Schalken the Painter, and other Halloween tales

This YouTube video - very murky in both vision and sound - is probably the only chance currently to see Schalken the Painter, Leslie Megahey's atmospheric adaptation, broadcast in December 1979, of the Sheridan Le Fanu story Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter. The adaptation is based around the real paintings of Godfried Schalcken (1643-1706).

Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter is one of the online stories in The Little Professor's 2013 Annual Halloween Horde of Horrible Happenings, this year compiled from mid-19th century horror fiction. Read on.

Addendum: And for a bonus - I nearly forgot - check out the Exeter CVS podcast of Clare Girvan's story Meet the Wife, originally on the Exeter CVS radio show.

"When their light aircraft crashlands in the middle of nowhere on Halloween, two stranded airmen seek help from a local villager."

Ray

Faust (2011)

Johannes Zeiler (left) as Faust; Anton Adasinsky (right) as Mauricius

Another film recommendation: we just borrowed the video of Faust, Alexander Sokurov's 2011 film adaptation of the Faust legend. Russian-made, with dialogue in German, it's a "free fantasy" adaptation of the legendary Faust -  a man who sells his soul to the Devil - as portrayed by Goethe and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus.

In the Sokurov film, Heinrich Faust is a disillusioned middle-aged academic working in a seedy hospital in a seedy little German town, struggling to understand the nature of life through dissections and dabbling in alchemy. Penniless, he fails to pawn a ring, and buys hemlock to commit suicide. However, at this point he's visited by the sinister moneylender, Mauricius, who drinks the hemlock instead. It doesn't do anything but give him stomach pains, which amazes and intrigues Faust, who takes up the moneylender's offer to show him a side of the town he has never seen.

As the two wander the town, which is populated with grotesques and eccentrics, discussing life and theology, it becomes clear that Mauricius, though not overtly identified as the Devil, is something very strange. He shows Faust some corrupt highly-placed people who are his clients, and gets kicked by a carter who evidently knows his nature. Undressing in a laundry, he is revealed to have a monstrously deformed body with (as a woman comments) "nothing in front" and all his tackle at the back. While at the same laundry, Faust becomes attracted to a young woman, Margarete (played by Isolda Dychauk - a casting straight out of Vermeer). Things turn considerably for the worse when Mauricius starts a quarrel in a tavern by calling the wine "donkey-piss", then in the further mayhem caused by his miraculously making quality wine spout from the wall, engineers it that Faust fatally stabs a soldier with a meat fork. The two go to the soldier's funeral, when we find that the soldier is Margarete's brother; Mauricius uses the situation to broker a meeting between Faust and Margarete. However, despite her attraction to him, the (correct) rumour is spreading that Faust was the murderer, and he further blows his chances by admitting his guilt to her. He goes to Mauricius, who finally springs the deal: Faust's soul for one night with Margarete. Faust signs.

Mauricius conducts Faust through a tunnel to Margarete, who is standing on the edge of a lake, evidently contemplating suicide. Faust embraces her and they both fall into the water. What happens next is a little enigmatic: is the fall a metaphorical one of falling into passion, or literal?  I took it as the latter: that the pact has granted Faust's wish in letter rather than in spirit: that Faust and Margarete are both dead, and Faust has spent the night with her only in the sense of being in the same place.

The next morning, Faust appears to wake, with grotesque figures creeping toward the window of the room where he's lying with Margarete. Mauricius aids him in fleeing town, and they ascend a rocky landscape, meeting characters we know to be dead, as Faust (we assume) is too. But Faust finds the wilderness interesting, and is fascinated by the workings of a volcanic geyser. His curiosity about the world revived, he finally tires of Mauricius's nihilistic gripings, buries him under rocks, and confidently departs into the vast glacial landscape.

The film has had mixed reviews. It was a hit at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, where it premiered, but has also been described as "ponderous". It may be; its plot is a tapestry of detail, character, and strange encounter, all relevant to the theme, but not all directly relevant to the central story. I did, however, find it gripping, and its atmosphere intense; it's filmed in Iceland and in various Czech castles, all in visually beautiful subdued pastel (Faust's blood as he signs the pact is about the only saturated colour in the whole film). The film is carried by Anton Adasinsky's charismatic performance as Mauricius, combining the appearance of decrepitude with flexibility and sudden vigour; I didn't know until Googling that Adasinsky is a mime, clown, and veteran of physical theatre. And he does bring a certain dark Boschian humour to a rather solemn movie, in the sheer bizarreness of the characterisation, as when Mauricius reveals his Cronenberg-style body in the laundry (the New Statesman review described it as "as if a Doctor Who villain had strayed into Ingres") or the exchange when Mauricius prepares to defecate outside a church (the horrified Faust tells him he can't do that - he agrees, and instead, with much off-camera groaning, does it inside). If you like weird and moody films, check it out.

- Ray


moviemaniacsDE trailer



the more action-focused atlanticfilmtrailers trailer

Shepherd aesthetes and Barry Pain

For a long time I resisted getting an Internet-capable phone, but it has proved invaluable on holiday for pursuing trains of thought that come out of conversation. A couple of days back, on the train to Portsmouth, Clare recalled a snippet of a song she'd had to learn at school. Googling found rapidly it was The Shepherd's Song: one of the Seven Lieder of Edward Elgar, a cycle of songs with lyrics by various authors. Here it is on YouTube sung by Mackay Choral Society's Male Chorus - The Shepherd's Song - and here are the lyrics:

Down the dusty road together
Homeward pass the hurrying sheep,
Stupid with the summer weather,
Too much grass and too much sleep,
    I, their shepherd, sing to thee
    That summer is a joy to me.

Down the shore rolled waves all creamy
With the flecked surf yesternight;
I swam far out in starlight dreamy,
In moving waters cool and bright,
    I, the shepherd, sing to thee
    I love the strong life of the sea.

And upon the hillside growing
Where the fat sheep dozed in shade,
Bright red poppies I found blowing,
Drowsy, tall and loosely made,
    I, the shepherd, sing to thee
    How fair the bright red poppies be.

To the red-tiled homestead bending
Winds the road, so white and long
Day and work are near their ending
Sleep and dreams will end my song,
    I, the shepherd, sing to thee;
    In the dreamtime answer, answer me,
    In the dreamtime answer, answer me.

The Eliza Stories, the 2002
Prion Classics collected edition

I find it fairly ludicrous; this narrator is in the long tradition of shepherd aesthetes with idyllic lifestyles (this one involves admiring poppies and going for long starlit swims). However, I was interested that the lyrics are by Barry Pain, author of the 1900 Eliza.

If you like observational humour of the style of George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, Eliza is very much in the same vein, a gentle send-up of late-Victorian social aspiration. It tells of the long-suffering Eliza and her husband, a pushy junior clerk who is trying to get them up the social ladder from working class to lower middle class. Do check it out: Eliza, Project Gutenberg E-Text 23783.

When Barry Pain is remembered, if it all, it's generally for Eliza and its sequels. But I hadn't realised, until I looked at the Wikipedia page and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, the breadth of his writing. As a contributor to Punch and the Cornhill Magazine, much of his work was humour and parody, some of it very barbed (though, like a lot of historical parody) a trifle inaccessible when its targets have been forgotten. A couple of his classics in this area are Marge Askinforit (Gutenberg #26204) , a parody of the self-obsessed and name-dropping autobiography of Margot Asquith ...

I was christened Margarine, of course, but in my own circle I have always been known as Marge. The name is, I am informed, derived from the Latin word margo, meaning the limit. I have always tried to live right up to it.

We were a very numerous family, and I can find space for biographical details of only a few of the more important. I must keep room for myself.

My elder sister, Casein—Casey, as we always called her—was supposed to be the most like myself, and was less bucked about it than one would have expected. I never made any mistake myself as to which was which. I had not her beautiful lustrous eyes, but neither had she my wonderful cheek. She had not my intelligence. Nor had she my priceless gift for uttering an unimportant personal opinion as if it were the final verdict of posterity with the black cap on. We were devoted to one another, and many a time have I owed my position as temporary parlour-maid in an unsuspicious family to the excellent character that she had written for me.

