Zangwill's Bow

Outwardly I was calm, and spoke to the people about me as usual.  Inwardly I was on fire with a consuming scientific passion.

It is probably advisable not to reveal which character in this book, the first full−length locked room mystery novel of the kind subsequently made famous by this writer, is responsible for the above quote.  Unlike the masterworks of Carr, Zangwill has little interest in the actual logistics of the crime.  There is no Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale or any other cozy and flawless figure to work out the kinks of some of the most ingenious mysteries ever devised (unfortunately, as can be expected, Carr’s page−turners suffer greatly from a lack of character development; I say this having last read them almost twenty years ago).  Instead, we have a slew of Dickensian caricatures: Mortlake, Wimp, Drabdump, Grodman, Constant, Crowl, Dymond, Spigot, Crogie, and the underappreciated poet and ghost writer Denzil Cantercot whose “epic poem” is “morbid from start to finish … [with] ‘death’ in the third line.”  They bandy about the trendy issues of the day — religion, money, and social reform — in broad confirmation of William James’s adage on what some people call thinking.  But before all that, there is the matter of the crime.

The victim is Arthur Constant, a lovable young fellow known both as an altruist and a citizen of upright moral principles.  One morning at seven o’clock, he is found with his throat freshly cut in his bed by his landlady Mrs. Drabdump and the retired detective Grodman.  All accesses to his modest boarding house accommodations are locked from the inside (his room’s old door gave way to such a scene).  By all indications, he had no reasons to end his life and even fewer that would provoke a murder, as he was

A man who had never made an enemy even by benefiting him, nor lost a friend even by refusing his favors … a man whose heart overflowed with peace and goodwill to all men all the year round … a man to whom Christmas came not once, but three hundred and sixty−five times a year … a brilliant intellect, who gave up to mankind what was meant for himself, and worked as a laborer in the vineyard of humanity, never crying that the grapes were sour … a man uniformly cheerful and of good courage, living in that forgetfulness of self which is the truest antidote to despair.

It may be surmised that the only possible motive is deception; in other words, that someone so unabashedly interested in the Brotherhood of Man might have concealed a dark inner life.  Unsurprisingly, a woman surfaces that links Constant to another young man, and a tenuous thread is drawn through the otherwise unconnected events.  An arrest is made, followed by a glorious trial (an echo of an equally entertaining inquest earlier in the book) and a quick juridical decision.  As is so often the case in murder mysteries, that decision is reached only four−fifths through our novel, which leaves just enough time for a couple of characters to probe the matter more deeply.

What is remarkable about Zangwill’s novel is how unremarkably its scenes unfold.  In a Victorian London less sultry and more talkative than the one popularized by the residents of Baker Street, the crime initially garners great attention:

The mystery was the one topic of conversation everywhere — it was on the carpet and the bare boards alike, in the kitchen and the drawing room.  It was discussed with science or stupidity, with aspirates or without.  It came up for breakfast with the rolls and was swept off the dinner table with the last crumbs.

In time, however, it becomes yet another incident that, upon mention of the deceased or consideration of his deeds, makes people more thoughtful but not stop going about their business.  Everyone misses Arthur Constant but there will be other Arthur Constants.  Given the novel’s inexplicably silly name, a reflection of the age’s yellow press sensationalism, the whole business might sound hollow to our modern sensibilities.  So when one character claims that “the key to the Big Bow Mystery is feminine psychology,” we wonder to what extent that has changed in the last hundred years.  Maybe not as much as you might think.

A Christmas Carol

The study of human soul has been claimed by many a discipline, both scientific and pseudo-scientific, which means that while the conclusions boast the stamp of empirical evidence, the data culled is almost purely subjective.  The latest cabalists on the scene are neuropsychiatrists, and their particular methods border on the fascinating while, at the same time, straddling the ridiculous.  Do certain parts of our brain (forgive my simplifications) rev and rumble when certain things happen to us?  Well, I suppose they do, since we are nothing if programmed robots when it comes to chemical conflict.  Can we understand abnormal behavior through abnormalities in our cerebral structure or patterns?  I'm sure that those beleaguered by delusions will light up an odd selection of ornaments and constellations.  Should we at all be worried that our interpretation of brain activity is subject to the subjective filter that is our own mind's pulse?  How could frontal-subcortical circuitry not produce the desired personality, might be the retort echoing against our silent discomfort at the ease of such conclusions.  And the personality in question may well be the main character of this renowned story.

