Readers May Find Much of the Following Tedious

.I don't know how many of you are aware of this bit of fringe culture ephemera, but in 1996, a man named Richard Wallace published a book called Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend, in which he proposed that the identity of the most famous serial killer in world history was none other than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, author of, among much else, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I stumbled across this book in 1999, while working in a bookstore, and I bought it very soon thereafter, because how could I not? I bought the book not with the feeling that this Wallace person might be on to something, but because I figured this simply must be the most ludicrous "solution" to the Ripper murders that anyone had ever had the balls to make public.
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And as far as I know, it is. I might as well admit right off the bat that I haven't read Wallace's book in its entirety -- I don't know about you, but while my superficial interest in the scribblings of the mentally, yet enthusiastically, imbalanced seems to be limitless, my patience when it comes to actually reading the stuff is extremely thin. From what I can tell, the vast majority, by which I mean all, of Wallace's so-called evidence takes the form of anagrams, composed from Carroll's own writing. So, if you take, as Wallace did, the first verse of "Jabberwocky", from Through the Looking-Glass:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

...and put all the letters in a blender, mash down all the buttons at once, and then pour it all out on the table, you might end up with:

Bet I beat my glands til,

With hand-sword I slay the evil gender.

A slimey theme; borrow gloves,

And masturbate the hog more!

Which stands to reason, because about two-thirds of the alphabet is represented in that original verse, so you can make it say just about anything you want it to, provided you're not looking to talk about xylophones, zebras or quetzalcoatls. So, QED: Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper.

That's what the book is -- that and a lot of psychoanalysis of both Dodgson/Carroll, and the anagrams Wallace claims to have solved. Get a copy, flip through it, or read the whole damn thing, and you'll see. Fascinatingly absurd, but also tedious. However, what I did read clean through just recently (and for the first time, I'm embarrassed to admit) was both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. And quite delightful they both were, though Through the Looking-Glass was a good deal stranger and more uneasy than its predecessor. Finishing that second book, I couldn't help but think about Wallace, and what he must have made of the ending. Briefly, Alice has been crowned queen, and the celebration goes entirely bonkers, with the White Queen and the Red Queen and everybody else persisting in the illogical nonsense that has driven Alice a little bit further around the bend than her adventures in Wonderland ever did. Not being able to put up with any more of it, Alice loses her shit, knocks over tables and dishes, and grabs the Red Queen, shaking her, and insisting that she is really a kitten. Which she is, because this has all been a dream, and Alice wakes up shaking not the Red Queen, but her cat.

But Alice is blaming the Red Queen! The Red Queen! Red like blood! Plus, she's blaming the Red Queen, essentially, for turning everything insane. And what's another word for cat? Pussy. And you take my word for it when I say that Wallace will stop at nothing to find vagina imagery in his anagrams. Both the Alice books were written before the Ripper murders, but Wallace uses, for instance, his "Jabberwocky" anagrams as evidence that Carroll was predicting the murders, or at least the further disassembling of his psyche that would lead to them. Surely Wallace could have a field day with this stuff ("queen", too, since he seems to believe that Carroll had homosexual tendencies).

When I finished Through the Looking-Glass, I pulled down my copy of Wallace's book, and began scanning it for references to this ending. But, from what I can tell, if my skimming and the book's index are any indication, Through the Looking-Glass barely gets a mention, outside of "Jabberwocky". The Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who is basically an earlier version of the Red Queen, gets far more of Wallace's ink (she was Carroll's mother, don't you know), but "Queen of Hearts" is far less evocative in this context than the "Red Queen". Are you seriously telling me, Richard Wallace, that you could do nothing with Alice giving the third degree to her pussy because she thinks it's a maniacal blood-red queen? This is your bread and butter, you big goofy lunatic! I mean, okay, if you're trying to find incriminating metaphors by way of anagrams, you're work has already pretty much been done for you, and your obsessive need to rearrange the letters of poems, to make them spell out brand new things about masturbation and knives, probably didn't find much of an outlet here. All the words you'd need are already spelled out correctly. But still! It doesn't have to be anagrams, does it!? If what you really want is to waste your time finding dark meanings in a piece of literature the entire purpose of which is to be nonsense (and here I can't entirely blame you, because there's some weird stuff in these books, particularly Through the Looking-Glass), then shouldn't you be willing to latch on to whatever works? What is it with you and anagrams, anyway?

