The Birth-Mark

One of the most common topoi on these pages has been one of the most ill-named: positivism.  A dictionary will tell you that this sorry word denotes a system whereby only what can be perceived by the senses is worth remarking; a good dictionary will add that this selfish approach somehow also means being positive.  It is more than a little ironic that a theory boasting of knowing nothing except what can be grasped, smelled, tasted, seen and heard by a single mortal form could dare bestow upon itself such an uplifting motto.  Let every person negate the information accumulated by the rest of the world and only count himself, and let us then behold the amazing rapture that overcomes this soul, or darkling cave, upon learning that he can only learn so much.  Indeed, even the greatest of positivist minds can only absorb so little of what the world holds that it seems laughable to think they could ever survive without the input of others.  They do, naturally, because it is their grand decision to perceive what others have already achieved.  Should all this sound like a stinking heap of particularly rotten fish, you may enjoy the gentle allegory contained in this story.

Our tale is not distinguished by its originality, but by its beauty – in which case it has much in common with its heroine, Georgiana.  Georgiana is a woman of stunning attractiveness, attractiveness that could not be more proportionate, more radiant or truer to nature's perfect design.  Yet amidst these angelic fibers lurks one small flaw, a birthmark of the oddest proportions:

It shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size.  Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy, at her birth-hour, had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek, and left this impress there, in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts.  Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand.  It must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign-manual varied exceedingly, according to the difference of temperament in the beholders.  Some fastidious persons – but they were exclusively of her own sex – affirmed that the Bloody Hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty, and rendered her countenance even hideous.

It has been said that there is nothing more repulsive than a slightly distorted version of what one finds incredibly beautiful (an example from fiction would be a loved one resurrected as a corpse-like phantom); it has also been said that there is nothing to which one inures oneself more quickly than ugliness.  The male mind, if it can successfully be cloven from the female mind on such an issue, would likely suggest that a woman's voluptuousness can blind even the fussiest of male admirers to a flaw.  But another argument can be made outside of the gossipy circles of tea parties:

It was the fatal flaw of humanity, which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.  The Crimson Hand expressed the ineludible grip in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust.

Both arguments are presented to and considered by perhaps the most important person to have to consider them, Georgiana's husband Alymer, which brings us to another story quite apart.

Alymer is "a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy," who possesses, much like this literary figure, the oracle of the Brazen Head.  What experiments he conducts in his laboratory are not ours to know, but his trusted assistant Aminadab has much of the modern cinematic notion of such helpers:

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer's underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he executed all the details of his master's experiments. With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that encrusted him, he seemed to represent man's physical nature; while Aylmer's slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.

Aminadab ("bad anima" reversed) should not be written off as a minor character just as Aylmer, for all his pomp and thriving circumstances, should not really be considered our protagonist.  The dichotomy indicated above finds its harshest echoes in Aminadab's own chuckling.  As Aylmer struggles, mixing, matching, meditating through alembics, ingredients and formulas, Aminadab fulfills his every command yet cannot stifle a more than occasional snicker.  For whatever triumph as Aylmer may have achieved in his eventful existence, such fortune pales in comparison to what has surrounded him, on the outside of his laboratories, its seeds and stems the essential components of innumerable concoctions.  Indeed, when he finally whisks poor Georgiana into his offices to find a means to remove her solitary blemish, he even boasts that "no king, on his guarded throne, could keep his life" if he chose to administer a certain potion he humbly dubs the Elixir of Immortality.  Georgiana resigns herself to her husband's genius because everyone else has already succumbed to his wise ways – even if what he wishes to do infringes upon all natural law.

I have previously commented that Hawthorne produces two types of goods, and despite its primitive symbolism, The Birth-Mark is undoubtedly riveting.  One can fairly whiff the exotic scents that Alymer cascades around the wretched Georgiana as if she were nothing more than another damned spot that could not be removed.  The "discord in life" that describes, in turn, Georgiana's odd mark then the havoc wreaked by the votaries of implacable materialism is also buttressed by Alymer's diary, which is something more of a financial statement than a personal account:

The volume, rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part.

