The Afterlife

There is an old literary conceit, as old as the hills, in which the protagonist rumbles through a series of inexplicable obstacles that seem to be at once completely unrelated and complicit in some hideous pattern. What he finds at the end of his search is that both these observations are perfectly true. And they are true because our lives are both episodic and often interpretable only upon death – or thereafter, if you believe that there is a thereafter – and our protagonist is dead. The theme is so common (I will not spoil a handful of stories and films that employ this device) that it may be easy to conclude that hell comprises not ever realizing that life has ended, eternal suffering as to why we cannot just die, why people no longer take any interest in you, and why what mattered before now has little to no meaning. A subtler reader, of course, might understand that those who do not live by moral principles will not be able to distinguish life from death even while still obligate aerobes. Perhaps the only difference is the level of acceptance we attach to them, which brings us to the eponymous story in this collection.

We are introduced to the Billingses, Jane and Carter, by way of the exploits of their friends. Now in their fifties and rather immune to the hubbub and locomotion of youth, Jane and Carter cast a weary look at their contemporaries and find that everyone is doing something that they are not: one couple is split by adultery and a subsequent living arrangement that raises a  few eyebrows; another pair is exposed as embezzlers and smug embezzlers at that (as if, over time, there could be any other kind); but we are bound by numerical convention, and it is the third couple that will raze all other plot lines. This third couple are the Egglestons, Lucy and Frank, who decide that instead of waiting for retirement and a brooding dream of moving to England, they will come to it. They dispense with job, house, and responsibilities that have cost them half their lives and depart to this county along the North Sea which has big blue skies. Just like, apparently, the big blue skies Frank would have gazed upon had he taken the corporate suggestion of moving to Texas. 

It will take three years for Jane and Carter to rouse themselves from the changes that are not nearly as shocking as they might seem and book two plane tickets to that most-often visited of European destinations for Americans. What they cannot help are their expectations. Frank has become heavier, rosier, and more deferential in that bluff English fashion; Lucy, on the other hand, has taken on a different hue altogether:

Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.

This passage is abetted by a long sequence on the staircase at night in which Carter, unable to orient himself properly in an older English home where everything seems to be "on the left," nearly kills himself. He is saved, it appears, by "something – someone, he felt – [that] hit him a solid blow in the exact center of his chest, right on the sternum." That something turns out to be the oval knob of a newel post, an object on which he could have just as easily maimed himself – but at this point Carter is unconcerned. His expectations have not been met because he did not really know what to think of the Old World, of its narrow quarters and quaint habits, of its air, its trees, and the numerous species that obtain special attention throughout the story. One segment involves a heron roving the neighboring duke's lands which Lucy and Frank "have never been able to spot." Lucy promises it found, yet the carnivore only appears upon Carter's premonition:

But the grey heron was not showing himself, though they trod the margin of the woods for what seemed half a mile .... At last their hostess halted. She announced, "We'd better get on with it – what a disappointment," and led them back to the car. As they drew close to the glittering, pleated, roaring weir, Carter had the sudden distinct feeling that he should look behind him. And there was the heron, sailing out of the woods towards them, against the wind, held, indeed, motionless within the wind, standing in midair with his six-foot wing-spread – an angel.

It may or may not be important that Carter, who shares a name with the man who located the most famous tomb of modern times, feels the need to turn back and encounter a bird so closely related to an avifauna of Egyptian mythology (naturalists will undoubtedly object to such fuzzy classification, and I am always a factioneer of naturalists). It may be simpler to aver that Americans immigrating to England because of the lack of culture in their homeland, a very common and unfortunately not spurious assertion, will never discover the nest of the grey heron, that noble and incredibly inventive bird, just as they will never ingress the soul of – and I think we all know where such platitudes lead.

While the playground of Updike's imagination is almost invariably American suburbia, England, site of a glorious year abroad, appears now and then like a lily cast afloat upon a pond's gently detonating surface. The name Billings is American enough – it is, after all, the largest city in the fourth largest U.S. state – but in the language of the invaders of Norfolk, invaders who came in savage waves about a thousand years ago, the word means "twin." In fact, a famous tale in the tradition of the "North Folk" has Billings hiding out in some reeds waiting for his beloved (there is also another famous story about a woman that belongs to him, ostensibly his daughter, but that is a tale for another day). Why would twins have anything to do with a plain plot of fiftyish friends trying to be youthful and active and above all, still friends? Let's just say that death and life have many things in common.

