by S. T. Joshi
Other stories in Pleasantries continue the pattern. The focus of “Desirable Villa” is a crime—but one set in the future. “The Yellow Imps,” again set in Chinatown, tells the story of a man who kills another man after a strange encounter and then believes he is being followed by yellow imps. Is all this the result of a magic spell? Is it all in his mind? It is impossible to tell.
The stories in Night-Pieces are of such a wide range in mood, theme, and implication that they justify the celebrity that the volume has engendered. It is true that the book contains some stories that are purely of crime and suspense; but even these are gripping and effective. In “One Hundred Pounds” a young man who has ingratiated himself into the good graces of his grandfather seems disinclined to wait until that elderly gentleman’s death to inherit the sum cited in the title. “The Watcher” tells of a burglar who kills a man who he believes has been a witness to his crime—but the truth proves to be quite different. On the threshold between mystery and psychological suspense is “The Black Courtyard,” which vividly evokes echoes of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in its account of the protagonist’s sense of dread after killing an old man. The pseudo-supernatural is featred in “The Horrible God,” where an idol believed to have supernatural powers is shown to be something else entirely. And what do we make of “Funspot,” where a man envisions a murder that proves to be his own? Somewhat related to this tale is “Events at Wayless-Wagail,” where a man who has had a vision of an apparent murder in the future seeks desperately to avert or negate it—but finds that that is not so easy to do.
Two delicate stories underscore Burke’s skill at employing benign supernaturalism. “Yesterday Street” displays an almost Bradburyesque sense of nostalgia as a man returns to the place where he grew up and appears to see his childhood friends, still young and innocent. “The Gracious Ghosts” features the novelty of ghosts of the living—a couple that had a falling out but are subsequently reunited. Much more malign are two other tales of witchcraft and precognition. In “Miracle in Suburbia” a man is given supernatural “protection” of some kind by a sorcerer—but what happens upon the sorcerer’s death is unspeakably horrific. “Uncle Ezekiel’s Long Sight” is the half-humorous narrative of a man who seems capable of making uncanny predictions—and he uses this skill cleverly in gaining revenge on an old enemy.
Without question, the most distinctive story in Night-Pieces is “Johnson Looked Back,” one of the most brilliant tales of second-person narration ever written. What begins as the seemingly non-supernatural tale of a man pursued by some implacable enemy proves to be something quite different; and again echoes of Poe—this time “William Wilson”—are clearly evident. But this story is in some senses surpassed, at least in hideousness, by “The Hollow Man,” an unforgettably loathsome tale of a man raised from the dead who haunts his killer. This seemingly trite premise devolves into something far more disturbing, especially as the dead man inexorably decays while stolidly haunting his murderer.
Other tales in Night-Pieces are perhaps less successful. “The Man Who Lost His Head” is the somewhat unsatisfactory story of a man who wants to make a new start in life but one day wakes up and finds that he has the face of a suspected killer. How this has happened is never clarified, although there appears to be some connexion with a person the man had met in a bar, who may or may not be acquainted with Satan. “Murder under the Crooked Spire” is a lacklustre crime narrative, while “The Lonely Inn” is a routine ghost story set in a ghostly tavern. Night-Pieces also contains three largely mainstream stories—“Father and Son,” “Two Gentlemen,” and “Jack Wopping”—that are themselves fine stories in their own right and vividly display Burke’s keen eye for telling traits of character and his profound understanding of class distinctions.
It is fitting that “The Golden Gong”—the one weird tale Burke wrote after publishing Night-Pieces, as John Gawsworth commissioned him to write it for the anthology Thrills (1936)—is his final contribution to the genre. It is a splendid summation of all the variegated strands of weirdness that he had utilised for the previous two decades: the exquisitely rendered Limehouse atmosphere; the subtle and ambiguous use of the supernatural (does the gong of the title, whose ringing by a small boy appears to summon a lovely and kind Chinese lady, a magical device?), the fusion of terror and heart-rending pathos, and a smooth-flowing, crisply muscular prose style that instantly evokes a sense of wonder in both setting and character.