We should all be so lucky as to have our earthbound senses thwart us in our climb to heavenly glory.  How else are we to attempt a modest life if not by filling our gums with dirt?   Or perhaps with the red clay so ready at our fingertips.

The History of Witchcraft

Twenty-two years ago or so I first ingested the very odd phrase "banned books."  Very odd not only because these were precisely some of the texts on our rather unambitious school curriculum, but also because the concept of prohibition was somewhat lost on me, a rather ambitious young thinker.  The list was long and quite varied, although even then one could detect an undercurrent of political deviance.  I shall not enumerate these works since, as it were, most of them were children of the moment, as topical then as they are forgettable now (with one remarkable exception of genius).  Why do such works fade into oblivion as quickly as they scorched our headlines?   Because it is not within the agenda of the daily news that art lurks.  When revolution occurs, it is inevitably succeeded by compromise and regression to a more palatable mean for the simple reason that true revolution takes place only in the human mind.  So when we look back on our happy lives and recall the works that meant the most to us, we will find them at junctures and crossroads of our thinking.  They will support or alter our beliefs so violently as to be milestones of our days.  This is not quite, however, how I feel about this seminal work.

What is dubbed here witchcraft may be generally understood as Satanism, since for the Christian little difference persists.  Our witches begin not before Judeo-Christianity but against the early adherents of these faiths, and their services and rituals seem consistently to portray hideous mockeries of what is sacrosanct – a point that cannot be overstated.  It is the common ignorance of the non-expert – and Summers's knowledge of the occult may never be surpassed – to think that the Abrahamic religions simply borrowed the rituals of the prior pagans and removed the bestiality, the polytheism, and the sacrifices, reducing Christianity and its cousins to solemn epigones.  Precisely the opposite argument is made on the pages of The History of Witchcraft: 

Witchcraft as it existed in Europe from the eleventh century was mainly the spawn of Gnostic heresy, and heresy by its very nature embraced and absorbed much of heathendom.  In some sense Witchcraft was a descendant of the old pre-Christian magic, but it soon assumed a slightly different form, or rather at the advent of Christianity it was exposed and shown in its real, foul essence as the worship of the Evil Principle, the Enemy of Mankind, Satan.

Is an argument for monotheism's primacy belied by this admission?  Does not evil appear to come first?  As in all his works, Summers's dazzling erudition will prove impenetrable to those who like everything in plain English with plain explanations – but these are not, shall we say, members of the target audience.  We are treated to copious details of exorcisms, the Sabbath until its more modern manifestations, worship and rituals of the witch and warlock, and the all-important familiars, usually small animals that serve as conduits to darker operators.  Admittedly perhaps a little too much is made of the portrayal of the witch in literature,  especially since the focus of the text is supposed to be facts as they are reported not interpreted by poets and dramatists.  Yet it is very true that our concepts of sorcery and its practitioners, for better or worse, stem from precisely their places in our arts, the ever-fickle popular imagination, and a hearty dose of folk tales, which unfortunately tend to emphasize the most ludicrous and overwrought elements (such as broom-riding, although this is clearly a modern addendum).  The anecdotes included are horrible and probably true to their last detail; the only debatable matter is the cause of these events.  The skeptic, of course, will immediately attribute them to natural maladies and worldwide Church-sponsored fraud, which brings us to a brief aside about books banned or otherwise disdained.

