The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 24: We're Friends Already

Can I shill for just a second? Am I permitted? I promise this stems from my own excitement and enthusiasm only, and I'm getting nothing in the way of kickbacks or free books or anything. But Wordsworth Editions, you see, is a British publishing company, and they have a line of books collectively dubbed "Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural." Clicking this link will take you to that particular catalogue, and you can see what's on offer. Pretty much all British mystery and horror fiction from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of it forgotten and ignored. All's I'm saying is, if you like this kind of thing, the price is right. I've bought I don't know how many of these things over the last couple of days. I feel no embarrassment over the preceding paragraph.

And it's not entirely a non sequitor, either, because before I have one of those very same Wordsworth Editions books, this one called The Beast With Five Fingers by William Fryer (W. F.) Harvey. I wrote briefly about Harvey the other day, and his story "The Clock," which interested me enough that I sought to learn more. What I learned, mainly, and this I related in that same post, was that Harvey had written the story "The Beast With Five Fingers" on which the well-known, but not especially faithful to Harvey's story, Robert Florey film was based. From there I stumbled across the Wordsworth Editions book, called The Beast With Five Fingers, which is a rather thick (over 400 pages, 45 stories) "best of" collection. Introductions to these books are generally written by David Stuart Davies, the series editor on Wordsworth's "Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural" line, and he takes that task on the Harvey book as well. In that introduction, Davies explains that Harvey was one of many "amateur" ghost story writers from the early 20th century. By this, he means people whose professions were something other than "horror writer," or even "writer" in a lot of cases, but who took to the form as a kind of hobby. This approach is probably best exemplified by M. R. James, though Davies lists several other much less famous names, Harvey's among them. Davies sketches out Harvey's life, which was considerably shortened (he died when he was 52) by injuries sustained during a heroic act performed in his capacity as a Naval surgeon during World War I. His lungs badly damaged, he was left an invalid, and between his return home and his death in 1937, he wrote four collections of short stories, the last one published posthumously.

It goes without say, I should think, that I chose to start with "The Beast With Five Fingers." It's by far the longest story in the collection -- most seem to be about ten pages or less -- and, as I've said, is considerably different from the film version (which, in all honesty, I hardly remember now, but Davies backs me up on this). The story begins with a summary of the life of Adrian Borlsover, a kindly, well-off bachelor who, in his middle age, goes blind. He is occasionally visited by his nephew Eustace, a student of heredity who lives with Saunders, his secretary and a top-notch mathematician, and a cluster of servants. One day, while visiting his uncle, Eustace discovers that the old man has taken up what Harvey describes as "automatic writing," which typically refers to a psychic channeling spirits during a seance and manically and unconsciously scribbling what the spirits communicate to her. You know, real stuff like that. Watch the movie The Changeling for a good scene involving automatic writing. Anyhow, is that really what's happening with Uncle Adrian? While sleeping, his right hand writes things like:

"King George ascended the throne in 1760...Crowd, a noun of multitude; a collection of individuals. Adrian Borlsover, Eustace Borlsover.

And eventually Eustace begins communicating with this whatever it is. Again, while Uncle Adrian is asleep:

"Who are you?" asked Eustace in a low voice.

"Never you mind," wrote the hand of Adrian.

"Is it my uncle who is writing?"

"'O my prophetic soul, mine uncle!'"

"Is it anyone I know?"

"Silly Eustace, you'll see me very soon."

"When shall I see you?"

"When poor old Adrian is dead."

Presently, poor old Adrian dies, and among the meager offerings he leaves to his nephew is a box sent to Eustace's home one day. Inside, his butler believes there is a rat. It turns out to be Adrian's left hand, which escapes. A few times, over the course of the story. There is a great deal of humor in the early goings of this development, and off and on thereafter. Harvey is well aware of the basic absurdity of his premise. Upon first discovering what he's up against, Eustace wishes Saunders were home because "one can't tackle this sort of thing alone." (Funnily enough, when I wrote about Harvey before, my one complaint about his story "The Clock" was that the protagonist felt fear earlier than I thought reasonable, whereas here the exact opposite occurs, and it's played for laughs.) But the hand is not easily tackled by anyone. It defeats a bird that harasses it, it uses its handwriting skills to escape a locked drawer, it even overcomes being nailed to a board. The story slowly creeps towards something nastier towards the end, and there's a powerfully sinister quality to the hand. What it says, or writes, has a barely hidden yet gleeful malevolence, so that it finally does rise above absurdity to become a genuine monster.

