Blood Disease

I suppose one would have to be intrigued by an inn called the Blue Bat, for reasons that should be obvious, even if the story is set in 1934 England. What was happening in 1934 England, you might ask? For one thing, the British Empire, whose zenith was the first half of the nineteenth century, was nearing its demise. The colonies, protectorates (a comically poor choice of words), and other dependencies which had lived only for the glory of a cold and distant isle, had begun their unshackling; a monarch unlikely to distinguish a Ghanaian from a Jamaican was relieved by a local leader who could sort whole cities by tribe; and the ways of the West, the onus of the paleface invader, were shed in order to embrace what had always been the way there, in those specific corners of the world whose peoples had survived, "utterly at peace with the forest that sustained and sheltered them." We note that "forest" could be replaced by "mountain," "river," "village," or simply "lifestyle" and yield the selfsame conclusion. Which is a fine way of explaining the perplexity of a man known widely and appropriately as Congo Bill.

Our tale begins and ends among bloodsuckers – perhaps that already gives away too much – as well as with British anthropologist William Clack-Herman. Professor Clack-Herman, henceforth Congo Clac–, I mean Congo Bill, has the misfortune of enduring a mosquito's lust and the attendant frailties. After a great ordeal of a 'cure,' Congo Bill returns to the Empire's home base "haggard and thin," and, although still young, now availing himself of a walking stick. He is met by his shocked wife Virginia, "a tall, spirited woman with a rich laugh and scarlet-painted fingernails," and his son Frank, nine years old and, regarding otherwise shocking phenomena, restrained and skeptical beyond his years. Almost immediately, fickle chance lures them to the Bat, which merits its own interlude:

It was a warm day, and in the sunshine of the late afternoon the cornfields of Berkshire rippled about them like a golden sea; and then, just as Virginia began to wonder where they would break the journey, from out of this sea heaved a big inn, Tudor in construction, with steeply gabled roofs and black beams crisscrossed on the white-plastered walls beneath the eaves. This was the Blue Bat; since destroyed by fire, in the early Thirties it boasted good beds, a fine kitchen, and an extensive cellar.

A very extensive cellar, I may add – but we are getting ahead of ourselves. The only other tenants at the Bat turn out to be Ronald Dexter, "a gentleman of independent means who had never had to work a day in his life," and Dexter's butler, a wizened, God-fearing man by the name of Clutch. Clutch will both live up and down to his name during the course of our tale, but that is to be expected of English elderly butlers who "have seen many strange things" in their "long lives":

Clutch was running a small silver crucifix with great care along the seams of his garments. A curious-looking man, Clutch, he had a remarkable head, disproportionately large for his body and completely hairless. The skull was a perfect dome, and the tight-stretched skin of it an almost translucent shade of yellowy-brown finely engraved with subcutaneous blue-black veins. The overall impression he gave was of a monstrous fetus, or else some type of prehistoric man, a Neanderthal perhaps, in whom the millennia had deposited deep strains of racial wisdom – though he wore, of course, the tailcoat and gray pin-striped trousers of his profession.    

Dexter sighs at Clutch's superstitions – but then again, the young spend an inordinate amount of time sighing at the old. So when we also learn that Ronald Dexter and Virginia Clack-Herman have long since been acquainted thanks to, of course, "consanguinity," or a "rather tenuous blood relationship," we understand malarial Congo Bill will now be set aside, at least for a wild night or two, while the kissing cousins consolidate their very mutual interests. What we do not understand is why the local patrons of the Bat, "farm laborers ... fat, sallow people, many with a yellowish tinge to their pallor" set the crucifix-toting Clutch at ill ease.