... and If Winter Don't (Gutenberg #27375), a parody of the style and format of ASM Hutchinson's family saga If Winter Comes. In the introduction, Pain comments on the fashionable stylistic foibles of the time, ridiculing novelists who would write the tongue-twister (or drunkenness test) “She stood at the door of Burgess’s fish-sauce shop, Strand, welcoming him in” as:

Across the roaring Strand red and green lights spelling on the gloom. ‘BURGESS’S FISH-SAU.’ A moment’s darkness and again ‘BURGESS’S FISH-SAU.’ Like that. Truncated. The final —CE not functioning. He had to look though it hurt him. Hurt horrible. Damnably. And his eyes traveled downward.

Suddenly and beyond hope she! Isobel-at-the-last. Standing in the doorway. White on black. Slim. Willowy. Incomparable. Incommensurable. She saw him and her lips rounded to a call. He sensed it through the traffic. Come in. Calling and calling. Come in.

“Come in....

“Out of the rain.”

Barry Pain, from the 1891
In a Canadian Canoe

This kind of thing wasn't to everyone's taste. Pain was caught up in the controversy over what was characterised as "the New Humour" (as exemplified in the works of Pain along with writers such as Jerome K Jerome, WW Jacobs, Israel Zangwill, JM Barrie and William Pett Ridge). Critics considered it arch, self-conscious and over-written, as described by this critique by Andrew Lang (Mr Andrew Lang on the new Humour, Press, Rōrahi XLVIII, Putanga 8040, 8 Hakihea 1891, Page 2, syndicated from Longman's Magazine).

But humour was just one aspect of Pain's highly varied output. As the ODNB says:

... it was his serious writing that earned critical acclaim during his lifetime. He was admired for his narrative ability and economy in a range of books that included novels, fantasies, a theological study, a detective story, and a series of parodies that were widely admired. In all, he wrote over sixty books and a mass of uncollected articles and short stories in every conceivable vein.
- N. T. P. Murphy, ‘Pain, Barry Eric Odell (1864–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35362, accessed 28 May 2012]

A sampler of other Barry Pain works online:

• In a Canadian Canoe, The Nine Muses Minus One, and Other Stories (1891, Internet Archive inacanadiancano00paingoog) - his first collection of stories and essays, many originally in Granta, the style varying through humour, whimsy, reflective essay, and fantasy. This is the work that Andrew Lang so disliked as "the New Humour".
• The Octave of Claudius (1897, Internet Archive octaveofclaudius00painrich) - a macabre fantasy/SF novel about an impoverished young would-be novelist who is given £8000 by a mysterious benefactor as long as he agrees to be the subject of an experiment (which turns out to be along the lines of Dr Moreau).
• De Omnibus (1901, Internet Archive deomnibus00paingoog) - these Cockney humorous stories may not be to everyone's taste, but Pain comes up with the occasional gem, such as his narrator's garbling of the well-known riddle as:
  Mothers an' fawthers 'ave I none,
  But this man's sister was my brother's son.
• Lindley Kays (1904, Internet Archive lindleykays00paingoog) - a then long-awaited serious novel from Pain, telling the story of a man who breaks away from a stultifying trading family to become a successful dramatist.
• The Memoirs of Constantine Dix (1905, Internet Archive memoirsconstant00paingoo) - a collection of crime stories featuring the anti-hero Constantine Dix, a gentleman of leisure whose public life is devoted to helping criminals go straight, while privately he is a successful thief.
• The Exiles of Faloo (1910, Internet Archive exilesoffaloo00painuoft) - a dystopian novel set on a Pacific island, and focusing on the increasingly tense politics within the "Exiles Club", an elite governing group formed of criminals and outcasts from English society.
• The New Gulliver and Other Stories (1913, Gutenberg #33542) - a collection of satirical fantasy stories, the lead one concerning Gulliver's visit to the dystopian Ultima Thule, where the late-Victorian class system has been exaggerated into a society ruled by an intellectual/technical oligarchy.

- Ray

What D'you See in Pictures?

In the Picture / Three Cases of Murder (1954) via National Media Museum

Above, the results of a partially successful search: an introductory segment from the seldom-shown 1954 film Three Cases of Murder. This British film, a portmanteau film of a sort no longer made, comprises three murder-themed shorts, all featuring Alan Badel, and all excellent. One, You Killed Elizabeth, is a very English darkly comic whodunit concerning a rivalry between two business partners for the attention of a woman that leads to murder. Another, Lord Mountdrago, features a Somerset Maugham psychological drama with Orson Welles as a high-ranking politician whose thoughts turn to murder when he experiences humiliating dreams involving Owen, a Welsh MP whose career he ruined - dreams whose content Owen seems aware of. However, the third, In the Picture, seems to be the one that people find most memorable.

In the Picture (directed by Wendy Toye from a screenplay by Donald Wilson adapted from a Roderick Wilkinson story), is a wonderful piece of English Gothic that starts in a picture gallery with Badel's character - who is never named -  sitting opposite a painting with broken glass. He accosts a mild-mannered guide, Jarvis, enquiring about the latter's fascination with the painting - a country house in a gloomy landscape titled Landscape - Artist Unknown. After expressing the view that the composition could be improved by a light in a window, "Mr X" proceeds to talk Jarvis closer and closer and into the painting with him. They enter the house to find a draughty expressionist interior and its two other occupants: an unnamed woman and an artist-taxidermist called Mr Snyder. It turns out that the three have been "assigned" to the painting as a kind of purgatory, and Mr X is the artist who painted it. The visit rapidly turns to horror for Jarvis, who finds he's the pawn in a bargain between Mr X and Snyder; Mr X gives him Jarvis as a vivisection victim in exchange for the use of Snyder's coveted candle. We hear a scream from the painting as Mr X lights the candle with Jarvis's matches. The segment ends with Mr X dissatisfied with the composition - he wants another light - and he exits the painting again to sound out another victim, a young woman with a cigarette lighter.

There's been a deal written about this piece: see, for instance, the account at British Horror Films (Three Cases Of Murder); and Drawn and Quartered: Wendy Toye’s In the Picture (Jorge Didaco, Senses of Cinema, Issue 34), which says of it:

British cinema has drawn extensively on these patterns of ghastly horror (from Hammer to Amicus and beyond), but rarely so quietly shocking and perverse as in Wendy Toye’s adaptation of Roderick Wilkinson’s short story “In the Picture” (with a screenplay by Donald Wilson)

I was interested in tracking down the original story, and as I said above, I was partially successful. It was slightly difficult because virtually all accounts get the story name wrong: it's not In the Picture but What D'you See in Pictures?. I managed to trace it, or at least a reprint after the film was made, to a 1964 edition of Short Story International magazine (Google Books snippet view here - though the Google Books metadata is wrong; the edition is Short Story International, Volume 1, No. 11, September 1964). The blurb runs:

What D'you See in Pictures? by Roderick Wilkinson
Have you ever seen a painting that made you want to walk right into it and become a part of the scene? Don't ever wish too hard. What D'you See In Pictures? is reprinted from Courier Magazine, a British Publication.

A trifle annoyingly, this is one of those instances where Google Books snippet view doesn't recover enough to skim the story, and often purports to show snippet view but shows an irrelevant or blank portion of the page. All that was findable was the start and finish of the story. The start is similar to the film, except that the narrator is a draper ...

If I say a word of it to the authorities — or even to my wife — they'll take me away. But I'll tell you.

It was in July. You remember the hot spell we had — lovely summer weather. I was in the park one Tuesday afternoon (I'm a draper by trade and Tuesday's my day off). I felt very warm out there so I came into the Galleries because I thought it would be cooler. The Galleries were very quiet — and I didn't meet anyone until I came in here. And it was here I met him. He was sitting here on this very seat. I sat down beside him. He was a queer-looking type — dressed in a black raincoat with a sort of cape at the shoulders, and he wore a big-brimmed hat; it was black too. ...