"The Beast With Five Fingers" was written in 1928 (or thereabouts, but that's when Harvey's second story collection of the same name was published), and while the idea of possessed, killer hands existed before (The Hands of Orlac, for instance), as far as I know this story is the first time a possessed, killer hand functioned independently of a body. This has gone on to influence everybody from Charles Addams to Clive Barker (see his story "The Body Politic," which does little more than multiply the concept, but does so effectively), but seems to me to have been entirely understood in all its implications by Harvey, right out of the gate. Not just the absurdity and basic surrealism, but in the inextricable implications of the source. Granted, the source of your everyday killer hand needn't be a relative, but there is a very interesting hidden story going on here about the truth of the Borlsovers genetic line, and how it could be to blame for what Eustace now finds himself facing down. Not that Harvey ever explains it, but it's there, and you'd think Eustace would catch on, being an expert on heredity. Not that understanding it would have helped much, probably.

I also read a few of Harvey's much shorter stories. It's hard to talk about them in any kind of detail, but "August Heat" is a rather brilliant little tale of two strangers who one day find their fates fatally and apparently unavoidably linked. What's great about "August Heat" is how it ends at a point where what is unavoidable still seems objectively impossible. How could what we know is going to happen, happen? There's a little bit of a time travel paradox thing going on here, except without the time travel. "The Dabblers" is a very strange story about youthful, schoolboy rituals, and what their sources could possibly be. The source is nothing good, you can be assured. Meanwhile, "The Man Who Hated Aspidistras" is one of my favorite kinds of short, short story, the kind that charts an entire life, or near enough, in just about four pages. In this case, the life is that of Ferdinand Ashley Wilton, who as a young boy is surrounded by aspidistras, can't seem to avoid them throughout his unhappy childhood and early adulthood, becomes a famous writer, who incidentally resents and therefore tortures the aforementioned plant, and comes to pay for it. This story reminded me somewhat of John Collier, in its dry, humorous cynicism. Plus Collier had a thing for plants, too.

So that's William Fryer Harvey, as I currently understand him, which, I hope, is only the least of what there is learn.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 12: Jungles of the Upper Air

Speaking of Gahan Wilson, as I was just yesterday, along with being an artist and a writer, he also edits horror anthologies. Well, two anthologies. The last one came out over forty years ago. But still! Horror anthologies! I have here before me the more personal, to Wilson, of the two, Gahan Wilson's Favorite Tales of Horror. It's not an especially long volume, and Wilson only offers a few paragraphs of introduction and a few lines before each story to explain his thinking behind, say, including among the eleven stories a chapter from the memoirs of Sir Frederick Treves. Considering that Treves is famous for being Joseph Merrick, aka The Elephant Man's doctor, Wilson's thinking here can probably be deduced.

Anyway, not a lot of extra bits here, is what I'm saying. As far as the roster of authors Wilson has gathered together, apart from Treves we have a reasonably popular lineup, one that includes Charles Birkin, Clark Ashton Smith, M. R. James, and Robert W. Chambers. The Chambers story is called "The Harbor-Master" and I'll tell you, I wanted to read that one for today -- of it, Wilson says "The evocation of the sheer physical presence of a monster has never, I think, been better done..." -- and my rules for this project being less strict than they once were I very well could have, but the pull to write about another guy was too strong.

But of course, what am I going to say about Arthur Conan Doyle? Are you guys really itching to know that I think Sherlock Holmes is a great character and I sure do like those stories? I can't say this for sure, but I think "The Horror of the Heights," the Doyle story Wilson included in this anthology, is the first Doyle story I've read that was not about Sherlock Holmes, a fact that, were he around today, would have exasperated Doyle. The man has a rather massive body of work outside of Holmes, and the fate of that work seems to be to enjoy occasional reprints because Doyle's name is on the cover, and then never read by anybody. I myself recently picked up a volume of Doyle stories published by NYRB called Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard but haven't cracked it, but I'm excited to. There's a whole, complete writing career behind Doyle that has nothing whatsoever to do with the stories I love. How is that not a great thing? And yes, I love Holmes, and Doyle hated him, but that's okay. The man's entitled to his ridiculous opinion.

