by James Morrow
No sooner had he peeled away the signature-sheet than Mrs. Crompton clutched her chest and slumped into the chair beside the scrubbing counter. “’Sheart, I am a-swoon,” she moaned.
“Oh, my poor Mrs. Crompton!”
“A swallow of water should bring me round,” she whispered, rapping her knuckles against her breastbone.
He calculated that he could race back to the slopping table, seize his pint bottle, return to the press-room, and place the container to her lips within twenty seconds. He did it in fifteen. The liquid proved efficacious, and she quickly regained her composure, speaking in a steady voice.
“Merci, Monsieur.”
“Do you swoon often?”
“’Tis my first such spell. But hear my explanation.” She drained the bottle. “When I was but fourteen, I saw the farmer Giles Corey crushed to death for refusing to plead at Salem. I’d largely banished the episode from my mind, but now your great press brings it back.”
“I must dispute your memory in one particular. No lady so lovely as yourself was more than three years old when the Salem Court convened.”
“You’re a beguiling rascal, Ben Franklin, but you see before you a woman of forty-six years. Now tell me, how long must I wait ere a bound volume appears in my hands?”
“Seven jobs lie ahead of yours, two of substance, the rest trifles. I believe we can begin come April. After that, allow us four more months.”
“Might you do’t in three?”
“Mayhap.”
She rose with fluid grace. “I should like to see this Von Guericke sphere of yours. I’ve heard of such devices but ne’er beheld one.”
Thus it was that Ben spent the final moments of his luncheon interval in the compositing-room, demonstrating the sulphur-ball. He showed Mrs. Crompton how to infuse the pungent globe with the electric force; how her own charged flesh, once isolated from the floor, became as attractive to tobacco and petals as was the sphere itself; and how to make a tiny lightning-bolt leap from her electrified finger to a metal object. The asymmetries brought a smile to his face. On one side of the slopping table: the unfolding of a philosophic experiment, beautifully repeatable. On the other side: the ebb and flow of life, marvelously unpredictable. When he’d jumped out of bed that morning, Ben had assumed the day would prove as mundane as any other.
He’d never imagined that by one o’clock he would be standing beside
an elegant woman, filling his tissues with electricity even
as he longed to reach out and stroke her
with deliciously stimulating
and impossibly
passionate
j
Sparks
spew from Van
de Graaff generators. Electric
rainbows scurry up and down Jacob’s ladders.
Tendrils of lightning spiral around Tesla coils. In short, we
have entered the domain of 1940’s American science-fiction cinema,
a phenomenon that in my opinion occasioned numerous paragons of the dramatist’s art, literary works to rival Œdipus Rex, King Lear, and Long Day’s Journey into Night.
The reflex by which you humans lionize theatrical scripts over screenplays bewilders me. When it comes to the latter, you unfailingly seize upon some arbitrary celluloid simulacrum, always a coarse and budget-bound shadow of the writer’s vision. One day you’ll learn a proper respect for the text itself.
In any consideration of 1940’s science-fiction screenplays, one name towers above all others, well above Joseph West and Man Made Monster, well above Brenda Weisberg and The Mad Ghoul. I speak of the great Edward T. Lowe, whose deathless duology, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, cannily dramatizes the triumphs and trade-offs intrinsic to the scientific worldview. Through the braided narratives that constitute the first masterpiece, the author serves up a critique of Western rationality so withering as to warm the heart of every middle-class mystic in the audience. But in the second scenario Lowe reverses the poles, arguing that we abandon Reason only at our peril.
Whatever the flaws in my attempt to document the birth of the Enlightenment—a project that has recently obliged me to depict my dear Jennet in intellectual congress with Benjamin Franklin, with more such intimacies to come—you cannot deny the subject’s inherent significance. If our civilization has made a Devil’s bargain with its own cleverness, consigning its soul to a false god called scientific progress, then this swindle must be exposed at every opportunity. If, on the other hand, the Age of Reason represented humankind’s last hope of unshackling itself from sanctified ignorance and consecrated nonsense, then we should stand up and say so, even if we offend the astrologer next door or the cleric down the street.