Once upon a time tales like these were termed, appropriately enough, "penny bloods," although their dry style was miles away from McGrath's lucid streams. His unusual literary debut possesses a ghoulish magnificence well superior to the subject matter, some of which is vowed to such perversity as to be better left forgotten. That is not to say, however, that there is no pathos in the plight of the Clack-Hermans, who are at one point associated, perhaps unfairly, with "members of the upper classes" (the double-barrelled surname might have had something to do with it) and then with "the fall of the Roman Empire." The narrative overcomes one of the worst opening lines you will ever read, as well as the thin pun on what courses through those same upper class members' veins, to provide the reader with a most harrowing experience, even when young Frank unravels his own macabre thread. Congo Bill could not, you see, completely forsake his beloved Africa and the utopia of the pygmies who saved his soon-to-be miserable life. As a token of that continent's unique fauna, Congo Bill imports (how this would be allowed now with quarantines is not ours to imagine) a colobus monkey in a cage that will become its coffin. The monkey is intended for Frank but will, in many ways, come to embody the anthropologist who thought that an endangered primate would thrive in England just as it had lived out its peaceful existence under its birth trees. Frank befriends the daughter of the inn's proprietor, a widower and another one of those sallow, wheezing beasts with beady stares, and the children get along nicely if in the way that children neglected in equal measure always seem to hit it off. Should it then strike us as coincidence that the taxonomic name for this monkey is colobus satanas? Let's just say that once you've seen the cellar, you may wonder about the beds and kitchen. 

The Dream Woman

Anyone who bothers to remember his nightly peregrinations will assure you, even if he knows not why, that our dreams may prefigure our lives. More than occasionally we are stopped by reality's eerie coincidences, feelings of having experienced a particular moment at least once before, and odd bends and breaks in logic that seem reasonable to us because reason knows no greater bugbear than the megrims of the sleeping human mind. I often begin to write down pieces of my other existence, but my thoughts are betrayed by captions of waking notions. These are two separate lives, and when they begin to merge we may get something akin to the events of this story.

Our protagonist is Isaac Scatchard, a plain man of middling education and no luck in any field. Events have conspired time and again to relegate him to menial work that never pans out into a more permanent station, and while he is diligent and true, he always seems to be too late for the job. As might be expected of a man nearing the middle of life's generosity, he resides with his mother who makes a point of celebrating her son's birthday as if he were still a child. This whole setup is intended neither as farce nor an opportunity for psychobabble and mindless theories about the familial structure. Its distinct purpose is not to paint the picture of a soul howling in the caverns of the night to a God who has forsaken him, but of an average man who has little recourse but to accept his lot. Two days before his birthday, Isaac sets out on a day's journey for another possible job at a stable. Even before he takes a step in that direction, we know two things: the job will be gone when he arrives and his return home will be complicated by an obstacle, if true tragedy is meant, then a self-imposed one. Sure enough, after yet another disappointment in what is turning into a hideous pattern, Isaac makes inquiries and learns that "he might save a few miles on his return by following a new road." All good works of horror append a scene in which the character is allowed the option of retreat or of following sage and time-tested advice, advice he will invariably reject out of hubris or personal convenience, thus making him deserving of his gruesome fate. That Isaac seeks out an alternative to his long hike simply because he wishes to be home in time for his birthday meal can only bode poorly.

As it turns out, poorly would have been far more pleasant. Losing his way on this new road – the symbolism is blunt but appropriate – Isaac is obliged to spend the night as the solitary guest at a family inn. Usually an early sleeper, he stays up well past his normal hour; and when he retires to the humble guest room he notices "with surprise the strength of the bolts and bars, and iron-sheathed shutters." Why would any simple innkeeper have such an outlay in home protection? An explanation is given that cannot be true, but which suggests that our Isaac has, by his own will naturally, stepped into a realm of which he should want no part. What happens to him that night will not be revealed here; suffice it to say the sequence remains one of the most terrifying you will ever encounter in a text of this caliber. Isaac beats a hasty path homeward from these premises and soon enjoys what must be considered for him exceptionally good luck. This little streak lasts, we are told, seven years, and consists of steady work for one master and a "comfortable annuity bequeathed to him as a reward for saving his mistress's life in a carriage accident." If all this strikes you as more than a little curious, you will not be greatly astounded by what ensues shortly before another of Isaac's birthdays: 