You know what? I'm starting to think that maybe Lewis Carroll wasn't Jack the Ripper after all!

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 11: His Red, Wrong Life

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In 2009, how do you begin writing about Jack the Ripper? What can you say about him, at least in preface, that will add any insight to the man who, in the public mind, invented serial murder? Who, having never been caught, exists as both a historical figure and as a source of mythical horror (so he's like Dracula in that sense, I suppose)? You'd do as well to write about Santa Claus, for all you can add to the conversation. Oh, you could make a fool of yourself, I suppose, by concocting a new, poorly researched and barely thought-out theory as to identity, but even then you'll have your work cut out for you if you hope to reach the level of absurdity achieved by Richard Wallace, whose candidate for Jack the Ripper's true identity is Lewis Carroll (by the way, if you don't feel like picking up Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend, Wallace's book on the subject -- which I recommend you do, for the entertainment value -- then at least click on that link. It's amusing stuff).
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Fortunately for me, I'm not here to write about the Ripper murders as a piece of history, or as a symbol of certain cultural trends, both in 1888 and now, but rather as the subject of fiction. Which is, of course, difficult enough to do, as the list of novels, comics, films, poems and short stories is virtually endless: cheap thrillers by the handful; Hollywood B movies (or B+, in some cases) like Time After Time and Murder by Decree; Hitchcock's The Lodger (or John Brahm's The Lodger, or Marie Belloc-Lowndes's The Lodger); blasphemous, though still good, Sherlock Holmes pastiches like Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story; high literary novels like Lawrence Durrell's Quinx, or The Ripper's Tale, Paul West's The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, Ian Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Pat Barker's Blow Your House Down; and the grandaddy of them all, from where I sit, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's epic, and epically complex, comic book, From Hell...I think you know as well as I do that I've barely scratched the surface. So for my purposes today, the question has much less to do with how I am going to write about this subject, but how do writers still find a scrap of meat to pick off the Ripper's bones, and turn it into a meal?

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Apparently, they don't. Or rather, they don't necessarily concern themselves with the fact that the road they've chosen has already been well travelled, because, by pure coincidence, both stories I chose to read today -- chosen essentially at random -- deal with a Jack the Ripper who has survived into old age. I think it's probably safe to assume that, in reality, the murders stopped because the Ripper died (though who knows), but the legend is so powerful, so unhappily rich (and richly unhappy) that almost nothing is too much, or too ridiculous. The Ripper is a ghost to us now, and ghosts can do and be anything. The entire reason for this is because he was never caught, and unsolved murders refuse to be shaken from our collective conscious. Even attempts to downplay the dark mystery by focusing on the day-to-day, historical reality can't snap things into focus: James Vanderbilt and Brad Fischer, the screenwriter and producer for David Fincher's Zodiac -- and I bow to no one in my love for that film -- have both said that one of the aims of that film is to demystify the Zodiac Murders, but I believe it's a rare individual who leaves that film and doesn't have the strange facts and numerous unknowns of that case buzzing and scratching around in their brains.

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So...Jack the Ripper as an old man. The first story I read is by Charles L. Grant. It's a little nine-page affair called "My Shadow is the Fog", and it's a low-key, mysterious little story whose true nature isn't revealed until the end. The truth is, it would be easy to be entirely unaware that this is a Jack the Ripper story until the ending, if I hadn't found it in an anthology, edited by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper, called Ripper! For most of its length, it appears to simply be a somewhat off-kilter story about an old man wandering along a beach, who finds himself bothered by a young girl. At first he humors her, but he grows increasingly frustrated by her presence, and her strange questions, and her unnerving familiarity, a familiarity whose source he cannot place.

