The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  Jacobs’s first book, Many Cargoes (1896), contained a potpourri of tales that set the tone for much of his subsequent work—stories about sailors (not actually set on the open seas, but focusing more on sailors’ antics on land, especially in and around port cities), humorous tales of married life (the wives frequently get the better of their doltish husbands in the battle of the sexes), and the occasional tale of mystery or horror. The book went through an incredible twenty-three printings in England, and in addition was reprinted in the United States by the prestigious firm of Frederick A. Stokes (1897) and also in Europe in 1898 by the celebrated Leipzig firm Tauchnitz, whose “Collection of British and American Authors” disseminated a wide array of Anglophone fiction on the Continent. Indeed, the mere fact that Jacobs’s book was chosen for reprinting is significant, since Tauchnitz generally issued books only by established authors.

  From here on, Jacobs published collection after collection—Sea Urchins (1898; as More Cargoes in the United States), Light Freights (1901), The Lady of the Barge (1902), Odd Craft (1903), Captains All (1905), Short Cruises (1907), Sailor’s Knots (1909), Night Watches (1914), Deep Waters (1919), and Sea Whispers (1926). Few of these volumes received the uniformly positive notices of his first book, and there is some justice to the criticism that Jacobs early on discovered a winning (i.e., saleable) formula and mechanically stuck to it throughout his life in spite of its diminishing returns in terms of freshness and originality. Jacobs may have had an economic motive in adhering to the formula. He first appeared in the Strand Magazine in February 1898, and this fabulously well-paying magazine made constant demands on Jacobs to provide his customary comic tale for issue after issue.

  Jacobs also published novels—the first being A Master of Craft (1900)—but these were generally less successful, both commercially and critically, than his story collections. Paradoxically, in these novels Jacobs abandoned the tight concision in diction and incident that he practiced in his short stories, and as a result the novels were criticised as being verbose and meandering. Jacobs also frequently adapted his own stories into short plays, among the first being the psychological ghost story The Ghost of Jerry Bundler—based on the story “Jerry Bundler” in Light Freights—which premiered at St. James’s Theatre on June 20, 1899.

  Jacobs married Agnes Eleanor (“Nell”) Williams in 1900; he was thirty-seven and she was nineteen. She had begun work at the Post Office three years earlier and had quickly struck up an acquaintance with the older man. They would have five children over the next decade. By 1899 Jacobs felt economically secure enough to quit the Post Office job for full-time writing. In 1910 Jacobs moved his family to a large house, Feltham House, outside of Laughton, in Essex. Two years later scandal hit the family: Nell was arrested for participating in a suffragette riot that caused thousands of pounds of damage. (Jacobs, for his part, remained staunchly conservative and had trouble adjusting to the liberal movements dominating his era.) Although Jacobs begged for leniency for his wife (he claimed implausibly that she had been naively misled by the leaders of the suffragette movement), she was sentenced to a month of hard labour.

  In 1914 the family moved to a house in Berkhamstead, Beechcroft, where one of their neighbors was H. G. Wells. It seems quite clear that the central figure in Wells’s novel The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon (1914) is based on Nell Jacobs, as it depicts “an independent woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who tries vainly to find self-fulfillment.”[22]

  By the 1920s Jacobs’s literary career seemed to have come to something of an impasse. Although still grinding out stories, he seemed trapped by the very literary success he sought. He turned to writing plays, mostly adapted from his own stories. Some of these were reasonably successful (and some were actually made into films), but a number of them were panned as being outmoded and stale. A number of omnibuses of his stories appeared in the 1930s: Snug Harbour: Collected Stories (Scribners, 1931), which incredibly omits “The Monkey’s Paw”; Cruises and Cargoes: A W. W. Jacobs Omnibus (Methuen, 1934); and others. Jacobs wrote little after 1935. He and his family moved frequently in the final decade of his life, all in the London area. In addition to his habitual melancholy, he was now plagued with insomnia and nervous troubles. During World War II he had to move out of London to Upton-on-Severn in Worcestershire. He died of pneumonia on September 1, 1943, a week short of his eightieth birthday.