It is one thing when a controversial work is marketed as such, and quite another when an innocuous if opinionated text that would attract the attention of few is besmirched with scattered apologies for its existence.  Why then should it be published at all?  Such is the fate of The History of Witchcraft, branded dismissively on its back cover as furthering "a medieval viewpoint" (concocted by someone, doubtless, who thinks of the Middle Ages as a mindless wasteland of sword and sorcery) and prefaced by not one, not two, but three introductions.  The last, by Summers himself, succinctly outlines his project; the first, by a Christian admirer of the scholar, can be swiftly filed under what we have come to term fanmail; but the second by a Marxist ignorant of both languages and academe is the most ignominious.  Under the guise of an "enlightened" take on what Summers will so eloquently – and, it must be said, convincingly – describe, Morrow denounces the whole endeavor as some tribute to unprovable superstition, championing along the way this regrettable excuse for research once popular among the least imaginative of our species.  Murray's work, with which I am unfortunately acquainted, is not only lauded as "true scholarship" – evidently meaning that original thinking and fact-gathering are not permitted – but juxtaposed like some shabby, doddering hut against Summers's bright fortress of heavenly strength.  When Summers later relates a couple of likely spurious stories about the murders of Christian children at the hands of European Jews engaged in extralegal sacrifices, Morrow – who was Jewish and atheist – comments that "the intelligent reader need scarcely be told that the publisher abhors the author's views," and then cites the "reasons indicated in the foreword" as justification for the project.  Why would anyone bother with Murray's poppycock may be puzzling enough.  But why any publisher would essentially condemn his own book for the sake of being politically correct suggests derangement.  Summers writes at a level so much greater than that of the average reader that he is in no position to exert the malefic influence commonly incident to works of, for example, right-wing hatemongers who speak in plain words about bare and brutal emotions.  We do not see ourselves or our discontents in these pictures, nor do we have an easily absorbable text laden as it is with quotations in seven languages – and I think we shall end our litany of protest right about there.         

About Summers much has been said but the records remain inevitably crooked.  Summers was probably a priest, but not an ordained Catholic one; he was not trained in any field in particular, but exhibited that uncanny brand of genius that can absorb information from variegated sources and explain it in its own words – a much undervalued and glorious skill; and his belief in the evils he so gladly recounts should not detract or enhance our understanding that he is interested in their imaginary consequences as much as their physical.  That is to say, while Summers probably did wholly believe in things such as vampires or witches, he perceived them first and foremost as immoral phenomena.  As he states:

In truth he who accepts the spiritual world is bound to realize all about him the age-long struggle for empery of discarnate evil ceaselessly contending with a thousand cunning sleights and a myriad vizardings against the eternal unconquerable powers of good.  Nature herself bears witness to the contest; disease and death, cruelty and pain, ugliness and sin, are all evidences of the mighty warfare, and it would be surprising indeed if some were not wounded in the fray – for we cannot stand apart, each man, S. Ignatius says, must fight under one of the two standards – if some even did not fall.

He knew that someone who prizes the world's gold over the world's goodness, someone who cares little if innocents suffer for his own benefit, and someone who thinks war is a necessary method for eliminating anyone who stands in the way of one's might and money can be undeniably charged with leaguing with the blackest of forces.  He also was possessed of an almost boundless imagination that allowed him to ponder such a question abroad in the coolness of the evening: knowing what I know of the horrors of man, of what evil he has shown himself capable, can I imagine that these beings could not exist in humanly guise?  Could there not be some who truly adhere to some Satanic agenda in barter for materialist advantage?  Alas, what has lured great minds to madness is still fodder for those who find faith in something benevolent a little boring.  And if we come to laugh at evil, we should ask ourselves what on earth we could possibly think of good.

