"Seaton's Aunt" (1922)

Walter de la Mare has been something of an acquired taste for me—this story might be the place where I acquired it. It's good enough I'm going to go back and look at some of the others again. Nothing overtly supernatural happens, nor anything cruel beyond a certain cold haughtiness, yet it is charged with uncanny tension and malevolence. It feels in many ways like a dry run for Robert Aickman's later style of "strange" story. It halfway feels like a dream much of the time, the kind where you can't remember all the parts or how things changed. Arthur Seaton is a classmate of the first-person narrator, both of them in early adolescence at the beginning and for much of the story. Seaton is a sickly outcast at school, vaguely ethnic. The racial note is another point of unease. He is orphaned as well, and in line when he comes of age to acquire the mansion his aunt now inhabits (and has all her life). The narrator befriends Seaton out of pity as much as anything. When Seaton invites him home on a break from school he accepts for no apparent reason. Things like that just seem to happen in "strange" stories. Seaton's aunt is a woman of great appetite and poise, with a very large head and imperious manner. She needles everyone in her orbit, including our narrator the hapless houseguest, whose name she can never get right. It's Withers, which is provocative itself in this context, but she more often calls him Wither or Smithers. The story is often funny in a way but the aunt is also casually monstrous. She's terrible but it's never personal. She is like some greater being dwelling among us—amused by us. She might be using up and/or killing people but it's hard to say. There's no evidence, beyond her vaguely sinister manner and oversize head. People are dying, as they do, but it's not clear she has anything to do with it. It just feels like she does. Lots of poetical turns in the language and unsettling asides along the way, which is typical of de la Mare, who can be allusive almost unto vaporous, but here every sentence, every word practically, is effective and it leaves a chill.

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

"Mrs. Amworth" (1922)

This E.F. Benson story is fairly conventional vampire stuff, but it does feature Benson's sly way of telling a story and has some nice effects too. He eases into it the way he often does, starting with a description of an ancient isolated village in England and proceeding at his own pace. The narrator is an affable lifelong resident. His neighbor, educated at Cambridge, is a native who has returned. He's something of a crank, with a keen interest in the occult—the rational man of science who wants to believe, retired into his studies. Into this tiny society along comes Mrs. Amworth, "widow of an Indian civil servant." Now in her 40s, she has deep roots in the village herself, with graves of ancestors in the churchyard. "Big and energetic, her vigorous and genial personality speedily woke" the village. Everybody likes her. The narrator enjoys dropping by her place in the evening to play piquet, a card game. She also plays the piano and grows a lovely garden. Everyone adores her except the academic from Cambridge, though he is at least "vastly interested" in her. I like the way Benson sprinkles his clues cunningly and relentlessly but I admit I'm confused again by vampire rules. In a way, Mrs. Amworth is sunshine itself—she certainly has no problems with daylight. On the other hand, more conventionally, she is visibly refreshed and more youthful after drinking up, and she can also sink into the earth back into a grave. These aren't necessarily the good effects here but they're not bad. To set the mood there's a lot of lore to sort out but it's interesting mostly. It seems there had been vampire activity reported back at the Amworths' post in India, as, indeed, there had been in the distant past of the English village. Hmm, makes a person think. Benson is actually quite artful at this. He knows when he is showing you his cards, though he always seems to be holding back another. And he delivers some nice surprises. But I'm still working on the basics around here, as I understand that vampires and zombies are both undead creatures but on different paths? (Let's leave witches out of it for now. I haven't seen enough of those stories yet.) Perhaps film director F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is the last point where the species resemblance between vampires and zombies remains. Interestingly, Nosferatu (released the same year "Mrs. Amworth" was published) was based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Universal Pictures adaptation of 1931 with Bela Lugosi has presently, of course, become the more famous enduring vision of the undead blood-sucker—suave, debonair, European, pointing down the road to Count Chocula. With that in mind, perhaps what we have is a spectrum of perception, with "undead" at one end and at the other "immortal," which seems to better fit the tenor of these charming and dashing but ultimately deadly creatures (leaving fairies out of it too for now). The ability to charm may be Mrs. Amworth's strongest trait, but she has some other interesting tricks up her sleeve as well.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.

Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Germany, 81 minutes
Director: F.W. Murnau
Writers: Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker
Photography: Fritz Arno Wagner, Gunther Krampf
Cast: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroeder, Alexander Granach, Max Nemetz, Wolfgang Heinz

I'm going to blame the Universal monster movie franchise for my stubborn confusion in thinking that Bram Stoker's novel Dracula came before Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Actually, Stoker's vampire tale was published in 1897 and Frankenstein in 1818. Among other things, that means this silent movie version by German director F.W. Murnau—more or less officially the first Dracula movie—came only 25 years after the novel, which is comparable today to a movie based on Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, say, or Donna Tartt's's The Secret History. Dracula had been around awhile, but still might have felt new in 1922. Frankenstein was over 100 years old by that point.

I'm also holding Universal accountable (with Hammer not far behind) for treating the Count Dracula less as a loathsome monster of the night and more in the direction of a Playboy Mansion leisured gentleman, a popular conception of vampires that evolved into George Hamilton in 1979's Love at First Bite and may be extended to include Jim Jarmusch's Adam and Eve in 2013's Only Lovers Left Alive. Note how the word "love" occurs in both titles. Let the Right One In, from 2008, is another recent example. In these pictures the vampire often works as surreptitious seducer (or practical black marketeer, in the Jarmusch, making surreptitious contacts directly with hospitals for blood). But nothing like that is happening in Nosferatu. This Count is not discreetly sucking blood in sexy make-out sessions but is more like the earthworms crawling in the dirt that you spade up when it's time to go fishing. In fact, Nosferatu plays up that aspect of Stoker's novel—Dracula's affinity not just with bats but with other nocturnal vermin and disgusting insects, and especially the way he travels in boxes ("coffins") filled with dirt. It's not the coffins, folks, it's the dirt. Nosferatu even one-ups Stoker by making it plague-infested dirt, complete with swarming rats.

"The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922)

Read story by D.H. Lawrence online.

It's possible I was in the wrong mood for D.H. Lawrence, this story, or both, but its tedium was thick. The horse dealer's daughter—Mabel, by name—is an only daughter of 27, with two older brothers and one younger. Their mother died long ago, their father more recently. After his death the siblings ran his horse dealing business into the ground. The story takes place on the eve of their giving up the estate, having lost it. Now it's a matter of moving out. Mabel refuses to answer any of her brothers' questions about what she plans to do next. The second-oldest son, Fred Henry, is close friends with the village doctor, Jack Fergusson, who comes by to say goodbye. Fred Henry's and Fergusson's goodbye is so tender I caught myself wondering if they were gay, which is doubtful. I don't think it's consciously intended that way. Mabel is bereft by all these turns of event, starting even many years before with the death of her mother. She visits the cemetery and lovingly tends her mother's grave. All this takes place on the same day. Fergusson sees her at the cemetery, and she notices him too. Later, Mabel tries to drown herself in a pond. Fergusson sees what she's doing and comes to her rescue, nearly drowning himself in the process, as he can't swim. She is unconscious when he gets her out of the water. He takes her to her place, undresses and dries and treats her, with his clothes still full of the muck and stink of the pond water. She awakes. They have a conversation. Suddenly they are consumed by passions for one another, declare their love, and plan to be married in a day or two. It's the kind of fictional passage that really has to be carried by the language, or at least set up better. To me, last night, Lawrence failed on both. I think his language is rarely up to his scenarios, certainly not here, with stultifying descriptive details and too many murky points about their intense emotional states. Obviously it's about passion, to practically a demented degree, but it also seemed evasive about the sources. It could have been the overwhelming circumstances of an extraordinary day for either or both. It could have been Fergusson getting a good look at Mabel's body while he was caring for it. It could have been feelings Fergusson had for Fred Henry jumping siblings to Mabel. It could have been anything. Now they're getting married. It goes from screamingly dull to weirdly repulsive just like that. I'm sure it's not intended any such way. But it hasn't aged well, at least not for me.

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

"Winter Dreams" (1922)

Read story by F. Scott Fitzgerald online.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published this story in 1922 and it's standard fare in many ways, more in the vein of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, though it is also considered a foundational story for The Great Gatsby. A young man from Minnesota—"Black Bear Lake," as opposed to the White Bear Lake which actually exists there—goes East for an Ivy League education, returns home, sets up in business, and eventually moves to New York City. Dexter Green is his name. Getting rich is his game. The woman he falls for, Judy Jones, is a kind of early pastiche of Daisy Buchanan and especially Jordan Baker, both in The Great Gatsby—beautiful, and careless. Dexter falls in love with her almost at first sight, when she is 11 and he is just a few years older. Not much happens beyond random lifelong encounters between them, though it is marked by Fitzgerald's gift for wonderfully extravagant language. Describing a summer evening scene by a lake, for example, he writes, "Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet." Lines like that are one of the main reasons it's so difficult to make a movie of his work. He casts spells that only words can. Meanwhile, Dexter is busy getting rich and Judy is busy breaking hearts. That's what we do in a Fitzgerald story. It's also apparent from this story and the way it moves, again, why Fitzgerald had such a hard time accepting the realities of America and the world in the Great Depression '30s. He preferred the middle-class greed fantasies of the '20s, the "roaring" '20s, which he had a hand in inventing and mythologizing. So the people in this story golf and belong to country clubs, spend summers at lakes sailing, and in general extol the virtues of wealth (I use the word "virtues" ironically). Fitzgerald's characters are more or less innocents, these men falling in love with jaunty chicks. But it's a very white world and I'm not talking about the snow. It's a world scrubbed free of common troubles of the masses, a world of rank privilege. The justification, which he doesn't really even bother with, is "the human condition," people forever unsatisfied and into mischief. I'm prone to forgive Fitzgerald some because he could be such a peculiarly good writer. Even the names he comes up with are just wonderful: Dexter Green, who loves money, and first earned it as a golf caddy at the country club. Judy Jones (much later, Judy Simms). T.A. Hendrick. Mr. Hart and Mr. Sandoval (golfers). Krimslich (Dexter's mother's maiden name). Irene Scheerer (Dexter's fiancée). As for the title, it seems beside the point, in many ways. But I suppose it's an allusion to the ideal Fitzgerald had of the experience of growing up in the Midwest, dreaming to get money, a specific experience shared by Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby. For fans only.

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