We begin with an affirmation of the material world: Jacob Marley, the long-time partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, is dead and has lain in such a state for seven long years.  Marley must be dead for the events of the story to occur as they do; but he must also be dead (and he is killed repeatedly on the story's first page) so that we may consider a belief in his reappearance.  We must also depict our protagonist as someone so unlikely to accept the contrivances of the spiritual world as to be immune to the faint whiffs of humanity that encircle the dowdyism of his wretched soul:

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

As subsequent episodes reveal, Scrooge once had a soul and wishes for a happy life within society.  He forfeited these dreams once business became his only burden; over time his wizened countenance has come to reflect the lack of human humidity.  He is spouseless and unchildrened, year after year he rejects his deceased sister's only son's Christmas dinner invitation, and in dreariest winter his poor clerk is allotted one feeble coal to match his number of paid yearly holidays.  Is Scrooge a caricature?  Most evidently; his name, now a figure of common parlance, suggests the coiled grip of a lusty hand.  Even his domicile bears his blueprints:

They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.

Scrooge was free and full of the freshest dreams that a promising young life can hold; what closed him off to the world we shall never know for sure.  Could the smell of pocket change have replaced violets in his imagination?  Could the smooth sides of bullion imbued him with a more concrete sense of nature's perfection?   Perhaps Scrooge was always there for the tempting, awaiting his turn on the rickety stage known as financial prosperity, a mystery that is better left as Dickens intended: an inexplicable yet all too common deviation from the straight road of moral well-being.

We have still said nothing about those famous ghosts.  They are three, like the Magi; and like the Kings they are harbingers of something fantastic from which no mind can avert itself in indifference.  They vary in physical size, or at least the size of what they represent: the Ghost of Christmas Past is an old man shrunk to the dimensions of a child; Christmas Present is a jolly green giant, if an evanescent one; and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come bears a remarkable resemblance to the Keeper of the Scythe (and like He, the future is dark and mute).  I stand corrected: four apparitions envelop Ebenezer Scrooge that lonesome Christmas Eve, and it is the first among them that will be the most affecting because it is the ghost of his old partner, Marley.  Marley appears in the chains that Scrooge tells himself are customary for spirits, but chains of "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses" – the souvenirs of lifelong dealings with the greatest miser of London.  After some staring and banter (the ghost first announces his presence by mimicking Scrooge's knocker, but then is quick to materialize fully), Marley's spirit cuts to the chase and warns his erstwhile associate about what is to befall him during the longest night of his life.  Scrooge will eventually believe him, but his instinct hints at a more modern explanation for such phenomena:

'Why do you doubt your senses?'

'Because,' said Scrooge, 'a little thing affects them.  A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.  You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.  There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'

Modern science informs us that digestive obstacles manipulate the retinogeniculocalcarine tract, which in turn redounds in the summoning of visual hallucinations; that would explain those particularly vicious images after a spicy meal.  Ah, but Scrooge likes his meals the way he likes his morals: unaccompanied, tasteless, and wholly pragmatic. 

The Captain of the Polestar

The man becomes a greater mystery every day, though I fear that the solution which he has himself suggested is the correct one, and that his reason is affected.  I do not think that a guilty conscience has anything to do with his behavior.  The idea is a popular one among the officers and, I believe, the crew; but I have seen nothing to support it.  He has not the air of a guilty man, but of one who has had terrible usage at the hands of fortune, and who should be regarded as a martyr rather than a criminal.