  Like so many comic writers, Jacobs himself was in no way a bubbly, cheerful presence in person. Physically he was short, very fair (almost an albino), and extremely shy and taciturn. A friend in later life, the poet and critic Edmund Blunden, recounts a talk Jacobs gave at the Charles Lamb Society: “W. W. Jacobs made a speech apparently of unprecedented length for him; it was quite twenty-five words. He’s the quietest modestest man in London.”[23] A somewhat more pungent characterisation of Jacobs was offered by the satirist Evelyn Waugh, whose family (including his father Arthur and his brother Alec) saw much of Jacobs, his wife, and his children:

  In person he was wan, skinny, sharp-faced, with watery eyes. Like many humourists he gave scant evidence of humour in private intercourse. In losing the accents of Wapping he had lost most of his voice and spoke through the side of his thin lips in furtive, almost criminal tones, disconcerting in a man of transcendent, indeed of tedious, respectability. He was a secular puritan, one of those “who have not got the Faith and will not have the fun,” and all his opinions were those of Lord Northcliffe. But concealed behind this drab façade, invisible to my boyish eye, there lurked a pure artist.[24]

  And yet, Jacobs did not lack for critical esteem on top of his popular success. The greatest comic writer of the twentieth century, P. G. Wodehouse, considered himself a “young disciple” of Jacobs.[25] And Henry James, that most austere of highbrow novelists, admitted to envying Jacobs. Meeting Jacobs at the Garrick Club in London, James expostulated: “Ah, Mr. Jacobs, you are popular! Your admirable work is appreciated by a wide circle of readers; it has achieved popularity. Mine—never goes into a second edition. I should so much have loved to be popular!”[26]

  Jacobs began writing weird fiction quite a bit earlier than has generally been believed. The early and unreprinted story “A Strange Compact” (1889), set in the eighteenth century, is a definitely supernatural deal-with-the-Devil tale with a clever twist at the end. Almost every one of Jacobs’s story collections includes at least one weird or mystery tale—or, at any rate, a tale that is anything but comic. Sea Urchins contains the disturbing story “The Lost Ship,” a grim account of a man who returns home after many years following a shipwreck at sea but dies in the night. Perhaps this cannot be considered either weird or mystery, but its brooding atmosphere of tragedy fully justifies its inclusion here.

  Several early stories seek to fuse elements that Jacobs had used so well in his comic tales—the lives of sailors (including their distinctive Cockney speech) and the difficulties of married life—with supernaturalism or psychological suspense. The character of the night-watchman—an actual figure whom Jacobs and his friend, the artist Will Owen, encountered in the Deal/Sandwich area—is the narrator of several of these tales, beginning with “In Mid-Atlantic” (1894), which starts out as a supernatural narrative, whereby the captain of a ship seems to hear warnings from a ghost, but turns comical at the end. The delightful “The Rival Beauties” (1895), unusually set on the open sea, deals with a sea serpent that is frightened away by the ugly mug of a hapless sailor. Later stories continue the trend. “Twin Spirits” (1901) hints at supernaturalism in suggesting the appearance of a revenant, but this element is clearly used for purposes of comic deflation. “The Castaway” (1903) is a humorous story involving a fake spiritualist, in which a married man unexpectedly gains a victory over his suspicious wife—or, rather, over his even more suspicious and contemptuous mother-in-law. In “The Vigil” (1912) a bluff soldier tries to frighten a presumably timid young man who seeks his daughter’s hand in marriage by dressing up in a woman’s nightgown and pretending to be a
ghost, but the last laugh is on him. Finally, “Sam’s Ghost” (1915) is a delightful tale in dialect in which we cannot ascertain whether the supernatural comes into play or not; for the question of whether the night-watchman narrating the tale actually saw the ghost of Sam Bullet or not is never resolved.

