Darling, It's Simply A Mystery And Much Too
Awful To Talk About
"I
won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me
... the most dreadful thing..." Peter Straub, Ghost Story, 1979
True crime horrifies me. Perhaps this is because I have personally
known people who were victims of evil deeds...
Forty plus years ago, I knew a girl who
simply vanished and never again returned to our junior high classroom. Her body was eventually found in a remote
wooded area. The newspaper article spoke
of skeletal remains chained to a tree.
Local whispers spoke of a drunken father with unnatural desires...
 |
| Ghost Story: Alice Krige as Alma Mobley aka Eva Galli aka a woman who didn't appreciate being killed by a band of rich young drunks |
Horrible stories fascinate us. And I am not immune to that fascination,
though I prefer the nightmares that I am able to end by closing the covers
of book or pushing a DVD player OFF
button...
In the early 1800s, a
jurist in Germany wrote stories of fantastic happenings that caused shivers to
dance the spines of his genteel readers.
He was a man of many talents but E T A Hoffman made a non-career
enhancing mistake by using them almost as soon as he sat down at his desk for
the first time in his first job. Rather than
chill folks with grisly and eerie tales, he thought to amuse them with
sketches. Unflattering caricatures of
military officers were passed around at a ball in Posen during the Carnival
season. It took the authorities little
time to figure out who drew them...
Young Hoffman was showing promise and his
superiors in Berlin were loath to dismiss him over an act of misguided youthful
dissolution. So, to teach him a lesson,
he found himself "promoted" to a remote post in the boondocks of the
boondocks of Prussia with duties that included finding surnames for Jews who
were slow to understand their duty to acknowledge the cultural superiority of
their gentile neighbors. [The process of
forcing Jews living in Teutonic lands to use European style family names began
in 1787 as a follow-up to the "Edict of Tolerance" issued five years
earlier. Napoleon liked the ideas of the
Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II so well that he, too, decided in 1808 that
Jews living in lands under his control wanted surnames.]...
Ernst Hoffman, despite tendencies towards
alcoholism and syphilis, lived with an active and restless mind that expressed
itself as a composer of music, playwright, sketch artist, and writer of stories
where the grotesque and macabre merged with the ordinary lives of men and
women. His novelette, The Nutcracker and The Mouse King,
inspired Tchaikovsky's ballet which every local dance troupe in the United
States forces itself to inflict upon the neighboring community during the
Christmas season.
 |
| Hoffman's The Sandman adapted for the stage by Bob Fisher and performed at the Oracle Theatre, Chicago |
[Sigmund Freud was particularly impressed by
Hoffman's The Sandman as was Ernst
Jentsch, a psychologist who investigated that curious psychological phenomenon
which we all experience at times: something ordinary and extremely familiar
suddenly seems alien and foreign to us.
Elaborating on Jentsch's turn-of-the-century
research in a 1919 essay, The Uncanny,
Freud saw such moments as linked to unconscious desires, forbidden feelings too
horrible to publicly acknowledge or admit to ourselves.
The element of blindness in Hoffman's story
corresponds, to Freud's way of thinking, to the Greek tale of Oedipus who
blinds himself upon learning he has joyfully bedded his own mother after
killing dad. For Sigmund, self-blinding
equates to self-castration. He seems to
have been fixated on genital mutilation:
writing in Moses and Monotheism
(1939), Freud argues "Circumcision is a symbolical substitute of
castration, a punishment which the primaeval father dealt his sons long ago out
of the awfulness of his power...."]
 |
| Edgar Allan Poe: a troubled man who did not well at West Point but who excelled at traipsing life's darker paths |
The darkness of Hoffman's stories helped
inspire a dark and troubled genius across the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe, to pen "The
Murders In The Rue Morgue", often said to be the "first detective
story"...
Two women, a mother and her daughter, are
brutally murdered in a locked fourth story apartment in Poe's tale. A man named Adolphe Le Bon is charged with
having done the savage deed although no evidence can be found to link him to
the crime. The streets of Paris are,
unfortunately, not safe despite the arrest of M. Le Bon. A gentleman named C Auguste Dupin takes an
interest in the affair for he is intrigued by the mystery of it all and does
not wish to see an innocent man mount the steps to the guillotine...
Dupin eventually solves the
"murder" by deducing that an escaped "ourang-outan" killed
one of the women as it attempted to shave her with a straight razor as it had
observed its owner shave himself on a daily basis. The sight of blood filled the ape with a lust
to cause more death, inciting him to strangle the daughter who walked in on
this scene of horror...
 |
| 1932 film adaptation of Poe's Murders |
Monsieur Dupin and his skill in using intellect
to solve an impossible mystery provided a useful role model for Sherlock Holmes during his
investigation of the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, apparently at the jaws
of a supernatural hellhound, a rather common creature in British folklore. This
adventure, the third novel in Arthur Conan Doyle's series of stories about
the English detective, first saw print in serialized form from August 1901 through April 1902
on the pages of The Strand magazine,
a popular British periodical which published fact and fiction by writers such
as Doyle, H G Wells, Agatha Christie, and Rudyard Kipling from the early 1890s
until 1950...