Mrs. Scatchard discovered that a bottle of tonic medicine which she was accustomed to take, and in which she had fancied that a dose or more was still left, happened to be empty. Isaac immediately volunteered to go to the chemist's and get it filled again. It was as rainy and bleak an autumn night as on the memorable past occasion when he lost his way and slept at the road-side inn. On going into the chemist's shop he was passed hurriedly by a poorly-dressed woman coming out of it. The glimpse he had of her face struck him, and he looked back after her as she descended the doorsteps. "You're noticing that woman?" said the chemist's apprentice behind the counter. "It's my opinion there's something wrong with her. She's been asking for laudanum to put to a bad tooth. Master's out for half an hour, and I told her I wasn't allowed to sell poison to strangers in his absence. She laughed in a queer way, and said she would come back in half an hour. If she expects master to serve her, I think she'll be disappointed. It's a case of suicide, sir, if ever there was one yet."

This fantastic passage precipitates yet another choice, namely to accost a woman who seems to have been on the verge of committing that most cardinal of Catholic sins. Although our poor Isaac has finally gained in luck and finances after almost four decades of hardscrabble denigration, he has yet to learn much about the fairer sex for his own purposes. That may account for, we suppose, his gallantry towards a wounded soul. And yet in an interview the woman reveals nothing that would require his intervention:

He asked if she was in any distress. She pointed to her torn shawl, her scanty dress, her crushed, dirty bonnet; then moved under a lamp so as to let the light fall on her stern, pale, but still most beautiful face. "I look like a comfortable, happy woman, don't I?" she said, with a bitter laugh. She spoke with a purity of intonation which Isaac had never heard before from other than ladies' lips. Her slightest actions seemed to have the easy, negligent grace of a thorough-bred woman. Her skin, for all its poverty-stricken paleness, was as delicate as if her life had been passed in the enjoyment of every social comfort that wealth can purchase. Even her small, finely-shaped hands, gloveless as they were, had not lost their whiteness.

Has Isaac found beauty pure and unblemished or something much more malevolent? Is it telling that the young woman, whose name is Rebecca Murdoch, asks Isaac to a meadow for their first private meeting? And what then of the editorial insert about "a man previously insensible to the influence of women" – and it is best to end our interrogation right here.

While the profundity of Collins's contributions to English literature could be questioned, his style and ability to enthrall are glorious. I fear that only his two most famous novels are read with any regularity, as much a testament to our unlearnedness as to the fleeting caress of literary enamourment. This much-adapted work concludes disappointingly because the evildoers are revealed somewhat too early along, and the value of this magnificent novel lies more in its innovation than its perspicacity. Nevertheless, the reading of even one of them should assure the student of literature that he is dealing with a heavyweight. What is particularly superb about The Dream Woman is how neither of the main characters' actions require any explanation or motive. Skeptics may claim that short stories necessarily predicate a single decision, gesture, or even a word, because there is little time for anything else. But in the hands of first-rate writers even short stories may make their ensembles live. And why then did our dream woman not bother to complete her sin? There is only one plausible reason, but I will leave that discovery to the curious among us who are still not afraid of turning on the light in the wee hours just to take a look around the room. Sometimes ignorance is both bliss and salvation.

The Rumor

We possess a most malevolent habit of claiming to know more than we really do, a habit so developed that it has engendered the cult of lying, of deception, of chicanery. Why is lying so attractive? Because in many ways it is easier than the truth. The truth in its common form has limitations: colors, dimensions, dates, surfaces.  Something happened to a specific someone at a specific time and place, and to be good and faithful reporters, we must have the precise combination of these details or confront a quick barrage of no-confidence votes. And although a certain type of mind, usually a bit dry, is most adept at bringing us the latest bulletins and in-depth coverage, it takes entirely another spirit to concoct and embellish. I suppose you can say that fiction has never actually hurt anyone, except when it bleeds into the vastness we call real life. Which brings us to a story from this collection.

