Green Tea

Our headlines have long since been saturated with the modern notion of the Devil, what we have come to call the serial killer.  The circumstances will always be gruesome and the bewilderment of the police will only match their repulsion (although, with the plethora of such events the faces and words of investigators have begun to seem jaded and unshocked), but day in and out we learn of more monstrosities.  Now surely some of these flagitious people are the victims of their own crapulence or other such addiction; perhaps they are even inherently rotten in bone and vein.  Yet others are often depicted as having been hitherto the model of average citizenship.  What compels them to their horrid deeds cannot be explained, not by psychobabble, not by the testimony of neighbors ("he was such a quiet man ..."), not even by the recapitulation of small failures in the course of one human life now construed as a mounting catastrophe.  No, there is something else that lays its hand upon your shoulder, directs your gaze and maintains your attention.  And the identity of such a being lies at the heart of this tale.

Three narrators will be refracted through one another like a hall of mirrors: an unnamed philologist and wanderer, "educated in medicine and surgery"; his master, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a Faustian polymath of sinister leanings; and finally, the Reverend Robert Lynder Jennings.  We learn almost nothing of our first speaker as he quickly diverts attention to his mentor, more than three decades his senior; yet in truth, little too of Hesselius can be derived.  It is the initial Boswellian narrator who translates from the German Hesselius's correspondence to a fourth man, a Dutch scholar by the name of Van Loo, in which his discoveries on the human soul are revealed in scientific detail.  Jennings has all the qualities of "a perfectly gentlemanlike man": he is serene but witty, bright but hardly arrogant, and, although moneyed, more interested in the pursuits of his vocation than his estate.  There is about him, however, something not lost on the keen observer – and Hesselius is far keener than most:

Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there.  This, of course, is not always.  It occurs now and then.  But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said, to his manner, and in this glance traveling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.

Hesselius is thankfully also a man of principles, which means that all those keen observations are not squandered.  He believes that "the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life."  Conviction in a God sublime and indefinable does not impede Hesselius's science, nor, for that matter, his compassion.  His friend Jennings is not a man in clover.  Proof of his misery comes in the form of that most literary of devices, the casually perused book replete with underlined passages.  In this case, the book turns out to be this mystical work, and the most vibrant passage reads as follows:      

The evil spirits associated with man are, indeed from the hells, but when with man they are not then in hell, but are taken out thence.  The place where they then are, is in the midst between heaven and hell, and is called the world of spirits – when the evil spirits who are with man, are in that world, they are not in any infernal torment, but in every thought and affection of man, and so, in all that the man himself enjoys.  But when they are remitted into their hell, they return to their former state.

As implications loom, so does a project to which Jennings has always wanted to devote himself: the religious metaphysics of the ancients.  Unlike most monographs that focus on symbols, totems, and rituals, Jennings is drawn to the "actual religion of educated and thinking paganism."  And when he begins his study, he finds himself for some inexplicable reason consuming a large daily amount of tea – first black, then green – at which point his life shifts in a most dramatic and terrible direction.  

What happens to Jennings will not, of course, be disclosed on these pages.  Modern readers accustomed to the narcotic rubbish of the beat or smash or crash generations will sketch large rings around Jennings's claim that all serious writers compose on a substance – be that substance caffeine, nicotine, or something more potent – but these are all cheap conceits.  Apart from the suppleness and ease of his prose, Le Fanu's strength as a writer comes from the frequent suggestions that he does not quite believe all of what he describes.  That is not to say that his works are insincere (such disingenuousness is reserved almost exclusively for the charlatans and jesters of postmodernism), but rather that two possible explanations may be provided without diminishing the supernatural effect.  In this tale it falls to Hesselius to make sense of the events and to bring them onto a plane of human understanding at once intelligible and awesome, and admittedly he wavers so elegantly as to have us doubt the dénouement.  If only poor Jennings had vacillated in the slightest.   

Dr. Haggard's Disease

What I believe in the morning I doubt at night.  What I'm sure of at night is fantastic in the morning.

