“Afterward” (1910)

[spoilers] My first Edith Wharton horror story is in The Dark Descent and for once I don’t think editor David G. Hartwell was trying too hard to pump up the volume on literary credibility. Wharton is obviously good at this—far better than her mentor Henry James, who could rarely get out of his own way when it came to horror. I still need to take another look at “The Turn of the Screw.” At any rate, Wharton’s story does involve Americans living in Europe, or anyway England. Our young American couple rents a house in the English countryside that is reputed to be haunted. They joke about wanting to meet a ghost, but there’s an unusual twist to this one. It’s only later (“afterward”) that you understand the ghost or haunting. This is a strange, almost arch concept, not easily grasped, but the payoff is quite good. The couple seems like an ideal of American innocents, but shade soon begins to fall on the husband. We see he is worried about something and hiding it from his wife. We know we need to keep an eye on that. But mostly the Jamesian air holds sway of light banter, blue skies, and easy good fortune. Then Wharton springs a big surprise when the husband suddenly disappears and is never heard from again. She knocks us off balance as we are not prepared for the unexplained disappearance of a main character. The events of the day are detailed up to the point where peak annoyance has begun to turn to anxiety. The next section starts two weeks later, with a police investigation underway and the wife with a bad feeling. As the weeks and months elapse, she begins to remember things that are a little ghostly and only become more so as she gradually adds up clues and learns what her husband was involved in that enabled them to move to England and pursue their easy, carefree way of life. I’ve given away the main surprise of this story, but the surprise is not the point of it. Wharton is careful from the start to make her characters vividly felt, as normal or bland and humdrum as they may seem. While many things are explained, the ghost story aspect is not. It exists at the center of the story as a mystery that can’t be understood or penetrated even. And like all the folks in this story say, you only really get it afterward, as the inescapable futility of explanation becomes apparent. Very nicely done.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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The House of Mirth (1905)

Edith Wharton's novel is the missing link I did not know I was missing between Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It has all of James's surging narrative style with Fitzgerald's impeccable eye for detail. Like song titles of Nirvana songs, "the house of mirth" never does show up in this novel, but unlike the Nirvana songs Wharton's poetic title has some meaning, as approximately the grasping social landscape of parties, looking good, getting rich, and having a fun time. Fitzgerald's world. Lily Bart, for most of The House of Mirth, is not having a fun time. She is beautiful, but pushing 30, and decisions about marriage must be made. She's also, well, not exactly destitute, but not really in the money either. At the beginning of the novel she has decided to marry a rich introvert, but bridles in the clinch, distracted by the man she really loves, who has no financial prospects. Subsequently, partly as a target of vicious rumor, her rich introvert bridles himself when he gets word of Lily's gambling debts. Those debts have been rung up at evenings of bridge. I didn't know bridge was played for money this way. Big debts as usual are what you get for playing with the rich. Wharton captures a late 19th-century portrait of New York City social life, and it's not pretty, but the novel is quite good. Her language moves comfortably through the architecture of the story—originally serialized, it is put together well, with a steady stream of events escalating the impossible tensions. It ends as a tragedy, a certain template for stories of later beauties such as Marilyn Monroe. I thought Lily's aunt was too hard on her but now I'm nitpicking. The House of Mirth was Wharton's second novel and more or less her coming out, considered her best by many (including Larry McCaffery), though perhaps not as many as her Age of Innocence. I'm not sure exactly what my expectations were but The House of Mirth beat them. In my old Riverside Edition paperback the introduction by R.W.B. Lewis, a very interesting piece (copyright 1963) itself, cautions against seeing Wharton as a missing link between James and Fitzgerald. In fact, it might be where I got the idea. But I am ignoring him on the point.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"John Charrington's Wedding" (1891)