  Entertaining as these stories are, Jacobs achieves a much more powerful effect with tales that leave out the comic touch and become relentlessly grim and terrifying. The supernatural is used with relative infrequency, and we have already seen instances where the suggestion of the supernatural is dispensed with at the end. We find this tactic in “Over the Side” (1897), where a man rescued from the water is initially thought to be the spirit of a dead sailor who had believed in the transmigration of souls; but in fact it is a dying sailor from another ship. “Jerry Bundler” (1897) reverses the comic paradigm by beginning humorously—an actor wishes to play a trick on guests at a supposedly haunted inn by dressing up as a ghost—but ends tragically. Another tale set in an inn, “Three at Table,” fuses psychological terror with poignancy: the inn is said to be haunted by a monster, ghost, or some sort of animal, but proves to be something altogether different. This core idea is at the source of one of Jacobs’s longest tales of psychological suspense, “The Brown Man’s Servant” (1896), where the supernatural—a “devil” that is sent by a mysterious Burmese man to pressure a Jewish pawnbroker to give up a valuable jewel in his possession—is cleverly dispensed with, but with no diminution of terror.

  The celebrated “Monkey’s Paw” (1902) was, anomalously, first published in the American magazine Harper’s but was gathered in the collection The Lady of the Barge (1902), which may count as the volume that contains the highest proportion of weird or mystery tales, with five such narratives. The story remains an effective variant of the deal-with-the-Devil trope, although here the “deal” (i.e., the three wishes that are at the heart of the tale) derive from a dried monkey’s paw brought from India. While the tale is generally considered one of supernatural horror, it is in fact a kind of morality-based fantasy. The granting of the wishes is so obviously at variance with known reality that the events must be interpreted metaphorically and symbolically, focusing mainly on the classic dangers of having wishes fulfilled (as epitomised in the triuism “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it”). Also central to the story is the notion that fate cannot be avoided: the initial wish (for the modest sum of £200) would represent a classic instance of “getting something for nothing,” and the elderly couple at the heart of the tale pay dearly for their cupidity. But beyond any moral undercurrent, the tale is technically effective in the narrative restraint employed by Jacobs in only hinting at the hideous resurrection of a decaying corpse of a son banging on the door outside his grieving parents’ house. Jacobs augments the narrative tempo toward the end to spring this grisly denouement upon the unsuspecting reader—but at the end of the story we are forced to conclude that no visible manifestation of the superatural has actually occurred.

  Something approximately similar can be said of “The Toll-House” (1907), an effective story of another age-old weird motif—spending the night in a haunted house—in which we are unable to determine whether the supernatural has come into play or not. “The Three Sisters” (1914) may also be ambiguous, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that the scenario—an old woman frightens her sister by pretending to be the ghost of another sister who has recently died—points to a psychological explanation. This remarkable story generates an atmosphere of claustrophobic horror reminiscent of the work of the American writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

  Jacobs’s tales of mystery and suspense form an interesting adjunct to his tales of the supernatural or quasi-supernatural. The emphasis in all these stories is on the shifting temperament of the murderer (who is usually known at the outset) as he struggles to keep his crime hidden from view. “The Well” (1900) is of this sort, although it may in fact have a faint supernatural twist at the end. “Captain Rogers” (1901) deals with a captain who now runs an inn and cleverly escapes from the blackmailing of a former colleague who has knowledge of some dark secret in his past. “In the Library” (1901) tells of a man who recklessly attacks his business partner in the library of the house they jointly occupy, then tries to pin the murder on a conveniently appearing burglar.

  Two of the most accomplished of Jacobs’s stories of this type are found in his last original collection, Sea Whispers. “His Brother’s Keeper” (1922) is a searing treatment of the guilt a man feels after committing a murder. “The Interruption” (1925), like “Captain Rogers,” deals with blackmail—here a housekeeper has knowledge of her master’s killing of his wife by slow doses of poison—but the man’s attempt to escape from her clutches proves futile. Here again there may be a faint trace of the supernatural in the concluding suggestion of the return of the dead wife’s ghost.