Thomas Burke is one of many writers of his period who freely engaged in weirdness and terror while generating volume after volume of a very different sort. Because the weird tale at this time was not a concretised genre rigidly distinct from other genres or from mainstream fiction, authors could draw upon it whenever the mood struck them—or, more significantly, whenever they came upon a theme or motif that could be most pungently vivified by the manipulation of the strange. Amidst a mass of sound work Burke has written a few tales of exemplary power that deserve a high place in the canon of weird fiction. Whatever his ultimate rank may be, the sheer pleasure derived from reading such a gifted and fluent author is reward enough in itself.
D. H. Lawrence: Weird Fiction as Symbol
The writings of David Herbert Lawrence are unusually and inextricably related to his life—not only because of the peculiar intensity with which he lived it but because he lived at a time of unusual flux and turmoil in society, politics, and culture. Born on September 11, 1885, the fourth child and third son of a collier (a coal miner) and an ex-schoolteacher, Lawrence never forgot his lower-class birth even as he later ascended to the rarefied aesthetic heights of the Bloomsbury group. His birth in Nottinghamshire, near the border of Derbyshire, also played a role in his outlook, enhancing the sense of liminality in his consciousness—the sense of being on the border line between classes, regions, sexes, and cultures. As G. M. Hyde maintains, “The border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire may not be marked by outstanding geographical features, yet it codes, for Lawrence, deeper, more subjective boundaries between mother and father, father and son, mother and son: the disputed territory in which sons are also lovers (and haters).”[141]
After attending Nottingham University College, Lawrence himself became a schoolteacher at the Davidson Road School, Croydon, outside of London. His four-year stint at the school (1908–12) saw his emergence as a writer. Although his first story was published in 1907 in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, his first major publication occurred when his story “Goose Fair” appeared in the prestigious English Review in 1910. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published the next year. By this time Lawrence had become acquainted with several of the leading literary and intellectual figures in England, including Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), J. Middleton Murray and his lover, Katherine Mansfield, Bertrand Russell, and others. He also became involved in a torrid love affair with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, the daughter of a Prussian aristocrat, whose emergence in Lawrence’s life, around 1913, triggered both the severance of a long-running and tortuous affair with a local girl, Jessie Chambers, and his increasing sense of defiance of Victorian morality, especially in sexual matters. His novel Sons and Lovers (1913) is only the first of many works to broach this subject.
By this time, Lawrence had begun to dabble in works—exclusively short stories—that might be thought to touch upon the weird and supernatural. The first such venture, “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (1911), is perhaps nothing more than an expression of Lawrence’s loathing of death—a loathing that had come to him through a kind of Nietzschean affirmation of the wonders and glories of life intensely lived. Its setting among the miners of Selston, a village in Nottinghamshire, is manifestly autobiographical. “The Prussian Officer” (1914), although apparently written before the outbreak of World War I, is clearly influenced by Frieda Weekley (whom Lawrence married on July 13, 1914, after a two-year European tour), but also reflects Lawrence’s own conflicted views of class distinctions in its depiction of an orderly
who kills his high-born superior officer.
Lawrence’s career was permanently affected by the publication of The Rainbow (1915), which was confiscated by the government and publicly burned for obscenity. Lawrenced believed that other political considerations—to say nothing of his marriage to the scion of Prussian aristocracy—played into the matter, and he spent much of the war in a kind of exile from London, living with Middleton Murry and Mansfield in their home in Cornwall. Even so, he was compelled to leave that house on short notice in 1917 as a result of the Defence of the Realm Act; for the next two years or so he resided in various homes in Berkshire and Derbyshire before abandoning England permanently, aside from infrequent visits, in late 1919. During this period he wrote a magnificent tale of sexual tension, “‘Tickets, Please!’” (1919).
For just over two years the Lawrences resided in Italy, making frequent trips to Germany and elsewhere. In early 1922 they decided to emigrate to the southwestern United States—but did so by going in the opposite direction, heading east and stopping in Ceylon and Australia before reaching Taos, New Mexico, late in the year. There they encountered the socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan, who helped them acquire a large tract of land for the purpose of setting up a utopian community. This plan proved unworkable, but Lawrence was manifestly taken by his new environment—an environment that was both “new” in terms of Anglo-Saxon development and ancient in terms of its Spanish and Native American settlements. This dichotomy is imperishably reflected in the long story “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925), where a European woman becomes enmeshed in primitive rituals in the American Southwest. The story also shares thematic links with the novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), with its implications of the revival of ancient gods.