... and at the end, the narrator escapes the painting, failing to rescue another character from it.

another form in front of me — the dark form of the hole in the ground.

"I've found it!" I yelled. "Quick — I've found the hole!"

I threw myself head and shoulders first through the cavity, shouting all the time — "Come through — come through. Give me your stick — your walking stick. I'll pull you through."

I don't know what happened. I think I must have fainted. When I came round to my senses the first thing I saw was the grain of that wooden floor in the art galleries. When I got to my feet I stared at the painting.

He was there — just as you see him now — hanging by the neck from the third gallows.

Sane? Mad? I don't know. I have only one small link in the chain to show me that I must be sane. It must have happened. When I picked myself up from that floor in the galleries I was leaning on his walking stick.

I don't know what happens in between - maybe it's excellent - but the narrator's survival rather puts in the bracket of "cosy" horror. Donald Wilson's screenplay, with the urbane and completely amoral Mr X as framing character and chief driver of the plot, makes it a much darker and stronger story; and Wendy Toye's overall visual treatment of the piece, including the stunning chiaroscuro of the best black-and-white films of that era, raises it to perfection.

Ken Russell: great imaginer of music

Showbiz 411 tributes to Ken Russell by Martin Scorsese and Ben Kingsley

I was very sorry to hear of the death at 84 of film director Ken Russell; apart from the basic news, there's been very little on television so far. My favourite obituaries so far are the ones in the Los Angeles Times by "Culture Monster" (Ken Russell, one of film’s great imaginers of music.) and the New Yorker's Culture Desk (Ken Russell: The Rare Director Who Understood Musical Greatness).

Russell produced a certain amount of rubbish, and has often tended to categorized purely for his dimension of outrageousness ...

"the chief defiler of celebrities of the past and present," which is what Pauline Kael called him.

... but I don't think that's accurate. His films brought a kind of 'comic strip' approach to musical biographies: outrageous exaggeration, anachronism and invention cloaking an essentially faithful portrayal of musical history in terms accessible to the modern mindset. Lisztomania is my favourite in this respect, faithful both in its portrayal of Liszt fan frenzy - "Lisztomania" - and in biographical detail, being partially based on the "kiss and tell" novel Nélida, by Liszt's longtime mistress Marie d'Agoult. The same goes for the 1970 The Music Lovers (Russell's take on Tchaikovsky) and the 1974 Mahler. (This is not forgetting his lower-key earlier biographies s such as the 1962 dramatised documentary Elgar; the 1966 Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World; the moving 1968 Song of Summer, about the last days of Delius, reportedly so accurate that Eric Fenby had a nervous breakdown over the suppressed recollections it activated).

His vigorous approach worked just as well on his groundbreaking film of The Who's rock opera Tommy, and his wide musical interests also surfaced in the (in my view) under-rated Crimes of Passion, whose score was a prog-rock adaptation by Rick Wakeman of Dvořák's New World Symphony; and in his contribution to Aria, an excellent compilation film in which various directors filmed music videos for operatic arias.

Other personal highlights from Russell's work that spring to mind: the 1969 DH Lawrence adaptation Women in Love; the 1971 The Devils, despite its hugely controversial reputation a not-so-wildly exaggerated portrayal of historical events described in Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon; the 1972 Savage Messiah, a biopic unusually for Russell not about a composer, but about the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska;  the 1986 Gothic, a not at all bad portrayal of the Shelleys' visit to Lord Byron at Villa Diodati that led to the writing of Frankenstein and The Vampyre; and the 1988 The Lair of the White Worm. Russell's comedy-horror treatment of this final example incorporated his signature fixations on sex and religion, and in fact they prove faithful to Bram Stoker's own obsessions - it's an again rather under-rated take on a hard-to-film book. See The Lair of the White Worm previously.

As Russell was a film-maker, I think it's appropriate to end this appreciation with a sampler of clips from his works:

• 1962: Elgar: Portrait of a Composer (in full on YouTube: part 1 / 2 / 3 / 4).
• 1968: Song of Summer: portraying the difficult collaboration between the syphilis-crippled Delius and the uptight Fenby. In full on YouTube: part 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5. Of all of these clips, this one is a must to check out.
• 1970: Omnibus: Dance of the Seven Veils:  a highly controversial and little-seen biographical film, portraying the links between Richard Strauss and Nazism.
• 1970: The Music Lovers.
• 1974: Clip from Mahler: spot the movie quotation at 5:10 onward; and Mahler - The Conversion scene: Mahler's conversion from Judaism to Christianity dramatised through an over-the-top fantasy sequence filmed in some mountain quarry, involving Cosima Wagner and a mix of Wagnerian, Nazi and religious iconography.
• 1975: Elton John, Pinball Wizard, from Tommy.
• 1975: Love's Dream from Lisztomania: sensitive arrangement of Liszt's Liebesträume No. 3 as a Charlie Chaplin pastiche.
• 1984: Clip from Crimes of Passion (NSFW): exemplifying its sharp dialogue, synth-heavy score from the New World Symphony, and Anthony Perkins' tour de force performance as a tormented street preacher who becomes embroiled in a relationship with the prostitute alter ego of a businesswoman, played by Kathleen Turner.
• 1988: D'Ampton Worm song - Lair of the White Worm  - and the movie trailer (NSFW).
• 1987: Nessun Dorma from Aria (NSFW): Russell's segment uses "Nessun dorma" from Turandot as backing for a powerful fantasy in which a car accident victim's resuscitation mirrors a dream scene of tribal ritual.

The Performance786 YouTube channel has a number of Russell's early short films including the 1956 Peepshow and Knights on Bikes; the 1957 Amelia and the Angel; and the 1961 Antonio Gaudi.

- Ray

HG Bell: the first cyborged leg?

Further to The Steam Arm: the paper ‘The Steam Arm’: Proto-Steampunk Themes in a Victorian Popular Song (Kirstie Blair, Neo-Victorian Studies, 3:1, 2010, pp196-207) mentions a parallel broadsheet to the 1834 one of the rogue cyborg arm: the rogue cyborg leg in The Cork Leg.

The Cork Leg appears in William Evans Burton's 1837 Burton's Comic Songster (pp12-13) credited as "Written by Mr. Hudson, expressly for Mr. Burton". Its first US publication appears to be a broadsheet by Hudson, The cork leg,and Oyster maid (see Yale University Library Catalogue) published in Boston in 1832.  There were also British versions circulating, uncredited, around the same time: the Bodleian Harding collection's Harding B 11(3925) manuscript has one published by a J Catnach, London, between 1813 and 1838.

In a story somewhere between The Red Shoes and The Wrong Trousers, it tells of:

... Mynheer Von Flam,
Who every morning said "I am
The richest merchant in Rotterdam."

who has his leg amputated after breaking it, and replaced with an artificial one:

An artist in Rotterdam, it should seem,
Had made cork legs his study and theme,
Each joint was as strong as an iron beam,
And the springs were a compound of clock-work and
steam.

The leg, however, goes Horribly Wrong.

He walk'd through each square, and he pass'd each shop,
Of speed he went at the utmost top,
He went with a bounce, and a jump, and a hop,
When he found his leg he could not stop.

Horror and grief were in his face,
The neighbours thought he was running a race,
He clung to a lamp-post to stop his pace,
But the leg kept on nor gave up the chace.

And finally...

He walk'd of days and nights a score,
Of Europe soon he made the tour,
He died, and though he was no more,
His leg kept on the same as before.

The leg-maker grumbles and loudly swears,
That of his bill he'll increase the amount,
But for all this the leg never cares,
But still keeps up a running account.

I've told my story fair and free,
Of the funniest man I ever did see,
He never was buried, though dead he be,
And I am now singing his L E G.

Googling "steam leg" finds a number of contemporary references to the song. However, it also finds something different: this allusion by Thomas De Quincey to a different and earlier work.

