“The Spectre Bridegroom” (1819)

[spoilers] This story by Washington Irving may be his best known after “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” although in my opinion (with all due respect for him as a pioneer) “The Adventure of the German Student,” which came five years later, is his best I’ve seen. The earlier classics are all from Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. This story is a little proud of its own cleverness but comes by it honestly as it is actually clever, and well done, though it never takes itself much seriously. Really it is the story of a prank, but a strange and macabre one. It turns out Irving was another Anglo-American infatuated with Germany. I don’t know how I missed this (maybe the Nazis). I know my Humanities 101 class in college started with Goethe, so it’s always been there for me to see. Irving based both “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” on German folklore and here he doesn’t even bother to move it out of Germany. It is a sitcom premise though it broods with gloomy atmosphere. A man is to marry a woman he has never met, arranged by their parents, but is attacked and killed by highway robbers on the way to the wedding. He and his old bosom buddy were already late, now this really tears it. The dead fiance’s companion—as it happens, an enemy of the bride’s family—immediately goes on to the wedding party to pass the news. Now comes the comedy part. The bride’s family is so happy and relieved he has arrived he can’t get a word in edgewise. They presume he is the groom none of them has ever seen. Yes, we’re approaching stretcher territory now. In all the confusion he and the bride fall in love at first sight. More sitcom: our pretender has the presence of mind to strike on a brilliant idea. Granted he has the whole evening to work it out, but basically he makes himself more and more gloomy as the evening goes along. At midnight, he announces dramatically that he must leave—he was killed earlier tonight by robbers and must be buried tomorrow. He leaves the wedding party stunned. At first they think he is astoundingly rude and then they are just astounded when they get the news. A more modern sensibility might end it somewhere around here as a kind of conte cruel with a sharp twist. This being 1819 and horror as we know it in its infancy, we carry on with the romance. He appears to the bride and conducts some other shenanigans as a ghost before cluing her in. The ending is also very sitcom, with all revealed and all forgiven and this former enemy of the family welcomed to marry their daughter, who loves him true, and happily ever after.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1819)

Washington Irving's chestnut came out the year after Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was first published. That's some bona fides. It's old and it prefigures many things. I was exposed to it somewhere along the line—maybe I read it in junior high or saw TV productions or heard readings. Something. Whatever, I feel like I've always known it even if I don't always remember the details. This American brand of horror—Nathaniel Hawthorne provides more examples, though Edgar Allan Poe does not entirely fit the profile—is rooted in Puritanism, of course. In 1819, Puritanism might have been two centuries old, but it was still callow in comparison to the millennium-plus age of Europe's Roman Catholic Church, whose ancient corruption alone is a much better underpinning for ghosts, blasted spiritual lives, violence, and/or remorse. Let's not forget the druids and barbarian tribes and such either. Horror is one case where I generally favor the Europeans. Maybe because I was raised on it, or in it, American horror stories like this one too often feel close to yippee ki-yay tall tales folklore and myth, campfire ghost stories that rely too much on some cheap shock gimmick like the teller whispering and then standing up suddenly and howling. Who wouldn't get a jolt of adrenaline? But that's not really the point, is it? Here the one thing, the only thing, is headlessness (as opposed to heedlessness, though that is arguably part of the point too). "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" manages a few effective paragraphs near the end, with the Headless Horseman seemingly in hot pursuit of the hapless Ichabod Crane. But otherwise it is mostly endless setup and description at deadly plodding pace. The ending is terrible, and distinctly American as well. In fact, Irving often looks forward to Mark Twain here in the gentle notes of deadpan skepticism. But "Sleepy Hollow"—it was all a practical joke? Everything of weird interest is drained by that. Plus you hate to see a bully win (reminding me once again, as compulsive aside, that Donald Trump is a very old American story). Irving's language is antiquated too, as long as I'm complaining—I object to the frequency of "peradventure." Is this story really beloved by children? Is it beloved by anyone? It's not particularly beloved by me. I know it's a certain icon of American Halloween imagery and ritual but what does that mean? Irving's "Tom Walker and the Devil" is much better in every way, as I recall, though it is also dogged by problems of American horror. "Sleepy Hollow" is less overtly Puritan, set in the times following the American Revolutionary War, when the general project at hand was to build out the structures of a democratic society, in which case superstition necessarily needs to be treated skeptically. But the story often seems to have something less than moral clarity, with its implicit suggestion that bullies gain favor and power and then, in the natural order of things, banish intellectuals and teachers. Or maybe just, in my contrarian way, I don't like the story because everyone else seems to, especially at this time of year.