The Wendigo

Presumably we all have nightmares (we cannot believe those who claim never to recall in waking what took place in sleep), but what those nightmares entail will depend much on the mind in their thrall.  Attempts to find commonalities among the legions of the reposed should be dismissed as swiftly as the long day's platitudes.  Nightmares may be universal, but riveting nightmares tend to be as exceptional as riveting biographies (with, it should be said, little coincidence of the two).  One of my most recurrent midnight scenes involves a fairground.  Perhaps the modern concept of an amusement park provides a better description.  I am alone and with friends; the park is both full of customers and gleefully empty; what I can say for certain is that it is night or evening, which necessitates a definite amount of artificial light, and a large store of current to engineer the rides swooping and sliding behind me.  What is occurring in my vicinity I never solve; but the motion and sounds of the machines indicate that on these grounds something baleful has taken root.  Sometimes I have a rucksack on; sometimes a companion is also outfitted with this appurtenance.  Most often I have awoken just as the tumult seems to be teetering on the brink of riot, and yet the source of this chaos is never revealed.  A different landscape but similar conundrum besets the characters in this famous story.

Our place is the wilds of Canada, and our cast is an unlikely quartet: Cathcart, a Scotsman and materialist scientist; his nephew Simpson; Hank Davis, a guide; and Simpson's guide, the French Canadian Joseph Défago.  A fifth man, the Native American Punk, has little function outside of his cooking, but he will steal more than one scene.  The aim of this small hunting party is the moose that roam the northern wilderness as hegemons among the mighty trees; they are practically unstoppable, although they are not what one would normally deem apex predators.  Like all good fictional prey, the moose never rear their comely antlers but are only rumored to be lurking a kilometer away or perhaps less, a relatively simple kill for a trained shot even if the animals can easily detect footsteps in their direction.   It is then from Simpson's perspective that we gain an affective picture of the surroundings:

It was one thing, he realized, to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred .... The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible.  The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred.  Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.  In front, through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped.  A sky of rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands – a hundred, surely, rather than fifty – floated like the fairy barques of some enchanted fleet.  Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded – about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.

If you have read much of Blackwood, you will understand that it is precisely in such detail that he excels.  To paraphrase this author, Blackwood allows nature to speak for itself; he does not armor it in unwieldy description.  For that very reason do his psychological tales tend to drift into diffuse abstraction, distant echoes of a greater image now long forlorn.  But with one of the territories least explored by man as his backdrop, there seems little to encumber the magic labyrinths of his intellect.

What fate befalls our men?  The hunters and their guides split in pairs, and our text chooses to follow Simpson and Défago, a wise move as Cathcart later proves himself to be an insufferable skeptic.  The young men hike vigorously for a day or two and still come very shallow into the endless woods where their alleged bounty awaits.  Since hunting holds about as much appeal to me as chewing glass shards, I cannot possibly evaluate their methods nor the terrain on which they dare to practice them.  Suffice it to say that about a third of the story passes before the title is uttered, and it is given but casual mention.  One fateful night, Simpson is assailed by something ineluctable and cannot sleep without torment:

As, sometimes, in a nightmare events crowd upon each other's heels with a conviction of dreadfulest reality, yet some inconsistent detail accuses the whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events that now followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind somehow that the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in the confusion, and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest delusion.  At the back of the sleeper's mind something remains awake, ready to let slip the judgment.  'All this is not quite real; when you wake up you'll understand.'

I am loath to betray what the young Scot finds and does not find the next morning, because those details are perfectly presaged yet more than a bit surprising.  The best moments still involve Punk, especially what he is rumored to have done at the end of the narrative, as well as his furtive glances and stealthy evenings spent listening to or smelling God knows what.  And you may also discover how useful it is in a story like this to have a character by the name of Défago.  

Presumably we all have nightmares (we cannot believe those who claim never to recall in waking what took place in sleep), but what those nightmares entail will depend much on the mind in their thrall.  Attempts to find commonalities among the legions of the reposed should be dismissed as swiftly as the long day's platitudes.  Nightmares may be universal, but riveting nightmares tend to be as exceptional as riveting biographies (with, it should be said, little coincidence of the two).  One of my most recurrent midnight scenes involves a fair.  Perhaps the modern concept of an amusement park provides a better description.  I am alone and with friends; the park is both full of customers and gladfully empty; what I can say for certain is that it is night or evening, which necessitates a definite amount of artificial light, and a large store of current to engineer the rides swooping and sliding behind me.  What is occurring in my vicinity I never solve; but the motion and sounds of the machines indicate that on these grounds something baleful has taken root.   Sometimes  I have a rucksack on; sometimes a companion is also outfitted with this appurtenance.  Most often  I have awoken just as the tumult seems to be teetering on the brink of riot, and yet the source of this chaos is never revealed.  A different landscape but similar conundrum besets the characters in this famous story.