Their names are Frank and Sharon Whittier, which given some revelations towards the end, should count as humorous and ironic – but let's not spoil all the fun. They have known each other since childhood, almost an eternity; they have three children; they moved in the tumultuous 1970s from "the comfortable riverine smugness of semi-Southern, puritanical Cincinnati" to New York, "this capital of dreadful freedom"; they are gainfully employed as the owners of a small art gallery on West 57th Street; and, most importantly as our story opens, they seem to have survived the self-aggrandizing and gaudy decadence that was the nineteen-eighties. They would be called high school sweethearts by a reporter if it weren't for the fact that we have no immediate evidence of the image that such a moniker generally bestows – the homecoming dances, the varsity jackets, the necking behind the gym or a locker door, the earth-shattering loss of innocence. All we have is their marriage date, Frank's fear of being drafted, and their shared interest in the humanities. Offspring bound them more closely together, as did work, and life trod on in unobtrusive fashion until one day, after about twenty years of husbandship and wifeship had sailed along, Sharon gets word that Frank has a gay lover.

The source of this rumor is Avis, one of Frank's former adulteresses – a can of worms that is thankfully kept shut. Avis is a "second-wave appropriationist who ma[kes] colored Xeroxes of masterpieces out of art books," then does something rather terrible to them with her bodily fluids. She first heard of Frank's secret life from two other members of that powerful subculture that had patiently waited its turn and was now demanding that the term "equal rights" be extended to those young men in tight jeans and somewhat feminine demeanors. Yet Frank had spent twenty years as a confirmed and shackled heterosexual without having ever suggested that what he endured every day was just that, enduring, and not enjoying. A discovery of this nature, especially given the pretentious and trashy informant (Frank apparently had a rash of flings, but Avis was particularly abrasive), tends to diminish the credibility of the accusation. Sharon questions Frank, who answers in a manner she finds studied, whereupon she remembers his womanly fastidiousness about his weight. For the time being, this minor revision is sufficient to admit society-wide subterfuge:

In the days that followed, now that Sharon was alert to the rumor's vaporous presence, she imagined it everywhere – on the poised young faces of their staff, in the delicate negotiatory accents of their artists' agents, in the heartier tones of their repeat customers, even in the gruff, self-preoccupied ramblings of the artists themselves. People seemed startled when she and Frank entered a room together: the desk receptionist and the security guard in their gallery halted their daily morning banter, and the waiters in their pet restaurant, over on 59th Street, appeared especially effusive and attentive. Handshakes lasted a second too long; women embraced her with an extra squeeze; she felt herself ensnared in a net of unspoken pity.

There is much in what follows about being the proverbial last person to know; there is also a generous helping of ambiguity that has always served as a topic for art because unlike ethnicity, age, or gender, sexual orientation can be successfully and continually suppressed for an entire life. How often have we seen film or literary characters act in an unusual and initially inexplicable way, only to have it all sobbingly confessed in the end as another case of fear and loathing? Too many, I suppose; not that such methods are ineffectual in heightening awareness and perhaps making us ponder the eccentricities of neighbors and old friends – but here we stray onto territory that should remain ungrazed.

To opine that the story adheres to a formula would be unfair. Where its tension flutters is precisely those passages in which Sharon's conscience becomes our lodestar. I will not go so far as to say that a betrayed wife's mind is a dull rock of presumption, but I think you know what I mean. The cuckolded husband and his enraged quest for knowledge is old hat even though newer additions to the canon are invariably distinguished not only by a vivid imagination, but one positively grotesque. Such is not Sharon's problem. Even when she computes the hours whiled away apart, the grooming, the lecherous looks exchanged between Frank and strangers, the "buttery, reedy tone of voice that might signal an invisible sex change" (a marvelous description), she still arrives at the same prime number. He simply cannot be something he has always been and something that he might very well be, because one life effaces the other. What can be said, however, is that there is only really one artistic exit from this conundrum, and it is the one taken by Updike. Anything less would have acceded to hideous plot devices and conspiracy at its most macabre. And what wagging tongues could possibly find all that interesting?                 

Mr. Justice Harbottle

There is a tinge to tales of the morbid that appeals both to the vulgarian and those of elevated sensibilities. The vulgarian, of course, will enjoy first the trepidation and the terrorizing and lust secretly for disembowelments; those of finer mind will be able to read the same pages with the same words and detect a design far more sinister than plain brutishness. Is this why I have always loved ghost stories? Is this the vulgarian in me or someone striving towards greater understanding of our realm through the prism of art? Whatever the case, those of faith know hooves when they see them dragged through the dirt. Which brings us to this horrid little gem. 

