The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 18: Should I See Him Smile Again?

In his introduction to Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories, Dahl talks about being shocked by the number of terrible ghost stories written by famous writers, a lesson he learned while reading through hundreds of them during the planning stages of a TV anthology series. He eventually starts to find the good ones, and after much talk of women writing ghost stories (he's in favor of it) and how difficult it is to write children's books (very), he says:

Good ghost stories, like good children's books, are damnably difficult to write. I am a short story writer myself, and although I have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, I have never succeeded in bringing it off. Once I thought I had done it....But when it was finished and I examined it carefully, I knew it wasn't good enough....I simply hadn't got the secret...

He then claims:

The best ghost stories don't have ghosts in them. At least you don't see the ghost. Instead you see only the result of his actions.

This last bit is noteworthy for a couple of reasons, and I can't decide which to go with first. Okay, basically, what I find interesting about the idea that great ghost stories don't feature ghosts you can physically see is that, with stories like that, what the writer is edging into is the weird story, or stories of the unexplainable, by which I mean stories where something supernatural or otherworldly does seem to happen, but at the end you can't point to something specific and say "It was mummies," or whatever. "Ghost story", in this context, becomes both as vague and as intriguing to me as the concept of the weird story, itself quite broad in scope -- broad enough to take in the kind of ghost story, if we really still want to call it that, that Dahl is talking about.

The second interesting thing about what Dahl said is that neither of the stories I chose from Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories actually comes anywhere close to fitting that criteria. Another story from the anthology that I read some time ago, Robert Aickman's "Ringing the Changes", does, but the other two, one of which is among the most famous and beloved ghost stories of the 20th century, don't. And it's really very curious, because each might have gone that route, and the famous one in particular would have benefitted hugely from that decision.

I may take these two stories together, incidentally, because, while chosen almost completely by random, the number of similarities, or anyway the significance of those similarities, are such that running through them separately would feel redundant. First, to name them: "The Corner Shop" by Cynthia Asquith, which I chose only because I have a great fondness for horror stories that revolve around mysterious shops; and "Afterward" by Edith Wharton, this being the famous one, and for roughly 28 of its 31 pages damn near perfect, as far as I can tell.

The idea behind "Afterward" and its title is that the ghost that haunts the new, but very old, home of Ned and Mary Boyne is not, according to the friend who helped them acquire the place, one you will ever see, or ever know exists until, much later -- afterward, to put it another way -- you find yourself putting together the pieces and realizing that some other force was at play in your life. This is a brilliant concept, and almost impossible to pull off as advertised. Edith Wharton is Edith Wharton, and I'm just me, but I have to say she doesn't do it. But how could she? For her to succeed, I, or you, the reader, would have to have the exact same experience as the characters in the story, and would have to forget about the possibility of a ghost, and only after we'd read the story and been entirely puzzled by the events described therein, would we think "Hey wait a second!" as we flipped back through the pages to find the part where they talk about ghosts. So it's impossible, full stop, forget that "almost" hedging I tried before. You just can't do it.

This doesn't make "Afterward" any less great for much of its length. It is so quietly eerie, and is very delicate in its effects, much moreso than Asquith's "The Corner Shop". The haunting of "Afterward" involves a man seen in the distance, and later someone asking to see Ned Boyne and being told that he is in the library. It then ramps up into full-blown mystery from there, but even then a large piece of what the reader must note as strange is that Mary Boyne does not remember a crucial and entirely memorable event that would have happened only a bit earlier on the day her whole life falls apart. Is some sort of haunting force clouding her memory? Wharton never says, so the possibility is either that, or that Wharton is disregarding normal human thought patterns to an obscene degree. Myself, I have no trouble whatsoever buying the idea that Mary's memory has been supernaturally fiddled with, and I was left wondering whether, despite my insistence that just about any work of literature short of maybe Finnegans Wake is filmable, "Afterward" could ever be made to work on screen the way it does on the page.

The Asquith story, as I started to say, is much more obvious in its methods. It involves a poor young man who one night finds a very welcoming antiques shop run by two delightful young women, a shop being manned, he discovers on subsequent visits, by an ancient but very solicitous man, from whom our narrator buys a little jade frog for half a crown. He comes to learn the frogs true value, and of course he never sees the old man again. An act of generosity, which our narrator regards as one of simple fairness, brings to light who the old man really was and what led to the transaction of the jade frog, and the last pages of "The Corner Shop" consist of an explanation being told to us.

