Adventure classics – Rational or romantic – what is evil?

“Rappaccini’s Daughter”

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

image: wikimedia commons

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Last Friday’s Halloween horror post about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” ended with the beautiful Beatrice, daughter of maniacal scientist Rappaccini, hopelessly in love with Giovanni Guasconti, a young student who had himself fallen in love by watching her in her father’s enchanted garden.

Rappaccini effectively was the literary descendent of one of Romanticism’s earlier villains, Dr. Frankenstein, the personification of the era’s distrust of rationalism and intellectualism, and a man willing to sacrifice even those he loved in the pursuit of scientific progress. It was a character type the 19^th century loved to hate, even while the century reaped the benefits of scientific advancements in industry and medicine.

By the end of the century the cold-blooded scientific investigator would become transform into both the villains of such H.G. Wells tales as “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and the loveably eccentric Sherlock Holmes, about whom an acquaintance said, “I can imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest (poisonous) vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence. . . but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects.”

Deadly flowers: wikimedia commons

 Beatrice is the human personification of that deadly vegetable poison. Her whole physical being has been so saturated by the poisonous plants of her father’s garden that one touch from her can kill those less habituated.

As her beloved Giovanni gradually realizes the nature of her dilemma, he seeks the counsel of Pietro Baglioni, a physician/professor at the university where he is supposed to be studying. Baglioni had warned Giovanni earlier about the unpleasant rumors swirling around Rappaccini and his daughter.

Now Baglioni finds evidence of Beatrice’s deadly influence in Giovanni, including the deathly sweet fragrance that clings to him, and which is also a symptom of Beatrice’s inner sickness. And to his shock, Giovanni realizes he has also acquired some of Beatrice’s other effects. If the progress of their love affair continues unchecked, they will be isolated from all other beings by their mutual deadliness.

Even as Giovanni desperately searches for an antidote to their joint poisoning, he wonders whether Beatrice is truly as good and innocent as she seems or whether – although the thought seems blasphemous to a besotted lover – she has been infected morally as well as physically by the evil of her surroundings.

At times, Hawthorne’s awareness of his characters as symbols rather than people threatens to overwhelm participation in the story. I haven’t found any hint that Hawthorne ever acknowledged the influence of one of his contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe, however much Poe’s beautiful, sometimes deadly, oftentimes dying women seem reflected in Hawthorne’s work.

 But Poe was certainly aware of Hawthorne. In nonfiction prose more pointed than his fiction (and carrying a less than sweet scent of sour grapes), Poe wrote in an 1847 review about “the strain of allegory which completely overwhelms the greater number of his subjects. . . The deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as allegory, is a very, very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer’s ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an October of Halloween horror with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. . . What – you expected to learn how Beatrice and Giovanni’s story ended? You’ll have to read it for yourself. For this copyright-expired work, try a free online version.)

Adventure classics -- A pit and a pendulum and rats, oh, my!

“The Pit and the Pendulum”

by Edgar Allan Poe

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I wrote Monday about what Texas authors consider the essential works of horror writing. Nobody mentioned Poe. I could understand excluding Robert Louis Stevenson, although his "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is undoubtedly a horror classic. Or excluding Oscar Wilde, although his Picture of Dorian Gray is also a classic. After all, neither Stevenson nor Wilde specialized in horror.

But what about Poe? Sure, he invested modern detective fiction, dabbled in what would now be termed science fiction, and prided himself on his poetry. But can anyone dispute that in the realm of psychological horror, he’s the original master?

Published originally in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1843, “The Pit and the Pendulum” seems at first glance to be an odd choice for a Christmas present. A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition is subjected to a mock trial, apparently after torture, then whisked away to the Inquisition’s deepest dungeon for an over the top execution by inches.

The execution relies on bizarre devices of the kind beloved by modern thriller writers. In practical terms, , although the cost of building a prison cell designed to force a prisoner to fall or jump to his death in the cell’s central pit doesn’t make sense from an accounting standpoint. It can’t even count as a deterrent, since nobody is supposed to know the final end of prisoners in this situation. And what’s with that crazy pendulum? What government with the faintest sense of fiscal responsibility would fund such things?

Seriously, and fortunately for readers for the past hundred and seventy years, accountants couldn’t put a price on Poe’s ingenuity.