Our titular character is not a merry old soul, and never a merry old soul could he possibly have been. He is, however, a man of particular sway since his bench has wrought the most death notices of any other under the crown – well, actually, that matter may be implied but not confirmed. A description of our judge during his last living year suggests something of the Dickensian tyrant laden with terrible auspices:

The Judge was at that time a man of some sixty-seven years.  He had a great mulberry-colored face, a big, carbuncled nose, fierce eyes, and a grim and brutal mouth. My father, who was young at the time, thought it the most formidable face he had ever seen; for there were evidences of intellectual power in the formation and lines of the forehead. His voice was loud and harsh, and gave effect to the sarcasm which was his habitual weapon on the bench. This old gentleman had the reputation of being about the wickedest man in England. Even on the bench he now and then showed his scorn of opinion. He had carried cases his own way, it was said, in spite of counsel, authorities and even of juries, by a sort of cajolery, violence and bamboozling, that somehow confused and overpowered resistance. He had never actually committed himself; he was too cunning to do that. He had the character of being, however, a dangerous and unscrupulous judge; but his character did not trouble him.

The identity of the narrator is of little concern. Le Fanu used the papers of literature's first occult detective, Martin Hesselius, to achieve several degrees of separation and lend his tale what all good ghost stories need: the strength of hearsay. Hesselius lived well past the erasing of Roger Harbottle's traces from this earth, but a tenant known to a friend of his spoke of a "dark street in Westminster" and "a spacious old house" where one unforgettable night, two men emerged from a closet in a locked room and began to traipse insouciantly across his bedroom floor:

A slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the room on tiptoe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villainy .... this direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of rope.

These specters "walked as living men do, but without any sound," and our judge, given what we learn later on, is clearly the older, scurvy-ridden of the two. And his dark, thin companion may very well be a certain Lewis Pyneweck.

Pyneweck was once a grocer in Shrewsbury, to become in the course of our narrative "prisoner in the jail of that town." His charge, perhaps ironically, is forgery. As in so many of the cases presided over by Judge Harbottle, the only questions to weigh are whether the charge is valid, and if so, whether the punishment meted out conforms to the dimensions of the crime – and here is where our narrative begins to swerve and slope. Harbottle is visited by a rickety old man, Hugh Peters, who warns him of a plot afoot against the judge by his peers. A few pointed remarks are bandied about before Harbottle has the mole followed by his footman, who will be surprised at his quarry's hidden talents. In time, it is also revealed that another mole resides in Harbottle's own home, his housekeeper Flora Carwell. Carwell is the maiden name, now reassumed, of the former Mrs. Pyneweck, and into this household she brought her only child in exchange for the silence of the Judge on what had previously occurred, what was occurring between two consenting adults, and what would occur to her husband, incarcerated and abandoned to the whims of injustice. Were Harbottle's promises just more taradiddle? Given his propensity for "jollifications," it would appear that Mrs. Carwell is at best a muted conspirator and at worst a galley slave. Imagine her horror, therefore, when she consults a Shrewsbury paper one May morning on the only Friday the 13th in 1746 to find her ex-spouse among the most recently executed.

Some may argue that Le Fanu's talents were wasted on the occult, yet I must dissent. Surely mystery and murder can be deemed a lesser genre than the pure pleasure of first-rate art; but as soon as genius decides for a more layered interpretation of reality, it may find the supernatural the most plausible of all phenomena. Harbottle is a baleful rogue, but he is not immune to logic or logic's fearful consequences. In this vein he reconsiders his guest that night and begins to doubt the senses he so loves to indulge:

I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again. The Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he laughed to scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the very first puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark front parlor were often in his memory. His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this false old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were identical with those of Lewis Pyneweck.

A quick check with prison officials confirms what cannot be reassuring: that Pyneweck has long been accounted for and has never once been released from his murky dungeon. And if you think this would be nightmarish enough among the waking, wait until you see what godforsaken corners our judge visits when he sleeps.