The Sign of the Broken Sword

We may reconstruct the past on our own terms – indeed, doing so on the definitions of others is nearly impossible – but we cannot overcome the sensation, captured in many a platitude, about time and pain. However much we have suffered, however wickedly the world has rendered us a disservice, however hollow the special moments desired turned out to be, over time we immerse ourselves in the favorable aspects of memory. A shade despised and now deceased will become the object of our pity; one loved but lost will resonate not because that era ended the way it did, but because it ended at all: overcoming time and mortality remains the greatest obstacle to happiness. And what applies to that narrow pocket of humanity we know is equally valid for those we only know of, which brings us to this tale.

Our story is about the past, but in the present waft two figures, "one man ... enormously big, and the other (perhaps by contrast) almost startlingly small," both thoroughly versed in the mutability of man. They also know, however, that each person possesses some inherent characteristics that will never change; the stronger that person's willpower, the more adamant his mind. Such logic attends the curious case of two soldiers, one British and one Brazilian:

'Sir Arthur St Clare was a soldier of the old religious type .... he was always more for duty than for dash; and with all his personal courage was decidedly a prudent commander, particularly indignant at any needless waste of soldiers. Yet in this last battle he attempted something that a baby could see was absurd. One need not be a strategist to see it was as wild as wind; just as one need not be a strategist to keep out of the way of a motor-bus. Well, that is the first mystery; what had become of the English general's head? The second riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had really wronged him came away touched by his simplicity and sweetness. Why the deuce should he diabolically revenge himself only once in his life; and that for the one particular blow that could not have hurt him? Well, there you have it. One of the wisest men in the world acted like an idiot for no reason. One of the best men in the world acted like a fiend for no reason.'

Hyperbole aside, our sober subject is a one-sided skirmish between British and Brazilian forces on Black River in Olivier's South American territory. And while there are few topics more dull or moribund than battle descriptions, the event was noteworthy for two reasons: the discrepancy in troop numbers and the mercy granted to all members of the conquered but one. St. Clare, a man renowned for his cunning and caution, led an impetuous assault on an enemy vastly superior in number; Olivier, a man renowned for his lenity, hanged that dauntless commander and spared his underlings. What seems to be a question of history becomes a question a character, and for that reason the two men prowl about in search of a plinth's revealing inscription. 

Chesterton has a particular relationship to history, which for him is more a study of what kinds of man have existed than of mankind as an amorphous, decision-making collective. As he comments in a somewhat different context:

The only history that is worth knowing, or worth striving to know, is the history of the human head and the human heart, and of what great loves it has been enamoured: truth in the sense of the absolute justice is a thing for which fools look in history and wise men in the Day of Judgment.

And what history lies in the heart of men? According to Chesterton, each person might not be substantially different from any other – let us leave this codswallop to the relativists and their cretinous and insincere games of oneupmanship – but each person does have a different concept of the world. Perhaps no two people have exactly the same memories, but it is even less likely that two people will have matching ideas of who they are in the realities that greet them upon waking. Father Brown reviews the extant details, including a memoir by a certain Captain Keith who would posthumously become St. Clare's son-in-law, the accounts from soldiers and related narratives that describe the oddly broken sword with which the general is immortalized and petrified, and then a few observations that could only be made by someone who knows what untruths may lurk behind flaunted virtue and good reputation. He also knows what harm can befall those who attempt poliorcetics with unwhole weapons. Perhaps broken words would be more like it.

The Body Snatcher

It might be better to pretend that this story never happened, which of course it did. Graverobbers are for obvious reasons of supply some of history's most chronicled criminals, yet with the explosion of medical science in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not graves which were violated but the bodies themselves. These bodies were sold in parts to anatomists and medical students for scientific purposes and tomb after tomb went hollow. Even more morbid is the fact that demand began to get fussier and fresher bodies became all the rage, leading one particular team to pursue the freshest bodies out there, those of the still living. The actions of William Burke and his accomplice were so notorious as to be immortalized in a verb, so when we meet Fettes and Macfarlane in this small masterpiece of horror, we understand them to be his direct descendants.

The story begins with their unwanted reunion: Fettes is constantly soused and impecunious; Macfarlane, garbed in the finest boutique-bought whitewash, a successful London physician. They meet by chance and are none too pleased about it, for their consciences share crimes of diabolical scheming. It turns out both were once students of a certain K., a physician who collected cadavers for his own medical experiments, and had no qualms or questions about the work of his minions. The tale is too brief to provide much characterization of their sinister master, so we only get the following snippet:

There was at that period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for the blood of his employer. But Mr. K- was then at the top of his vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. 

That K. is really Stevenson’s compatriot Robert Knox is not so much a secret as a literary device to prevent the piece from becoming historical journalism. Suffice it to say that imagining two of Knox’s suppliers, with a few pale strokes of ghoulish vengeance thrown in for good measure, would make a glorious tale of horror (not unlike what would be produced half a century later in a very different setting). Stevenson’s genius does not allow him, however, to stop at the Gothic. The arc of such a story (devised and perfected by, among others, this author) is built in five acts: the re-encounter, the origin of their acquaintance, an “agenbite of inwit,” the appearance of an even greater evil, and then the destiny of all souls involved. You might think the opening section clumsy and almost unconnected to the meat of the tale, and you would not be wrong. But the story makes us wait for the integrant appearance of a man called Gray.

Gray is a marvelous sketch in the annals of literature, a being that barely defiles more than two pages and yet is etched deep in our memory. He becomes, I can say without being indiscreet, the unremovable stain. These are all evildoers, but there is something about him that outhowls the other devils:

This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal–black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad’s vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

The end looms the moment Macfarlane is obliged to foot the bill for their long and gluttonous night, and then spend the next day “squiring the intolerable Gray from tavern to tavern.” This all culminates in a scene in a carriage that could be taken (substituting a car or train for the fly) from any contemporary horror film. If you haven’t read Stevenson, you are missing one of literature’s unheralded giants, capable of portraying both sides of human nature in equal load (as he does in a more famous work, one of the most perfect literary creations of all time). In The Body Snatcher, there is only one side, and it is remarkably vile; but its vileness wields the distinct advantage of making us cringe in fear of dark and darting shapes in the night. Endless, blackest night, that is. 

A Nursery Tale

The original title of the above story found in this collection would be "a fairy tale," which suggests something not altogether fit for young ears. As it were, there is little to distinguish the prototypical fairy tale, replete with anthropomorphism, violence, and more than occasional wickedness, from our narrative. The protagonist is a lecherous bachelor still of marrying age by the name of Erwin; the place is a "fairy-tale German town." From our childhood on we learned that, by virtue of their beauty, serenity, and order, German towns tend to be perfect backdrops to the unusual and eerie. Erwin has a lot of free time on his clammy hands and spends it observing the nubile unattached maidens in his vicinage. There are many and he is but one, as alone as the toad upon the lily pad, so it takes him hardly any time to feel overwhelmed. After one unfortunate incident that ends in an upbraid and a hint of deterred sexual assault, Erwin alters his scheme:  

In compensation, separated from the street by a windowpane, clutching to his ribs a black briefcase, wearing scuffed trousers with a pinstripe, and stretching one leg under the opposite seat (if unoccupied), Erwin looked boldly and freely at passing girls, and then would suddenly bite his nether lip: this signified the capture of a new concubine; whereupon he would set her aside, as it were, and his swift gaze, jumping like a compass needle, was already seeking out the next one. Those beauties were far from him, and therefore the sweetness of free choice could not be affected by sullen timidity. 

I believe the waggish modern term for such a hobby is "eye candy"; it is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most forgivable hobbies in the world, as well as one of the hardest to relinquish. We would not be presumptuous in thinking that Erwin's fantasies are sketches for later portraits, hung ingloriously on the four bare walls of his humble studio. It is in this vein then, "on a frivolous evening in May" with the flower aria from this opera playing in the distance, that Erwin meets the one woman who can give him everything he wishes. And that woman is the Devil.

