VIII. THE WEIRD TRADITION IN AMERICA
THE public for whom Poe
wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means accustomed
to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the usual
dark folk-lore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations
to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognised as fruitful
subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal
fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment
of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded,
as Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological
interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature
of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin forests
in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of
coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted
strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given tinder the influence
of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation
to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous
Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits
each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods
life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed
by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional
repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival --
all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black
whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner,
and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities
lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.
Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more
technically finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious
milieu. Another school -- the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint,
and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical --
was represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in
American letters -- the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of
antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft
judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the high
colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided
and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped
by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved
at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns
thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil,
a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and
conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre
of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences hovering
over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies
of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The
heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he
saw a dismal throng of vague specters behind the common phenomena of life;
but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and
beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy
into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in
which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal
the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn
despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never
a primarily object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven
into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of
genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon
he wishes to preach.
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive,
and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced
them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths
for children contained in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales,
and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and
intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually
supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret,
which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this
day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street Burying Ground.
In
The Marble Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian
villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy
and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses
of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a
romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus
of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which
has caused the modern writer D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat
the author in a highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous
novel whose, idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the
unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on the Elixir of Life in a
more or less capable fashion whilst the notes for a never-written tale
to be called The Ancestral Footstep show what Hawthorne would have
done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition -- that
of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood
as they walked-which appears incidentally in both Septimius Felton
and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret.
Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either
of atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. Edward Randolph's
Portrait, in Legends of the Province House, has its diabolic
moments. The Minister's Black Veil (founded on an actual incident)
and The Ambitious Guest imply much more than they state, whilst
Ethan
Grand -- a fragment of a longer work never completed -- rises to genuine
heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the
blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable
sinner," whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the
night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's
notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer --
an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who
appeared now and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed
and found to come and go from a very ancient grave.
But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our
author's weird material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The
House of the Seven Gables, in which the relentless working out of an
ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister
background of a very ancient Salem house -- one of those peaked Gothic
affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England coast
towns but which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more familiar
gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as "Colonial." Of these
old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their
original condition throughout the United States, but one well known to
Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with
doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an
edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging
second story, its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice
windows, is indeed an object well calculated to evoke sombre reflections;
typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers
which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth
century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected
with some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own
line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft
judge in 1692.
From this setting came the immortal tale -- New England's
greatest contribution to weird literature -- and we can feel in an instant
the authenticity of the atomosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and
disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed
walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding
malignity of the place when we read that its builder -- old Colonel Pyncheon
-- snatched the land with peculiar ruthlessness from its original settler,
Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the gallows as a wizard in the year
of the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon -- "God will give him blood
to drink" -- and the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter.
Maule's carpenter son consented to build the great gabled house for his
fathet's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died strangely on the day
of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd vicissitudes, with
queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and sometimes terrible
ends befalling the Pyncheons.
The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house --
almost as alive as Poe's House of Usher, though in a subtler way -- pervades
the tale as a recurrent motif pervades in operatic tragedy; and when the
main story is reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state
of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman; childlike,
unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment; sly and
treacherous judge Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel an over again -- all
these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well matched by the stunted
vegetation and anæmic fowls in the garden. It was almost a pity to
supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of sprightly Phœbe, cousin and
last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who turns out
to be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne
avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his implications
of terror well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to
sustain the mood and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents
like the bewitching of Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century,
and the spectral music of her harpsichord which precedes a death in the
family -- the latter a variant of an immemorial type of Aryan myth -- link
the action directly with the supernatural; whilst the dead nocturnal vigil
of old judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour, with his frightfully ticking
watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and genuine sort. The way in
which the judge's death is first adumbrated by the motions and sniffing
of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact is suspected
by the reader or by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius which
Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange cat watches intently outside
that same window in the night and on the next day, for -- something. It
is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite
deftness to its latter-day setting.
But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity.
His mood and attitude belonged to the age which closed with him, and it
is the spirit of Poe -- who so clearly and realistically understood the
natural basis of the horror-appeal and the correct mechanics of its achievement
-- which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe's disciples
may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman Fitz James O'Brien (1828-1862),
who became naturalised as an American and perished honourably in the Civil
War. It is he who gave us What Was It?, the first well-shaped short
story of a tangible but invisible being, and the prototype of de Maupassant's
Horla;
he also who created the inimitable Diamond Lens, in which a young
microscopist falls in love with a maiden of in infinitesimal world which
he has discovered in a drop of water. O'Brien's early death undoubtedly
deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror, though his
genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which characterised
Poe and Hawthorne.