... thence doubling back upon London, like the steam leg in Mr H. G. Bell's admirable story.
- page 285, De Quincey's Works, 1853

HG Bell was the Scottish lawyer, poet and historian Henry Glassford Bell (1803–1874), and the reference tracks to his 1832 anthology My Old Portfolio; or Tales and Sketches and the story "The marvellous history of Mynheer von Wodenblock" (pp83-94). First published in the Edinburgh Literary Journal, 47 (1829), this erudite and literate story tells how a wealthy Rotterdam merchant, Wodenblock, is fitted with a complex prosthetic cork leg by the instrument-maker Turningvort.  Its power source isn't explained - it's described as containing "wheels within wheels" and "springs acting upon springs". However, it proves unstoppable, with horrific outcome.

Leyden is more than twenty miles from Rotterdam, but the sun had not yet set, when the Misses Backsneider, who were sitting at their parlour window, immediately opposite the "Golden Lion," drinking tea, and nodding to their friends as they passed, saw some one coming at furious speed along the street. His face was pale as ashes, and he gasped fearfully for breath; but, without turning either to the right or the left, he hurried by at the same rapid state, and was out of sight almost before they had time to exclaim, " Good gracious ! was not that Mynheer Von Wodenblock, the rich merchant of Rotterdam.

Next day was Sunday. The inhabitants of Haarlem were all going to church, in their best attire, to say their prayers, and hear their great organ, when a being rushed across the market-place like an animated corpse, —white, blue, cold, and speechless, his eyes fixed, bis lips livid, his teeth set, and his hands clenched. Every one cleared away for it in silent horror; and there was not a person in Haarlem, who did not believe it a dead body endowed with the power of motion.

On it went through village and town, towards the great wilds and forests of Germany. Weeks, months years, past on, but at intervals the horrible shape was seen, and still continues to be seen, in various parts of the north of Europe. The clothes however, which he who was once Mynheer Von Wodenblock used to wear, have all mouldered away ; the flesh, too, has fallen from his bones and he is now a skeleton—a skeleton in all but the cork leg, which still, in its original rotundity and size, continues attached to the spectral form, a perpetuum mobile, dragging the wearied bones for ever and for ever over the earth!

May all good saints protect us from broken legs! and may there never again appear a mechanician like Turningvort to supply us with cork substitutes of so awful and mysterious a power!

Given the uncertainty of chronology of British publication, it's unclear if the The Cork Leg is a rehash by Hudson of Bell's 1829 story, or if Bell wrote up the broadsheet as a story; either way, the unfortunate Mynheer von Wodenblock definitely pre-dates the 1834-35 The Steam Arm as an example of a cyborg in fiction.

Henry Glassford Bell looks worth reading. My Old Portfolio; or Tales and SketchesThe marvellous history of Mynheer von Wodenblock, they include The dead daughter (highly reminiscent of Poe's Ligeia with its tale of a family's new daughter who grows up identical to the one who died); The living mummy, and the Leyden professor (about a professor who finds a skinny merchant to be a suitable candidate as a mummy for his museum); The Wreck of a World, a Day-Dream (a vivid apocalyptic fantasy); A Tale of the Sea (about a passenger stranded aboard a drifting ship after waking to find the whole crew has decamped); and Dicky Cross, the idiot of Exeter (in which a young woman, taking a short cut through Exeter Cathedral, finds herself locked in with a murderous idiot).

- Ray

Du Maurier's doll

A couple of months back, various newspapers such as the Guardian - Lost Daphne du Maurier stories discovered (21 February 2011) - reported on the forthcoming launch of a Virago anthology of early Daphne Du Maurier works lost after appearance in magazines and obscure story collections. The title story was just published in Guardian Books section.

The Doll
"Lost for more than 70 years, this dark story of a man's obsessive passion for Rebecca, a mysterious violinist, hasn't been published since it appeared in a small collection in 1937."

- Ray

Ghost stories for Christmas

You have to wonder if Western Morning News photographer Richard Austin would have been quite so keen to capture images of world famous giant stags had he ever read William Shakespeare's famous words…

Oft have you heard since Herne the hunter dyed,
That women, to affright their little children,
Says that he walkes in shape of a great stagge.

So begins Martin Hesp's story in the Western Morning News today, An Exmoor stag ghost story for Christmas, inspired by the strange media tale of the "Emperor of Exmoor". This, widely reported a couple of months ago, was the contentious story that Britain's largest wild animal had been shot by a trophy hunter. But, as John Vidal told in the Observer - see Dead or alive? The Emperor becomes an Exmoor legend - it gradually became evident that there was little evidence for the story, or even the Emperor's existence.

On the subject of ghost stories, I'm pleased to see that BBC is returning to its tradition of a Christmas Eve ghost story with the showing of a new adaptation of MR James's Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad:

A chilling new single drama, Whistle and I'll Come to You is the thoroughly modern re-working of the evocative Edwardian ghost story Oh, Whistle and I'll come to You, My Lad by MR James, adapted for BBC Two by Neil Cross. Cross's adaptation delves into themes of ageing, hubris and the supernatural, with a horrifying psychological twist in the tale.

James Parkin has just left his wife in the care of a nursing home. Pensive and emotional, he travels to their old favourite destination for rambling, an off-season British seaside town. There he encounters an apparition on a desolate beach, which begins to haunt him - with terrifying consequences.

Details at the BBC2 website, where for UK visitors it's on iPlayer for six days from now.  (Update: I just watched it, and it's a very good reworking.  According to the Kent Film Office, the beach scenes below the chalk cliffs were at Botany Bay and Kingsgate Bay; the external locations for the hotel where Parkin stays were here.  The dune locations appear to be elsewhere: Camber Sands in East Sussex).

If this leaves you with a taste for more MR James ghost stories, many of the classic TV adaptations - A Ghost Story for Christmas - are on YouTube: Number 13 is a good entry point.

- Ray

Kipling: fantasy, SF and horror

A recent Anecdotal Evidence post, `The Illegitimate Branch of the Profession', reminded me of an interesting Rudyard Kipling short story, A Matter of Fact, involving an encounter with a sea monster, that could almost be considered a precursor to HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.

Kipling's short story canon has a reputation for more or less realistic character-driven stories, many with Indian settings, but he actually produced a large body of works classifiable as fantasy, SF and horror. In this context, Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (2008, Pegasus Books, ed. Stephen Jones, ISBN10 1933648783) looks very much worth checking out. The Kinokuniya BookWeb entry has a table of contents:

The Vampire
The Dream of Duncan Parrenness
The City of Dreadful Night
An Indian Ghost Story in England
The Phantom 'Rickshaw
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau
In the House of Suddhoo
The Bisara of Pooree
Haunted Subalterns
By Word of Mouth
The Recurring Smash
The Dreitarbund
Bubbling Well Road
The Sending of Dana Da
My Own True Ghost Story
Sleipner, Late Thurinda
The Man Who Would Be King
The Solid Muldoon
Baboo Mookerji's Undertaking
The Joker
The Wandering Jew
The Courting of Dinah Shadd
The Mark of the Beast
At the End of the Passage
The Recrudescence of Imray
The Finances of the Gods
The Finest Story in the World
Children of the Zodiac
The Lost Legion
A Matter of Fact
The Bridge-Builders
The Brushwood Boy
The Tomb of His Ancestors
Wireless
'They'
With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD
The House Surgeon
The Knife and the Naked Chalk
In the Same Boat
As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD
Swept and Garnished
Mary Postgate
The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat
A Madonna of the Trenches
The Wish House
The Gardener
The Eye of Allah
On the Gate: A Tale of '16
The Appeal

I thought I knew Kipling's short fiction well, but I recognise very few on the list. The Man Who Would Be King is of course thoroughly well-known: see The Great Game and other adventures and Larry J Kreitzer's analysis of its theological motifs in Borders, Boundaries and the Bible. With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD and As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD are also quite well-known SF stories of a world dominated by the "Aerial Board of Control", an airship trading monopoly ("The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons") enforcing its control with non-lethal beam weapons.