Being Poe, he also threw in enough (slightly-skewed) history and elegant vocabulary to make his story suitable for elegantly bound books. And although he couldn’t have known, his works have spawned dozens of films. (The 1961 film based on “The Pit and the Pendulum” relies only loosely on Poe’s story, which at approximately 6,000 words had to be expanded to fit the needs of a ninety-minute movie. The 1961 screenplay was by a noted horror writer of the twentieth century, Richard Matheson.)

The original story opens as the judges of the Inquisition pronounce sentence on the unnamed prisoner/narrator. Although the Inquisition was on the wane by the time of the early nineteenth century setting for Poe’s story, it was and is still a handy byword for terror.

“I was sick¾ sick unto death with that long agony,” the story opens, “and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.” Still only semi-conscious¾ and possibly hallucinating¾ the prisoner is carried from the courtroom to a lightless dungeon. While exploring his unseen, unseeable cell, he stumbles and falls. Reviving, he says, “I put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pit.”

Foiled in their first attempt, the prisoner’s jailers provide him with drugged food and water, tie him up and turn the lights on, the better for him to see an enormous razor-edged pendulum descending on him from the ceiling. And to see the rats, the large, ravenous rats, shown in the accompanying 1909 illustration by artist Byam Shaw for another lushly bound setting of Poe’s stories.

Give yourself a treat this Halloween or any time, and read the story. Or reread it. Or get a free listen at www.online-literature.com/poe/40/. Just don’t turn the lights down too low.

(Next Wednesday Adventure classics continues an October of Halloween horror with Richard Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” And tune in later this month for works from those by-passed horror authors Stevenson and Wilde, as well as modern-day mistress of the macabre Anne Rice.)

Adventure classics -- A woman dying to get out of the house

“The Fall of the House of Usher”

by Edgar Allan Poe

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Sometimes I wonder what Edgar Allan Poe’s life would have been like if so many doomed and abused women hadn’t crossed it. From his mother, Elizabeth, dead of tuberculosis after her husband abandoned her with three small children. To his foster mother, Frances Allan, whose husband became completely estranged from Poe after her death. To childhood sweetheart Elmira Royster, succumbing to parental pressure to marry another suitor. And finally and most famously, to the child bride and cousin, Virginia Clemm, whose illness and early death poured grief-stricken fuel on Poe’s alcoholism.

Over Poe’s life, these women would give spiritual birth to a succession of literary heroines suffering at the hands of husbands and family members whose abuse ranges from hatred to physical, possibly even sexual abuse. Invariably, the cause of the women’s death is listed as some vague, nameless disease. Invariably they die while still young and beautiful -- that is, while still able to excite desire and jealousy.

And sometimes they strike back. As in Poe’s 1839 story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” whose Lady Madeline, barely glimpsed in life, literally brings the house down on the brother who buried her prematurely.

The story opens with the arrival of the unnamed narrator, on a “dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year,” at the family home of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, and of Usher’s twin sister, Madeline. Although the narrator has not been in contact with the Ushers for years, he has responded to a letter imploring his company to combat Roderick’s progressive mental and physical illnesses. Or is the narrator responding more for the sake of Madeline than of Roderick?

It’s tempting to consider what Poe left out, wondering why Madeline managed to raise herself from what was becoming her death bed to catch merely a glimpse of the narrator. Or why even a brother as self-absorbed as Roderick could allow days to elapse without visiting his dying sister. Or exactly what the nature of Roderick’s “inexpressible agitation” was when his sister collapsed at the news that the narrator would arrive the next day.

Madeline is known have suffered from cataleptic seizures that induced almost death-like states. Following her supposed death, the narrator agrees to help her brother entomb her body in a dungeon-like crypt beneath the house. This precaution, Roderick hints to the narrator, is to protect the body from grave robbers. But considering the nature of Madeline’s illness, it seems likely he fears she may simply be in a trance, one he is determined for her not to wake from.

But wake she does, and escape -- unscrewing the lid from her coffin, bursting from the locked vault of the crypt, and finding her way to her brother’s room, “the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.” Her advent brings about his death. Is it from terror or did Madeline find some other way to choke out her murder’s life?

As both brother and sister die, a once barely-discernable fissure in the house’s structure rapidly widens, tearing the house apart. The fleeing narrator sees “the
mighty walls rushing asunder -- there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters -- and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’”

So what is it with all this violence against women, supposed grief turned to fear of a vengeful woman? From the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, it’s tempting to see such stories as inside out expressions of Victorian repression -- of the possibly incestuous jealousy of Roderick for Madeline, the insane desire to demonstrate his possessiveness of his sister to an outsider, the female sexuality symbolized by the many blood-spattered motifs. It’s also tempting to see Madeline’s quirky ability to move objects as an early version of telekinesis that would propel Stephen King’s Carrie to fame more than a century later.