This is how "Afterward" ends, as well, although in that case the story being told is rather grimmer than in the Asquith story. What's surprising is that both stories revolve around business transactions, and morality and ethical behavior within business, and the importance of behaving well even when the law does not require it. This is a coincidence, and the moral question at the center of "Afterward" is much clearer than in "The Corner Shop" -- for the stakes to be raised in her story, Asquith finds it necessary to make several people die completely alone and destitute simply because, apparently, they sold some item for much less than it was worth. But this helps the story to some extent, because while "The Corner Shop" eventually let me down, it is an interesting example of beneficence in horror -- "The Corner Shop" is, in fact, in the final analysis, not a horror story, because there is no malevolence in it. It is unquestionably a ghost story, however, and I'm left wondering if there is any other horror subgenre where this could work. Is it possible to write a vampire story that is free of anything sinister? Even if you tried, the liebestod would still be thick as molasses, and therefore unavoidably creepy to many. No, only in ghost stories can forces beyond the grave work towards the betterment of, if not mankind, then at least the individual.

This is not the case in Wharton's story, however. There's something far more malignant at play there, although while maybe (maybe? One can only assume) punishment has been meted out somewhere along the line, the ghostly presences aren't out to harm just whoever. No, if there's a malignancy in "Afterward", it's elsewhere, and has less to do with the act that served as the catalyst to the whole chain of events, but the ability of he who performed that act to think nothing of it. This is a hidden theme in "Afterward", and it would sure have been nice if more about the story had been hidden. As I've said, much of Wharton's story, the vast majority of it, is as perfect a ghost/weird story, of the low-key variety, as I've ever read. Why this insistence on explaining what could already have been safely inferred is beyond me, and it left me feeling slightly disappointed. Not much would have been necessary to achieve perfection, either -- maybe lop off five pages and cauterize the wound. Other than that, it's all there.

But I'm being greedy. It's still a terrific story, and the Asquith one really isn't bad either. Asquith wasn't the writer Wharton was, and when she makes the same mistakes as Wharton they tend to stand out more, but beyond that she does achieve a wonderful chill in the early going, and instilled in me a strong desire to know. The impulse to satisfy that desire has been the downfall of writers far worse than either Wharton or Asquith, and both of them finally rise above it.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 23: Eat Good and Healthy

I only read one short story for today, and that story is "Pig", by Roald Dahl. I like Dahl very much, but it may be that I'm a slightly off brand of Roald Dahl fan in that I didn't grow up reading his children's books, and to this day haven't read a single one of them. Not because I don't want to -- quite the contrary! I simply haven't yet. I'm intrigued by the sinister qualities I'm told are apparent in these books. Such qualities are often praised in children's fiction to a degree greater than how they're actually represented in the book (Neil Gaiman's Coraline, good as I thought it was, was not quite as dark as I'd been told), but having read a pretty healthy handful of Dahl's horror and suspense and just-plain-odd fiction, I believe his often cruel sensibility would be quite something to encounter in whatever form.

In 2006, Roald Dahl: The Collected Stories was published, and I read a review of it in The New Yorker. I can't find that review now, so I can't quote from it or attribute it to anybody, but I distinctly remember the reviewer singling out two of Dahl's stories as going too far, being simply too cruel. Not badly written in any way, but nasty and morally off-putting. Well, I am perhaps putting words in the reviewers mouth by slipping the word "morally" in there, but if a story about cruelty is being objected to because of that cruelty, and it's not being objected to on moral grounds, then on what grounds is it being objected to? Is the question I'm asking you. In any case, that's how I remember it, and upon reading about these two stories I naturally decided that I must read them both, and soon.

