“In Another Country” (1927)

After the longish “The Undefeated” in Ernest Hemingway’s second collection of stories, Men Without Women, most of the stories are short and even micro-sized. This one goes five pages. It’s a war story but set in a hospital, where our unnamed main character and first-person narrator is recovering from wounds. The war was obviously a horrific, traumatizing experience for Hemingway—in many ways these stories are about untreated PTSD. Perhaps hard to believe, but they are going on a century old and in many ways it shows. We just think of PTSD differently now—they didn’t think about it much then, with vaguely derisive terms for it like “shellshock.” Hemingway struggled with these mental and psychological problems in a time when people were not very sympathetic, considering them signs of weakness. He bought into that himself to some degree. Much of his work is marred by mawkish repressed self-pity. That said, this story is not one of the worst examples. I like the hospital scenes and the sense of both the war and the detachment from it in the hospital. First line, a good one: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Perfect! However, the story, such as it is, involves another man getting treatment at the hospital. It turns out his wife died recently and unexpectedly. So it’s a heavy-handed irony. The husband survived a war wound but his wife died from pneumonia and/or the influenza pandemic no one ever seems to talk about in literature. The widower erupts randomly with the narrator, telling him he must never marry, and later apologizes for his outbursts. That’s when we learn about the death of the man’s wife. So, yes, losing a partner is a great tragedy—and often a good story. But it feels more like a device here and somewhat clumsy. The war is terrible and it’s not talked about particularly in those terms. The pandemic is terrible and not talked about at all. The wife’s death is understood as terrible but that’s only as far as it goes. No one is really dealing with anything here, which we are given to understand is the human condition. Maybe in 1927! Not now (I hope). In the past I liked this story more for its concision, and this “iceberg” sense there is much more under the surface than what we see. Now the repressed behavior annoys me more. At a certain point there is little to say about the tragedies of others. You can only witness them. But is that really what Hemingway is doing here?

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

Just because the 1927 Ernest Hemingway collection is called Men Without Women doesn’t mean we’re going to get any stories without women, and here we are. The story is good, or not bad, but the values it puts out are terrible, repugnant. It’s another very short story—four printed pages—and involves a conversation between a man and a woman who are traveling together and waiting at a station for a train. They are having drinks. There is something between them—it’s likely she is pregnant and they are talking about an abortion, but the story is never explicit on the point, which is annoying. I mean, I’m pretty sure what’s going on here, but the third-person narrator is never clear enough for me. It feels stupidly coy. But it’s clear enough. He wants her to get an abortion and she doesn’t want to. She would prefer to marry but it doesn’t seem to be an option for him. All speculation on my part. This is one story where the whole “iceberg” thing goes awry. The wrong things are revealed. Too much is not disclosed. The narrator has an unexplained hostile attitude toward the woman. She is referred to as a girl and she seems to be behaving petulantly and immaturely. What the story doesn’t seem to understand at all, or at least not very well, is that this man is a jerk. The way I read it, he wants her to get an abortion and he doesn’t want her to bear his child. He obviously doesn’t care what she thinks, how she feels, or what she wants. He doesn’t want to talk about it at all. It’s infuriating to me and completely explains her behavior. Of course I have some sympathy for the guy’s position. Who among us has not wanted to eat their cake and have it too? But he is at least as petulant and immature as her. I’m not sure the story, or the narrator—or Hemingway—is aware of it. In terms of the mechanics of the story, yes, I have to admit it’s pretty good. The setting and the moment are well conceived and the story is carried by majority dialogue. It could be a one-act play. It’s poignant in its way, at least insofar as it subscribes to old school values that have arguably had their day. But it’s impossible to untangle the virtues of this story from the toxic attitudes. Somehow unfortunately this seems to happen with some frequency with Hemingway.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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Listen to story online.