Many of the other stories are findable online if you search the Internet Archive for Kipling stories. For instance, The Phantom Rickshaw and 'They', both ghost stories, are in the 1921 Selected Stories from Kipling. The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, concerning a man caught in a horrific trap, and The Finest Story in the World, in which a writer attempts to capitalise on a naive man who remembers his past lives, are in The Phantom Rickshaw And Other Stories. At the End of the Passage, concerning a man haunted in his dreams (on reflection I do remember that one as a horror classic), and The Mark of the Beast, concerning a man cursed to become a wereleopard, are in Mine Own People And Other Stories. And so on. There are plenty of strange tales to explore.

The New Readers' Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling has a good overview by Fred Lerner, Rudyard Kipling and Modern Science Fiction, listing the stories classifiable as SF.

- Ray

The Lair of the White Worm

I just finished Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm, which I started on the train to Portsmouth on January 31st. It was dire, and I want back the time I expended reading it. So that you won't have to endure it, here's a synopsis (apologies for the racist parts).

The story concerns Adam Salton, the heir to a Peak District estate, who finds himself in conflict with a mixed collection of villains: primarily Lady Arabella March, who is in league with the monstrous White Worm; but also with Edgar Caswall, a Mesmerism-obsessed landowner, and his sinister African servant Oolanga. By chapter:

CHAPTER I--ADAM SALTON ARRIVES
It's 1860, and Adam Salton, a young and successful Australian rancher and businessman, arrives in England at the invitation of his grand-uncle Richard Salton, who wants to make him his heir.

CHAPTER II--THE CASWALLS OF CASTRA REGIS
En route to his Peak District home, Lesser Hill, Mr Salton fills in Adam on local history, and when they arrive introduces Adam to his historian friend Sir Nathaniel de Salis, who tells him more; they both mention the general scariness of the local major landowners, the Caswall family.

CHAPTER III--DIANA'S GROVE
Sir Nathaniel lays more local history on Adam, showing him the landscape including the Castle and the wooded hilltop known as Diana's Grove.

CHAPTER IV--THE LADY ARABELLA MARCH
Sir Nathaniel takes Adam to Liverpool meet the Castle's new tenant, Mr Caswall, who is returning from Africa. En route they run into Lady Arabella March, whose carriage has broken down. While Adam mends it, he notices snakes hanging around, and also notices that Lady Arabella is weird:

She wore a close-fitting cap of some fine fur of dazzling white. Coiled round her white throat was a large necklace of emeralds, whose profusion of colour dazzled when the sun shone on them. Her voice was peculiar, very low and sweet, and so soft that the dominant note was of sibilation. Her hands, too, were peculiar--long, flexible, white, with a strange movement as of waving gently to and fro.

She invites him to visit Diana's Grove, where she lives. Once she's away, Sir Nathaniel tells Adam that it's generally known she's after Caswall for his money. They all arrive at Liverpool, and Adam is struck by Caswall's appearance...

so hard, so ruthless, so selfish, so dominant

and that of his African servant Oolanga

unreformed, unsoftened savage, and inherent in it were all the hideous possibilities of a lost, devil-ridden child of the forest and the swamp--the lowest of all created things that could be regarded as in some form ostensibly human

While in Liverpool, Adam buys a mongoose to deal with the snakes he saw. They go back to the Castle for Caswall's homecoming fete, where Adam meets the granddaughters of the local farmer Michael Watford, Lilli and Mimi. He's especially taken with the half-Burmese Mimi.

CHAPTER V--THE WHITE WORM
Once home at Lesser Hill, Adam, evenidently protective toward both sisters, gets angry at the way Mr Caswall was looking in a rather predatory way at Lilla. Changing the subject, Sir Nathaniel lays yet more local history on him, telling him the legend of the White Worm, a monstrous serpent under Diana's Grove.

CHAPTER VI--HAWK AND PIGEON
Adam, having been out snake-killing with his mongoose, comes home annoyed. Having visited Mercy Farm, where Lilli and Mimi Watford live, he reports how Caswall had visited too, and had been staring at them in a very odd way. Adam says he's getting Very Bad Vibes.

CHAPTER VII--OOLANGA
Sir Nathaniel, privately, asks Adam for more details of the staring incident, advising him of the extreme dangerousness of Oolanga. Adam goes off mongoosing again; in the woods, he meets Lady Arabella, whom his mongoose tries to attack. She shoots it, a lot.

CHAPTER VIII--SURVIVALS
Adam and Sir Nathaniel discuss the mongoose-shooting over breakfast, and via more local history and stories of local attacks and murders, come to the conclusion that Lady Arabella is under the control of the White Worm.

CHAPTER IX--SMELLING DEATH
Adams gets two replacement mongooses; and borrows Ooolanga, who has some kind of voodoo powers, to look for vibes of death at various locations. Adam meets Lady Arabella, who pets one of his mongooses, which apparently runs off. He goes home, where Sir Nathaniel tells him one of Caswall's ancestors was a student of Mesmer. Adam then finds the missing mongoose strangled in its box.

CHAPTER X--THE KITE
Sir Nathaniel tells Adam of a frightening encounter at Mercy Farm: a kind of intense psychic staring match between Mr Caswall, Lady Arabella and Oolanga versus Mimi and Lilla. Finally Mimi wins:

Her face suddenly flamed, as if some divine light shone through it. Her form expanded till it stood out majestically. Lifting her right hand, she stepped forward towards Caswall, and with a bold sweep of her arm seemed to drive some strange force towards him. Again and again was the gesture repeated, the man falling back from her at each movement. Towards the door he retreated, she following. There was a sound as of the cooing sob of doves, which seemed to multiply and intensify with each second. The sound from the unseen source rose and rose as he retreated, till finally it swelled out in a triumphant peal, as she with a fierce sweep of her arm, seemed to hurl something at her foe, and he, moving his hands blindly before his face, appeared to be swept through the doorway and out into the open sunlight.

Suddenly then the sky is filled with birds. Caswall orders a huge kite, which his servants fly day and night to frighten the birds from the crops.

CHAPTER XI--MESMER'S CHEST
Caswall becomes obsessed with the kite, as well as with the varied curios stored in the Castle. He's especially interested in a chest with no visible means of opening; his servant Old Simon is very scared of it, having seen the contents once.

CHAPTER XII--THE CHEST OPENED
Caswall has a strange dream of carrying the chest upstairs and opening it. He wakes up and finds that he has. Inside there are various glass devices. He continues his experiments with the kite.

CHAPTER XIII--OOLANGA'S HALLUCINATIONS
Oolanga spots Lady Arabella sneaking in and out of the Castle. Suspicious that she is after the treasure he thinks is in the chest, he follows her and confronts her, offering her his love. She rejects him on largely racist grounds, drawing a revolver, so he threatens blackmail (evidently with a confused idea of the English legal process):

He warned her that he knew she had tried to steal his master's treasure, and that he had caught her in the act. But if she would be his, he would share the treasure with her, and they could live in luxury in the African forests. But if she refused, he would tell his master, who would flog and torture her and then give her to the police, who would kill her.

CHAPTER XIV--BATTLE RENEWED
Lady Arabella invited Caswall to join her at Mercy Farm for another try at the psychic staring match. Again, Mimi wins, causing another manifestation of birds, which cause the collapse of Caswall's kite. Caswall goes home and mends the kite, before pressing Old Simon on what had scared him in the chest; Old Simon drops dead.

CHAPTER XV--ON THE TRACK
Lady Arabella sees Old Simon's death as an opoportunity to get to know Caswall better; followed by Oolanga, she goes to the Castle.

CHAPTER XVI--A VISIT OF SYMPATHY
Lady Arabella visits Caswall, offers her sympathies, and tells Caswall about her encounter with Oolanga. He advises her to think nothing of it:

"If you have the slightest fault to find with that infernal nigger, shoot him at sight. A swelled-headed nigger, with a bee in his bonnet, is one of the worst difficulties in the world to deal with. So better make a clean job of it, and wipe him out at once!"