It was around this time that Lawrence was contacted by Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960) to contribute to her anthology, The Ghost Book (1926). This landmark volume of all-original stories not only included the work of leading British specialists in horror, fantasy, and the supernatural (Walter de la Mare, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions), but writers of general literature who, up to that time, had only dabbled in the weird (L. P. Hartley, Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, Mary Webb, Desmond McCarthy). Why Asquith, who had known Lawrence from as early as 1913, decided to invite him to contribute is not entirely clear. It is possible that she read his story “The Border Line” (1924), which might qualify as his first actual supernatural tale: its account of the ghost of a first husband who prevents his former wife from saving the life of her second husband stresses many of those elements of liminality—the border between life and death, strength and weakness, and (in its locale) Germany and France—that were central to Lawrence’s thought.
In any case, Lawrence wrote “Glad Ghosts” for Asquith, but she rejected it, ostensibly because it was not sufficiently ghostly; one critic, Janice Hubbard Harris, maintains that “Many of the tale’s problems lie in its hesitancy to be a genuine ghost tale.”[142] But some critics believe that Asquith saw that the story was in fact about her and her husband, Herbert Asquith, son of the prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith. “Glad Ghosts” presents two sets of ghosts: the first, the ghost of Lucy (Cynthia Asquith), the first wife of Colonel Hale, who plagues the colonel because of his fear of physical love, and the second, the ghost of an unnamed female ancestor of the Lathkills, who is “laid” (in every sense of the term) by the narrator, Paul Morier (probably a stand-in for Lawrence) awakens the sexual feelings of the young Carlotta Lathkill.
Lawrence took the rejection of “Glad Ghosts” in stride, quickly writing “The Rocking-Horse Winner” instead. This is probably the most celebrated story in The Ghost Book, and it is Lawrence’s most widely reprinted weird tale. It is, however, extraordinary chiefly on account of its psychological acuity. Even if we are to assume that the young boy’s ability to predict winners of horse-races is a supernatural capacity (although there is some suggestion that it is merely a product of lucky guesswork), the riveting aspect of the story resides in the grim, even hideous psychological portrait of a boy who consumed with the prospect of his family’s imminent poverty that he rides his hobby-horse to death. Can we again detect an autobiographical implication? Are we to see in the harried boy a reflection of Lawrence’s own memories of his hardscrabble upbringing?
Asquith subsequently asked Lawrence to contribute to another anthology, The Black Cap (1927), and he obliged with “The Lovely Lady,” a compelling story of a domineering woman who, it is suggested, has sucked the life out of her dead son, Henry, and is about to do the same to her other son, Robert. Around this time Lawrence also wrote “The Last Laugh” (1925). Just as “The Border Line” was a thinly disguised account of J. Middleton Murry (the weak second husband, Philip), Katherine Mansfield (the surviving wife, Katherine), and Lawrence himself (the ghost of the strong first husband, Alan), so “The Lovely Lady” depicts a triangle between Lorenzo (Lawrence himself), Marchbanks (Murry), and Miss James (Dorothy Brett, a deaf painter). The supernatural manifestations here are very subtle, as they are in the short but powerful tale “Smile” (1926), which also appears to feature Middleton Murry and his grief over the death of Katherine Mansfield.
Around this time, Lawrence’s own health was declining. A bout of malaria and tuberculosis while on a visit to Mexico compelled the Lawrences to leave Taos and return to Italy. It was here that Lawrence produced his most celebrated and controversial novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), whose publication in Florence created a furore because of its perceived obscenity. It was not published officially in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the focus of a celebrated obscenity trial in which jurors ultimately found that the book did not violate the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. The ban on its publication in the United States was overturned around the same time. The result was a substantial liberalisation of the obscenity laws, with the result that sexual frankness in works claiming “literary merit” are now rarely banned or protested.