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I will admit that, had I found this story in a less thematically specific anthology of horror stories, the fact that it's revealed that the girl won't stop talking about a strange man named Jack, who is "a cleaner", and further that the old man's name is Jack Light ("light" being an old euphemism for lungs), I might have been tipped off that "Jack" wasn't a randomly chosen name. But still, for the most part Grant's story is quiet, moody, and keeps its cards close. The final truth of what all of this means in relation to Jack the Ripper is maybe a little bit old-news, but it's handled quite well -- Grant gets the chill he's after, as well as a haunting, lingering quality that most stories that aim for a similar kind of stinger ending could never manage.

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The other story I read is by Lucius Shepard, and it has the wonderful title, "Jack's Decline". In Shepard's version of events, the Ripper -- whose identity Shepard doesn't bother to provide, because he knows it's irrelevant -- had been caught, or rather identified, by his own family, and privately put away in an upper-class mental institution. At the turn of the 20th century...

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...there was a reawakening of interest in the murders, new clues and rumors that struck close to the bone, and his family -- none of whom he had seen since the beginning of his confinement -- gave orders that he be moved from England, fearing that their awful secret would be brought to light. He was issued a German passport under the name of Gerhard Steigler, and one night in the autumn of that year, along with his warders, his doctor of the moment, and a trunkful of the drugs that kept his demon tame, he crossed the English Channel to Calais, and there entrained for Krakow in Poland.

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Shepard's Ripper is a man who fully believes that his bloodlust is not entirely his own doing, but more the fault of a demon who has possessed him. In 1915, a new doctor is sent to the Ripper's home at a hunting lodge in the hills of Poland. This doctor attempts psychoanalysis on the Ripper, and manages to dredge up a series of childhood traumas that the doctor believes is at least a clue to his patient's mental aberrations, but the Ripper is having none of it:
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"You claim, Doctor...that once I accept the connection between my childhood pain and the murders, a cure will be forthcoming. But those experiences only weakened me, made me susceptible to the demon and allowed him to enter and take possession of my body. There were supernatural forces in play. Witness the arrangements I made of the viscera...like some sort of cabalistic sign."

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Those visceral arrangements are, of course, another source of the eternal power of the Ripper's fact and legend, because they've never been explained, or decoded. Alan Moore exploited this aspect with great success in From Hell, but Shepard's Ripper doesn't even know why he did it himself. Something forced his hand to drape the organs just so, and he's at as a great a loss to explain the meanings of those bloody designs as anyone. But if he doesn't know, surely someone must.

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Perhaps you've noticed that Shepard has placed the Ripper in Poland during the early part of the 20th century. And perhaps you've come to a conclusion regarding where this is all leading. Perhaps you think that's a bad idea. Well, you're right about some of that. There are Nazis in this story. It's such an obvious ploy, bringing the greatest symbol of pre-20th century horror together with the greatest evil of the modern world, and see what shakes out. When I clued into where Shepard was taking this, I began to despair. But the truth is that, while a small group of Nazis, and their abuse of Jewish captives, does feature prominently in this story's second half, it's also strangely irrelevant. At least, these Nazis are irrelevant as Nazis, but they are relevant as their own representation of a different, modern kind of evil. At one point, a Nazi officer and the Ripper (who everyone knows as a harmless old man named Herr Steigler, of course) have a brief conversation about the definition of evil. The officer believes that evil "is a judgment made by history", and idea that the Ripper dismisses this idea. The officer goes on to insist that while war "may call for a repression of one's conscience at times", he hardly believes this counts as true evil. The Ripper takes note of the officer's uniform and responds:
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"Black cloth and patent leather and silver arcana. These are not the lineaments of a good soldier, Captain. They are designed to inspire dread. But apart from being psychological weapons, they are ritual expressions. Invocations of evil...Your invocations may prove effective and allow evil to possess you. Should that occur, you will have no joy in it..."

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Later, the Ripper and the officer have cause to speak again (and the Ripper will face his demon) under much different circumstances. When the officer refers to the Ripper as "Herr Steigler", the Ripper's response sums things up quite nicely:

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"I am not Herr Steigler," said Red Jack. "I am mystery."