Read or listen to it yourself and decide, or just get lost in Poe’s gorgeous language.  Long out of copyright, you can get free printe and audio downloads at
www.online-literature.com/poe/31/.

(Next Wednesday, speaking of wronged, vengeful women, Adventure classics looks at Stephen King’s Carrie.)

Adventure classics -- Letter found, questions remain

"The Purloined Letter”

by Edgar Allan Poe

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I was probably about ten when I first read Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. I know a collected volume was my companion on the train trip to visit my desperately-ill grandmother that year. And like many things we read as children, I found them very different upon re-reading.

It was embarrassing, for instance, to realize the fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of Poe’s “stories of ratiocination” would have considered me only of average intellect. (Hey -- I was just a kid!)

I was so average at the age of ten, in fact, as to be overwhelmed by Dupin’s brilliant reasoning that the almost equally-brilliant, sinister Minister D-- had hidden the letter in question in plain sight.

Even if you also think you know the story, it rewards another reading. Minister D-- steals an incriminating letter to an “exalted personage” -- apparently the queen -- under her own eyes, to use as blackmail. But the queen dares not confront D-- because, well, her husband also walk in, and the letter definitely isn’t from him.

And despite the inevitability that D-- keeps the letter near him, the secret police have not been able to find it. So the bumbling police prefect tells his friend Dupin, describing in detail the efforts of his force to recover the letter without letting D-- know they’re trying to recover it. A quandary Dupin solves by reasoning and a couple of casual visits to D--,
a close but not dear, acquaintance.

Although Merriam-Webster lists the first use of the word “detective” in 1732, it was not used in the sense of the detective fiction genre when Poe wrote the first of his Dupin stories in 1841. Instead, he preferred the term “ratiocination,” meaning simply, “close reasoning.”

However, despite the occasional use of the reasoning process by other nineteenth century writers such as Wilkie Collins, the genre of “detective fiction” languished until Arthur Conan Doyle revived it with his first Sherlock Holmes story about a detective as unofficial as Dupin in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.

A comparison of the similarities between the Dupin and Holmes stories needs more space than this post allows. Holmes himself appeared sufficiently aware of the similarities to denigrate Dupin as “a very inferior fellow.”

(A view Holmes’ creator Conan Doyle begs to differ with, describing Poe as “to my mind, the supreme original short story writer of all time,” in his literary memoir, Through the Magic Door.)

All of which leaves me with quandaries such as, if the police turned over every page of
every book in Minister D--’s library, why didn’t they also turn over the pages of his letters, including the one hanging, in Dupin’s description, “from a trumpery filigree card-rack of paste-board” ?

Or why did D-- have a letter similar to the exalted personage’s in his pocket when he visited her? And who exactly is the exalted personage meant to be? (I’m voting for Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine -- although definitely not queen of France at the time of Poe’s writing.) And how on earth, while Dupin and the prefect sat in the darkened library of the opening scene, did the prefect find enough light to read a detailed description of the letter?

The story is readily available on the internet, if you want to try your own intellect at solutions.

(Next Friday: When you know dozens of ways to kill people, do you ever think of doing it in real life? To someone you dislike? Agatha Christie apparently did, to the woman who tried to prevent her marriage to Max Mallowan, in Murder in Mesopotamia.)

Adventure classics -- A hanging and an old gringo

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

by Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

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Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Bierce is more famous for his often-filmed Civil War story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” or for his mysterious disappearance during Mexico’s revolution.

In a number of ways, Bierce’s life parallels Edgar Allan Poe's, including service in the army, a series of jobs with periodicals, and reputations for bitter literary criticism. But it was his writings about paranormal events that ultimately earned him comparison with Poe, a comparison Bierce detested.

Like Poe, he wrote horror because people bought it, but the two writers’ styles could hardly have been more different. As Carey McWilliams notes one of the earliest works about Bierce’s life, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography, “The method, in so far as it attempted to produce a ‘dominant impression,’ might be the same (as Poe’s), but the styles were of two worlds. Bierce’s style has nothing of the sonorous, rhythmic sweep of Poe’s best prose. On the contrary, Bierce aimed at clarity, precision, and simplicity.”