                                                                                                                    Edward Haggard

That our emotions and fears are hardly trammeled by our nightmares may seem an obvious point, but at least our nightmares have boundaries.  We all know the sensation of being ensconced in some terrible predicament and then realizing that this situation so differs from the world we know that we cannot be awake (a deceased loved one is alive and kicking; persons of the same age appear twenty years apart; and a job and a country we have never known now constitute our everyday).  Yet another feeling is equally familiar: in the midst of some perfunctory task, we are reminded of something that occurred and yet could not have occurred, and we impute this event to our second existence.  Our second existence comprises a motley collection of thoughts, sentiments and visions – some utterly trivial and peripheral, others clearings in the hedge of our soul's labyrinth – two worlds that bend into one another like a weeping willow and its lake, mirror reflections distorted by the ripples of wind that disturb our serenity.  We are drawn to that willow and that lake like we are drawn to the oxygen they contain, but we sense a strained hum in the clouds that gather upon our approach.  A distant melody that brings us to this fine novel.

We begin on the eve of the Second World War on the seaside villas and villages that surround this body of water, although we will return to London in short order.  It is in London that the eponymous physician, a  callow resident at St. Basil's, one of England's preeminent teaching hospitals, comes to meet an older woman called Fanny Vaughn.  What separates Vaughn from all other women in the world will not be immediately obvious to the reader, nor is it to Haggard himself.  All too often fiction assumes the idealistic shapes of legend, and the flawlessness of the goddesses that haunted the Hellenic mind is imposed upon the earthbound mortals from which we may choose our beloved.  With Fanny Vaughn, however, little advance is made towards her coronation.  She is a simple and bright woman who appeals to a niche within Haggard that the diffident doctor had always hoped would exist:

That night, dear James, your mother took my heart by storm – took it without a struggle.  In those first moments I can't have been very articulate, I never am when I'm excited, I tend to become formal, but she understood .... As she leaned over, her gown rippled with reflected light from the chandelier, and what a truly lovely woman she was, I thought – already I was fascinated by her, the pale, perfect skin, the slight, slender figure in the shining sheath of satin.  Her dark hair was cut close to the head and gleamed in soft waves in the candlelight.  

Faint light tends to fawn over blemishes, and Haggard spends most of his days before and after Fanny Vaughn in natural dimness.  Yet the more important question is why Haggard is addressing Fanny's son when stories like these, if in second person, are usually made out to the object of their affection.  Unless of course we are dealing with a confession.

The confession reveals nothing unexpected.  Haggard falls in love with the wife of the hospital's chief pathologist (that the latter wastes most of the novel in vain attempts to diagnose his wife's indifference must count as one of its least subtle motifs) and relinquishes the details of their intimacies, albeit with little grunting and moaning, as a diary made out to Fanny's only begotten son.  There are scenes of exquisite tenderness made even sweeter by the fact that Haggard is now a morphine-addicted cripple with little appetite or vim; there are also more than a few observations on the state of his wretched soul.

I understood that our love affair would influence me profoundly – define me profoundly – for the rest of my life, and this being so, I chose, freely, not to forget.  I would not, I decided, allow the memory to atrophy, to wither and fade, I would keep it fresh, I would nurture it, make of it an object of worship and construct an altar in my heart where I could perform, nightly, my devotions.  I'd realized you see that I was one of those rare men who, having loved, come to understand love as the most significant spiritual activity a man can undertake.  Love, for me, is not ephemeral, it is not a transient emotion, a passing state, a passage or flight into madness or ectasy; I see it, rather, as an exalted or even sacred condition, a condition in which all the highest and best of human faculties are exercised.

Somehow Haggard understands that happiness will inevitably elude those who sit and read poetry on the verandas of their discontent; those quiet minds wait and wait for life to resemble poetry, which it cannot.  True poetry's path must resemble the entrails of life, the pain and redoubtable joy that can only be lived firsthand and relived through the magic of art.  I suppose it would be kind to mention that for much of our story Haggard is indeed depicted as a faithful lover in the spiritual sense.  He loves Fanny for what she is, not what she means to him, which could be a fair definition of genuine affection.  But the errors he commits, and they are numerous, force his delicate, womanly hand into gloves that suit a much bolder personality.  Could anyone truly love a sappy underachiever, if Edward really is cut out to be a physician, which is not the sustained opinion of some of his superiors?  Edward has answers for all these questions, copious answers, but not things he would like to hear repeated.  

