The Development of the Weird Tale
Page 25
Ransome himself (1884–1967) is, of course, a presence in the literary history of England. He attained celebrity by a series of children’s books—including Old Peter’s Russian Tales (1916), Swallows and Amazons (1930), and Peter Duck (1932)—that featured liberal doses of fantasy. He wrote a number of books on fishing and sailing, and these retain their interest and popularity today. During the 1910s he spent several years in Russia, witnessing the Soviet revolution of 1917 at first hand; he subsequently wrote three stirring books on the Russian political situation. As a literary critic he attained prominence with such works as Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Study (1910) and Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (1912); the latter book inspired a lawsuit against Ransome by Lord Alfred Douglas, but Ransome prevailed in the litigation. He translated Rémy de Gourmont’s languid philosophical treatise A Night in the Luxembourg in 1912—a work Lovecraft read in 1923. Ransome’s Autobiography was published in 1976.
The Elixir of Life is Ransome’s only novel for adult readers. An earlier work, The Hoofmarks of the Faun (1911), is collection of stories; I have not seen this volume, but one review suggests that it contains some horror/fantasy content.[176] Ransome wrote Elixir in a period of a few weeks during early 1915, while on one of his earliest visits to Russia. He engagingly describes the process of writing in a letter to Dora Collingwood:
I am having the most exciting adventure of my life. I am . . . writing a romance. The idea got stuck in my head, and would not get out. I ought, as you know, to be doing serious work, and there is plenty to do, but this wretched tale kept dangling itself in front of my eyes, until at last I made a bargain with it. I said, ‘If you will let me write you in three weeks, I’ll do it’, and the tale, humble beggar, said, ‘Fire away’, so I chucked all other work and fired away. This is the end of the first week, and behold six chapters, 20,000 words are written, and the rest is still seething. The whole book will be sixty thousand, . . . and if I really do get the whole thing into rough draft in the three weeks it will be a record, for me at any rate. You can have no conception of the excitement of the performance. I start out each day at nine sharp, and go it all day, knocking off finally at seven. Then in the evening I smoke pipes and gossip with my heroes and heroine, and discuss next day’s business. Then I sleep. Then up, wallop down two glasses of coffee and a whack of bread, and off again.[177]
Lovecraft would have approved of this frenetic manner of writing under the spur of inspiration, for he felt that this was the only way that genuinely meritorious literature could be produced: a work should be written when it insists, in the face of all obstacles, on being written. In his autobiography Ransome speaks of his work in considerably greater detail. He begins by noting:
Then, one day when I was thinking about something quite different, I saw the faint glimmer of a story, somehow growing out of a long dialogue between a philosopher and a homunculus. It was a discussion of the elixir of life, with a few roots still clinging to a book I had read about Paracelsus. This was something very unlike [Hugh] Walpole’s novels, and I did not tell him about it in detail in case he should by seeing the weak points of the story make it impossible for me not to see them myself. I did not want to see them. I wanted to write the whole story, if only to prove to myself that I could.[178]
Ransome goes on discuss the rapid progress of the work: 19,500 words by February 27; 34,000 a week later; 46,800 a week after that; and, on March 20, “I had 58,500 words in typescript and I had stuck.” (By “stuck” Ransome appears to mean that he not yet finished writing the book—specifically, what he terms the “missing vital chapter of the book, ‘An Invitation to Eternity.’”) Still unsure whether the work was publishable, he solicited the opinion of his friend Hugh Walpole, who “laughed at the idea that I should have any difficulty in finding a publisher for it, [and] urged me to do the revision at once, to send the book back to England in time for publication in the autumn.”[179] Ransome finished his revisions on April 17 and a few weeks later sent the ms. to Methuen, which did indeed bring out the book that autumn.
Reviews of the work were few, but one of the more interesting ones appeared in the Times Literary Supplement—a review written (as the online edition of that periodical now identifies) by Walter de la Mare. De la Mare concludes his review by observing:
There are some horrific moments in Mr. Ransome’s romance—unusually sudden exits of his characters from this world into another place. He “hath an art to make dust of them” with a rapidity uncommon in mortal experience, whereby they instantaneously “fall into indistinction, and make but one blot with infants.” The Elixir may not be a novelty, and though Mr. Ransome introduces certain ingenious features into its decoction and indulges in curious and speculative thinking about it, he might have indulged himself still more without complicating or impoverishing his story. It is his own ingenuousness and jollification of high spirits that keeps it bubbling—unflavoured by this black modern world, a story “Slipt in the black space ’twixt an idiot’s gabble And a mad lover’s ditty.”[180]
De la Mare’s reference to the fact that the tale “may not be a novelty” refers to the antiquity of the elixir of life theme in supernatural literature, extending back to the Gothic novel at least to William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799), if not earlier. And yet, it cannot be said that the theme has been treated with notable effectiveness in prior supernatural work; certainly, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s drearily prolix novel A Strange Story (1862), in spite of Lovecraft’s charitable discussion of it in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” cannot be said to utilise the motif successfully. Indeed, aside from Ransome’s novel, one of the more substantial treatments of the idea can be found in . . . Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927).