House of Frankenstein takes as its principal figure the deranged scientist Gustav Niemann. When we first meet this egomaniacal Übermensch, he lies imprisoned somewhere in central Europe, condemned for performing blasphemous medical experiments. The plot centers around the covenants through which Dr. Niemann, after breaking out of his dungeon, lures three other outcasts into his sphere. First he promises to repair the crooked spine of his obsequious hunchback assistant, Daniel. Upon encountering the vampire Count Dracula—avatar of the enchantment that Reason has drained from the world—Niemann agrees to “protect the earth” upon which the undead aristocrat lies. Finally, crossing paths with Lawrence Talbot, a self-pitying werewolf, Niemann claims he will surgically reconfigure Talbot’s brain and thereby “lift this curse from you forever.” For Lowe, clearly, Talbot is the quintessential dupe of Enlightenment rationality. The moon that broods over House of Frankenstein is not the vibrant orb that for centuries has stirred the blood of poets, but a thing of cold Newtonian horror, triggering a condition that Talbot regards as irredeemably pathological. Rather than reveling in his lupine nature, his inner wolf, he succumbs to the supposition that he’ll never be happy until he stops ripping out people’s throats and instead settles into a respectable bourgeois existence.
Like so many captains of corporate technocracy, Niemann has no intention of honoring his philanthropic vows. He cherishes but one goal, to further empower himself by reanimating a legendary corpse-assemblage known as the Frankenstein monster, regardless of the consequences to the human community or the biosphere at large. By the time the drama is done, Niemann has violated all three covenants, and his would-be beneficiaries lie dead—Daniel defenestrated, Dracula vaporized by a sunbeam, Talbot shot with a silver bullet.
The environmentalist discourse encoded in House of Frankenstein, which begins with Niemann’s disingenuous vow to protect the Earth, reaches its apex in Act Two, when the scientist enters a community where the corpse-assemblage once roamed. Now that the ghastly thing is gone, the peasants have regained their Rousseauean harmony with Nature. Explains the local police inspector, “Our village has been quiet and peaceful ever since the dam broke and swept the Wolf Man and the Frankenstein monster to their destruction.” (For a cogent analysis of the ecological motifs suffusing this text, the reader is referred to Saving Graces, written in 1987 by Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology.) The theme continues in Act Three, when the corpse-assemblage drowns Niemann in a quicksand bog, Lowe’s objective correlative for the miasma into which Newtonian instrumentalism has dragged the world.
House of Dracula radically inverts every epistemological premise around which House of Frankenstein turns. The main character is the blameless and upright Dr. Franz Edelman, whose “reputation for helping others” is known even among the world’s vampires and werewolves. Before Act One is over, both Count Dracula and Lawrence Talbot, mysteriously resurrected following their misadventures in the earlier text, have come to Edelman seeking natural remedies for their putatively supernatural afflictions. In contrast to the self-actualized vampire we met previously, the undead aristocrat of House of Dracula is under “a curse of misery and horror.” This time around, Lowe depicts Talbot not as a noble primitive who has failed to comprehend his own spiritual beauty, but as a physically d
iseased victim of intracranial pressure.
For Dracula, Franz Edelman prescribes an experimental vaccine to combat the parasites infecting his blood. In the Wolf Man’s case, Edelman proposes to soften his brainpan with a therapeutic mold derived from a “hybrid plant,” Clavaria formosa. (A delightful semiotic analysis of Lowe’s nomenclature appears in Stuff and Nonsense, penned in 1998 by Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge.) When the Frankenstein monster turns up in a seaside cave beneath Edelman’s castle at the beginning of Act Two, he resolves with characteristic benevolence to deliver the corpse-assemblage from its coma. Although the doctor’s deformed and saintly nurse, Nina, whose crooked frame he hopes to repair with the Clavaria mold, thinks that reviving the Frankenstein monster is a terrible idea—the thing is in all probability still a homicidal maniac—Edelman believes the monster deserves a second chance: “Is that poor creature responsible for what he is?” Counters Nina, “Man’s responsibility is to his fellow man.” Bested by dialectic, Edelman replies, “Perhaps you’re right, Nina. Frankenstein’s monster must never wreak havoc again.”