Apart from a luxurious yet concise style, McGrath's great asset is his immunity to popular culture.  Never do the banal and easy comforts of lesser writers whisper to Edward, who sits impeached in Elgin, a cliff-bound manor inherited from a recently deceased uncle – the same uncle, mind you, who he had claimed was ill to provide excuses for his adulterous absences.  And when Fanny finally decides to call the whole thing off, he is neither surprised nor hurt.  For him to be surprised, she would have had to leave everything, including her burgeoning pilot of a son, and be with him in a world that was not amicable to betrayal; to hurt him, she would have had to tell him that all this meant nothing.  But she does, in a way, neither.  She pays him a specific compliment whose opposite is implied of her husband, a brutish man who always smells of formalin and chooses to examine cadavers without gloves (The explanation?  They restrain him in his analysis; and after all, he reminds his colleagues, pathology only works upon the failure of organic functions).  Haggard proceeds with the affair knowledgeable of his unrequited devotion, at least outwardly, and then incurs a stab of recognition that will only be hinted at from the following passage:

Do you know the feeling – you may not be old enough – the ghastly lurch of shock, I mean, that comes when, having thought about a thing for days on end, and then suddenly encountering a point of view in which previously unimaginable categories are employed, all values abruptly shift?

On more than one occasion does Fanny ask Edward to "use his imagination" instead of informing him properly of the minutia that always make adultery a futile romp.  The complications that arise, however, are more than he could have ever imagined.  On second thought, there is little that Edward Haggard's imagination cannot concoct.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

One wonders why certain works of art attract us, and the common answer is that they respond to something that we lack in our own lives.  Desperate housewives will devour hunky, everlasting romances; pimply lads will become superheroes in the furrows of their imagination; old men will wax sentimental over movies contemporaneous to their youth.  Our modern fascination with tales of horror has provoked a slew of interpretations so banal that one cannot but impute this banality to the interpreters themselves, and the less said about these silly theories the better.  Yet this fascination is long-standing.  For those of faith, evil is as real as goodness – even realer in the sense that evil invariably predicates the destruction of good and cannot exist in any sort of vacuum.  The tangibility of the horrors of war, famine, pestilence, or ethnic cleansing cannot be mimicked in art, only referenced.  So as we let our fancies drift into ancient castles, unlock rusted wards, and pore over wicked tomes, we feel a need to confront these baleful shapes – and then something very odd occurs.  Amidst every malediction and ghoul that might infect our thoughts, we desire for a brief moment – indeed, perhaps even a while longer – the possession of that shape because that shape is power over the commonality of our existence.  Each of us wants to be not only a superior among men, but also privy to what lies on the other side of the ineluctable modality of the visible.  Evil, for whatever you might conceive it to be, offers us the straightest path to knowledge, even if what it teaches us is that we should appreciate every iota of our earthbound life and treat it like the flaxen stream it is.  Which explains our First Disobedience, as well as this immortal tale.

As one might expect from a production bold enough to invoke a deceased author's blessing, the plot closely follows that of the book.  At the acme of Victorian storytelling in the late nineteenth century, a young barrister by the name of Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) sits aboard an East European train on his way to meet a Romanian count (Gary Oldman) who needs little introduction.  His travels are true to the fantastic opening passages of the novel, and the aura of mystery and dread could not be richer or more imminent.  During this obvious precursor to very bad things Reeves remains unflurried and almost impassive, which led to some nastiness in the reviews of the film and whispers of mediocrity.  Whatever one may think of his thespian abilities, Reeves's casting is correct: his natural stiffness and timidity reflect the average citizen's view on unusual matters.  Harker may be the only one in the theater who does not find the wizened freakish count to resemble a grotesque, long-nailed cadaver, but he is also not in full possession of what else the count could be if not a human being.  The solipsistic age of reason (a most regrettable misnomer) bred a certain type of man: the skeptic who took the longest time to admit that he did not or could not know how to explain the phenomena of his immediate environment.  Harker is essential because as he overnights within the Count's lifeless walls, he will witness a host of terrible events and in some of them even be implicated.  These will include an abominable tower and moat, three vixens and a baby, a mirror and a razor, and a series of unspeakable occurrences that he confesses only to his diary and to us.

Whom he cannot inform is his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), who awaits him in the company of her friend Lucy (Sadie Frost) and Lucy's triptych of hapless suitors.  The difference between the book and the film is an element that could only be theatrical and which is actually revealed by Ryder's presence in the very first scene not as Mina Murray.  Whether this conceit simply panders to the juvenile whims of the target audience depends on rather subjective notions of coincidence in art, although it can be said that in context the addition does more good than harm.  I would even go as far to say that it solves, in an artistic fashion, the main structural weakness of the original: namely, why on earth Dracula wished to leave the country in which he was practically invulnerable to expose himself to constant danger in a city brimming with enemies.  Mina worries aloud, a tidy way of containing the novel's original epistolary format, whilst the Count approaches, communicating through former barrister Renfield (Tom Waits) as around Gibraltar heads a boat replete with crates of his native soil (perhaps never in cinematic history has there been a crew so doomed).  Upon landfall, the Count begins plotting and scheming his way into the lives of strangers, all of which serves an ulterior motive.  Lucy becomes very ill from a mysterious sickness unknown to conventional science; an old abbey is attorned to a certain tall, dark foreigner; Mina suspects that Jonathan has fallen on very black days in that distant kingdom even though he is forced to pre-write a number of calming if overly plain letters sporadically mailed by the Count; and Renfield, who languishes in an asylum, has been predicting the arrival of his Master.  And what happens next will involve a hunt of the implacable monster who will flash enough of his former humanity to inflate what could have been a unerring fable into something deeper and more plausible. 

