The Return of Chorb

Perhaps the title character of this story is the typical Nabokovian hero ("destitute émigré and littérateur"); perhaps all such heroes are as doomed to misery and apotheosis as their creator was damned to fame.  Whatever you may think of our dear Chorb, the beginning of our tale has few equals in modern literature: 

The Kellers left the opera house at a late hour.  In that pacific German city, where the very air seemed a little lusterless and where a transverse row of ripples had kept shading gently the reflected cathedral for well over seven centuries, Wagner was a leisurely affair presented with relish so as to overgorge one with music.  After the opera Keller took his wife to a smart nightclub renowned for its white wine.  It was past one in the morning when their car, flippantly lit on the inside, sped through lifeless streets to deposit them at the iron wicket of their small but dignified private house.  Keller, a thickset old German, closely resembling Oom Paul Kruger, was the first to step down on the sidewalk, across which the loopy shadows of leaves stirred in the streetlamp's gray glimmer.  For an instant his starched shirtfront and the droplets of bugles trimming his wife's dress caught the light as she disengaged a stout leg and climbed out of the car in her turn.  The maid met them in the vestibule and, still carried by the momentum of the news, told them in a frightened whisper about Chorb's having called.

It takes a while to reach Chorb, who will prove to be anything but the picture of upper middle-class respectability sketched so sumptuously here.  Not one detail forgets the mores of the haute bourgeoisie; for not one moment are the Kellers out of character.  In fact, their inability to do anything not preprogrammed or measured in careful, flattened teaspoons will expose them as bereft of what may broadly be termed individualism and what may more precisely be called the nuts and bolts of an artistic temperament.  Chorb will grossly represent what may be accomplished through art; the Kellers what may be accomplished through the worship of rules, savings accounts, and cleanliness.  We will root for Chorb although we know very well that his return denotes his failure.

Their relationship to Chorb, we learn, is quite involuntary: he has gone and married their beloved daughter and absconded to the ends of an interbellum Europe with nature and romance as his lodestars.  As they travel (all in flashbacks; Chorb spends the bulk of the story alone in tortured memories) it is Chorb who points out the differences in flora and fauna in that storybook way, mimicked so awkwardly in films, through an occasional aside that discloses a whole library.  He will look back in vanquished emotions at his wife, whom he married just before her demise, and attempt to locate her parted spirit in the trail that they left together:

He passed in reverse through all the spots they had visited together during their honeymoon journey.  In Switzerland where they had wintered and where the apple trees were now in their last bloom, he recognized nothing except the hotels.  As to the Black Forest, through which they had hiked in the preceding autumn, the chill of the spring did not impede memory.  And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist.

We have seen these droplets elsewhere: they were already the festive baubles on a certain dress of a certain opera-goer.  And those telegraph wires?  And that spider's web?  Our instincts suspect a solution that our voices are loath to pronounce for fear of trespassing into the overgrown lawn of symbolic weeds and far too many avid gardeners.  Maybe how Chorb's wife died – a detail that need not be mentioned on these pages – might imbue the reader with a clearer notion of life's traps and tricks, especially on those who happen to notice the loose stitches in its tapestry. 

There is a second act.  Chorb, whose name suggests an angel or something far less aerodynamic, decides in almost tawdry cinematic fashion to replace the memories of his wife, which he knows he will distort and mostly lose over the course of his life, with the corporal proximity of a woman of little virtue who bears her some resemblance.  They adjourn to a room in a filthy hotel where the couple once stayed by accident but do nothing that is expected in such rooms with such company.  The girl, a pretty thing but obviously obtuse, stands in near-nakedness at the window, a sign that she will now act as the telescope for what we might consider to be a key to interpreting this odd tale, if it truly requires any interpretation at all:

Behind the curtain the casement was open and one could make out, in the velvety depths, a corner of the opera house, the black shoulder of a stone Orpheus outlined against the blue of the night, and a row of light along the dim façade which slanted off into the darkness.  Down there, far away, diminutive dark silhouettes swarmed as they emerged from bright doorways onto the semicircular layers of illumined porch steps, to which glided up cars with shimmering headlights and smooth glistening tops.  Only when the breakup was over and the brightness gone did the girl close the curtain again.  She switched off the light and stretched on the bed beside Chorb.  Just before falling asleep she caught herself thinking that once or twice she had already been in that room; she remembered the pink picture on the wall.