Closer to real greatness was the eccentric and saturnine
journalist
Ambrose
Bierce, born in 1842; who likewise entered the Civil War, but survived
to write some immortal tales and to disappear in 1913 in as great a cloud
of mystery as any he ever evoked from his nightmare fancy. Bierce was a
satirist and pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his artistic reputation
must rest upon his grim and savage short stories; a large number of which
deal with the Civil War and form the most vivid and realistic expression
which that conflict has yet received in fiction. Virtually all of Bierce's
tales are tales of horror; and whilst many of them treat only of the physical
and psychological horrors within Nature, a substantial proportion admit
the malignly supernatural and form a leading element in America's fund
of weird literature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a living poet and critic who was
personally acquainted with Bierce, thus sums up the genius of the great
"shadow-maker" in the preface to some of his letters:
In Bierce the evocation of horror becomes
for the first time not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and
Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Words, so
simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a
literary hwk, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation.
In Poe one finds it a tour de force, in Maupassant a nervous engagement
of the flagellated climax. To Bierce, simply and sincerely, diabolism held
in its tormented death a legitimate and reliant means to the end. Yet a
tacit confirmation with Nature is in every instance insisted upon.
In The
Death of Halpin Frayser flowers, verdure, and the boughs and leaves
of trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural malignity.
Not the accustomed golden world, but a world pervaded with the mystery
of blue and the breathless recalcitrance of dreams is Bierces. Yet, curiously,
inhumanity is not altogether absent.
The "inhumanity" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a
rare strain of sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight
in images of cruelty and tantalising disappointment. The former quality
is well illustrated by some of the subtitles in the darker narratives;
such as "One does not always eat what is on the table", describing a body
laid out for a coroner's inquest, and "A man though naked may be in rags,"
referring to a frightfully mangled corpse.
Bierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the
stories are obviously mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely
artificial style derived from journalistic models; but the grim malevolence
stalking through all of them is unmistakable, and several stand out as
permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing. The
Death of Halpin Frayser, called by Frederic Taber Cooper the most
fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, tells
of a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined
wood, and of a man beset by ancestral memories who met death at the claws
of that which had been his fervently loved mother. The
Damned Thing, frequently copied in popular anthologies, chronicles
the hideous devastations of an invisible entity that waddles and flounders
on the hills and in the wheatfields by night and day. The Suitable Surroundings
evoke's with singular subtlety yet apparent simplicity a piercing sense
of the terror which may reside in the written word. In the story the weird
author Colston says to his friend Marsh, "You are brave enough to read
me in a street-car, but -- in a deserted house -- alone -- in the forest
-- at night! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocket that would kill you!"
Marsh reads the manuscript in "the suitable surroundings -- and it does
kill him. The
Middle Toe of the Right Foot is clumsily developed, but has a powerful
climax. A man named Manton has horribly killed his two children and his
wife, the latter of whom lacked the middle toe of the right foot. Ten years
later he returns much altered to the neighbourhood; and, being secretly
recognised, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held
in the now abandond house where his crime was committed. When the moment
of the duel arrives a trick is played upon him; and he is left without
an antagonist, shut in a night-black ground floor room of the reputedly
haunted edifice, with the thick dust of a decade on every hand. No, knife
is drawn against him, for only a thorough scare is intended; but on the
next day he is found crouched in a corner with distorted face, dead of
sheer fright at something he has seen. The only clue visible to the discoverers
is one having terrible implications: "In the dust of years that lay thick
upon the floor -- leading from the door by which they had entered, straight
across the room to within a yard of Manton's crouching corpse -- were three
parallel lines of footprints -- light but definite impressions of bare
feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman's. From
the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one
way." And, of course, the woman's prints showed a lack of the middle toe
of the right foot. The Spook House, told with a severely homely
air of journalistic verisimilitude, conveys terrible hints of shocking
mystery. In 1858 an entire family of seven persons disappears suddenly
and unaccountably from a plantation house in eastern Kentucky, leaving
all its possessions untouched -- furniture, clothing, food supplies, horses,
cattle, and slaves. About a year later two men of high standing are forced
by a storm to take shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble
into a strange subterranean room lit by an unaccountable greenish light
and having an iron door which cannot be opened from within. In this room
lie the decayed corpses of all the missing family; and as one of the discoverers
rushes forward to embrace a body he seems to recognise, the other is so
overpowered by a strange foetor that he accidentally shuts his companion
in the vault and loses consciousness. Recovering his senses six weeks later,
the survivor is unable to find the hidden room; and the house is burned
during the Civil War. The imprisoned discoverer is never seen or heard
of again.
Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of
his themes as vividly as Poe; and much of his work contains a certain touch
of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or early-American provincialism
which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror-masters. Nevertheless
the genuineness and artistry of his dark intimations are always unmistakable,
so that his greatness is in no danger of eclipse. As arranged in his definitively
collected works, Bierce's weird tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can
Such Things Be? and In the Midst of Life. The former, indeed,
is almost wholly given over to, the supernatural.
Much of the best in American horror-literature has come
from pens not mainly devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic
Elsie
Venner suggests with admirable restraint an unnatural ophidian element
in a young woman prenatally influenced, and sustains the atmosphere with
finely discriminating landscape touches. In The
Turn of the Screw, Henry
James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently
well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous
influence of two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint and the governess,
Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl who had been under their care. James
is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to
subtleties of speech to realise fully all the wild and devastating horror
in his situations; but for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of
fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette
a permanent place in its special class.