“Browdean Farm” (1927)

This is the first story I’ve read by A.M. Burrage and it’s a pretty good one. Some is a bit unlikely, and some is dated, but the ghost effects are good and it’s always engaging, told well. A couple of young bachelors, one a writer about to be married soon, find a house in the country no one has lived in for years. They look at it, like it, and take it right away—it’s too good a deal to pass up. The rent is “astonishingly low.” The first-person narrator, by the way, is not the writer but the other guy. He goes fishing during the day a lot while the other writes. Of course the place is haunted. Later they learn the terrible history of it—a woman found hanged in the kitchen, her husband tried and executed for murder. He had a mistress, and the presumption is that he killed to be free of his wife. Actually, the wife committed suicide. But that’s because the husband is, as one of the townspeople tells it, “what we would call in common parlance a dirty dog.” So there’s an argument he drove his wife to suicide and deserved to be executed for it. Anyway, he’s a ghost now. And all the ghost wants is to get your attention and show you the scene in a way that convinces you it is innocent of the murder. The bachelors actually feel some sympathy for it at the end. This is an aspect that doesn’t make much sense and feels dated. In life the husband never wanted to marry the woman. He was forced into it because she was pregnant and he was responsible—the dirty dog. Right away he found a mistress and was “in love” with her. Why not? The way the ghost gets attention is by tapping its fingertips on the window while it peers in, which is scary as you read and another indication it’s creepy. It conjures the wife’s suicide only to speak for itself. It still has no regard for the wife’s suffering, which the husband caused in life. Its only concern is for its own suffering, which it brought on itself. I prefer to think the husband is now in some kind of hell, doomed to eternally pleading his innocence, which is hard to credit all things considered, even though, yes, the wife took her own life. God have mercy! Overall, “Browdean Farm” is a really good ghost story and I hope I run across some more of this Burrage, who M.R. James also liked.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

By the time I got to this story by H.P. Lovecraft I had accepted that all roads in horror fiction must presently pass through the Bard of Rhode Island. He died at 46, mostly neglected in his life, but is now considered one of the giants in the field—or, putting it another way, he used to be underrated and then he was overrated. Mostly he worked in the '20s and '30s and mostly he only wrote stories (my particular intersection), though some were more like short novels—the size of Heart of Darkness, say. A number of them created mythoses unto themselves (most famously Cthulhu but also the characters Erich Zann and Herbert West, "Fungi From Yuggoth," and an extensive so-called Dream Cycle). Extrapolations have since been assiduously worked by aspiring and established writers alike, and still are. It's certainly a type of influence, but at least in the realm of short stories it's hard for me to take such continuities as a particular strength, especially in horror. Then, in 2011, the Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor won a World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. The award at that time was a bust of Lovecraft and Okorafor went on to detail her mixed feelings, which reminded everyone that Lovecraft was a rank bigot and always had been. The evidence is in many of his stories.

This 2017 write-up of "The Horror at Red Hook" includes more details about Okorafor and fallout for the World Fantasy Award, and also spells out main problems with the story. In fact, as a result of articles like it (specifically this one from 2015, part of an invaluable series), I was led to believe that it's his most egregious, set in a Brooklyn well-populated with immigrants and swarthy foreigners. I wasn't reading it for that reason—I found it in the When Evil Wakes collection edited by August Derleth. Later I would come to Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls," which has a black cat with an extremely unfortunate name, and that seemed worse to me (or certainly more repulsively distracting) than anything in this story. The events recounted here are merely ridiculous, with its first scene for example a practical demonstration of a man reduced to abject terror at the sight of three-story brick buildings. Because of this man's extraordinary experience in a Brooklyn tenement, you see, taller brick buildings now apparently not only unnerve him but reduce him to gelatinous blathering insanity, at least until his field of vision can be altered. ("Yeah, right." That's me speaking aloud as I read.) Yet this turned out to be the story where Lovecraft's effects finally went to work on me.

To the Lighthouse (1927)