But precision and simplicity can be deceiving, as Bierce’s best-known story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” demonstrates.

It relates the story of Southern plantation owner Peyton Farquhar, condemned to be hanged near the end of the Civil War for sabotage. But was Farquhar entrapped by a spy, or merely warned of the consequences? As the scholars who edited The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce caution, “Readers -- in effect, all of us -- who initially misread Farquhar as the hero of the story put their feet on a path that leads to the shocking conclusion. . . .”

The atmosphere of journalistic realism was enhanced by Bierce’s personal knowledge of the setting, where he served as a Union Army officer in the Civil War. (Poe’s similarly-detailed knowledge of the setting for “The Gold-Bug,” discussed last Friday, stems from his own service on Sullivan Island in South Carolina during his army enlistment as a young man.)

The combination of realism and the ending’s psychological twist won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards for the 1962 French film based on “Owl Creek” and later shown on television as an episode of Twilight Zone.

It’s been reprised in a variety of settings, from a 1929 silent film to a 2006 DVD version, and seems as destined for immortality as the mystery of Bierce’s own death.

In 1913, at age 71, Bierce traveled to Mexico. He corresponded with his secretary, Carrie Christiansen, who later destroyed his letters after making notes of a few excerpts, as well as dates and postmarks. The last letter was mailed from Juarez, Mexico, in December 1913. Bierce was never heard from again.

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’s novel The Old Gringo (Gringo Viejo) fictionalizes Bierce’s disappearance and was adapted into a 1989 film. And Bierce lives on in additional films and stories, sometimes combined with elements from “Owl Creek.”

For additional interesting speculation, with photos, about Bierce’s fate and final resting place, see The Ambrose Bierce Site, http://donswaim.com/bierce-lienert.html/
(Next Friday -- Adventure classics revisits the progenitor of all horror stories, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.)

Adventure classics -- Poe's cypher challenge

“The Gold Bug”

by Edgar Allan Poe

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Which is the scariest thing about Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story, “The Gold-Bug?” Dropping a large beetle through a skeletal eye socket or his maddening use of dialect?

The nineteenth century was the high tide of phonetic writing in fiction. Not since Samuel Johnson standardized the spelling of the English language were there so many spelling variations writers hoped would approximate their fictional characters’ actual pronunciation.

The practice forced readers to sound individual letters aloud for clues to their meaning. Nicholas Carr, the subject of my August 10 post, might have said it threatened to return the art of reading to a medieval level.

The practice of writing nonstandard English for speakers of lower social classes, with the snobbery and racism that implied, further diminished the practice’s standing. Nowadays, writers from those despised races and social classes are moving to reclaim their versions of English, but in more imaginative ways than phonetic dialect.

But as I write about my twenty-first century prejudices, I can imagine Poe sneering, so I’ll move to what won “The Gold-Bug” the hundred dollar prize offered by the Dollar Newspaper in 1843 -- the cryptogram whose solution was a map to pirate treasure.

Poe prided himself on his ability to solve coded messages. During his editorship of Graham’s Magazine, he wrote an article, “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” offering a free subscription to anyone who sent him a code he couldn’t decipher. He ended the contest, saying he had solved all the legitimate ciphers he received. Poe published two, purportedly by a Mr. W.B. Tyler, challenging readers to solve them.

But although Poe claimed to have found their solutions, nobody else did -- for the next century and a half. In 1992, the first of Poe’s published cryptograms was solved. In an attempt to solve the second, as well as determine the originator -- strongly suspected to be Poe himself -- a college professor decided to seek help in a manner typical of Poe. He held a contest.

Israeli-Canadian software engineer Gil Broza won the contest in 2000. The solution, needless to say, was more difficult than the one Poe wrote about in “The Gold-Bug.”

The challenge

Scary cryptograms are great. But it wasn’t those that made me afraid to go sleep after reading Poe’s story as a child. That was done by the answer protagonist William Legrand gave to the question of the story’s unnamed narrator:

“Now there is only one point which puzzles me. What are we to make of the skeletons found in the hole?”

Legrand answered: “. . .it is clear that (Captain Kidd) must have had some assistance in the labor. But this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen -- who shall tell?”

No visible gore, but how would you top that ending?

If you’d like to learn more about the solving of the Poe cryptogram, see http://bokler.com/eapoe.html

(Next Friday’s classic horror -- Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.)