It is important that this girl notices only a blotch of pink on the wall; her exposure to the opera, to the Greek myths and our modern renderings of those myths, is limited to the brief snatches that she gets of what lies directly across from this den of debasement and primitive joy.  In a way she will remind Chorb, who sleeps through her entire discovery, of his wife and what she did not get to have, as well as of his own ambitions and what they mean in relation to what society prescribes.  Society will always gather after an artistic event and pretend that they understood every moment of it; an artist will keep to himself and revel in the future possibilities of his understanding it; and some unfortunate souls will just stare and know not what they espy.  They might not even know that opera usually has three acts.

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.

The Vampyre

There is much to be said for being the first – or, at least, the loudest – in the promulgation of a literary phenomenon.  Considering how briefly these phenomena tend to echo within the captive ears of their readership, a topos that has enjoyed two hundred years of uninterrupted (and rising) interest must be termed nothing less than visionary.  Perusing the annals of Gothic literature – a genre of writing which has always given me a sort of guilty pleasure – one learns that it was this poet who first formulated, in our modern sense, the monster that has dug its claws into every major literary tradition.  Given Byron's elevated assessment of himself that is hardly surprising.  Yet despite a lengthy, somewhat overwrought poem in which the beast is described with gory relish, it was not he who first put the real bloodsucker on the map in the dashing, often noble shape for which he is now most renowned, but this half-Italian writer who also died young.  And if he gains no other readers for his works and short life in the future, Polidori will be remembered until kingdom come for this classic tale. 

Byron made one other contribution to the legend in a "fragment of a novel" that he wrote almost three years before Polidori's story was published in 1819.  A first-person narrator begins to talk about a certain Augustus Darvell, and his attitude is given a curious spin:

He [Darvell] had a power of giving to one passion the appearance of another, in such a manner that it was difficult to define the nature of what was working within him; and the expressions of his features would vary so rapidly, though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources.  It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none could be fixed upon with accuracy.  Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil: I know not how this may be, but in him there certainly was the one, though I could not ascertain the extent of the other – and felt loath, as far as regarded himself, to believe in its existence.  My advances were received with sufficient coldness: but I was young, and not easily discouraged, and at length succeeded in obtaining, to a certain degree, that common-place intercourse and moderate confidence of common and every-day concerns, created and cemented by similarity of pursuit and frequency of meeting, which is called intimacy, or friendship, according to the ideas of him who uses those words to express them.

I include the description in full because the fragment itself is so abbreviated that the rest of it contains but allusions to this primary passage (such is often the case when the germ of an idea has not yet been cultivated into a full-grown flower).  However incomplete the characterization, it provided enough impetus for Polidori to expand the story into a cautionary tale of judgment and imposition, one remarkably acute in its portrayal of human weaknesses.  The weaknesses, as it were, turn out to be all too familiar: delusion, curiosity, and the unforgivable human predilection to cater to those in positions of power.

In The Vampyre, our mysterious stranger assumes the pseudo-Germanic name of Count Ruthven (which may be loosely etymologized as "friend of suffering").  Yet the stage is set not through the third-person narrator, who knows better than to trust such a baleful being, but by the young Aubrey, a naive landed elite:

He [Aubrey] had, hence, that high romantic feeling of honor and candor, which daily ruins so many milliners' apprentices. He believed all to sympathize with virtue, and thought that vice was thrown in by Providence merely for the picturesque effect of the scene, as we see in romances: he thought that the misery of a cottage merely consisted in the vesting of clothes, which were as warm, but which were better adapted to the painter's eye by their irregular folds and various colored patches. He thought, in fine, that the dreams of poets were the realities of life.

We all know an Aubrey or two, and most usually they are harmless sorts who dream of life as much as they actually observe it.  In a society in which little crime or misery can be found, the Aubreys of the world stay sheltered if feckless, and only with time if at all understand that there is more to existence than a lyric poem to the mountains.  We should not be astonished, therefore, at the effect that Ruthven has on a person like Aubrey, nor that Ruthven would not hesitate to identify his mark:

He [Aubrey] watched him [Ruthven]; and the very impossibility of forming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact: allowing his imagination to picture every thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed this object into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him.