Holmes, being a rationalist, arrives at a
reasonable solution to the demise of Sir Chuck.
His creator, however, had a fondness for the mysterious. A Conan Doyle, MD, held a firm belief that
spirits of the dead could communicate with the living (a faith born out of the
tragedy of his son's death during battle in World War One) but ultimately saw
his reputation suffer when he vigorously defended the authenticity of photographs
which appear to capture fairies at play with two teenage girls in the English
countryside...
 |
| Miss Elsie Wright converses with a Fairy, circa 1920, in a photo of dubious authenticity defended by Arthur Conan Doyle |
[In Doyle's defense, we might note that many
men of science took strong interest in the question of the survival of the
personality after death during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among them was the dogged pragmatist Thomas
Edison who reportedly spent the last decade of his life working on a device
that would allow the living to speak with the dead.]
Doyle took the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles from legends attached to Squire
Richard Cabell, charitably described by contemporaries as a "monstrously
evil man" who lived to hunt foxes and murder wives. Inasmuch as the local peasantry held to the
opinion that Squire Richard sold his soul to the Devil, they were not
particularly upset when he died in July 1667.
However, the very night that Cabell was entombed near the village of
Buckfastleigh in Devon, a pack of phantom hounds came baying across the moors
to mourn at his gravesite. A year
passed. On the first anniversary of Squire
Richard's death, his brutish specter led the ghostly hellhounds on a hunt. And it has done so, the story goes, each July
5th since...
 |
| Aaron Campbell illustration for A Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles |
Here I recall an elderly woman who lived near
me when I was a child. We never met and
my eyes saw her but once in more than ten years. Her home was a spacious and columned affair
as befits the Deep South. The grounds
were a manicured jungle of flower-filled shrubs and majestic trees towering
over a neatly trimmed carpet of Saint Augustine grass. Yet this lady rarely stepped beyond her front
door. A local grocery delivered her
food. Her help-- a maid and a gardener--
ran other household errands and took whatever needed to be mailed to the post
office...
Late in the twilight on one summer's day, I
happened to be walking past her home as she stood on the front porch and
surveyed the lilies and hydrangeas of her garden. She was a small and slender woman. She wore an ankle length black dress with
long sleeves. Our eyes met. She looked down towards the ground
immediately. A few seconds later, her
front door closed behind her...
 |
| Ghosts and Old Oaks: A Southern Love Story |
The local story was that her son had been a
prominent officer in a local bank. He
had embezzled funds. Upon discovery of
this betrayal of an employer's trust, he chose the gentleman's way out, sparing
his family the disgrace of a public trial.
Knowledge of his misdeeds became public despite the suicide. His mother, once a vibrant butterfly of the
Central Louisiana social scene, withdrew into herself because of the shame,
becoming a mystery created by the personal horrors of her life...
Past sins intruding into the present fuel
many literary and cinematic excursions into the oft intertwined realms of
mystery and horror...
I recently found a wonderful example of this
linking of themes in my own home library while sifting through a stack of
"when I have the time to just relax, sit down and read" books. The long ignored title was Peter Straub's If You Could See Me Now which tells the
story of Miles Teagarden's terrifying summer twenty years after his last meeting
with his beautiful cousin Alison Greening on the night of June 21, 1955 at a
moonlit rock quarry near the farming town of Arden, Wisconsin, as they
skinny-dipped...
Miles was thirteen, Alison was fourteen. They kissed playfully as they swam naked...
 |
| Ghost Story: The Chowder Society wishes Eva Galli had never died |
Afterwards, Alison extracted a promise from
Miles that, come hell or high water, they would meet at the rock quarry twenty
years later. Teagarden is on his way to
Arden as Straub begins a deftly worked tale of memories and vengeance. Now a lecturer at a college in the Northeast,
Miles hopes to complete his doctoral dissertation in the balmy summer of
1975. But, far more importantly, with a
failed marriage to haunt his thoughts, Teagarden hopes to reconnect with his
beloved Alison...
Miles finds himself unwelcome in his mother's
hometown. A local girl, the first of
many, has just been savagely murdered and mutilated. And the very long memories of small town
preachers and gossips recall his scandalous coupling with Alison Greening, seen
both Teagarden's other cousin, Duane, and a high school jock who grows up to be
the local chief of police. Neither could
resist telling the story of Miles and Alison's frenzied adolescent coupling to
all who would listen, the violence and fury of their love-making...
 |
| A Conan Doyle also gave us the adventures of Professor Challenger who found dinosaurs on a remote plateau in the Amazon |
The pious townsfolk of Arden have long
believed Miles Teagarden got away with rape and murder because of his youth and
his family's prominence in the community.