She introduces herself as such and also has another name, Frau Monde. Monde seems interested in pleasing Erwin and strikes up conversation in so casual a fashion as to be unconvincing in her claims. As Erwin reaches for his hat mumbling the niceties his mother taught him to mumble in such awkward situations, Monde directs his attention to an old man crossing before one of the ubiquitous trams loved by any lover of Germany and predicts disaster. The disaster occurs, although her phrasing allows the man to survive, and Erwin stops leaving, uncertain as to what turn their relationship is about to take. Monde fills him in concisely:

'Here is what I suggest. Tomorrow, from noon to midnight you can select by your usual method' (with heavy humor Frau Monde sucked in her lower lip with a succulent hiss) 'all the girls you fancy. Before my departure, I shall have them gathered and placed at your complete disposal. You will keep them until you have enjoyed them all. How does that strike you, amico?'

There is, as there ordinarily is with such pacts, an additional stipulation: his harem must be odd in number. Should midnight chime with an even collection, he will lose every single one of them – and perhaps a little more than that. So Monde stealthily exits, a mildly flabbergasted Erwin begins looking forward to tomorrow's eventful errands, and the dollhouse is built.

The informality of the encounter may remind students of Russian literature of this subsequent novel, both of which owe much more to the Faust legend than to each other (Nabokov's story antedated the palaver at the Patriarch's Pond by several years) – but close analysis yields no comparison of any value. What Erwin does or does not accomplish by midnight possesses much of the suspense wrought by the best of fairy or nursery tales, stories that do not so much as shock as fulfill expectations in an offbeat way. You and I and Frau Monde and any other experienced reader all know that Erwin and his harem are quickly parted; what we do not know are the circumstances of his occlusion. When he sets out that fateful afternoon, we are treated to a magnificent scene:

He went out just as the church clock had begun the laborious task of striking noon. Sunday bells joined in excitedly, and a bright breeze ruffled the Persian lilacs around the public lavatory in the small park near his house. Pigeons settled on an old stone Herzog or waddled along the sandbox where little children, their flannel behinds sticking up, were digging with toy scoops and playing with wooden trains. The lustrous leaves of the lindens moved in the wind; their ace-of-spades shadows quivered on the graveled path and climbed in an airy flock the trouser legs and skirts of the strollers, racing up and scattering over shoulders and faces, and once again the whole flock slipped back onto the ground, where, barely stirring, they lay in wait for the next foot passenger. In this variegated setting, Erwin noticed a girl in a white dress who had squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup with warts on his belly. The inclination of her head bared the back of her neck, revealing the ripple of her vertebrae, the fair bloom, the tender hollow between her shoulder blades, and the sun through the leaves found fiery strands in her chestnut hair.

You would think this would be enough for most people, and indeed, our Erwin would have been better off stopping right there. German trees in the shape of playing cards will also call to mind another Russian work of art that again traces its spindly roots to Doctor Faustus and his endless thirst for what we boldly call knowledge. After all, Frau Monde's late third husband was a professor. And a worldly one at that. 

The Dagger with Wings

If you know even a little about the English Romantic poets, you will understand their lineage to the antagonist of likely the greatest literary achievement of mankind. Being a Romantic meant being in love with ideals against all the conformities and customs of bourgeois society, that suffocating python, even with the knowledge that there would always be a bourgeois society; being an English poet also necessarily meant being inferior, because there would always be Milton. Shades of the most famous of fictional Satans still inhabit the gunslinging outlaw, the gangster, the drug lord, and the ruthless chief executive officer who from his underlings wishes to make grist for his golden mill, but they also animate the pious fraud. After all, it is the alleged prophet or clairvoyant who aims to seduce those too feeble of mind and experience to distinguish a sham from a Lamb. Which brings us to this odd and rather unsettling tale.

You may already know a little about our protagonist, if that is really the right word: a diminutive Catholic priest often consulted when an unusual crime stumps the usual investigators. And our investigator, Dr. Boyne, "the medical officer attached to the police force," has something very usual about his approach:

Dr Boyne was a big dark Irishman, one of those rather baffling Irishmen to be found all over the world, who will talk scientific scepticism, materialism, and cynicism at length and at large, but who never dream of referring anything touching the ritual of religion to anything except the traditional religion of their native land. It would be hard to say whether their creed is a very superficial varnish or a very fundamental substratum; but most probably it is both, with a mass of materialism in between.

Dr. Boyne will later claim to be "a practical man" who "do[es]n't bother much about religion and philosophy," and will be corrected as to what a practical man should really do with his time. But between these two sidelights on our Irish coroner, a fantastic situation presents itself: a rich old man by the name of Aylmer has died and his three sons have inherited. A standard bequest were it not for the fact the two eldest followed their father in death with unenviable rapidity. The reason? A fourth son, as it were, who equally qualifies to be the first, a "very brilliant and promising" boy legally adopted by Aylmer "in his bachelor days, when he thought he would have no heir" (the patriarch, like many people of lifelong wealth, married late). Boyne's description of this fellow, "who went by the name of John Strake," will imbue even the callow reader with a distinct impression:

His origin seems to be vague; they say he was a foundling; some say he was a gypsy. I think the last notion is mixed up with the fact that Aylmer in his old age dabbled in all sorts of dingy occultism, including palmistry and astrology, and his three sons say that Strake encouraged him in it. But they said a great many other things besides that. They said Strake was an amazing scoundrel, and especially an amazing liar; a genius in inventing lies on the spur of the moment, and telling them so as to deceive a detective .... Perhaps you can more or less imagine what happened. The old man left practically everything to the adopted son; and when he died the three real sons disputed the will. They said their father had been frightened into surrender and, not to put too fine a point on it, into gibbering idiocy. They said Strake had the strangest and most cunning ways of getting at him, in spite of the nurses and the family, and terrorizing him on his death-bed. Anyhow, they seemed to have proved something about the dead man’s mental condition, for the courts set aside the will and the sons inherited. Strake is said to have broken out in the most dreadful fashion, and sworn he would kill all three of them, one after another, and that nothing could hide them from his vengeance. It is the third or last of the brothers, Arnold Aylmer, who is asking for police protection. 

With all his materialist mores, Boyne certainly resembles a real person; but there is no way on earth or beyond that John Strake is real in person, name, or image, which shouldn't surprise us in the least. Like the Romantic poets (one in particular leaps to mind), he has constructed his own identity to be as lush, mysterious, and provocative as his verse. Someone like John Strake could not possibly have hailed from an average, bourgeois family or entertained the notion of enjoying such a family's quotidian comforts. So when Brown ventures to Arnold Aylmer's isolated residence, a cold and distant patch likened at one point to "the North Pole," he will obtain a private pow-wow since all of Aylmer's servants have already abandoned him – and here we must also abandon our cassocked friend.  

A minor imperfection or two can be in found in each of Chesterton's Father Brown tales (as a whole, however, they form an impregnable fortress of genius), and The Dagger with Wings omits more than one crucial detail, or at least appears to do so. Even the story's name does not quite get at the gist of the matter. Brown will make his way to the lonely house just before a convenient snowstorm literally covers his tracks; there, a lengthy conversation will ensue on an array of subjects: white (or "silver") magic, the sort of man who would sell himself to the Devil, Simon Magus (whom some may include in the last category), and some threatening letters "marked with a sign like a winged dagger." We could inject some levity into these dreadful debates by calling Magus a pioneer in human aviation, but Magus has always been revered by those of dark intent because he was one of the first and most determined apostates. Yet the most salient line of discourse comes after one character declares it the priest's "business to believe things," to which the alleged believer replies: "Well I do believe some things, of course ... and therefore, of course, I don't believe other things." A perfectly logical statement, if you happen to be a weekly subscriber to logic. It may also explain why when one character labels himself an "agnostic," he means it in the precise Greek sense of the word, that is, one who doesn't know. Perhaps I should say he knows some things and doesn't know others.