Lowe wrote House of Dracula in 1945, the same year that atomic bombs destroyed two Japanese cities, and the scholarly consensus is that he added the pivotal “never wreak havoc” line immediately upon hearing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evidently Lowe was the first serious Western dramatist to express a hope that the same scientists who designed thermonuclear weapons might ultimately campaign for their elimination.
The downfall of Franz Edelman begins when Dracula, unable to master his demonic nature, injects his contaminated blood into the doctor, who subsequently acquires a split personality. Edelman’s compassionate side predominates long enough for him to perform the Clavaria treatment on Talbot, but then his dark half takes over, prompting him to murder his gardener, strangle Nina, and revive the Frankenstein monster.
Despite this tragic conclusion, we must note that medical intervention and the Enlightenment worldview function throughout House of Dracula as wholly positive forces. Talbot emerges from Edelman’s castle a man reborn, a normal life ahead of him. He has rejected the lycanthropic moon of superstition for a humanist moon lit by scientific insight. It would seem that, unlike the Lowe of the earlier text, the author of House of Dracula feels little sympathy for the self-appointed avengers of dispossessed enchantment.
As my story progresses, we shall address the primitivist complaint again, but now we must return to Jennet. Before you negotiate the next scene, however, let me invite you to spend a moment meditating on Edmund Lowe’s piquant symbol of the post-Enlightenment dilemma:
the Frankenstein monster, lying on the operating table of the valiant
Dr. Edelman. I invite you to contemplate the monster’s
bubbling bile and flowing lymph, its buzzing
nerves and pulsing veins, its
throbbing brain and
beating
j
Heart
a-flutter, flesh
a-quiver, Jennet pulled
back the door to Keimer’s Printing
-House, thus setting Ben’s ingenious bell to tinkling,
and stepped inside. As the journeymen and the apprentices looked
on, she removed her gloves, unwound her scarf, and brushed the snow from her arms. Briefly her admirers savored her presence, then returned to their duties. George Webb took up the inking-balls and pounded them against a type-form like a hortator beating out a cadence in the hold of a Roman galley. John O’Leary yanked the spindle lever on the Blaeu press, permanently staining a perfectly good sheet of paper with some insipid tract or blathering ballad. David Harry dipped a recently employed type-form, now grimy with ink, into the swampy waters of the rinsing trough.
She wasn’t exactly sure which phenomenon had triggered her infatuation: the brilliance of Ben’s writing, or the unmediated fact of Ben himself. Near the end of their dalliance with the sulphur-ball, he had lent her the complete Silence Dogood series, fourteen letters submitted serially to The New-England Courant by a country widow of limited income, lively intellect, and prolific opinions. It was a double hoax. Silence’s devoted audience didn’t know she was really James Franklin’s apprentice, his upstart brother Ben—and neither did James himself. By disguising his identity, altering his handwriting, and slipping a new letter each night beneath the door of James’s printing-house, Ben had managed at age sixteen to secure for his prose prominent weekly exposure in the Courant, a situation the elder Franklin would never have tolerated had he known the epistles’ provenance.
Where had Ben acquired such confidence? From whence came this astonishing nerve? A city youth had thought his way, with considerable charm and only a few lapses, into a different gender, another generation, and a rural cast of mind. Jennet adored Silence Dogood. After savaging the supposition that women were less intelligent than men, Silence went on to attack those who barred the female sex from higher education. “Women are taught to read and write their Names and nothing else. We have the God-given capacity for Knowledge and Understanding. What have we done to forfeit the Privilege of attending Colleges?” In weighing atheists against hypocrites, Silence concluded, “I am of late inclin’d to think the Hypocrite the more dangerous of the Two, especially if he sustains a Post in the Government.” Above all, Silence was a realist: “I am apt to fancy I could be persuaded to marry again, but a good-humor’d, sober, and agreeable Man being all but impossible to find, I have grown resign’d to Widowhood, though it is a Condition I have never much admir’d.”
Jennet proceeded to the drying-room, where dozens of freshly printed signatures hung from a network of overhead strings, Ben standing in their midst like a washer-woman surrounded by the day’s laundry. The philosophers traded exuberant greetings, and then she reeled off her usual questions. How many pages of her treatise had he consumed? What was his opinion so far? When would he finish? It was their eighth such encounter in a month—though only now did she realize that, beyond his resplendent mind and generous soul, she found Ben appealing in body as well. True, his limbs extended from a stoutish frame, but rarely had a barrel-chest boasted such dignity. Yes, his countenance contained some superfluous flesh, but it was a pudding-face of the most meritorious sort. Indeed, his shanks were hefty, but where in Pennsylvania might one behold a more graceful turn of calf?
He touched his finger to a dangling signature, ascertaining that the ink was dry. “Last night I read your chapters on those motion-spirits in service to acceleration. With each paragraph I grow more enchanted.”
“But do I make a convincing case against demonology?” she asked.
“For all I am delighted by your book, I would learn how your argument plays out ere I judge it.” He began unhooking the signatures. “Not being a church-going man, I expect to read your last sentence on Sunday morning, whereupon I shall render my verdict.”
A spasm of rapture seized Jennet as she realized that their next rendezvous might occur in Ben’s own lodgings, but an instant later her joy was eclipsed by sobriety, clarity, pragmatism, and several other of her mind’s more annoying habits. The pièce bien faite wherein she and Ben became lovers knew little of logic and much of lunacy. Whilst the darling boy might accept her as a kind of intriguing middle-aged cousin, it was inconceivable that they would ever enjoy a tryst. Faugh, he was but three years older than Rachel!
Resting a hand on his shoulder, she asked him whether she might visit his rooms at two o’clock on Sunday afternoon to discuss her treatise in full. When he protested that his accommodations were ill-suited to a woman of her breeding, she reminded him that she’d been happier living in a Nimacook wigwam with an Indian she esteemed than in a Chestnut Street townhouse with a postmaster she disdained.
The interval was interminable, three whole days, but at last the appointed hour arrived. She stepped off her front stoop, tramped through the swirling snows of Market Street, and, ascending the decrepit rear stairway of the Thomas Godfrey mansion, entered the domain of th
e callow genius who’d given Silence Dogood to the world. He greeted her dressed in a pristine ensemble that would have fared disastrously in the printing-house—fawn breeches, vest of yellow silk, white day-shirt with ruffled cuffs.
“Bienvenue au Château Franklin,” he said.
“Merci, Monsieur.”
“Yesterday I went bear-hunting in homage to your Indian past, and soon I found my quarry, lying torpid in a cave by the river. Straightaway I knew him for an industrious beast, as ’twas apparent he’d built his own brewery then consumed the whole of his first barrel of ale, that he might study the effects of inebriation on hibernation. I have no meat to give thee, Madam, for I hold it unsporting to shoot a bear whilst he’s conducting a philosophic experiment.”
She laughed and said, “I require no meat, sir, but I should like a tour of your castle.”
“Suivez-moi.”
There were four rooms altogether, including Ben’s little bed-chamber, tiny parlor, suffocating study, and congested laboratory, the latter a mere dressing alcove into which he’d jammed a cherry table a-jumble with an air-pump, a microscope, a telescope, a Von Guericke sphere, and other such paraphernalia. Each space boasted its own hearth connected to a common chimney, an arrangement that he merrily compared to quadruplet piglets nursing on a brood sow.
Instinctively they drifted to the coziest place, the parlor, where her host had built a convivial fire. A copper kettle occupied the chimney niche like an egg snugged into a rookery.