This is a short novel but not so easy. Things don't "happen" as they do in more conventional narrative (scare quotes as feeble approximation). I was tempted to say nothing at all happens, but then I thought about it. Death, of course, has to be counted as something that happens—sometimes I think it's the only thing that does. And there are three of them here, including arguably the main character, Mrs. Ramsay, a family matriarch and mother of eight children (two of whom are the other deaths). But these things "happen" in the shortest section (of three), called "Time Passes," which specifically lists out events. The first section, the longest, takes place at a summer house used by the Ramsays, their friends, and extended family. They decide to go on a day trip the next day to a nearby lighthouse. Then they decide not to. The first half of the book is spent leaping from head to head of various characters and dwelling there awhile. What's hard is learning the implied assumptions of each new character as we eavesdrop on their thoughts and see from their points of view. There's a lot of reading followed by pauses to assemble and interpret the known facts into a concrete picture. I was reading it for the first time—I suspect it deepens and enriches some returning to it. Virginia Woolf is a skillful and sensuous writer. The ideas are prolific and rich. One theme, for example, is the choices offered to women for creativity and what they mean. Mrs. Ramsay has eight children. Lily Briscoe is an unmarried painter in her 30s (in her 40s in the last section). The novel is autobiographical, based on Woolf's summers growing up in an educated and professional family. Mr. Ramsay is a model of Woolf's father, a man of letters, an editor and a critic. The cast on hand in To the Lighthouse is literate and artistic to a person, and I like that, though I admit I come to it with some class resentment. I'd avoided the novel anyway for its reputation as being difficult. I was also wary of its preoccupations with women's issues in a context of privilege. But Woolf's handling makes it all work. She is very sharp and clear-sighted—Mrs. Ramsay may deserve to be ranked with greatest fictional characters such as Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, or Elizabeth Bennet. Many of the characters here, in fact, are etched and memorable.

In case it's not at the library.

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

It might be crass to talk about pro-Catholic or anti-Catholic narratives, especially with a writer as good as Willa Cather, so let me put it this way. This Western novel challenged a lot of my own perceptions about the Catholic church, and made it seem a little more genuinely noble than I normally think of it. Cather was extraordinarily good at telling tales of the West, finding some chink in a niche and exploring it to great depths. This one takes place in New Mexico and environs (north to Denver City, east to Texas, south to Mexico, and west to Arizona) and involves the efforts of a French bishop to establish a diocese there in the 19th century. It is many small stories in the region knitting themselves together—white pioneers, Mexicans, native tribes—facilitated by the church, headed by isolated Europeans. The threads of history here go back centuries to the Spanish occupation, when the church was a mighty force in the region. Some of those descendants are still there, priests in name with churches and who hold services. But they reject celibacy and other church requirements that don't suit them. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a remarkably quiet and sprawling book, effectively covering some four decades, floating on time's currents and landing on evocative anecdotes. Even when I grew impatient with the pace or suspicious of Catholic dogma, I admired many of its characters, notably the bishop (who only becomes an archbishop late in the story) (as if I know what these titles mean). The bishop handles his power gracefully, is quick to bend and relent, but ultimately unyielding in his pursuits. He brings a lot of good and help to people who badly need it. In a similar way, this book is unassumingly confident and competent. That part of the world is wonderfully described. It's as good a Western as any. There's hardship and privation, horses and mules, interesting people from all walks of life, and spectacular mountain vistas. We learn a lot about Mexicans, natives, and the Catholic church. I might be making it sound pedantic and stiff, but it is anything but. It's a series of anecdotes built into stories skillfully strung together, outlining a life that had substance and meaning. Something universal and instantly recognized here. Recommended.

In case it's not at the library.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

It's possible I was confused by the setting of this short novel by Thornton Wilder, but I think it fits surprisingly well with strains of Latin American literature—with Gabrial Marcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Roberto Bolano, with Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain, perhaps most of all with Jorge Luis Borges. It surprised me that it came from the author of the play Our Town. It's set in Spanish colonial Peru, in the early 18th century. A wooden footbridge over a canyon-like abyss in the highlands of the Andes gives way, and five people who happened to be crossing it drop to their deaths. A missionary priest, Brother Juniper, takes it upon himself to investigate the deaths, wanting to uncover the reason God took them so seemingly randomly. At the center of this narrative is the image of the five plunging to their deaths—it recurs again and again, at the end of each section, the inevitable conclusion (and the only clear one) of these investigations. Swirling around that image are the complicated lives of the dead, rendered all in moral shades of gray. One woman never wanted to marry. Now she feuds with her daughter whose marriage has taken her to Spain, and writes a series of beautiful letters. Another is a twin whose brother recently died. Their relationship is fierce, tortured, confusing. Another is a patron of the arts in the colonial outpost. All have sinned. All have redeemed themselves. "He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven." That's how Brother Juniper looks at it, and fair enough, at least until you get down to cases. Because which is which—in this story as in the world? That's the wonderful (and sardonic) ambiguity in which this novel dwells. It's short but remarkably dense, as it lays out the frontiers it knows of entire lives, with complications of threads of connections reaching in and around and through them all. Among other things, it's apparent we can only know so much about these people. Additional detail would not help much, you suspect, because it doesn't help much here, except in floating patches. There's a consistency to all these lives we come to recognize, but I'm not sure that's the same as understanding them. In fact, the image at the center of this novel, the five falling into the abyss, is almost perfectly apt for the mystery that suffuses this. I'm not trying to make a joke when I say I'm not sure how Thornton Wilder pulls this off. It's powerful, mysterious, and singular.