The stories in question were "The Last Act" and "Pig". I was very pleased to find both stories in a collection I had called The Roald Dahl Omnibus, and since the reviewer had sort of spoiled the ending of "Pig", I decided to go ahead and read "The Last Act" first. My memory of it is a bit hazy now, but glancing at it again earlier today I was reminded of the gist of its plot, and, anyway, the ending to "The Last Act" had always hung pretty strong in my brain. Because that fucker is pretty goddamn cruel, chronicling a depressed woman's complete psychological dismantling at the hands of one of the single worst human beings in all of literature (the part of all of literature that I've read, anyway) -- Neil Labute could never create anybody to approach him. And as I recall, this man does what he does just to do it, because it's the kind of thing he likes to do. Which I guess is what makes "The Last Act" so cruel, and I suppose now my question to that New Yorker reviewer would be "What makes it too cruel? What constitutes 'just cruel enough'? Should a story like 'The Last Act' soften its impact with some sort of redemption or retribution, and if it did, would it be memorable, or would it be forgotten because it ultimately lacked a spine?" That's at least three questions, and I can't ask any of them since I don't even remember who the reviewer was, but had I the opportunity, you can be assured that ask those questions I, indeed, would.

I couldn't say why, exactly, it took me four more years to get around to reading "Pig", but it did, and here we are. "Pig" is a somewhat different situation, though in some ways it's no less alarming than "The Last Act". Whereas "The Last Act" begins in a more or less standard way, with a description of the main character preparing dinner for her husband (who won't be coming home), "Pig" begins like this:

Once upon a time, in the City of New York, a beautiful baby boy was born into this world, and the joyful parents named him Lexington.

That "Once upon a time..." can lead you anywhere, and collectively we know that, and so realism is not what we would expect from a story that begins this way. That's not to say that "Pig" is a fantasy, but those joyful parents will go on to be killed by the police after a mix-up ("[T]hey succeeded in scoring several direct hits on each body -- sufficient anyway to prove fatal in both cases.") and the boy, Lexington, will be whisked off to Virginia by his Aunt Glosspan, a merry spinster and vegetarian who teaches young Lexington to cook, and, later, Lexington, age seventeen, will walk from Virginia to New York in sixteen days. So "Pig" has a bit of a fair tale air to it, and you all know how nice those can be.

The boy has an astounding gift for the culinary arts, it turns out, though throughout his childhood with Aunt Glosspan he's never tasted meat, nor is he even aware that people eat the stuff, until he asks his aunt about it. Full of disgust and disdain, she informs him that cows and chickens and pigs are all eaten by most of the rest of humanity, and they the poor animals' throats are slit, and that "they love to eat lumps of cow's flesh with the blood oozing out of it." More fascinated than revolted, Lexington nevertheless sticks to his brilliant vegetarian meals, and even develops plans to write a cookbook, when his aunt drops dead. Finding a note of instructions from Aunt Glosspan detailing what he needs to do in the event of her death, Lexington first buries her, and then goes to the medical examiner to get a death certificate:

"Old Glosspan?" the doctor said. "My God, is she dead?"

"Certainly she's dead," the youth answered. "If you will come back home with me now I'll dig her up and you can see for yourself."

"How deep did you bury her?" the doctor asked.

"Six or seven feet down, I should think."

"And how long ago?"

"Oh, about eight hours."

"Then she's dead," the doctor announced. "Here's the certificate."

It's at this point that Lexington travels to New York City, collects a sliver of his inheritance, and has his first taste of pork. The ending that the New Yorker ruined for me will not be ruined here for you. It's enough, I think, to say that "Pig" is a pretty fucked up story, as is "The Last Act", as are any number of Dahl's stories for adults. He had a particularly merciless imagination, one that was equally vibrant -- this story's grotesque conclusion is set up by a very weird conversation Lexington has with a waiter and a cook, a conversation whose weirdness is never commented upon, the weirdness not being weird in the New York City where "Pig" takes place. And "Pig", at just under thirty pages, makes room for quite a lot of stuff, including a long encounter with an attorney that would appear to not have all that much to do with what the story is ultimately about.

It's a full story, a complete one, and, yes, a cruel one. But my questions about "The Last Act" would apply to "Pig" as well, because to complain about the cruelty of "Pig" is to complain that "Pig" is not a completely different kind of story. Of the kind of story "Pig" actually is, it is a brilliant example -- it rolls on with a great narrative force, wit, shock, horror and elegance, with a last couple paragraphs, and especially last line, that are exquisite. Exquisitely cruel, yes, okay, fine. But still exquisite.