Sir Nathaniel tells Adam about Lady Arabella's house, mentioning a mysterious and foul-smelling well in one room.

CHAPTER XVII--THE MYSTERY OF "THE GROVE"
Adam decides to explore Diana's Grove, where he sees Oolanga bringing Lady Arabella the mongoose box, and arranging a meeting with her there that evening.

CHAPTER XVIII--EXIT OOLANGA
Adam follows Lady Arabella and warns her not to trust Ooolanga. He goes with her to the well room in her house and hides when Oolanga arrives. Oolanga, however, notices him and after ineffectually exchanging pistol fire, they grapple at the edge of the well. As Lady Arabella is about to join the fight to help Adam, his final surviving mongoose breaks loose and attacks her. She tears it in half and grabs Oolanga, pulling them both down into the well. Adams hears horrible screams and sees a baleful green light from the well, but when he leaves the room, he sees Lady Arabella is back out of the well and calmly following him.

CHAPTER XIX--AN ENEMY IN THE DARK
Adam goes home and sleeps on matters. The next morning he gets a courteous letter from Lady Arabella telling an entirely different story of events: that Oolanga had been after her emerald collar (hence the green glow) and had fallen into the well while grasping for it. Over breakfast, Adam reveals that he is in love with Mimi and wants to protect her from Lady Arabella.

CHAPTER XX--METABOLISM
Adam and Sir Nathaniel discuss Adam's account and the letter in detail, concluding that Mimi needs immediate protection and Lady Arabella must be destroyed.

CHAPTER XXI--GREEN LIGHT
The plan proceeds: Adam secretly marries Mimi and they go away to the Isle of Man. On their return, Sir Nathaniel reveals that the White Worm seems to know the secret; drawing the curtain, he shows Adam the sinister green glow from Diana's grove.

CHAPTER XXII--AT CLOSE QUARTERS
Adam and Sir Nathaniel investigate the glow, finally seeing the White Worm - revealed as a vast snake - in the woods. They run.

CHAPTER XXIII--IN THE ENEMY'S HOUSE
The Saltons and Sir Nathaniel receive an invitation to tea at Lady Arabella's house. Cautious but hoping to gain some information, they go. Attempts are made to trap them, first by filling the room with smoke, then putting out the lights, but they escape.

CHAPTER XXIV--A STARTLING PROPOSITION
Adam gets a strange letter from Lady Arabella asking for his help in selling her house. He decides to buy it himself, Sir Nathaniel having deduced that the White Worm is white through burrowing through valuable china clay deposits. His purchase is immediately expedited through lawyers, and Adam and Sir Nathaniel make plans to destroy the Worm by blocking the tunnels with sand so that it can't escape, then dynamiting it.

CHAPTER XXV--THE LAST BATTLE
As the sand-and-dynamite setup is prepared, Adam has a chat with Lady Arabella, who asks if he cuuriosity can be satisfied as to the depth of the well. Adam gets a reel of piano wire to sound it. At Mercy Farm, Lilla is alone, and Caswall visits; he arrives and recommences the psychic staring. Mimi turns up in time to drive him away, just as Lilla collapses.

CHAPTER XXVI--FACE TO FACE
Mimi finds Lilla is dead. She goes to the Castle to confront Caswall, who warns her against such accusations, so she goes home. Later she follows Lady Arabella to the Castle.

CHAPTER XXVII--ON THE TURRET ROOF
Not knowing where Lady Arabella is hiding, Mimi arrives at the Castle to find Caswall staring at the growing thunderstorm. He asks her to accompany her to the roof, where he is experimenting with his kite. He reveals himsef as totally barking:

"Come to me! You shall see now what you are despising, what you are warring against. All that you see is mine--the darkness as well as the light. I tell you that I am greater than any other who is, or was, or shall be. When the Master of Evil took Christ up on a high place and showed Him all the kingdoms of the earth, he was doing what he thought no other could do. He was wrong--he forgot _Me_. I shall send you light, up to the very ramparts of heaven. A light so great that it shall dissipate those black clouds that are rushing up and piling around us. Look! Look! At the very touch of my hand that light springs into being and mounts up--and up--and up!"

Lady Arabella, hiding nearby, decides that she'll kill him. She unhooks the reel carrying the kite wire, and unravels it behind her as she goes back to Diana's Grove, knowing he will follow it. There she awaits him:

She tore off her clothes, with feverish fingers, and in full enjoyment of her natural freedom, stretched her slim figure in animal delight. Then she lay down on the sofa--to await her victim! Edgar Caswall's life blood would more than satisfy her for some time to come.

CHAPTER XXVIII--THE BREAKING OF THE STORM
Mimi escapes from the tower roof by shooting the gate lock. She runs home to tell Adam and Sir Nathaniel, who notice the wire leading to Diana's Grove. Suddenly there's a huge explosion: lightning has struck the kite, destroying the Castle and presumably killing Caswell, conducting along the wire and setting off the dynamite under Diana's Grove. They go there to find the house destroyed and the remains of the White Worm and Lady Arabella amid the ruins. All is well, and Sir Nathaniel says:

"We know, my boy," he said, "that the unfortunate Lady Arabella is dead, and that the foul carcase of the Worm has been torn to pieces--pray God that its evil soul will never more escape from the nethermost hell."

Old Mr Salton recommends that Adam and Mimi go on a well-earned honeymoon.

Where to start? As is obvious and well-known, it's based on the Lambton Worm legend, and that's the chief point of interest. The book is full of "information dumps" of back-story, especially from Sir Nathaniel. Richard Salton plays so little part that you wonder why he's even in the novel and why Stoker didn't just conflate his character with Sir Nathaniel. The motivations of the villains are confused. The heroes are geeky, and there's a kind of Buffy/anime flavour to the story: amid horrific life-and-death struggles, the characters persist in having normal polite dealings with each other when not fighting. The book is thoroughly racist in its assumptions and language: Mimi is feisty from being half-Burmese, Caswall is dominant through being of Roman stock, and Oolanga is the scum of the earth for being African. There are strong resonances with Dracula: the psychic dominance of Caswell like Dracula, the knowledgeable mentor like Van Helsing; the heroine's expendable sidekick like Lucy; the marriage like that of Harker and Mina.

See Lair of the White Worm – From Novel to Film at Cinefantastique for a good summary and critique of the many plot weaknesses - not the least being how Adam continues to have polite dealings with Lady Arabella after she has shot one of his mongooses, probably strangled the second, and torn in half the third.

I persisted with the book because I liked Dracula and The Jewel of the Seven Stars and was expecting equal quality. But it was Stoker's last book, and I strongly suspect his valves were sticking. He wrote it in March-June 1911 when in poor financial circumstances and failing health from Bright's disease (he died in April 1912). Bram Stoker and the man who was Dracula (Barbara Belford, Da Capo Press, 2002) mentions that in February 1911 he applied for, and received, a grant from the Royal Literary Fund. He cited the aftermath of a paralytic stroke in 1906 and a breakdown from overwork in 1910. This all probably explains the book's incoherence. However, in a strange way it's pathologically interesting.

There's an excellent paper online, Objectifying Anxieties: Scientific Ideologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm (Diane Long Hoeveler, Érudit, Romanticism on the Net, Numéro 44, November 2006), that explores the Victorian "weird science" and social anxieties floating around in The Lair of the White Worm: "racial theories, physiognomy, criminology, brain science, and sexology":

For Stoker, the real threat of devolutionary power is clearly represented in the separate creation of the monstrous female, an immortal lamia who feeds on the whole bodies of her victims, not just their blood. Consider how Sir Nathaniel describes Lady Arabella March: "a woman, with all a woman’s wisdom and wit, combined with the heartlessness of a cocotte and the want of principle of a suffragette" but with the "reserved strength and impregnability of a diplodocus". Apparently, the woman demanding equality was an evolutionary aberration, a freak of nature, so monstrous that she could only be represented by a sickeningly immortal white worm who swallows her victims whole.