Our place is the wilds of Canada, and our cast is an unlikely quartet: Cathcart, a Scotsman and materialist scientist; his nephew Simpson; Hank Davis, a guide; and Simpson's guide, the French Canadian Joseph Défago.  A fifth man, the native American Punk, has little function outside of his cooking, but he will steal more than one scene.  The aim of this small hunting party is the moose that roam the northern wildnerness as hegemons among the mighty trees; they are practically unstoppable, although they are not what one would normally deem apex predators.  Like all good fictional prey, the moose never rear their antlers but are only rumored to be lurking a kilometer away or perhaps less, a relatively simple kill for a trained shot even if the animals can easily detect footsteps in their direction.   It is then from Simpson's perspective that we gain an affective picture of the surroundings:

It was one thing, he realized, to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred .... The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible.  The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred.  Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. In front, through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped.  A sky of rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands—a hundred, surely, rather than fifty—floated like the fairy barques of some enchanted fleet.  Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded—about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.

If you have read much of Blackwood, you will understand that it is precisely in such detail that he excels.  To paraphrase this author, Blackwood allows nature to speak for itself; he does not armor it in unwieldy description.  For that very reason do his psychological tales tend to drift into diffuse abstraction, distant echoes of a greater image now long forlorn.  But with one of the territories least explored by man as his backdrop, there seems little to  

The Angel

We are confined in our flesh only by our thoughts, however persistently morbid those thoughts may become (I, for one, have always been plagued by what this author once termed "the imp of the perverse," an epitaph that will not gain further explanation on these pages).  The drift of our imagination may be denied by those who believe in nothing greater than themselves, but some of us know full well that it is within our imagination not our reason that the truth lies hidden.  Amidst the clouds we gaze upon are the shapes of things that do not make sense except in dreams of another realm, dreams that suggest we inhabit a sliver of the universe reflected in many others.  A somewhat abstract introduction to a fine story in this collection.

Our narrator is Bernard, a younger writer in New York whose future seems neither particularly obscure nor particularly bright.  He has no ostensible family or friends and the structure of his days is embedded in his petty routines.  In this setting a good mind will not despair.  However disheartening such an existence may appear to be, the creative spirit will not languish in self-pity for more than a few moments and instead let the surroundings guide its thoughts.  Such an event is the writer's sudden acquaintance with an elderly dandy called Harry Talboys.  A name that already sounds like a cocktail or the pseudonym of a ne'er-do-well:

A tall, thin figure in a seersucker suit the grubbiness of which, the fraying cuffs, the cigarette burns and faded reddish wine stain on the crotch could not altogether disguise the quality of the fabric and the elegance of the cut.  Very erect, very tall, very slow, on his head a Panama hat; and his face a veritable atlas of human experience, the nose a great hooked bone of a thing projecting like the prow of a ship, and the mouth – well, the mouth had foundered somewhat, but the old man animated it with lipstick!  He must have been at least eighty.  His shirt collar was not clean, and he wore a silk tie of some pastel shade – pale lilac or mauve, I seem to remember; and in his buttonhole a fresh white lily.

One short phrase in this passage gives away much more than it should, but we can do without belaboring these unfortunate hints.  Harry is for all intents and purposes a perfect literary subject.  He is cultured, old enough to have had a very interesting life, and mindfully rueful about some past mistakes.  When he confesses something we are not so much appalled as curious as to how much was omitted from his sentiments.  For that reason and some others is his narrative about a young man once his age by the name of Anson Havershaw far more provocative than it would first appear.