Perhaps I am naturally suspicious of those described as well-read because it implies that reading an indefinite amount of books can convert an average human being into an extraordinary one.  Yet man cannot learn on reading alone.  Life in its myriad tragedies and triumphs must imbue a learned person with perspective on his shelves that cannot be gained if he never abandons their side.  The dialogue of two Victorian lovers will only sound stilted if one has heard two contemporaries mutter sweet nothings; the desperation of frustrated dreams and private pain will only resound if the reader can reflect upon his own losses; and the postmodern, relativist nonsense that masquerades as deep thinking will only be exposed to the mind who knows the history of letters and also knows garbage when he smells it.  That is not to say, of course, that we should succumb to the adolescent habit of masking the cast of fiction with faces from our own reality.  One finds, I think, certain faces and manners – be they of people we know personally, those of certain celebrity, or odd amalgams not immediately traceable – particularly enchanting, and it is they who become our regulars, our fetished players.  We may even discover that we are haunted by images beyond our ken summoned only as fiction dictates – which brings us to this tale of unease.     

Our narrator is John McAlister Ray, Jr. (which may remind readers of the usher to this novel), a skeptical man of science who apparently learned nothing from his father, also a doctor, who appears towards the story's end in very unusual circumstances.  Ray is commissioned for reasons still unclear to us to an Arctic whaler commanded by Captain Craigie.  There are some gestures in the direction of this magnificent work – Craigie's bizarre,  almost pathological obsession with reaching a certain point in the trajectory, his seeming insouciance for the welfare of his crew, and his sudden outbursts of violent rage – but they are quickly subsumed under the carapace of another tale: a ghostly white figure  floating over the seas of ice has been sighted by several members of the fifty-man company.  Craigie is "remarkably well read" and has "the power of expressing his opinion forcibly without appearing to be dogmatic"; he also has a particular hue to him that may or may not mark his character:

A man's outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within.  The captain is tall and well-formed, with a dark, handsome face and a curious way of twitching his limb, which may arise from nervousness or be simply an outcome of his excessive energy.  His jaw and whole cast of countenance is manly and resolute, but the eyes are the distinctive feature of his face.  They are of the very darkest hazel, bright and eager, with a singular mixture of recklessness in their expression, and of something else which I have sometimes thought was more allied with horror than with any other emotion.

How eyes can be "of the very darkest hazel" and yet "bright" at the same time comprises one of the conventions of art that may confuse those who only read to pass the time or those who never read anything at all.  Somewhere, from among the thousands of faces we have gazed upon and their twinned portals, we can imagine exactly what the effect of these eyes might be.  What we cannot imagine is what they conspire to behold in both sleep and waking hours.

The secret of the Polestar's skipper may not really be a secret at all.  The atmosphere created is so conducive to terror, however, that we are almost obliged to take the whole series of events – if that is the right word – at face value, something that Ray is very hesitant to do.  Our story evolves in journal entries that monitor the crew's dwindling supplies and mounting anxiety.  Ray even misses the birthday of his fiancée, his beloved Flora to whom no one could possibly compare, while the sailors lament Craigie's extended circuit because herring season, the most profitable time of the year, begins in short order.  It is here that Ray comes across an item of unavoidable interest in the captain's quarters:

It is a bare little room, containing a washing-stand and a few books, but little else in the way of luxury except some pictures on the walls.  The majority of these are small cheap oleographs, but there was one watercolor sketch of the head of a young lady which arrested my attention.  It was evidently a portrait, and not one of those fancy types of female beauty which sailors particularly affect.  No artist could have evolved from his own mind such a curious mixture of character and weakness.  The languid, dreamy eyes, with their drooping lashes, and the broad, low brow, unruffled by thought or care, were in strong contrast with the clean-cut, prominent jaw and the resolute set of the lower lip.  Underneath it in one of the corners was written M.B., aet. 19.  That anyone in the short space of nineteen years of existence could develop such strength of will as was stamped on her face seemed to me at the time to be well-nigh incredible.  She must have been an extraordinary woman.

Could Ray be thinking specifically of his own favorite?  Perhaps the attitude conveyed so unambiguously by the artist may explain what we learn as our story resolves itself into a certain coherence.  That is, if you consider what happens in one of the planet's most silent regions to be resolved.

Aes Triplex

After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.  By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.  Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact?  Why, no.  They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived someone else; and when a draught might puff them out like a fluttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.  It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.