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

Up From Slavery (1901)

Booker T. Washington is an interesting American historical figure all the way around and his memoir is a good place to get the basic points. For the full context, as a conservative business leader in the South, you have to dig a little more, and it's complicated. Washington's personal ethos appeared to genuinely hew close to bedrock conservative American puritanism, certainly in terms of traits like work ethic and thrift. What he accomplished in his lifetime with Tuskegee University remains plain amazing. For crying out loud, he built a kiln to make the bricks to raise the buildings while they farmed the rest of the land. There is something at once inspiring and exhausting about this story. Why did it have to be that hard? Washington is an obvious source for the so-called Jackie Robinson rules as we understand and still live by them now—as an African American you always have to be better and you can never get mad or even complain. Washington was born into slavery and raised in a world where he would never get a break. He had to be grateful for even the smallest concession—a loan, say, which could be easily obtained by most white men—and he had to be silent on racism. He's still mostly silent about it here. He is quick to criticize members of "my race" and slow to condemn whites. So among other things Up From Slavery is a look into the strange ways of the South in the transition period from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. Washington is amazed, on his first visit to the North, that he can stay in a hotel where whites stay. It's poignantly sad in those terms. The facts of the shabby treatment of former slaves are mostly left out, and it seems like a strange absence now. Yet who can fail to be impressed with what Washington did? He built a kiln to make the bricks to raise the buildings for a university campus while he farmed the rest of the land for food. Like the best memoirs his book is a pleasure to read, with rambling anecdotes and lots of insight, some of which seems to me now harsher than necessary. But then he accomplished all that he did. Still, Up From Slavery has strange gaps, not just on racism. I got the feeling we're not getting the whole story on everything with his three marriages, for example. But it's great on Tuskegee, and an affecting landmark of where race relations were in America, 40 years on from Fort Sumter.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Devil and Tom Walker" (1824)

Read story by Washington Irving online.

Washington Irving's tale is a 19th-century American update on the Faust story. It's a good story structure, a classic, and Irving makes the most of it. It starts with buried pirate treasure in the deepest Massachusetts forest, and then introduces Tom Walker and his wife, both bitter misers. They fight constantly, and one is always trying to cheat the other out of shares in their meager wealth. In the woods, Tom Walker happens to encounter Old Scratch himself, who offers knowledge of the buried treasure in exchange for the usual: one (1) immortal soul. Tom Walker says he'll have to think about that. It's such a momentous offer that he lets his wife in on it, who scolds him for not accepting it right away and then immediately leaves for the woods to cut her own deal. She's never heard from again, except later, when Tom Walker sees her apron hanging from a high branch in a tree, guarded by a large vulture. When he climbs up to recover it he finds only a heart and liver bundled into it. This is probably my favorite part of the story—dark and spooky, reminiscent of scenes from The Blair Witch Project or the more recent The Witch. Her absence is final. Nothing is heard from her again. Time passes, and Tom Walker gets to thinking about that buried treasure again. He returns to the woods, looking for the devil, who finally after some time reappears. They bargain and hash it out, in somewhat vague terms. Eventually they agree that Tom Walker will do very well as a banker—or "usurer," their preferred term. Tom Walker moves to Boston and indeed does very well. His duties: "extort bonds, foreclose mortgages, drive the merchant to bankruptcy." Tom Walker attacks with relish and before long he is as rich as he ever could dream. Now comes the time for second thoughts and attempts to get out of the contract. Foolish mortal. All his plotting and scheming come to nothing, of course, except spoiling the time left to him. In the end the devil takes his due, in fairly dramatic fashion. Washington Irving is one of those early American writers I haven't actually read much, and this story was new to me. It comes from the collection Tales of a Traveller. His most famous stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," come from a collection of a few years earlier. My main concern with some of these early American writers I've neglected (James Fennimore Cooper is another) is that the language will be deadly dull and/or tricky to unpack, but that's not the case here at all. "The Devil and Tom Walker" is quite well done, though it starts slow on a lengthy description of the woods. Once we get to Tom Walker and his wife, it clips right along.

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

Fences (2016)

The primary purpose of this movie is obvious, given away by its Christmas Day release. It's here to win Oscars and be important. And if that's the only way a movie like this can be made, well, all right. I'm not exactly saying Fences is timelessly great, though it's pretty darned good. A big budget screen adaptation by August Wilson of his own play—with posthumous uncredited input from Tony Kushner—is probably not going to happen much of any other way. The bones of Fences are solid in the original play and story, which bristle with 20th-century African-American history. Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington, who also directs) is a garbage man in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, a washed-up and bitter former Negro League baseball player. He was quite a player, they all agree—only Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson were better, says one character—and now he's quite a storyteller. In the fullness of this narrative he was hard for me to like, but he's often infectiously charming when he gets wound up into his stories. Making him unlikable is a choice and it serves the whole well. There is a lot of complexity in Troy Maxson, and in all the other characters here too—his wife Rose (Viola Davis), a grown son from his first marriage, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), his son with Rose, Cory (Jovan Adepo), who shows signs of athleticism himself, and a brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson) suffering from untreated World War II PTSD. It's a great story and no amount of high-toned well-meaning production can obscure that—indeed, it probably helped with winning on all the talent. The play's the thing, as somebody said. This movie is built on a good play and further fortified by excellent performances. I wasn't always sold on Washington, but that might be because I wasn't always sold on Troy Maxson—which probably means it's a good performance. I thought Viola Davis as his wife Rose was the best thing in a picture full of great things. She is humble, long-suffering, and eloquent when the occasion calls, full of bubbling joy and poignant dignity that never feel put on. Stephen Henderson as family friend Jim Bono is also great in a supporting role. Washington's directing is nothing special—he seems to like putting characters at opposite sides of the frame to fill the screen, and he uses lots of close-ups. But it's still mostly a film of a play, driven by dialogue in static settings. Washington never gets in the way of anything either. Altogether a safe choice.