It is unfortunate, then, that Lovecraft—who inserted a brief discussion of the Ransome novel in the revised version of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (“In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a general naiveté of plot”)—read The Elixir of Life only after writing The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a less than two months in January–March 1927. He borrowed a copy of the novel from W. Paul Cook and read it in August 1928.[181] There can be no doubt that Lovecraft was struck, perhaps even a bit taken aback, by the parallels between his novel (which remained unpublished until after his death) and Ransome’s. Some of the parallels are understandable in works addressing the elixir of life theme, such as the citation of the alchemists Paracelsus, Raymond Lully, and Cornelius Agrippa; even the fact that Ransome’s baleful hero-villain, Killigrew, withdraws from society for a time and then comes back as his own son after he has taken the elixir—just as Simon Orne came back to Salem posing as his son Jedediah—is to be expected. But some other passages in the two novels are striking in their similarities. Killigrew’s diary speaks poignantly of his gradual moral corruption as he continues to seek eternal youth—something that can only be achieved by murder—and remarks of his initial fascination with the elixir: “My desires were pure. I did not ask for youth that I might garland my head with flowers and gorge myself with sin. I cared for knowledge only, and for that end alone I hoped for eternal life.” How could Lovecraft not have recalled an analogous passage in his own novel, when Charles Dexter Ward writes a harried letter to Dr. Willett and speaks in extenuation of his own involvement with Joseph Curwen: “I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again.” And Killigrew’s final dissolution in a cloud of “light grey dust” echoes Willett’s destruction of Joseph Curwen, whose remains “now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.”
I have elsewhere conjectured[182] that Lovecraft’s reading of Herbert Gorman’s The Place Called Dagon may have inhibited him from preparing The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for publication, given some similarities between those two works; but the similarities between Ward and The Elixir of Life are still more patent
, and may also have contributed to Lovecraft’s reluctance to submit Ward to a mainstream publisher in spite of several publishers’ requests for a novel (as opposed to a short story collection) from his pen. Ransome’s novel, to be sure, owes something to Oscar Wilde (Killigrew is approximately a Dorian Gray figure, as Peter Hunt has pointed out),[183] and perhaps still more, in general atmosphere, to Poe. It is unclear how many of the old-time Gothic novels Ransome read; but Lovecraft’s novel, written as it was shortly after he had himself completed an extensive reading of Gothic literature for “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” can take its place with Ransome’s as a tribute to the pervasive influence of Gothic motifs upon subsequent horror literature. The Elixir of Life, a fabulously rare work, has not always attracted devotees even among Ransome scholars;[184] but as an effective and occasionally powerful treatment of a venerable supernatural trope, it deserves to find a new generation of readers.
Robert Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold (1915)
There is no evidence that H. P. Lovecraft ever read The Dweller on the Threshold by British writer Robert Hichens (1864–1950). The novel is not mentioned in any existing documents by Lovecraft, and Hichens himself is only mentioned in passing in a few letters. And yet, a compelling, if speculative, case can be made for the influence of the novel on a seminal late work by Lovecraft; in any case, the strikingly Lovecraftian title or The Dweller on the Threshold makes it a work that Lovecraft, by all rights, should have read—and would have relished if he had done so.
The Dweller on the Threshold is a remarkable short novel. Serialised in the Century Magazine (November 1910–April 1911) and published as a book by The Century Co. in March 1911, it is the most exhaustive treatment of a theme that appears to have obsessed its author: psychic possession, or the transference of personality from one body to another. Much of the weird work of Robert Hichens revolves around this theme, but he treats it in such variegated ways that he cannot be accused of repetition. One of his earliest weird tales, “The Return of the Soul” (1895), focuses on this motif, as do, in their various ways, such tales as “The Charmer of Snakes” (1897) and “The Black Spaniel” (1905), both of which deal with the transference of a human soul into the body of an animal. Hichens’s other weird novel, Flames: A London Phantasy (1897), also utilises this theme, but is marred by prolixity. That cannot be said for the compact and intense Dweller on the Threshold, which can well be seen as the capstone of Hichens’s weird work, fully equal to the celebrated novella “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (1900).
The secret of the success of this novel is the very element that Lovecraft himself admitted was his greatest literary deficiency—the portrayal of character. We are here introduced to two clergymen, the Rev. Marcus Harding, the rector of a fashionable London parish, and his senior curate, the Rev. Henry Chichester. The latter was once “marred . . . by a definite weakness of character” but has now become anomalously “aggressive”; Harding, on the other hand, had once been a domineering figure but now fails to project “self-confidence.” It is clear that some kind of personality exchange has occurred, as Evelyn Malling, a psychic investigator, detects at once. But how could this have occurred? Malling eventually learns that Harding had compelled Chichester to engage in occult “sittings,” for the ostensible purpose of enhancing his subordinate’s strength of will, but in reality for the sake of penetrating the veil beyond death and “to communicate with the spirit world.” But the effect of these repeated sittings was, in fact, to cause Harding’s strength of will to be transferred into the soul of Chichester.
