Thursday, September 27, 2012


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
 
Sometimes life's dark side has a mundane explanation for what seems inexplicable to the viewer...


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
 
Then they held each other, bodies coming together in a moment that others would call sinful and shameful and evil, but one they knew was divine and ordained of old...


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
 
Alison never answered any of the hundreds of letters Miles sent her afterward.  He has assumed her shame quenched her love for him but he desperately hopes she will keep the vow they made with God as a witness to meet again at the place of their sin.  Now, back in Arden he learns that he has repressed a horrible memory-- of awakening at the quarry, to find Alison nude and lifeless, her skull shattered by rocks pounded against them...

 

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

 
 

 

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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)

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