And how precisely does it first appear?  In the guise, as it were, of a normal, homosexual coupling, although one might ask oneself how many public passions of this nature were successfully carried out in New York in 1925.  Havershaw, "he of the milk-white flesh and non-existent navel," becomes Harry's muse in a series of episodes whose contents we perceive emotionally more than in any consistent reality, and Bernard begins to entertain – such is his vocation, as it were – a few rogue ideas.  Harry has his own notion of what his relationship was to the young man "who bore a striking resemblance to himself ... an uncanny physical likeness":

That summer ... Harry often found himself leaving Anson's house in the first light of dawn, still in evening clothes, and slipping into the welcome gloom of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue. 'You wouldn't know it, Bernard,' he said; 'they tore it down in 1947.  A lovely church, Gothic revival; I miss it ... at the early Mass it would be lit only by the dim, blood-red glow from the stained-glass windows, and by a pair of white candles that rose from gilded holders on either side of the altar and threw out a gorgeous, shimmering halo ... The priest I knew well, an ascetic young Jesuit; I remember how his pale face caught the candlelight as he turned to the congregation – the whole effect was strangely beautiful, Bernard, if you had seen it you would understand the attraction Catholicism held for so many of us ... it was the emotional appeal, really; disciplined Christianity we found more difficult to embrace.'

Without revealing why such an understanding of standard Christian faith and practice could be so important to Harry, I should confess that without an emotional appeal, religion is no different from any system of beliefs that convinces the holder of its benefits.  Liturgy and Mass may involve rote memorization, but what these rituals truly signify should bring the believer quite often to tears.  Harry does not elaborate on his flirtation with the Catholic system, only suggesting that it fulfilled some of his Romantic criteria and did not wholly dispel the rest.  Alas, Harry's stories become saturated with self-analysis, and Bernard grows increasingly frustrated at his new acquaintance whom he once considered mining for fictional ends.  The dénouement, an inevitability that even Bernard admits, involves more impolitic neighboring although the young writer, at times, does seem justified in his skepticism.  

Blood and Water was McGrath's first work, and while not his best (a scatological preoccupation abounds; one edition even features a ghostly likeness of a once-ballyhooed quack), it tenderizes topics that will be probed at greater depths in his delicious novels.  However one feels about the mentally ill and the delusional, their minds are fabulous sources of creativity.  When reading McGrath it is thus preferable to discount the clinical aspects of his analysis and focus on the imaginative wonderlands that these psyches paint in an eerie vividness reminiscent of a Scottish moor in early autumn.  Harry does not belong on such a moor, and indeed may not quite belong anywhere apart from his quarters in the same building as Bernard where his neighbor repeatedly finds himself ensconced in an uncomfortable seat.  And I haven't even mentioned the intensifying stench.

Casting the Runes

I have spent some time in Denmark – not enough time for my taste, alas, but sufficient to speak at length with an amateur's zeal – and when Scandinavia appeals to you, few things will be able to supplant this interest.  Even those who know little about the region will confess that the countries and people of the North are incomparably beautiful, their landscapes as tranquil as their attitude towards the vicissitudes of life.  Native speakers of English, however, are also drawn to the affinities of language: we may love our classical etymologies, but ours is a Viking tongue, and in the vast majority of our basic words we hear the echoes of berserkers, sagas, and longships.  Before the Cross came to vanquish these pagans and find its way onto each of their banners, albeit in different shades, these were some of the most mysterious and obscurist peoples on our planet.  Their intentions may have been to plunder, and their worship and combat ideals just as ferocious, yet amidst this violence came their alphabet, named after the Gothic word for "secret" or "whisper."  My Danish host mother happened to have written a monograph on the odd hieroglyphs called the Runes, with the requisite asides as to their alleged mystic power.  My enthusiasm for her pet project and occasional comments regarding the origin of these old symbols led her to believe I knew much more than I did about the subject – which was not quite untrue.  As it were, this knowledge is primarily owed to a very famous English story.