The gradualness with which this whole scenario is conveyed to the reader is a masterstroke of subtlety and careful psychological delineation. At its centre is a long and peculiar sermon delivered by Chichester, whose upshot clearly suggests that he wishes to take Harding’s place, both in his religious office and in his very life. The sermon, focusing upon an apparent doppelgänger who looks through the window of a house and sees himself sitting by the fire, clearly shows that Chichester himself is the Dweller on the Threshold—although, curiously, that term is never used in the text of the novel.
A central role in this scenario is played by Harding’s wife, Lady Sylvia Harding. While her highly unfeminist portrayal may be politically incorrect—she is depicted as a “woman who, intensely, almost exaggeratedly feminine, can live in any fullness only through another, and that other a man”—the characterisation is probably not inaccurate for a certain segment of society at this time, given how few opportunities women had for an independent existence. Accordingly, Lady Sylvia, who initially is fervently desirous of securing advancement for her husband, gradually transfers her allegiance to Chichester, whom she sees as the stronger man and therefore more worthy of her devotion.
If there is any influence of The Dweller on the Threshold on Lovecraft, it may be in reference to Lovecraft’s own tale of psychic transference, “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933). Several other novels have been brought forward as antecedents to Lovecraft’s tale. He himself wrote an entry in his commonplace book in regard to H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928; first published in England as The Remedy, 1925):
Man has terrible wizard friend who gains influence ove rhim. Kills him in defence of his soul—walls body up in ancent cellar—BUT—the dead wizard (who has said strange things about soul lingering in body) changes bodies with him . . . leaving him a conscious corpse in cellar.
This is in fact not an exact description of the plot of The Shadowy Thing but an imaginative extrapolation on it. The problem—as Lovecraft noted in regard to a later work on the same theme, the film Berkeley Square (1933)—is what exactly happens to the soul or personality of the person who has been thrust out of his own body. Lovecraft came to believe that the only feasible solution was that the exiled personality enter the body of his captor. This scenario is found not only in Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (1911), which Lovecraft owned and is known to have read, but also in The Dweller on the Threshold. It is true that Pain’s novel more precisely echoes the general scenario of “The Thing on the Doorstep” in the sense that the exchange occurs between husband and wife; but in that novel the wife is a relatively passive participant in the exchange. It is only in Hichens’s novel—as well as in The Shadowy Thing—that a strong, forceful personality takes command of another person’s soul; as Harding states at one point, “Chichester seemed to suck my will away from me gradually but surely, till my former strength was his.” Later, a Professor Stepton, who has studied psychic matters deeply, comes to believe that he was dealing here with “a case of transferred personality.” Still later, Harding confesses harrowingly: “I, Marcus Harding, stared upon myself, out of the body of another man, of Henry Chichester.” This exactly duplicates the scene that Lovecraft depicts at the beginning of “The Thing on the Doorstep,” where it is said of Asenath Waite: “By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality—as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression.”
Regardless of whether Lovecraft was influenced by The Dweller on the Threshold or not, it is a fine weird novel that should be made available for the delectation of devotees. It is only the tip of the iceberg of Robert Hichens’s rich and substantial contributions to weird literature, all of which should be savoured for their power and intensity.
Leland Hall, Sinister House (1919)
It is likely that Leland Hall’s Sinister House (1919) would have been entirely forgotten had H. P. Lovecraft not cited it in the revised edition of “Supernatural Horror in Literature,”[185] noting that “Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of magnificent atmosphere but is marred by a somewhat mediocre romanticism.”
The period between the wars saw the definitive birth (or, perhaps more precisely, rebirth) of the horror novel as a viable literary form. After the Gothic novel had died o
f inanition, and a surfeit of mediocrity, in the 1820s, weird fiction was largely confined to the short story, and under the towering influence of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), the short story became the preferred vehicle for supernatural writing of all kinds. Only two of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novels—The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864)—are weird, and the first of these does not represent him to best advantage. Bram Stoker had attempted horror at novel length in Dracula (1897), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), and other works, but he had few followers. William Hope Hodgson would have been a pioneer in the weird novel—with such works as The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912)—had he lived longer; but with his early death his work was plunged into obscurity for a generation.
Marketing factors played a considerable role in the revival of the horror novel. By the early twentieth century, major publishers were already shying away from collections of short stories, seeing in the novel a more commercially attractive commodity. Lovecraft himself was often urged by such publishers as Simon & Schuster to send in a novel as opposed to a collection of tales, but he claimed he had none at hand to submit. Mainstream publishers at this time were remarkably receptive to horror, either supernatural or psychological, as attested by such works as Eleanor M. Ingram’s The Thing from the Lake (1921), Francis Brett Young’s Cold Harbour (1924), Harper Williams’s The Thing in the Woods (1924), Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber (1927), Herbert Gorman’s The Place Called Dagon (1927), and H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928)—all read and appreciated by Lovecraft.