This is the most telling passage in a story brimming with niceties and victories of style, and it thoroughly accounts for the horrific sequence of events that follow.  Aubrey and Ruthven become acquaintances but Aubrey still cannot place what about the Count bothers him so; eventually, he goes to Greece and falls in love with a Greek girl called Ianthe who warns him as all good heroines do not to wander through a dark and gloomy sylvan scene.  And like most of the heroes of contemporary horror fiction, Aubrey just does that and comes across a few rather nasty secrets about his former acquaintance.

What obtains through the end of the story is what habitually befalls those who are both outgeneraled and impatient.  The special twist in this case, and one that indicates the demonic origins of the Count, is a promise that he extracts from Aubrey even after the youth has been witness to flagitious displays of his power.  That Aubrey wavers only slightly might be imputed to the hypnotic clasp of his adversary, although a more cynical mind could easily charge Aubrey with too much optimism in the affairs of man and beast.  And Ruthven would surely qualify for both of those epithets.

The Horror of the Heights

A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger.  Yet tigers exist; and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured.

                                                                                                   From the "Joyce-Armstrong Fragment"

More than once on these pages I have claimed that the best works of this author are his best-known.  Now this statement has stood through generations of scrutiny, detractors and admirers, and cannot seriously be denied.  Nevertheless, Conan Doyle's remaining oeuvres are valuable not only as satellites around the brilliant sun that he placed among our stars but also as exemplary prose of its own.  Conan Doyle's greatest asset as an artist was his unwillingness to listen to anyone except himself – thereby incurring both the good and bad of splendid creative isolation.  The bad, of course, may be found in some of his weirder works, for the most part historically inspired (and here I admit my difficulties in finishing these works, so lengthy and unpromising have they proven to be); but the good has yielded some texts of astounding creativity, even miniatures like this famous story.

We begin as in so many tales of Holmes and Watson with a first-person narrator, but unlike Watson, who often knows much less than the characters he describes, our editor and host appears to be omniscient – well, omniscient apart from one important detail.  The tone is also markedly different because from all indications our subject seems to lurk outside the realm of empirical science:

The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter.  The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts which reinforce the statement.  Though the assertions contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation.  This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger.  I will endeavour in this narrative, which reproduces the original document in its necessarily somewhat fragmentary form, to lay before the reader the whole of the facts up to date.

The Joyce-Armstrong fragment turns out not to be the logbook of some collaborative scientific expedition, but the notes of one wealthy Romantic with particularly rabid opinions on what should be valued in life.  He was "a retiring man with dark moods," a "poet and dreamer," and a "mechanic and inventor," all of which point to the felicitous and rare coincidence in one soul of ambition and imagination.  Despite these credentials, "there were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious," a comment which had it been made by a more cynical writer might have been interpreted as something less extraordinary than deranged, the madness of the blue flower.  But Joyce-Armstrong has more sober ends in mind.  He is convinced that something above the clouds (what he labels an "air-jungle") has been snapping up pilots and disposing of them elsewhere.  Precisely that "elsewhere" is what interests him, and he is definitely in the minority:

Nevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere .... But then they are two empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond seeing their silly names in the newspaper.  It is interesting to note that neither of them had ever been much beyond the twenty-thousand-foot level.  Of course, men have been higher than this both in balloons and in the ascent of mountains.  It must be well above that point that the aeroplane enters the danger zone – always presuming that my premonitions are correct.

Thus begins the actual manuscript in medias res, its first two and its last page having been lost.  Yet that first "nevertheless" indicates that Joyce-Armstrong has been struggling to convince anyone who would listen and might understand a smidgen about flying of his unearthly "premonitions."  And one fine day, dressed "for the summit of the Himalayas" and full of mettle and grit, he sets out with the goal of scaling forty thousand feet of air.

What he finds, if it can be described with any available vocabulary, will not be revealed here.  The premise of the story is one of sheer terror that cannot appeal to the average person because the average person would not possibly be able to take a monoplane seven miles above the ground, nor grasp what insanity might beset an oxygen-starved brain at those heights.  And given the awesome dramatic tension that Conan Doyle develops, the cantle of jungle above these clouds might not be what horror buffs would expect.  But horror assumes many forms, one of the most effective being the subtle dread of something evil that should not exist.  There is also the matter of the self-fulfilling epitaph that Joyce-Armstrong leaves and which is often cited by students of the ghost story as well as erudite connoisseurs of Conan Doyle's oeuvre.  But what, pray tell, would we do without "accidents and mysteries"?