  Throughout his career, as has been mentioned, Jacobs adapted several of his short stories into short plays while also writing some original plays. Two of the former are adaptations of weird or mystery stories. Both of these plays—The Ghost of Jerry Bundler (cowritten with Charles Rock) and In the Library (cowritten with Herbert C. Sargent) follow their respective stories (“Jerry Bundler” and “In the Library”) quite faithfully, although the former features an alternate “happy” ending that evidently proved more popular with playgoers of the time than the tragic ending of the initial version, which follows the story. Both plays feature all-male casts and relatively minimal staging, so they are likely to be of continued interest in boys’ schools or other such venues.

  There is also a celebrated dramatic adaptation of “The Monkey’s Paw,” but this play was solely the work of Louis N. Parker (1852–1944), a well-known dramatist and composer of the period whose most famous play, Disraeli (1911), was later filmed and won an Academy Award in 1929 for its lead actor, George Arliss. Parker’s 1903 play of The Monkey’s Paw proved immensely popular and remains in print today. It too follows the story closely and in some senses could be said to be aesthetically superior to the story. To choose only a few examples: in the dramatic scene where an official from the establishment where the Whites’ son, Herbert, had been working (and in whose machinery he had been killed) shows up at the Whites’ house, Mrs. White first points confidently to Herbert’s breakfast plate as an indication that he will shortly be arriving; soon thereafter, the official, answering Mrs. White’s query as to why he didn’t come with Herbert, replies with poignant awkwardness, “No—no—I’ve—come—alone.” These wrenching touches are absent from the story. Parker has in other ways enhanced the dramatic effectiveness of the scenario, and The Monkey’s Paw can be considered a triumph of horrific drama.

  W. W. Jacobs did not break any new ground in the weird tale, but exhibited an enviable capacity for manipulating many of the standard motifs of weird fiction—the ghost, the haunted house, the fatal bargain—with pungency, economy, and a keen sense of the overriding tragedy of human life. Even in his comic tales there is frequently an undercurrent of melancholy that shows how plangently this pessimistic humourist was aware of the darkness behind surface comedy. In his tales of mystery and suspense he utilised themes and devices with a skill rivalling that of the leading mystery novelists of the day, and his understanding of the cataclysmic effects of guilt and conscience on a sensitive personality brings these tales close to the realm of psychological terror. Jacobs deserves to be remembered for much more than the standard anthology chestnut that is “The Monkey’s Paw”; in tales spanning the entire range of his creative work, he mined a fertile field of horror, mystery, and strangeness.

  Barry Pain: The Occasional Weirdist

  The weird fiction of Barry Pain (1864–1928) constitutes a distinctive ele­ment in the work of a writer whose focus was largely elsewhere. Not a great deal is known about him. As John D. Cloy, the author of a recent monograph on him, states, “Pain in particular, and [W. W.] Jacobs generally, were private men who hated being interviewed.�
�[27] Born in Cambridge, Pain attended a preparatory school, Sedburgh School (1879–83), to whose literary magazine he contributed. Entering Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he edited a school magazine, the Cambridge Fortnightly, and contributed to other college publications. This early interest in writing would set the stage for an immensely prolific literary career as a short story writer, novelist, poet, and essayist. Pain graduated from Cambridge in 1886 and in 1890 moved to London, where he early gained a reputation as a comic writer: from as early as 1890 he contributed to some of the leading middlebrow publications of the day—Punch, To-day, Black and White, the Idler, the Sketch, and numerous others. He, W. W. Ja­cobs, and Jerome K. Jerome were quickly branded the New Humourists—a term initially coined in derision because it was believed by highbrow critics that these writers were deliberately seeking to satisfy the lowbrow tastes of the rapidly increas­ing British middle class. As a result of the Education Act of 1870, the middle and lower-middle classes were achieving a level of literacy previously unheard of; at the same time, they were not inclined to sample the literary and artistic work of such highbrows as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, and others who made the “Yellow Nineties” so memorable. Essentially conservative in their tastes, these readers sought a literature that was accessible, entertaining, and unthreatening to their political, moral, and sexual predispositions. The New Humourists, among others, were on hand to satisfy them.