We begin at the turn of the century with three letters, one not quite finished, dismissing the work of a man called Karswell who intended to publish an ominous tome entitled The Truth of Alchemy (notably, the book was not meant as a work of fiction).  More than ten years before, the same mysterious gentleman brought out a History of Witchcraft – to scathing reviews:

It was written in no style at all – split infinitives, and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge rise.  Then there was nothing that the man didn't swallow: mixing up classical myths, and stories out of the Golden Legend with reports of savage customs of today – all very proper, no doubt, if you know how to use them, but he didn't; he seemed to put the Golden Legend and the Golden Bough exactly on a par, and to believe both: a pitiable exhibition, in short.  Well, after the misfortune, I looked over the book again.  It was no better than before, but the impression which it left this time on my mind was different .... now his book seemed to me to be a very sinister performance indeed.

The speaker is Henry Harrington, and the misfortune in question befell his brother John, who deemed the History of Witchcraft the afflatus of a lesser god, perhaps one dwelling beneath the earth, and a literary mediocrity.  Within weeks of his caustic comments, he was at a concert where a "stout, clean-shaven man" handed him a program that John had supposedly dropped.  This program was nothing more than "a strip of paper with some very odd writing on it in red and black – most carefully done," which seemed to Henry to resemble "Runic letters [more] than anything else."  The Runes were cast and three months to the day of this fateful handover, John Harrington was scared enough one night to clamber up a tree, only to fall and be crushed by a huge dead branch; he was found the next morning "with the most dreadful face of fear on him that could be imagined."  All this narrative prefaces the fact that The Truth of Alchemy was refused by an expert on the subject, a man by the name of Dunning, with whom our real story begins. 

Dunning also happens to come into contact with a "stout, clean-shaven man," and the reader is duly aware of the consequences of such interaction.  Karswell is at present the Abbot of Lufford – that is to say, he is the proprietor of Lufford Abbey – and his mettle is shown in brief descriptions at the onset of the story, unbeknownst, of course, to poor Dunning:

Just at present Mr. Karswell is a very angry man. But I don't know much about him otherwise, except that he is a person of wealth, his address is Lufford Abbey, Warwickshire, and he's an alchemist, apparently, and wants to tell us all about it .... Nobody knew what he did with himself; his servants were a horrible set of people; he had invented a new religion for himself, and practiced no one could tell what appalling rites; he was very easily offended and never forgave anybody; he had a dreadful face ... he never did a kind action, and whatever influence he did exert was mischievous.

What Karswell embodies should be clear to even the uninitiated reader; his aims, however, remain vague.  A person of wealth should be able to have his works published without batting so much as an eyelid, especially when a self-effacing editor and hefty contribution to the publishing house can ensure a better product.  Yet Karswell's quest for publication in the finest journals reminds one of his apparent need for another person to accept his Runic drawings: only through active acceptance can his black magic be implemented.  This important point will come to bear on the dénouement of the story, one that, unlike many of James's miniatures of horror, has a cinematic flavor to it (indeed, the tale has been filmed more than once).  Yet before we reach the end, we must endure the tortures of Mr. Dunning, who one day just so happens to notice "some way ahead a man with a handful of leaflets such as are distributed to passers-by by agents of enterprising firms."  A leaflet is thrust into his hand as he passes, and the hand of the giver seems "unnaturally rough and hot."  He is unable to get a good look at the remainder of the man's shape, although he will become very familiar with it in time.  And soon a change comes over him that he shall not soon forget:

More than once on the way home that day Mr. Dunning confessed to himself that he did not look forward with his usual cheerfulness to a solitary evening.  It seemed to him that something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped in between him and his fellow-men.

Impalpable at times, yes, but very palpable at others, especially when Dunning decides to reach under his pillow one night for a matchbox – and perhaps the rest should be left to more daring souls.