In the Land of Time

The fantastic has grown and shrunk over the last several decades, a product of what we have come to believe and what we are taught no longer exists.  The fables and whispers of yore, beasts and gods and impossible feats from impossible dreams – these have been exposed, say the high priests of galactic speculation, as signs of inner tribulation and repressed desire.  Metempsychosis is as ludicrous as miracles, both of whom yield no ocular proof.  Now readers of this site are aware of what I think of such humbug defended to the death by militant minds who have never really used their minds at all.  We are built for calculation and observation, true enough; but our minds are not bound by numbers, theorems or, worst of all, by our own pathetic human limitations.  Should we doubt our flight when all the birds of paradise skate our skies?  Should the fact that our deoxyribonucleic acid is shared in almost precise sequence by so many other animals oblige us to conclude that we must obviously be their descendants?  Evolution has revealed many vital links to our biological situs, but left unanswered the real questions of our cosmogony.  Yet modern science, in their insufferable arrogance and quest for fame – a fame that in their world of charlatans and speculators could not be more fleeting – continues to insist that we know enough to say that there is no anthropomorphic Creator because "the idea of an old man with a long white beard sitting on a throne is preposterous" (quoted from many dull and dead sources).  That idea is one that people of faith have felt in countless variations since they were far too young to be told of such an image; it is an image of our omega that we carry within ourselves because that same image can be purported to represent something less benevolent, Time.  Which brings us to a fine story from this collection.

Although a tale of fantasy In the Land of Time is also admixed with one of horror, and all good horror tales begin with a warning.  Our warning comes in the first paragraph in the form of a testament:

Thus Karnith, King of Alatta, spake to his eldest son: 'I bequeath to thee my city of Zoon, with its golden eaves, whereunder hum the bees.  And I bequeath to thee also the land of Alatta, and all such other lands as thou art worthy to possess, for my three strong armies which I leave thee may well take Zindara and overrun Istahn, and drive back Onin from his frontier, and leaguer the walls of Yan, and beyond that spread conquest over the lesser lands of Hebith, Ebnon, and Karida.  Only lead not thine armies against Zeenar, nor ever cross the Eidis.'

Karnith père thus expires to be relieved by Karnith fils or, more fully, Karnith Zo.  The matter is then not whether the new regent will cross the Eidis but how and when – certainly a policy advocated by the more hawk-like among the Alattans.  And so, as many decision-makers tend to do, Karnith decides to poll his people, not by democratic vote but by sensation.  He walks over the fields of his massive demesne and into the villages of the fiefdoms; he watches the smoke rise from the humble huts, the villagers tending to the bleating sheep (with the beautiful aside: "and the King wondered if men did otherwise in Istahn"), and "pondered much, who had not pondered before."  He had waited years to become king but had not gotten to know the designs of his own labyrinth, the breaks in his own earth.  He is then primordially shocked by the instances in which his folk attribute their wizened apathy to the megrims of Time.  "Time has ruthlessly done it," he is told and stares back at the clouds and sun that "shone upon Alatta and Istahn, causing the flowers to open wide in each."  An attack on his neighbors is postponed for an attack on that force which has spread equal ruin and dread to all nations, and his armies set out for the Land of Time with the blood-parched zeal of true warriors of doom.

What they find after their endless luff into an unsubsiding wind will not be revealed here, but it can be held for an allegory of what Time has to offer us.  Dunsany's prose of fantasy has been rightly praised as some of the finest of the British Isles, and there is much to be said for his archaisms, quickness of imagery and courage in presenting that which can only be presented in absolute terms.  His other writings, primarily featuring this fictional raconteur, are not as successful because his mind did not really operate on the level of the parlor room churl: he was born to write the fantastic in hues hitherto undiscovered.  Included above is an illustration from his most cherished of artists (a modern disciple of this Dutch painter of genius) who appended many pictures to his tomes and even inspired some of his tales.  My antipathy towards what has assumed the title of fantasy (and its twin separated at birth, science fiction) is mostly owing to the mechanical nature of the storytelling.  We may envision at more fanciful moments Mordor or some other realm as a thinly-veiled counterpart to our own; but rarely are moral themes touched upon with any valence because the themes are not as important as the strangeness of the whole endeavor.  And what then of Time, "the servant of Death," the "Enemy of my House," he who "wore a look on his face such as murderers wear"?  Let's just say his representation matches his actions, which are ubiquitous and irreversible.  And let's just hope that his victory is not the last.