Here's another good one by E. Nesbit, who can really pack a lot into her stories. M. Grant Kellermeyer, proprietor of the useful Classic Horror Blog, helps clarify some of the fine points in a typically insightful analysis. I was puzzled at first, for example, by May Forster's bland change of heart after repeatedly laughing in John Charrington's face for his marriage proposals. Charrington himself chalks it up to "perseverance—and the best luck a man ever had in this world." Later, the narrator happens to find Charrington and May in an ambiguous tryst in a churchyard. Charrington is overheard saying, "My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!" It doesn't exactly sound like the Charrington we've come to know, and Kellermeyer suggests he may actually be a demon whose intention is to abduct May into the underworld. He says the implication of May's hasty reversal may be that she is pregnant. The meeting in the graveyard may thus not be so ambiguous. Indeed, that brief scene has a charge of the uncanny any way it's read. Nesbit carries this off well. In a way we are as seduced as May by Charrington. His name already implies destruction by fire but he's mild-mannered, seemingly straightforward, and well behaved. Charrington dies suddenly and mysteriously, hours before the wedding, but appears at the ceremony in disheveled state to take his vows. The witnesses cluck at the disgrace of what they assume is drunkenness before learning of his strange fate. Even at the end, on my first reading, he felt like a sad victim of some kind, his appearance at the ceremony a reflection of desire and fidelity from beyond the grave. Instead, much more insidiously as our view of these ambiguous deeds and statements shifts and refocuses, we may be seeing the destruction of a woman's life and soul. Yet it's still hard to make out the actual reprobate and victimizer even with the clues. Women might pick this up as obvious. I suspect my semi-blindness here has something to do with being male. There is a good deal of formidable power behind the work of E. Nesbit. Some of the shorter horror stories of others work because they keep you moving past the odd points and discrepancies. Nesbit's seem to work when you go back to worry over them. There's a lot to unpack in the fragments, such as the overheard conversation in the graveyard.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell

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"Man-Size in Marble" (1887)

I first knew of E. Nesbit as a children's author when I was a kid, by way of Edward Eager novels, but I never found any of her books (the E is for Edith) when I looked for them at my public libraries in the '60s. I never knew anything about her. I didn't know she was a woman. I wasn't even sure she was real. I barely understood she also wrote horror fiction though later I remembered her name in anthologies—it rang a bell, that was all. I never made the connection until recently. Her biography suggests her wide-ranging interests and the wild intellectual churn of her life, as she wrote continually for money, cofounded the socialist Fabian Society in England, bore three children and adopted others her husband had by another woman (who also lived with them), and collaborated with others as well as writing her own fiction for children and adults, horror stories, memoirs, and poetry. This story is one of her first and may be her most famous among the horror stories (with "John Charrington's Wedding," which is at least as good). "Man-Size in Marble" is remarkable not so much for its tale, more competent than inspired, but for some of the details and especially for its voice, which is deceptively easygoing yet bracing, seething, almost caustic when read in a feminist frame. She's an obvious source for Shirley Jackson. "Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe it," she begins. It's a man's voice—a newlywed, in fact—but the clear-eyed feminist revolutionary writing the story obviously understands the painful ironies of social double standards, signaling from behind over his shoulder. Many Nesbit horror stories feature relationships between men and women but they are rarely this happy. He is a painter and his wife a writer. They are bohemians, for all their youth, bright and sophisticated but unable to afford London. Their requirements for a cottage in the country—sanitary and picturesque—take some work but are finally met in a small village in the marshy southeast of England.

I say the story is uninspired but that's not exactly true. The premise is unusual—it would be interesting to learn Nesbit's genesis of it. There's a church in the village, and in the church are two statues, about which there is an extraordinary All Saints' Eve legend. The couple's housekeeper, Mrs. Dornan, refuses to be there for the occasion, quitting her job if she has to but saying she's happy to return the week after. The narrator is more focused on the inconvenience first and then on his amusement at the way Mrs. Dornan expresses herself. He refers to the statues in the church as "effigies of the knights in armor" but she has another way of putting it: "'I mean them two bodies, drawed out man-size in marble,' she returned, and I had to admit that her description was a thousand times more graphic than mine, to say nothing of a certain weird force and uncanniness about the phrase 'drawed out man-size in marble.'" The narrator also likes, when Mrs. Dornan gets to the legend itself, how she says they "sits up on their slabs, and gets off of them, and then walks down the aisle, in their marble." I like how actively he misses the point (and the danger) and yet how understandable that is—it's classic horror stuff. We know perfectly well this is heavy foreshadowing, that it's a horror story and these things will happen. And as ridiculous as they are, Nesbit finds a new way to drive home the perversity of horror (and her rage) with an ice-cold voice that verges on brutality in the recounting and a strange detail that only unfolds in its terrible implications. In a hand of the dead woman, the narrator's wife, is a finger from one of the statues which is found in the church next day broken overnight. By the evidence, the thing was raping her in its marble. And she fought.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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