldo). They are iconoclastic freethinkers. The elder made a fortune or seems to be financially independent. More or less they are Americans, plainspoken and bumptious. There’s a little clan of clergymen too, whose point seems to be to grease the social wheels. I liked the first half quite a bit. The writing seems more open and engaging, loose and fun, with a number of nice scenes as the tourists explore Italy at the turn of the 20th century. Wikipedia notes that Forster added an appendix or epilogue in 1958, detailing the fates of these characters. I kind of wish the edition I read had included it, but looking over the summary I’m kind of glad it didn’t. The more I read Forster the more I’m not sure who he is as a writer. Howards End is a much better Jane Austen novel, and the years-later A Passage to India is not at all like either, with much more politically charged themes. Curious now about that Merchant-Ivory version of A Room With a View.

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

The Old Wives' Tale (1908)

Here we have another novel and author from the Modern Library list I had never heard of—Arnold Bennett, who was both British and prolific. The Old Wives' Tale is pretty big, over 600 pages, and your basic pleasure, essentially a bourgeois family's multigenerational history, comparable to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, focusing on two sisters close in age but with very different fates. Or very different middles, as their fates are similar once they reunite. Their lives are ordinary. There are virtually no historical events here, beyond the grind toward the modern in technology and the capitalist economics that accompanied the 19th century into the 20th. Bennett is one of those writers who can create memorable characters and then let their lives spool out naturally. In a preface, he outlines his intention to tell the life stories of the anonymous middle-aged women all around him (and us). In a way focusing on ordinary women puts him way ahead of the curve. In another way he's just another white man taking advantage of his privilege to tell a story that belongs to others to tell. We have been learning since at least 1908 that people tell their own stories better. Yet even so Bennett is very good at the novel of social manners, once past a certain winding-up in the early going. The structure is a bit awkward, telling the parallel stories of the two sisters, who were separated late in adolescence, in separate sections. Bennett's heart seems closer to Constance, the elder, who is less beautiful, more conventional, and stayed where she was born in rural England. Sophia makes a bad marriage and ends up with a bad life on her own in Paris. Obviously it's the more adventurous and romantic of the two stories, but it goes second and often feels rushed. The reunion when they are both middle-aged, in the last quarter of the novel, is often poignant but also often feels mechanical. Bennett surprises with his insight and compassion, and then surprises again when he seems impatient and hurries through episodes. This is more a problem of the second half. The tempo of the first half, by contrast, especially the Constance chapters, feels almost perfect, stopping to dwell on significant events and then accelerating through time again. No one seemed to be talking about Arnold Bennett when I was in school, or if they were I didn't notice. In a way I can see why he faded, but for once I'm happy about the fuddy-duddy ways of the Modern Library list for putting this one in my way. Recommended for Jane Austen readers.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"The Screaming Skull" (1908)

I can only guess what this F. Marion Crawford story is doing in the Vampire Tales collection because I don't actually detect any vampire elements beyond some loose interpretation of the term "undead," which is never used or even implied here. No ruby red lips, in other words. If anything it's a ghost or haunted house story—specifically, haunted bedroom. But you can see from the big roundup below that it's enormously popular even in my relatively small sample. It's often hailed for its device of the hysterical first-person narrator, though I'm not sure how it can be called an innovation when you consider Edgar Allan Poe's even more widely anthologized "Tell-Tale Heart" from 1843. "The Screaming Skull" is an improvement on that score, and often wonderfully well done, I'll give it that. But this great strength can also become the greatest weakness, in both stories. "The Screaming Skull" is a little long and can drone on implausibly. The first-person narrator is speaking to another person, or believes he is, which leads to awkward constructions just trying to hold the concept together, e.g., "You want to know whether I stayed in the house till daybreak?"

So what exactly is this one-sided Bob Newhart routine all about? As far as I'm concerned, it's the premise that makes this story more than the narrative strategy. There's a skull. And it screams. That's it. Everything else is window dressing. Here's a short passage that has it all, good and bad:

You ask me why I don't throw it into the pond—yes, but please don't call it a "confounded bugbear"—it doesn't like being called names.
There! Lord, what a shriek!

It's so simple, so audacious, so ridiculous, so impossible, so thoroughly hammered home. It's not exactly scary, or even that uncanny, though it's certainly weird. Much of it, the best of it, is almost perfectly vexing, like an I Love Lucy episode. It's closer to the kind of comedy the Evil Dead movies trafficked in. The screaming skull screams even when you talk about it in another room—even when you think about it sometimes. (Perhaps the telepathy is what wins it its vampire wings.) It definitely screams when you try to move it from the cabinet in the master bedroom, and if you leave it there it makes random grumbling noises all night and wakes you every morning at 3:17 a.m. The screaming disturbs the help and makes it impossible to keep the place adequately staffed. If you try to throw it away—you can't throw it away. It's like a booger. There's a macabre backstory driving all this divine foolishness as much as the proof of concept, like what happens when you try to get rid of it. The skull belongs to a woman who is connected to the narrator. In fact, he has inherited the mansion she and her husband once lived in. She was killed by her husband in a notably grotesque manner. My skull would be screaming for all eternity too if I were done that way. The narrator blames himself (and evidently so does the screaming skull) because he suggested the manner of murder in a lighthearted way to the couple at a dinner party. He didn't know the husband was actually going to do it!