The pleasantries of the film are so numerous that we forget how simple and operatic the plot machinations really are.  Apart from sumptuous wardrobes and effects that convince us we have entered another dimension, the casting of all the main characters betrays Coppola's intuition for harmony among actors whose looks could easily have them mistaken for the heartthrobs of a daytime soap.  The exception to these pretty people is Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), a grizzled Dutchman and specialist on obscure diseases, as well as a perfect foil to the monster he "has been pursuing all his life."  He hijacks the search for answers and is necessarily branded a mystagogue; in time the other parties concur with his outrageous conclusions and finally know almost as much as we do.  Van Helsing alters every aspect of the film's course while also becoming its true crusader and detective; in the book, by contrast, more is accomplished by the peripheral characters although this may be a function of its inflexible structure.  That we first meet the Dutchman as he is making an old academic pun on an unfortunate pair of near-homophones indicates we must change our perceptions accordingly, and his humor and foreignness are much needed in the otherwise morbid London alleyways.  Not that you would want to go anywhere near those places.

The Temple of Death

There is an inherent facetiousness to reviews that begin with the platitude "if you're like me, then you know" (as well as some grammatical ignorance, but that's another story), and the facetiousness lies in an attempt to win over the reader.  Not the ideal reader who remains the target of every writer of talent and ambition, but as many readers as possible.  Whatever one may think of art, it is certainly not a popularity contest.  Art is an understanding of the beauty and justice of the world – often conveyed in hideously damning portrayals of their opposites – through moral values.  If that doesn't make sense to you step back and consider what you think about when you think of art.  Is art a gangster movie in which everyone betrays everyone else, four simple words cannot be strung together without an obscenity, and the only things that matter are money and power?  A political allegory with animals being slain and people exchanging sly looks over superficial chit-chat about second-rate philosophers?  A schmaltzy love affair of two hearts separated by choices but destined to find each other so subtly spun that we can almost hear the maudlin soundtrack that is supposed to steer our emotions like a rose-covered leash?  If you answered in the affirmative to any or all of these questions, I'm sure cyberspace has more hospitable places for you than these pages.  But if you're like I am – ahem, if the same look of utter disgust wandered across your face upon reading those three capsule summaries, I would recommend perusing the collection of these forgotten authors, and in particular this tale.

The setting is the early period of Christianity when it was still known as "the new faith" and held by many with the same contempt that is directed to other movements in our day.  Unlike some of these waggish variants on an old theme, this was the age of a true watershed for mankind – or, at least, that is the impression one might have given the context of the story.  Paullinus is our hero and he bears resemblance to the Everlasting Man he worships:

He was a young man, a very faithful Christian, and with a love of adventure and travel which stood him in good stead.  He carried a little money, but he had seldom need to use it, for the people were simple and hospitable; he did not try to hold assemblies, for he believed that the Gospel must spread like leaven from quiet heart to quiet heart.

Were you to ask me for the definition a true Christian, I would use this last phrase.  Unlike today's pantomiming pulpiteers that try to convince that "God wants you to be rich" in the same breath as they condemn anyone who disagrees with them or does not plate their sterile excuse of a church with gold, the passing of true faith has little to do with power or persuasion.  Like parenting, friendship and romantic love, faith is a slow revelation of a hidden truth that when hidden seems unattainable and when revealed seems the most obvious fact of our existence – but I digress.  Paullinus meets villagers and scattered folk alike and in due time – this is, after all, a tale of horror – an old man gives him the warning we know he will not heed:

'Of one thing I must advise you,' he said. 'There is, in the wood, some way off the track, a place to which I would not have you go – it is a temple of one of our gods, a dark place.  Be certain, dear sir, to pass it by.  No one would go there willingly, save that we are sometimes compelled .... It is called the Temple of the Grey Death, and there are rites done there of which I may not speak.  I would it were otherwise, but the gods are strong – and the priest is a hard and evil man who won his office in a terrible way and shall lose it no less terribly.  Oh, go not there, dear stranger,' and he laid his hand upon his arm.