When I was younger, I assumed that the Holmes stories were really the only genre fiction Doyle wrote. Eventually I learned otherwise, and I picked up from somewhere that his novel about the Hundred Year's War The White Company was one of his own favorites, and so I just naturally assumed that historical fiction was his passion, genre fiction was how he made money, and he hated it. Of course the truth is nowhere near that simple, not least because whatever his final opinion, Doyle didn't create Holmes with a sneer on his face. Plus there's the Professor Challenger books, and, of course, his horror fiction. After reading "The Horror of the Heights" I'd very much like to read more of it. In his introduction to the story, Gahan Wilson writes:

This is a grand demonstration that if you do this kind of story well, it has fantastic survivability. The question here asked has long been answered, the dreadful thesis advanced is hopelessly outdated, and yet I'll bet you think of it at some point during your next supersonic flight and look up.

I wonder if "thesis" is the correct word here, even though Doyle would come to believe a lot of goofy stuff in the course of his life, but otherwise Wilson is right. The story imagines what horrors could exist 30,000 and 40,000 and more feet into the air, as airplane and flight technology, at the time of the story's publication, made such heights ever more reachable, and us geniuses in 2012 know there aren't any monsters up there at all, but in terms of the effectiveness of Doyle's story this doesn't matter one ounce. It's a wonderfully strange and chilling story anyway, plus Doyle's protagonist, a pilot, inventor, and adventurer named Joyce-Armstrong (the story is made up mostly of a portion of a journal the man kept, the man himself now missing, that has been given the delightfully ominous and official-sounding "The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment"), who himself actually offers a slight rebuttal to Wilson's point about the story having been disproved, a rebuttal that no longer works, but that nevertheless might have an interesting effect on your imagination:

A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them.

"The Horror of the Heights" spends most of its pages chronicling Joyce-Armstrong's journey into the sky, most of the trip passing by without being encroached upon by otherworldly beings. It felt very slightly like something by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, eventually mixed with what I imagine Doyle's own Professor Challenger stories are like (a really weak-ass comparison, I understand that). When the horror comes, the tiger/jungle comparison actually doesn't seem especially accurate. What Doyle's version of the "upper air" feels like to me is another ocean, and the creatures Doyle describes, with their floating, billowing, strange and beaked nature, sound more like the mad, alien things that live on or near the ocean floor. I'd be terrified to be surrounded by a school of those things, too. The story ends in much the way you'd expect, based on Doyle's own build-up, and I'm wondering if Doyle might not have wanted to do more with this idea. Not necessarily in this story, but to expand on it in other works. Maybe it's best that he never did -- I'm a big proponent of letting strangeness be -- but I am curious to know Doyle's own take on this.

I did read one other story, a very short one called "The Clock" by William Fryer Harvey. Also known as W. F. Harvey, he wrote "The Beast With Five Fingers," which became the famous film starring Peter Lorre, and published a total of only three story collections in his lifetime, plus one posthumously. And "The Clock" is good, very much my speed, but I have one small problem with it. What it's about is, a woman, our narrator, agrees to do a favor for another woman, Mrs. Caleb, and go to Mrs. Caleb's home, which has been locked up for almost two weeks while she's on vacation, and retrieve a particular clock. There are connective details to all this that fill all this out, but anyway, so our narrator agrees, and her experience inside the house is very strange and frightening. I like much of this a lot, precisely for the reasons highlighted in Wilson's description of it:

I think that for sheer menace this is the most powerful story I have ever read, though exactly what it is that is menacing, and exactly what it is menacing to do are entirely mysterious.

He's right, and that's great, and I'll leave it to you to enjoy this, as I say, very short story on your own. But my problem -- and I'm not convinced this is me doing anything more than picking nits -- is that the narrator's fear, once inside the house, begins because the clock she's been asked to retrieve is still ticking. It's been twelve days, so a wind-up clock in those days (the story was published in 1928) should have long since winded down. Okay, but this causes the woman to be frightened, even before the frightening stuff happens. Had I been in her shoes, if I even thought about the fact that the clock was still ticking (without question, the strangeness of this would have never occurred to me), my reaction to it would have been something along the lines of "Huh." Then I would have left.

But it's a good story, and I plan on reading more of Harvey's stuff (there's a good, affordable omnibus volume out there of his work that I plan on picking up). It's just that we all get hung up on something from time to time, and clocks ticking beyond the point they reasonably should do not chill my blood.