It's fair to say "The Screaming Skull" looks forward to H.P. Lovecraft, at least insofar as it pounds the implausible until we relent and believe. It doesn't matter how unlikely it might seem at first, whether screaming skull in the bedroom cabinet (like, where are the vocal cords even?) or writhing octopus head in outer space, they strike the grim and hysterical tone and pile on the hideous detail. Crawford was a bit older and more into ghosts but he was often good with hideous detail—another famous story by him, "The Upper Berth" from 1885, is more conventional in some ways, but uniquely tactile in its effects—the ghost is aboard a ship at sea and can be touched and felt. "The Screaming Skull" may go on a little too long (also like Lovecraft and not like "The Upper Berth") but it's anthologized all over the place for multiple good reasons and counts as essential.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

"The Spider" (1908)

This fine and widely collected story by the German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers is approximately where my shallow grounding in fantasy and speculative fiction begins to show. It's all I know by him, though he wrote many other stories and is actually best known for a novel, Alraune, which is part of a trilogy. He kept himself otherwise occupied in a number of useful ways, such as editing an eight-volume collection of horror and fantasy literature, preaching Satanism on the lecture circuit, and likely loading up on absinthe a lot. He was probably gay and dallied long enough with German Nazis to destroy his own reputation, even though the Nazis personally destroyed his life because he was homosexual.

In many ways Ewers trucked with his own disreputability (like Mick Jagger or Marilyn Manson), and some of that is seen in "The Spider," which for example helps itself to ideas and signifiers from a couple of other very specific sources. In one case it verges on plagiarism. Ah but what is it that Ewers's Spanish contemporary, Pablo Picasso, is reputed to have said? Good artists copy. Great artists steal. Ewers makes vast improvements on what he steals. And then, in an amazing feat of something like time travel, he rhymes details in this story in uncanny ways with Roman Polanski's 1976 movie The Tenant and reminds us we shouldn't stay up all night on the internet.

"The Jolly Corner" (1908)

It's not his last story, but "The Jolly Corner" is a nice end-piece for Henry James. It's a ghost story, like The Turn of the Screw though more wistful, and again reverberates with the tensions of New World and Old—in this case, between a life lived in Europe or the States. Our hero, Spencer Brydon, left for Europe when he was 23. Now he is 56, returning to New York after a Jesus' age to deal with the properties that have supported him, including what he insists on calling "The Jolly Corner," the house in Manhattan where he was raised. He wonders what his life would have been if he'd stayed. He imagines an "alter ego" (James's italics), an ambitious and successful businessman, who seems to become ever more real as we go. In the wonderful (or exasperating) ambiguities of James, in the end it's not clear whether Brydon is alive or dead. It might work either way. It all turns on a nightly tour Brydon takes of his homestead, and a closed door that should be open. On such slender reeds are these things made. James's evasive allusive style is suited to a certain type of horror, where in many cases it's to the narrator's purpose to keep us in the dark, and blind. A lot of time is spent on that door. The path through three adjoining rooms is charted. We come away with a reasonable schematic in our heads for much of that section of the building. The room with the closed door is a strange architectural feature, and the door is the only access to it. Brydon is a man of habit and never shuts doors. Yet the door is shut. He is so filled with dread he cannot bring himself to open it. He takes his leave, then faints and falls, and comes to with his friend Alice Staverton cradling his head in her lap. Is it the afterlife? We'll never know. What's most haunting about "The Jolly Corner," its main charge for me, is the sense of a life that could have been, the road not taken, etc. This sense only increases and grows more complex as we age, growing apart by the vectors we have taken. We are many of us literally haunted by our own alter egos by the time we reach age 56. As it happens, I'm also someone who is a little haunted by the house I grew up in, much more so in fact than Brydon. He may have had it thrust on him, but I share his sense for the power of these physical locations, and not just in memory. They are places where ghosts dwell, and James is great at turning all that into a piece that is equally suggestive, mysterious, and powerful.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 35 pages

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

"To Build a Fire" (1908)

Read story by Jack London online.

One of the happy surprises I've had on this short story project is discovering how much I like the nature stories, "man vs. nature," as the English teachers explained it. This is one of the best yet. It's among London's best-known and most anthologized stories, but it's not the first one he wrote under the title. There's also a 1902 version, which I don't know. The premise is simple. The setting is the far north regions of North America. We never learn the name of our hero, who is trekking with a dog across wilderness to reach a camp by day's end. It's extremely cold—50 below zero F. or colder, our hero speculates, but at one point the third-person narrator who mostly stays inside the head of our guy steps out for a few beats to let us know it is actually 75 below. That's cold. The hiker keeps his lunch under his layers of clothes next to his chest and belly to keep it from freezing hard. He thinks occasionally about an old-timer who warned him never to travel alone in weather colder than 50 below. He knows he is taking a risk but feels confident. He has experience and knows the dangers. But this is not a story that ends well, and the power of it is all descriptive and rhythmic. London sets out all the basic elements and shows how the situation can naturally if unexpectedly grow worse. Then he shows what happens next. The last few pages are vivid and even hard to read. I had to take a couple of breaks to compose myself. Jim Thompson has written in similarly strong ways about claustrophobic experience. Here it is nearly unimaginable cold. I have experienced near 40-below temperatures, and certainly know well the kinds of things that happen at 20 below. Seeing the man attempting to deal with a drenched leg as the result of stepping in a hidden pool (a natural feature in the region) is extraordinarily intense, especially the more you see how skilled the man is even as he steadily loses to the elements. I know from The Call of the Wild how good London can be with animals, and the dog here and its relationship with the man are nearly equal to that again. The story is sustained entirely by description and long, blocky paragraphs (which you know I have to love), with no relief from dialogue. Yet it sets and maintains a powerful rhythm, as it moves from the start, with the man's thoughts of his lunch and getting back to camp that evening, to the awful events that descend on him, one at a time.

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