There are two types of warnings in life: those we give for the benefit of others and those we give for the benefit of ourselves; which one this may be is not immediately evident.  Paullinus bids farewell and finds himself intractably drawn to these very woods.  Admittedly, there is said to be a village in the woods that serves as a sanctuary to travelers, and there is where Paullinus convinces himself he can reach with a little bit of divine providence.  He wanders his way through as night falls and comes across a lone man, "of middle age, very strong and muscular," yet "undoubtedly he had an evil face," and pauses to think where he might have seen him before; but what he doesn't realize is that there is something about his grim savagery that reminds Paullinus of a portion of his own soul.  This is explained by the simple yet magnificent phrase upon discovering a fork in the road: "he felt a certain misgiving which he could not explain."  There is another fork, all around "a strange snarling cry some way off," and Paullinus's only wish is to clamber up a tree and let night and its minions forget all about him.  Yet that is precisely what it does not do.

Of course, Paullinus will not find the village but something else far less comforting.  The forest, as we know from this work, has many allegorical aspects, not the least of which are man's inferiority and susceptibility to the feral creatures that lurk therein.  As with its more tropical counterpart the jungle, forests are the epicenters of activity outside human law.  It is both the site of the most abominable devilry and a perfect representation of what may lie in the heart of many of us who fall prey to dark suggestion.  Someone or something had to put these trees, in their brutal denseness, on the earth, and a person whom Paullinus encounters understands this event as not the work of a Christian deity:

'The god who made these great lonely woods, and who dwells in them, is very different.' – he rose and made a strange obeisance as he talked.  'He loves death and darkness, and the cries of strong and furious beasts.  There is little peace here, for all that the woods are still – and as for love, it is of a brutish sort.  Nay, stranger, the gods of these lands are very different; and they demand very different sacrifices.  They delight in sharp woes and agonies, in grinding pains, in dripping blood and death-sweats and cries of despair.  If these woods were all cut down, and the land ploughed up, and peaceful folk lived here in quiet fields and farms, then perhaps your simple, easy-going God might come and dwell with them – but now, if he came, he would flee in terror.'

Whether the "new faith" accepts this challenge may depend on the reasons why there is always one priest at the Temple and why, occasionally, he must be replaced.  And that story may remind you of yet another, much older one about a brother and his keeper.

Baudelaire, "Le vin de l'assassin"

A drinking song of sorts ("The assassin's wine") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

My wife is dead, and I am free        
To give myself to thirsty night!         
Yet when flat broke I'd seek alee,   
Her cries would rip my fibers tight. 

As happy as a king am I:                      
The air is pure, the heavens clear;           
Such was the joyful summer sky       
When I first loved my wife so dear! 

This horrid thirst that cuts me cold,
Can only be relieved with wine.
As much wine as a tomb will hold:
My grave, a massive pit of brine! 

An endless well I threw her down,      
And even sealed her fate that night 
With every stone from that high crown
Forgetting it all if I might!

In sermons of most tender vow,
Where nothing could rend us apart,
To lead through waves our love's bold prow,
So drunk on memory was my heart,

That I asked for a rendez-vous:
An evil eve; a darkened road.
And folly-stricken she came, too!
We all endure sweet folly's goad.

She was quite fine, a beauty spry
If tired now; and as for me, 
I loved her so, too much!  That's why
I bade her from this life to flee!

No one gets why, perhaps one blight,
Among this drunken, foolish crowd:
Could he have dreamt in morbid nights
Of turning wine to blackest shroud?

This blameless crook, as firmly safe
As iron cog with iron wheel;
Never would he in winter's chafe
Or summer's sun know love most real.

With black enchantment and black fears,
His cursed parade to panic's tune,
His vials of poison and his tears,
His rattling chains and mortal dunes!

And now I'm free, single once more!
Tonight dead drunk in my rebirth
Without cold fear or hot remorse,
I'll then lie down upon the earth.

And like a dog I'll take to sleep!
A chariot fast on heavy spoke;
With stones and mud it trudges deep,
This furious coach would gladly stroke

My guilty head into the sod
Or split me into equal parts! 
And I would mock, as I mock God
The Devil and Dee's Table charts!