But all that came too late for Lawrence, who, although he continued to write prolifically, was increasingly plagued by tuberculosis. In early 1930 he checked into the Ad Astra Sanatorium in Venice, but later transferred himself to a private villa in Venice, where he died on March 2, 1930. Years later, Frieda Lawrence had his ashes brought to their ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where they repose in a chapel in the mountains.
Of Lawrence’s weird work it is difficult to speak in small compass, largely because it is of widely varying character—ranging from tales of psychological terror to pure ghost stories to stories that fuse supernatural and psychological elements. There is also a question of definition, or more precisely of inclusiveness: exactly what constitutes a “weird tale” in Lawrence’s work? Only four or five stories involve a readily recognisable supernatural phenomenon, chiefly a ghost or revenant; but even here, the ghosts are largely symbolic, serving to enhance the interpersonal conflicts that are at the heart of Lawrence’s entire work. And what do we make of “The Woman Who Rode Away,” a splendid tale by any right, and one that seemingly lifts the supernatural from symbolism to myth? “The Blind Man” (1920) has no supernatural element, but it generates substantial terror from what seems a very simple and possibly innocuous act—a blind man’s touching of another man’s face. It is plain that Lawrence was not interested in supernaturalism for its own sake, but instead employed ghosts, revenants, and similar elements as particularly potent tools to convey his core aesthetic and philosophical conceptions—the sexual tension between men and women, the power of a dominant personality to tame and even crush those within its scope, the conflict created by distinctions of class, race, religion, and nationality.[143] What can scarcely be denied is that a writer of Lawrence’s immense talent—and immense insight into human personality—has produced more than one monument to the literature of the supernatural, and for that we must remain forever grateful.
Surprised by Horror:[144]
The Fantasy Short Stories of C. S. Lewis
Fritz Leiber was corr
ect in remarking that “C. S. Lewis’ Malacandra (or Out of the Silent Planet) . . . reads as if it had been written to satisfy Lovecraft’s criteria”[145] of what an “interplanetary” tale ought to be as specified in “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” (1935). But if this novel falls into that anomalous subgenre of works which preserve an almost exact balance between fantasy and/or horror and science fiction (to which we may add such other works as H. G. Wells’s Time Machine and War of the Worlds or Lovecraft’s own At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time”), it may yet come as a surprise to many that Lewis actually wrote tales that can authentically and unreservedly be labeled fantastic, with no little increment of horror. It is true that his children’s novels, the Chronicles of Narnia, are purely fantastic adventure; but amongst his other adult fiction only Till We Have Faces—a rather tedious retelling of the myth of Amor and Psyche (one would do much better, if one does not wish to flounder through the astonishing prose-poetry of Apuleius, to read the retelling of this myth in the opening chapters of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean)—can even approach the genre of fantasy. This is not the case with Lewis’s posthumous collection of short fiction, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, edited by Walter Hooper.[146]
This volume certainly contains some remarkable tales that one would not have thought possible from the pen of this indefatigable and interminable Christian apologist. Indeed, Hooper remarks of the unfinished novel The Dark Tower that “There are, doubtless, others besides myself who were puzzled not to find in the fragment a high theological theme such as that which runs through [Lewis’s] other interplanetary books” (95). I suppose I was surprised, too, but relief might be a better term. It is true that we find in this brilliant fragment—a tale of time-travel whose rather lame premises are overlooked in the excitement of the narrative—various excursions into philosophical absurdity (as, for example, when we are told—apparently seriously—that mysticism may be a form of time-travel [20], a remark that would certainly have tickled both Lovecraft and Bertrand Russell; or when we learn that déjà vu may also be a form of “looking” into the future [21f.]; or when, as the characters view a rather bleak picture of a Dark Tower and its inhabitants on an anomalous “chronoscope,” one of them says, “I think that Dark Tower is in hell” [38]—again it seems that we are intended to take this remark seriously, although I confess that this was the one point in the work where I nearly burst out laughing); but nevertheless the tale has its sound moments. The excitement comes not merely at the dismal world that is shown by the chronoscope (a highly improbable and never fully explained device, hardly an improvement upon Wells’s time machine), but when one of the characters actually stumbles by accident into this world while his apparent double in the other world falls into our world. The tale breaks off, however, just as the real-world character is trying to effect his escape from the hideous Dark Tower world into which he has fallen.