Another paper, Tropical Ovaries: Gynecological Degeneration and Lady Arabella's "Female Difficulties" in Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm (Piya Pal-Lapinski, in Women's Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945, Leslie W. Lewis, Ann L. Ardis, JHU Press, 2003), similarly makes a strong case for the imagery of the book reflecting a variety of anxieties about race, health and female degeneration current when Stoker wrote it.

While it probably wouldn't have been what Stoker wanted, I think Ken Russell's 1988 comedy horror adaptation was the best thing to do with the material, and a deal of the undercurrents of the book - particularly its mix of horror and sexuality - make it into the film. It's seldom on TV, but I think it's much under-rated; for critical analysis, see page 278 onward in Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films (Joseph Lanza, Chicago Review Press, 2007). One of the film's many internal allusions is the D'Ampton Worm song (video unfortunately not embeddable) which is a variant on CM Leumane's Lambton Worm folk song.

Out of interest, the lyrics to Lair of the White Worm, by the Dutch metal group God Dethroned, are quite an accurate synopsis of the book. See Bram Stoker Online, Project Gutenberg for other Stoker works.

PS: a minor puzzle. Did Stoker have any particular location in mind for The Lair of the White Worm? Sir Nathaniel's description at the beginning of Chapter III - here - along with other clues such as the arrival via Stafford, the easy access to Liverpool, and Mr Salton's comment...

My old friend, Sir Nathaniel de Salis, who, like myself, is a free-holder near Castra Regis--his estate, Doom Tower, is over the border of Derbyshire, on the Peak

put it somewhere on the eastern or north-eastern border of Derbyshire. But though it doesn't fit geographically, much of the location description ties in nicely with the Castleton / Great Ridge area, with its multiple peaks, Peveril Castle and Iron Age fort.

PPS Holly Voley's Pamela Colman Smith site has the illustrations for the 1911 edition; I love the somewhat naive style.
- Ray

Whistle, and I'll Come To You

This week there was a rare showing of Jonathan Miller's adaptation, the film that started the former Christmas Eve ghost story tradition on British television, of MR James' Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad (part 1 (also above)/ part 2 / part 3). As the BFI Screenline commentary says, MR James purists didn't like some aspects, but it does bring a nice ambiguity by portraying the protagonist as evidentally mentally fragile.

Here's the original story - James has a pleasantly wry turn of phrase

The Colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

- and Project Gutenberg has the anthology from which it comes, Ghost Stories of Antiquary (part 1 / part 2). The title, incidentally, is borrowed from that of a Robert Burns poem.
- Ray

A Kafka day

Interesting synchronicity today, spinning off from going to get a cat collar ID tag engraved. How things have moved on; I was expecting it to be done by hand or using a pantograph (for instance). But no, they used a very nice computer engraving machine not unlike this one. It raised vague resonances, and then I realised what it reminded me of: the execution machine in Kafka's 1919 story In the Penal Colony, which kills prisoners by engraving on them the law they have broken. The Condemned Man in story is a servant who has been convicted of falling asleep on guard duty and threatening his master, so the words will be "Honour your superiors!". The story is an examination of a psychopathically authoritarian officer in a Third World or colonial penal colony in the tropics, who is so logically consistent in his sense of duty that he will subject himself to the device when he feels he has failed to be just. What exactly it means is debatable: see Fear and Trembling in the Penal Colony, by Kyle McGee, at The Kafka Project.

The device is very like the computer engraving machine, comprising the "Bed" on which the victim is put; the "Harrow", needles that do the writing; and the "Inscriber", the programmable control box for the Harrow. I was about to pass this on to technovelgy.com, which collects SF precursors to real-world science, technology and culture, but I find automatic engraving machines (although ones based on a disposable photographic template) existed at least as far back as 1901).

Later I read on the Telegraph website Japanese gamer 'marries' Nintendo DS character. I'm not entirely sure this is unprecedented - I vaguely recall stories a decade ago about the virtual idol Kyoko Date getting marriage proposals - but anyway the current news story immediately recalls one of the central themes of William Gibson's Idoru, in which the lead singer for a rock band becomes engaged to marry the idoru Rei Toei, an entirely artificial personality (admittedly a high-level AI with a holographic presence - rather more sophisticated than a Nintendo DS character). This is definitely one for Technovelgy, but I see someone beat me to it: Man Marries Anime Game Character.

On skimming my copy of Idoru to refresh my memory of the details, what should I find in the first few pages but an allusion to the Kafka story?

The stairway opened into The Penal Colony, a disco, deserted at this hour, pulses of silent red lightning marking Laney's steps across the dance floor. A machine of some kind was suspended from the ceiling. Each of its articulated arms, suggestive of antique dental equipment, was tipped with sharp steel. Pens, he thought, vaguely remembering Kafka's story. Sentence of guilt, graven in the flesh of the condemned man's back. Wincing at a memory of upturned eyes unseeing. Pushed it down. Moved on.
- Idoru, William Gibson, 1996

Gibson's previous novel, the 1994, Virtual Light, by the way, has a similar idea where Rydell recalls his uncle having a robot-created tattoo.

Rydell's uncle, the one who'd gone to Africa with the army and hadnlt come back, had had a couple of tattoos. The best one wenr right across his back, this big swirly dragon with horns and a sort of goofy grin. He'd gotten that one in Korea, eight colours and it had all been done by a computer. He'd told Rydell how the computer had mapped his back and showed him exactly what it was going to look like when it was done. Then he had to lie down on this table while this robot put the tattoo on. Rydell had imagined a robot kind of like a vacuum-cleaner, but with twisty chrome arms had [sic] needles on the end. But his uncle said it was more like being fed through a dot-matrix printer, and he'd had to go back eight times, one time for each colour.

This may also have come true. I'm not 100% convinced of the veracity of this 2002 Avanova report, Tattooing robot unveiled at hi-tech trade fair, but it looks very Kafka. Robot tattooing doesn't strike me as technically unfeasible, but it would need a lot more than a CAD-driven needle; skin being a flexible substrate, there needs to be some provision for stabilising the region being worked on (down to the skill of a human tattoo artist).

Addendum: After a little more reading, I find the connection between tattooing and engraving is closer than I realised. It appears that the now-standard tattoo machine derives from a stencil cutting device, Edison's 1876 Electric Pen and Press.
- Ray

Looks and sounds bad

Interesting video from YouTube: Kate Bush's 1986 Experiment IV, a Quatermass-style story about the development of a lethal sound at a research establishment; it still manages to be scary despite the jokey treatment. I don't know if it's a case of conscious/unconscious allusion, but the scenario is remarkably similar to David Langford's "What Happened at Cambridge IV" (in the anthology Digital Dreams, 1990) about the development of a lethal image at a research establishment. The latter is within Langford's mythos that started with his 1988 "Blit" (originally in Interzone) and continued in "comp.basilisk FAQ" (Nature, 1999) and "Different Kinds of Darkness" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2000).

See Motif of harmful sensation for many more examples of this idea. This is an Internet Archive document, because in March 2009 it was deleted from Wikipedia as original research. However, it's worth preserving as a catalogue of the myth, literature and culture concerning sights and sounds that can grab the mind in some harmful way (not necessarily fatally). This very common in SF and fantasy, which is no surprise (classically, Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos and Robert W Chambers' The King in Yellow spring to mind), but it extends to other genres such as mythology (e.g. the Medusa) and comedy (notably Monty Python's sketch about a deadly joke). A lot of the examples outside SF are entirely new to me. I'd never read Mark Twain's "A Literary Nightmare", for example, and while I'd heard of the Paris syndrome that fazes Japanese tourists, I didn't know about two other forms of culture shock, Jerusalem syndrome and Stendhal syndrome.
- Ray

Christmas Ghost Stories

It used to be a tradition, one that unfortunately dwindled, to have atmospheric and very English ghost stories on late-night BBC television on Christmas Eve. A few are findable on YouTube, however.