Those of artistic bent face a quandary that, compared to the perdition looming over so much of the world's population, may seem petty.  When we are young and unsung there are few who will heed our opinions.  Our parents and teachers smile at our sudden discovery of age-old platitudes, while the women we seek to impress cannot possibly be impressed with the unsteady observations of callow manhood.  As time progresses we marry and procreate, become greater experts in whatever field we have chosen either provisionally or as a simple means of sustenance until we blossom as artists, and if we are not careful, we wake up one morning and find ourselves no longer young.  Around us walk members of a whole new generation that consider us nothing more than martinets of stale values and ideals; if they're particularly rebellious, they will even deride our playfulness as inappropriate.  To all this, of course, we nod our heads and remember our own churlish gibes at our elders, part and parcel of becoming authorities on what it means to live.  Yet what no one can hold forth on with any credibility is the end of days, how life resolves itself either into nothingness or something greater still.  And how we should approach our evenings is the subject of this famous essay.

The most important thing about death is that we have no contrast for its understanding.  Life as we know it is not really life, but the pursuit of living – be that living wildly or quite prudishly with one eye cast above to the gathering clouds.  We continue nevertheless to prattle on about life in the most abstract terms as if it were a recipe or an amorphous mass of an invisible element, which is precisely what bothers Stevenson:

In taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed .... and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door.  All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.

A cursory glance at these words and further inspection of the essay should not result in the indifference so commonly incident to daredevils and other defiers.  Practice has been to worship those we loved, and that practice will never stop, at least inwardly.  But as children, a stage of life that greatly concerned Stevenson, we are told and shown a plethora of rituals that, as we age, do not necessarily become more intelligible.  Surely a blessing for safe passage is clear even to the greenest among us, but what of wakes, cremation, or burial among the filth we scrape daily off our shoes?  What possesses a society to exalt the enskied spirits of our beloved if we rudely dispose of their former forms?  This is no place for comparative anthropology on death rituals – a subject that always seems to infiltrate college curricula – so let us but roam amidst an infirm Scotsman's preset boundaries.

Death has its admirers, normally those among us who either seek exculpation from their sins or a release from what they perceive as unending torment.  The monk who beseeches his Lord to do away with his sullied body so that his soul may be clean is worthy of both our respect and pity; and those poor mortal coils who take matters into their own hands deserve even greater remorse.  But Death lingers on as the most impenetrable of human mysteries because it sustains more readings than life.  Ask a physician about our terminus and he will point to diagrams and x-rays; ask a theologian and he will nod in grave acceptance of our Fate; ask a soldier and he will see battlefields strewn with his companions, fallen but never forgotten; ask a very old man and you may notice a sadness as all of life flashes behind his eyes.  As the highest form of human expression, it is literature which assumes the task of imagining death most explicitly, and we do so by "rising from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life."  Death becomes what will be taken away and, in the view of some, never replaced:

Into the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life's possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of their personal safety.  To be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw.  For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

Death, we recall, "outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them"; after that some might say that there are no accidents, only destiny.  Yet as we pass middle age and move gently into that good night, we may have prudence and caution as our only bedfellows.  We may desist in any acts of generosity and instead devolve into an insular being surviving against the rest of the predatory world.  That survival has so casually come to replace life in common parlance among men of science says much about the world that now surrounds us: we have relinquished any hope for salvation and put our efforts into genetic experiments that may prove to be the greatest catastrophe we will have ever wrought upon mankind.  Already in Stevenson's age  and shortly thereafter there appeared scientists (including this scholar who inspired more than one literary understudy) who felt untouched by God's hand and yearned for a reality they could fashion in the image of our most perfect beast.  What you may think of these would-be creators will probably reflect what you think about our ultimate destination – but that is a subject best left to one's own conscience.

The title of the essay is from a citation by this Roman writer, but applied in anecdote to an English lexicographer and critic whose weighty step still resounds in our best libraries.  One may chuckle at the famously elephantine Johnson garbed in three layers of brass, but one should remember where he was at the time: roaming the Scottish highlands, ill of health, and accompanied, as one now imagines always to have been the case, by another Scotsman named Boswell.  A model of "intelligence and courage" to expose oneself to such a climate when many a physician had already surmised the end to be near.  But for some of us, our beginning is in our end. 

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.