The Tower in Rome

It is curious that some deride allegory, and even curiouser that others abuse it; and it is perhaps most curious that we need a word for allegory when we already have the word art. The modern mind, that cesspool of rebellion and relativism, has come to regard allegory as some kind of cheap trick, oftentimes imputing its prevalence to the necessity of making the masses believe without directly telling them what it is they should believe (which has much to do with how some parents educate their offspring). After cannons and pipes blaze in equal fury at the chicanery of medieval warlocks, we are handed the modern novel steeped in insincerity and nothing more than an allegory for the relativism that exculpates its authors from any kind of moral structure. You know the kind: everything hitherto has been a dream, or a lie, or a deception based on the lie found in a dream provoked by another sort of pipe. It is in this way that modern art finds an out when they really had no business at all being in. Allegory, when used elegantly, is one of the most radiant types of story because its revelation has overcome you in measured steps; it likely contains the recognitions and reversals that have been shown to compose good tragedy; and when sublimated by a master's hand can sometimes prove the corollary that "all art is an allegory of art itself" (I paraphrase to stymie the Googling hordes). First-rate works indeed add to the mystery of art's fascination, but old-fashioned, edifying allegories also yield the sensations we crave. Which brings us to the above tale in this collection.

You will have heard this story before, but not in this sequence or consummation. First we hear the legend of an ancient city's impregnable tower; then we hear of the death of the regent; finally another ruler lays claims to the throne with different motives as his engine. In this case our ruler was once "a man of lowly origin who had raised himself up from the dust to the highest station and had become a great lord" – although I suppose one never really stops being of lowly origin. Fairy tales and fables, which are some of the most tightly plotted narratives in all of literature, will inform the next stage. The new ruler understands that he cannot truly be considered the king of far and wide until he has deciphered the enigma that stands before him in metal and stone. The final preamble to the story's main events is very much an allegory of parental duties: the king asks his minions to swear to do his will without first telling them his wishes. They hesitate and then at length relent, all the while knowing his wish: to ingress the tower's "four gates, facing each of the four sides of the world." The oddities within the tower cannot be properly described here, but each one contains a clear parallel to older and more spiritual Judaic works that will be as familiar to the readers of The Tower of Rome as the creations of this writer or these siblings are to our ears. Since all despots end up resembling one another, our despot remains nameless throughout. And he does not tarry in threatening his court of advisers and stargazers to decrypt what he has witnessed within the tower walls. They are given a month to resolve the matter, at which point they will be replaced – although dismissals in those days usually meant more than simply an end to a career.   

And it is here that we find another familiar: the soothsayer and astrologist, as grey as the clouds he reads. It is he who steps forth after a month's investigation into the meaning of the monument has predictably yielded not one conclusive piece of evidence. The stargazer is taken aside by the emperor, who still lusts after the sacred knowledge to which he feels that he alone is entitled, and asked to speak of that which cannot be spoken and relate what must be deemed ineffable. What he confesses sub rosa to his liege will recall to mind another old tale:

The tower with the four gates was built by Emperor Nimrod, and not by human hands but with the power of enchantment. When Nimrod had subjugated the entire world and had become ruler over all creatures, he said in his heart, 'I am God.' Everyone knelt and bowed before him and brought sacrifices to him. Fearing that after death another would rule the earth and would destroy the altars that had been raised for him, and would blot out the name of Nimrod from human memory, he put the entire power and might of his universal rule into his iron crown ... [and] concealed the secret of the iron crown from the stars and spirits and hid it inside a rock. He recorded the secret on a tablet, and flying to the highest peak of the Mountains of Darkness, he hewed out a hole in a stone of the mountain and placed the tablet in it, and with enchantment rolled the heaviest stone in the world upon it.

You need not be a Biblical scholar to gain the substance of this passage, but like most works literary or otherwise, it most greatly benefits the subject experts. You may wonder about the actual location of the Mountains of Darkness, what the tablet could possibly say and in what language, and what on earth or beyond a king would be doing with something so Spartan as an iron crown that could easily be a shackle. Perhaps that's why instead of opening the gates, each emperor has hung new locks upon them.

http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/0611-sb-wsswintro/bruegel-tower-of-babel-ruins-big.jpg