One, part of a series produced in the 1970s by Lawrence Gordon Clark, was The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens (part 1 / 2 / 3 / 4) filmed at Birchen Coppice Cutting and Tunnel Mouth, Kidderminster, Worcestershire. Many others dramatised MR James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (Gutenberg ETexts 8486 and 9629). They included Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, filmed as Whistle And I'll Come To You (parts 1 / 2 / 3) and Number 13 (parts 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5). The Woman in Black is very much in the same vein; based on Susan Hill's 1983 novel, the TV film was by Nigel Kneale (see parts 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11).

That reminds me: check out The Incredible Robert Baldick (PDF), an extended article, archived at The Mausoleum Club, about Kneale's little-remembered The Incredible Robert Baldick: Never Come Night. Broadcast in October 1972, it brought Kneale's frequent "ancient evil" theme to a Victorian setting, producing an effect rather like an MR James story with more technology and action (Baldick is a scientist-investigator with his own private train). It was a pilot episode for a series that never came about, due apparently to scheduling issues, various BBC internal politics, and the possibility of legal action by a Robert Baldick Jnr who objected to the use of his father's name (it's hard to see why, since Baldick in the story is a thoroughly positive character). See YouTube again for a clip from the programme.
- Ray

Halloween miscellany

Journal of a Sinister Bookreader brings you a horrible literary miscellany for October 31st. From La Petite Claudine: The Commonplace Book of HP Lovecraft: "ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction". Ghosts and Scholars: Rosemary and Darroll Pardoe's site featuring a compendium of material relating to their MR James newsletter, including its archive of contemporary fiction and commentary. Ruthless Rhymes: "A site dedicated to the poetry of Harry Graham and the myriad of morbid poets he inspired". From the macabrely comic Edward Gorey: The Gashlycrumb Tinies (a Harry Graham style A-Z ); The Beastly Baby; and at Geoff Klock's blog Remarkable, an appreciation of Gorey's The Curious Sofa that despite its designation "a pornographic work by Ogdred Weary" is completely inexplicit, naive yet intensely sinister. By HH Munro ('Saki'): the classic story Sredni Vashtar, one of a number of this author's short stories (see Project Gutenberg) with a distinctly macabre turn. From Neil Gaiman's official site: Cool Stuff, various free content including the short story, A Study in Emerald (PDF), a dark inversion of the Sherlock Holmes mythos. Finally, from YouTube: Franz Kafka's "It's A Wonderful Life" (part 1 / part 2 / part 3) in which Kafka, played by Richard E Grant, attempts to find inspiration for Metamorphosis while the sinister Woland the Knifeman lurks at his door.

- Ray

Cautionary tales

Re-reading Kingsley's The Water-Babies reminded me of how dark and surreal Victorian children's fiction can be (bearing in mind that many works now viewed as children's classics, like The Water-Babies, weren't actually written for children. I just found online three of my favourites of this genre, all working on the premise of children's naughtiness creating changes in reality.

The most frightening is probably Lucy Lane Clifford's The New Mother, a fable in which a brother and sister are incited to naughtiness by a strange girl they meet after the fair has been in town. Their mother threatens that if the naughtiness continues, she will go away and they will get a new mother "with glass eyes and a wooden tail". This comes from Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise (Macmillan, 1882) which included The New Mother.  Other Lucy Lane Clifford works were, for their time, considerably groundbreaking, such Mrs Keith's Crime, which concerns an ailing young widow who makes the considered decision to kill her also-consumptive daughter; and Aunt Anne, the story of a woman of 68 who marries a man of 27.

The background is interesting: a novelist and journalist, Clifford was half of a highly intellectual partnership as the wife of the philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford (see Such Silver Currents: the Story of William and Lucy Clifford 1845-1929, Monty Chisholm, Lutterworth Press, 2002, ISBN-13: 9780718830175). Charlotte Moore, writing in the Guardian (Mind the gap, Wednesday May 22 2002) reads another Clifford story, Wooden Tony, as a description of autism, suspecting it to be based on first-hand knowledge. From outside the world, the story of a girl who doesn't relate to human concerns, could also be interpreted in that light. However, Moore's implication that WK Clifford was autistic

She was "the wife of the philosopher and mathematician WK Clifford"; that phrase rings a warning bell"

doesn't especially wash. According to the ODNB, despite his mathematical genius he was an entertaining public speaker and a sociable and popular guy:

Clifford's friends described him as having an amicable attitude towards everyone but enjoying himself most when planning children's parties and joining in the entertainment.
- Albert C. Lewis, "Clifford, William Kingdon (1845–1879)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006, accessed 7 Sept 2008

There's more about him and Lucy in the paper William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) and his wife Lucy (1846–1929) (PDF) by the abovementioned Monty Chisholm.

The second story I like is Harry's rash wish, and how the fairies granted it (The Hon. Mrs Greene, Frederick Warne and Co, 1891). This concerns a boy called Harry Thompson who is irritated by his baby sister and says, "I hate babies! I wish there were no such things in the world!". The next day he wakes and finds himself in a deserted landscape, where he eventually finds a single surviving man, 115 years old, who recalls how a century earlier someone's wish had caused no more babies to be born. Despite the twee mechanism of the wish, the story has a borderline-SF flavour (Greybeard by Brian Aldiss and The Children of Men by PD James naturally spring to mind). It can be found online here at the State University System of Florida libraries Literature for Children, or here at the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida (both excellent archives of this genre). The author, the Honourable Mrs Louisa Lilias (aka Lelias) Greene (1833-1886), was a minor Irish aristocrat, a daughter of one of the Baron Plunkets. Her works - see the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature at Google Books - are largely forgotten.

A third story on the dangers of naughtiness and incautious wishing is Edith Nesbit's 1899 Whereyouwanttogoto or The Bouncible Ball. The author and political activist Edith Nesbit is best known for her children's classics, notably The Railway Children, Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet. Her stories didn't, however, exclusively target a child readership; Five Children and It (as a series of stories) and The Seven Dragons and Other Stories (from which Whereyouwanttogoto comes) were originally published in the Strand Magazine.

Whereyouwanttogoto concerns Selim and Thomasina, two bored siblings stuck with uptight relatives in London, who are transported by a sentient rubber ball to an idyllic magical seaside where they can play as they like, go to bed as late as they wish, and every meal is unsupervised and delicious. Yet this paradise proves a tenuous reality, which is instantly reshaped by wishes based in dissatisfaction.

The next day they got out as early as they could and played water football with the seal and the Bouncible Ball, and when dinnertime came it was lobster and ices. But Thomasina was in a bad temper. She said, "I wish it was duck." And before the words had left her lips it was cold mutton and ricepudding, and they had to sit up to table and eat it properly too, and the housemaid came round to see that they didn't leave any bits on the edges of their plates, or talk with their mouths full.

This idea has been revisited many times in later fiction; it reminds me of the Star Trek Old Series episode Shore Leave; or the Red Dwarf episode Better Than Life, in which Rimmer's negative thoughts sabotage a virtual reality paradise; or even the "monsters from the id" that destroyed the Krell in Forbidden Planet - a motif that Colin Wilson paid homage to in his novel The Philosopher's Stone, where much the same happens to his Lovecraftian Old Ones:

"They had overlooked one absurd point. As the conscious mind learnt to project its visions of reason and order, the vast energies of the subconscious writhed in their prison, and projected visions of chaos"

Addendum: Victorian Fantasy (Stephen Prickett, Baylor University Press, 2005, ISBN 1932792309) looks an interesting analysis of this subject ("Far from being just children's literature, Victorian fantasy is an art form that flourished in opposition to the repressive social and intellectual conditions of Victorianism"). Prickett, for instance, contrasts the approaches of Lucy Clifford and Edith Nesbit. He argues that the former exemplifies an approach of threatening children with irrational horrors (The New Mother, ostensibly a Christian moral tale about obedience, has far older archetypal deeps); while the latter sought to exorcise such horrors. Nesbit's stories feature supernatural creatures, but they are generally non-threatening when the children in the stories interact with them rationally. A deal of Victorian Fantasy is previewable via Google Books.
- Ray