F.
Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now
collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. For the Blood
Is the Life touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed vampirism near
an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South Italian seacoast.
The
Dead Smile treats of family horrors in an old house and an ancestral
vault in Ireland, and introduces the banshee with considerable force.
The
Upper Berth, however, is Crawford's weird masterpiece; and is one
of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature. In this tale of
a suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the spectral saltwater dampness,
the strangely open porthole, and the nightmare struggle with the nameless
object are handled with incomparable dexterity.
Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered
extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early
work of Robert
W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality.
The
King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having
as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright,
madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic
fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation
of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby.
The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is The
Yellow Sign, in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard
watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a tussle
he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain
detail. "Well, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me wrists,
Sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off
in me 'and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a
strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which
the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills
the head "like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of
noisome decay." What he mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the Yellow
Sign?"
A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up on the
street by the sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after
stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two
learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that
this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed
cult of Hastur -- from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and
some nightmare memory of which seeks to lurk latent and ominous at the
back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black-plumed
hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night-shrouded
house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch.
And when the people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could
utter, they find three forms on the floor -- two dead and one dying. One
of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman,
and the doctor exclaims, "That man must have been dead for months." It
is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions
connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose
Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré
and macabre element are The
Maker of Moons and In
Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not
further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised
master.
Horror material of authentic force may be found in the
work of the New England realist Mary
E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rosebush,
contains a number of noteworthy achievements. In The Shadows on the
Wall we are shown with consummate skill the response of a staid New
England household to uncanny tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of the
poisoned brother well prepares us for the climactic moment when the shadow
of the secret murderer, who has killed himself in a neighbouring city,
suddenly appears beside it. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, in The
Yellow Wall Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating
the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered
room where a madwoman was once confined.
In The Dead Valley the eminent architect and mediævalist
Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror
through subtleties of atmosphere and description.
Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the
gifted and versatile humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and
recent contains some finely weird specimens. Fishhead, an early
achievement, is banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities
between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake, which
at the last avenge their biped kinsman's murder. Later work of Mr. Cobb
introduces an element of possible science, as in the tale of hereditary
memory where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words in African
jungle speech when run down by a train under visual and aural circumstances
recalling the maiming of his black ancestor by a rhinoceros a century before.
Extremely high in artistic stature is the novel The
Dark Chamber (1927) by the late Leonard Cline. This is the tale of
a man who -- with the characteristic ambition of the Gothic or Byronic
hero-villain -- seeks to defy nature and recapture every moment of his
past life through the abnormal stimulation of memory. To this end he employs
endless notes, records, mnemonic objects, and pictures -- and finally odours,
music, and exotic drugs. At last his ambition goes beyond his personal
life and readies toward the black abysses of hereditary memory --
even back to pre-human days amidst the steaming swamps of the carboniferous
age, and to still more unimaginable deeps of primal time and entity. He
calls for madder music and takes stranger drugs, and finally his great
dog grows oddly afraid of him. A noxious animal stench encompasses him,
and he grows vacant-faced and subhuman. In the end he takes to the woods,
howling at night beneath windows. He is finally found in a thicket, mangled
to death. Beside him is the mangled corpse of his dog. They have killed
each other. The atmosphere of this novel is malevolently potent, much attention
being paid to the central figure's sinister home and household.
A less subtle and well-balanced but nevertheless highly
effective creation is Herbert S. Gorman's novel, The Place Called Dagon,
which relates the dark history of a western Massachusetts back-water where
the descendants of refugees from the Salem witchcraft still keep alive
the morbid and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.
Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of
magnificent atmosphere but is marred by a somewhat mediocre romanticism.
Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions
of the novelist and short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose
themes arise from actual dreams. The Song of The Siren has a very
persuasive strangeness, while such things as Lukundoo and The
Snout arouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very peculiar
quality to his tales -- an oblique sort of glamour which has its own distinctive
type of convincingness.
Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic
horror so well as the California poet, artist and fictionist Clark
Ashton Smith, whose bizarre writing, drawings, paintings and stories
are the delight of a sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his background a
universe of remote and paralysing fright-jungles of poisonous and iridescent
blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis,
Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of spotted death-fungi
in spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and most ambitious
poem, The Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and opens
up chaotic and incredible vistas of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces
between the stars. In sheet dæmonic strangeness and fertility of
conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by, any, other writer dead
or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted
visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the
tale? His short stories deal powerfully with other galaxies, worlds, and
dimensions, as well as with strange regions and æons on the earth.
He tells of primal Hyperborea and its black amorphous god Tsathoggua; of
the lost continent Zothique, and of the fabulous, Vampire-curst land of
Averoigne in mediæval France. Some of Mr. Smith's best work can be
found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
(1933).
.....