 　

Adventure classics: First rule -- don't get run over

The Saturdays

by Elizabeth Enright

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Missing parents are staples of storytelling for children since, apparently, people began telling stories. To a great extent, this reflected reality. An article in the August 2011 issue of Scientific American, for instance, estimates that for most of human prehistory, few of us lived past the age of thirty. But honestly, I didn’t realize at first that all the young people in this month’s Adventure classics blogs were missing at least one parent.

Today’s is no exception. The mother of the four Melendy children in author-illustrator Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays, died at the birth of the youngest child. The children’s father is often away lecturing. And despite having a live-in housekeeper, the Melendys live through most of the book without adult supervision.

Not that they spend any time worrying about that. Most of the book follows their adventures after they pool their allowances to let each Melendy have a solo Saturday outing. And what outings they were -- to art galleries and operas (brother Rush is fascinated by the mechanical dragon Fafner at the Metropolitan Opera),beauty salons and circuses.

Although Mr. Melendy cautions his children that “the first and most important rule” is “don’t get run over," the children are otherwise on their own in 1940’s era New York until the youngest, six-year-old Oliver takes an unauthorized trip to the circus that gets him brought home by a mounted police officer.

In last Friday’s post, I commented on possible links between the orphaned status of the hero and the family problems of author Robert Louis Stevenson. This week, I have to wonder whether author Enright’s experiences influenced the Melendys’ situation. Enright’s parents divorced while she was a young child. Her mother Maginel Wright Enright, sister of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, remarried, but her second husband died while Elizabeth was in her teens. Maginel was an accomplished illustrator of children’s books (a career her daughter initially followed). But Elizabeth noted in a magazine article watching her mother “through to glass doors of the little room she used as a studio, my nose snubbed resentfully against the pane, for I was forbidden to enter while she was at work.”

Perhaps her way of making peace with the abandonment she felt as a child was to displace it onto Miranda (Randy) Melendy, the chief and best-loved character of The Saturdays, with the dark, curly hair of Maginel, and the same propensity for art and creative untidiness. A girl like her mother, only present with her.

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics starts a month of Halloween horror with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Gold Bug.)

Adventure classics -- murder most cozy

Whose Body?

by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Moving to a classic British cozy (and what other nationality did cozy so well?) from last week’s epitome of noir crime fiction is like stepping onto a brightly-lit operetta stage full of patter songs after emerging from a dark tunnel.  Making murder into a comedy as Sayers does, at least in the opening of her introduction to the inimitable Lord Peter Wimsey, seems, at first glance, offensive.  But even The Maltese Falcon, with its cast of grotesque eccentrics and risible opening scene of an adulterer unable to escape the embraces of a now-unwanted lover, is only a small step away from comedy.  And in the morality of murder mysteries, in which the sin of murder must be avenged, one of the worst punishments evil can face is to be made ridiculous.

Whose Body? introduces Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin – an aristocrat without a day job who solved puzzles of deduction as a game.  Such amateurs seemed more likely in the early nineteenth century, before the work of law enforcement reformers such as Sir Robert Peel in 1829.  But by the end of that century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes described himself acerbically as a professional “consulting detective,” relying on casework for his income, and deriding Dupin’s famous reproduction of a companion’s train of thought (a feat Holmes then replicated with Dr. Watson).

But the pendulum swung again.  Whether through the influx of women into the workforce following the First World War or the wave of democratic feeling that followed that war’s housecleaning of empires, amateur detectives returned in force in the early twentieth century.  And young Dorothy Sayers used the trend to plot a more lucrative use for her master of arts degree from Oxford than by writing poetry.  The rage at the time was for oddity, both in the crime and the detective, and Whose Body? has oddity in both departments.

A letter Sayers wrote in early 1921 contains the seed of the plot – “begin(ning) brightly, with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez.  Now why did she wear pince-nez in her bath?  If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer. . . ”

Sayers’ whimsical Lord Peter, even more than Dupin, engendered a line of mostly amateur detectives that contended for fans with the hard-boiled professionals of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  Usually combining Sherlockian skills of observation and forensic training with personal flaws both irritating and endearing, they find followers even today among readers who like their detection with a side of fun.  Who agree with the words Sayers put into Lord Peter’s mouth, “. . .this man possessed what most criminals lack – a sense of humour.”

(I had mentally divided mysteries into cozies and not-cozies, so a check of Duotrope’s Digest surprised me with its variety of mystery subgenres, including crime fiction, historic, supernatural and cross-genre.  What’s your favorite?  Next week – hard-boiled but with panache – Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.)