In case it's not at the library.

Metropolis (1927)

Germany, 148 minutes
Director: Fritz Lang
Writers: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang
Photography: Karl Freund, Gunther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann
Music: Gottfried Huppertz
Cast: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Frohlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp

You don't have to look hard to find the science fiction film heirs of Metropolis—some of the biggest and best. The architecture of Blade Runner (not to mention a female robot under the control of an industrialist), all the underground scenes in The Matrix franchise, and the fundamental narrative orientation of Avatar, to mention three easy examples, still fall under the shadow of Metropolis. There's even a shot that looks like a scene from Jailhouse Rock. It's no coincidence they are decades out from Metropolis—the impact is that profound. In fact, Avatar, which followed by 82 years, makes a particularly good comparison—expensive, arguably bloated, with a stupid-simple message no one can disagree with, and otherwise a sumptuous, disconnected visual feast—an experience.

The key difference, of course, is the amount of control the filmmakers had over their final products. In the case of Metropolis, it turned out director Fritz Lang had almost none. Lang's original cut, which ran to some two and a half hours, was summarily chopped down to around two hours for American release. After the film bombed—it was one of the most expensive movies ever made to that point, with tens of thousands of extras and many elaborate costumes and special effects, but on release it made back only a fraction of its cost (in Weimar Germany, remember)—it went down the memory hole, incidentally setting the model for failure that Cleopatra, Heaven's Gate, and many others would later follow. No one was particularly interested in film preservation in 1927 and that is ultimately how, long story as short as possible, I have come to own versions that are 82 minutes, 115 minutes, and 148 minutes.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

USA, 94 minutes, silent
Director: F.W. Murnau
Writers: Hermann Sudermann, Carl Mayer, Katherine Hilliker, H.H. Caldwell
Photography: Charles Rosher, Karl Struss
Music: Willy Schmidt-Gentner, R.H. Bassett, Carli Elinor, Emo Rapee, Hugo Riesenfeld
Editor: Harold D. Schuster
Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

There's a throwaway line in The Social Network that I haven't been able to get out of my head since the last time I saw it. In full-blown triumphalist mode, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker exults that everybody used to live in the country and then they moved to the city. Now they're moving to the Internet.

To the degree that The Social Network is about everybody moving to the Internet—a debatable point (but, at the very least, a movie somebody should probably make)—then to that degree the silent film classic Sunrise is about everybody moving from the country to the city.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

UK, 98 minutes, silent
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Marie Belloc Lowndes, Eliot Stannard, Alfred Hitchcock
Photography: Gaetano di Ventimiglia, Hal Young
Cast: Ivor Novello, June, Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney

Very few silent movies that you see nowadays, particularly those with the greatest reputations, are ever actually silent—some, such as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, with its score written by Chaplin himself, never were. And when you do happen to see one, the silence becomes positively intrusive, engendering a distracting kind of anxiety, which has to say something for how much music (leaving aside dialogue) contributes to the action of films, or at least our understanding of them now, and also makes one wonder about how the various live accompaniments back in the day colored the perceptions of a single film as it traveled from place to place. This Hitchcock silent, which I saw with its 1999 scoring, is no exception. Even if the music is a bit repetitive and not always synched perfectly to the action, it's charming enough and soothing for me just to have it there. I suppose this is all somewhat off the point. The Lodger is clunky as only a silent film from a director still learning his craft could be. At the same time, it's not hard to recognize the Hitchcock touches that would continue all the way to Psycho and beyond: screaming, terrified dames; a brutal serial killer who roams the streets of London knifing his victims (he strikes on Tuesdays); suspicion, anxiety, mistaken identities, questionable motivations, lust, jealousy, and a cameo by the director. The print I saw, transferred to a DVD for a circa 2004 product, was doubtless restored to some extent but remains old and damaged, losing detail to the point where occasionally faces are hard to make out. But it's worth seeing for anyone even casually interested in Alfred Hitchcock.