But they were wrong in their finger-pointing. A surly cousin named Duane and a future
police chief took advantage of Miles' exhausted sleep to know the pleasure of Alison's
flesh and then to brutally and eternally (or so they thought) silence her
tongue. But, now, a girl long dead
returns to avenge her murder and find the cousin she adores so he can share
death with her, forever in her arms...
 |
| Alice Krige as Bathsheba |
[In the way that unconnected things are
sometimes connected, I note a coincidence in Straub's story to the Concho
Valley where I live. We have our own
little town of Arden in Irion County, named for a pioneer couple who settled
the area in 1885. It is now a ghost
town. And the surname of Straub's
troubled and forgetful protagonist has its own Concho connection-- Jack Teagarden, one of the jazz world's most
highly regarded trombonists, grew up in San Angelo where he first played music
professionally. He went on to perform
with Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong, becoming one of the first white musicians
to show racial barriers the contempt they merit.]
Reading Straub's story, his third novel, I
was struck by its thematic resemblance to his fifth book, Ghost Story. The heroes of both
tales are young teachers unable to fit into the world around them
gracefully. The two stories feature long
dead women who seek vengeance against those who made them dead. Memories of violence and sex-- too horrible
to be spoken aloud-- are repressed but find their own voice and wreak havoc
when they speak...
 |
| Gustave Dore illustration for Poe's The Raven |
Critics took to Ghost Story, a long and complex novel which tells the story of a
group of elderly men, prominent lawyers and doctors in the town of
Milburn. Each week, these members of the
"Chowder Society" meet to outdo each other in the telling of gruesome
horror stories. This is their way of
honoring an agreement to never speak of a night in 1929 and the death of a
woman they knew as Eva Galli...
But the critics were not overly fond of the
novel's film version. I do respectfully
disagree. Ghost Story, the movie, tells a vastly condensed version of the
tale, removing a number of characters and plot twists. But the true test of the movie is whether or
not if provides a good grisly afternoon for the viewer...
It does do this. There has long been, and always shall be, a
debate on the merits of a written piece of fiction and one which unfolds across
wide silver screens. But they are
different genres and it probably as realistic to denigrate a filmed version of
a novel as it would be to criticize a painting of musicians for failing to
delight the ear of the viewer...
Plus, we have Alice Krige in the filmed Ghost Story. She plays the dual role of Eva Galli and Alma
Mobley, her returned-from-the-grave incarnation. There is a scene in this film which also
stars Fred Astaire and John Houseman-- a scene most pleasing to the eye-- where
Alma stands at a window, staring out a restless sea before she turns and slowly
walks toward the camera. But I digress,
perhaps revealing too much of why I say critics be damned if they don't love
the movie as I love it...
Ms Krige was born in South Africa, She often plays beautiful and wicked women. Her laughter is throaty, delightfully
devilish in its implied menace. Oh, If a
girl must be bad for the sake of the story, let her be as lovely and charming
as this one who also has portrayed Bathsheba, the wife of a Hittite captain,
whose rooftop bathing caught the eye of King David. Readers familiar with this Biblical story
know what David did and how Uriah's wife became the mother of Solomon...
 |
| The beauty of a woman, the sin of a king: Bathsheba bathes on a rooftop |
Unlike many tales, though, what David did was
awful but it was not too awful for an ancient chronicler to talk about. Nor was why he did it too much of a mystery. We today speak of a king's sin. He intentionally sent a man into battle,
knowing that the man would die and his wife would be free to lay naked in the
king's bed...
But what would we have done had we too gazed
out our palace window as Bathsheba loosed her robes? That is a mystery we cannot answer. Knowing what we would do is simply too awful
to talk about, for, as an unseen Presence once advised Cain, sin couches at our
door and its urge is ever toward us. But
few are those who remember that they may yet be its master...
 |
| Ghost Story |
LRNARTS MARKETPLACE:
Prints and greeting
cards by Louis R Nugent available through Fine Art America. Choose from nearly two hundred unique ideas
for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for someone who deserves
something out of the ordinary.
Individual cards can be purchased for under $5. High quality print prices start at $22.
Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.
Fine Art America now
features painting, drawings, and photographs by eleven artists who celebrate
the majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and
animals of West Texas. Claim your part
of a rugged, beautiful and dry corner of America's Southwest:
Fine Arts America now
features work celebrating the mysterious
and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:
CREDITS
Note:
All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia,
without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Photograph
by Ben Fuchsen of Bob Fisher's adaptation of The Sandman by ETA Hoffman performed at the Oracle Theatre from
timeoutchicago.com; Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, Universal Pictures,
Director: Robert Florey) memorabilia from tumblr.com; Alice Krige as Bathsheba
stills from King David, 1985, Paramount
Pictures, Director: Bruce Beresford; illustration for A Conan Doyle's The
Hound of the Baskervilles by Aaron
Campbell from aaroncampbellillustration.blogspot.com; Fairy offering flower to
Elsie Wright, circa 1920, photographed by Frances Griffiths from www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm;
poster for The Lost World (1925, First
National Pictures, Director:Harry O Hoyt) from supra-quintessence. com; Ghost
Story (1981, Universal Pictures,
Director: John Irvin) poster from movieposter.com; stills from Ghost Story (1981) digitally altered by Louis Nugent;
"Ghosts and Old Oaks" from Louis Nugent (faa.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment