The Weird Tale, page 22
In the tales in Can Such Things Be? Bierce is just as careful in using the supernatural as he is in avoiding it in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. We have already noted the tales that approach science fiction: what they represent is an extension of the boundaries of the natural world to encompass what, given our current state of scientific knowledge, appear to be supernatural events. Many other tales—perhaps the most effective is “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot,” although “Staley Fleming’s Hallucination,” “The Night-Doings at ‘Deadman’s,’” and “Beyond the Wall” all fit the pattern—are simply tales of revenge in which the supernatural is a scarcely veiled metaphor for the conscience of the guilty.
Perhaps Bierce’s most remarkable supernatural tale is the much-discussed “Death of Halpin Frayser.” Recently a controversy has arisen over what actually happens in this tale and whether the supernatural comes into play at all. In a brilliant and ingenious essay, Robert C. Maclean[135] has argued that it is possible to explain all the events of the tale naturally, with the conclusion that the murderer of Halpin Frayser is his own father, disguised as the private detective Jaralson. Maclean’s work is too involved to discuss in detail here,[136] but both he and William Bysshe Stein, who discussed the problem earlier,[137] reject the obvious supernatural “explanation” of the events of the tale—that Frayser is killed by his own deceased mother. But I sense that they and other critics do so because they are unwarrantedly embarrassed at the mere existence of the supernatural, which in any case does not preclude other (e.g., psychoanalytical) interpretations. Bierce leaves hardly any doubt of Frayser’s incestuous love for his mother (a love that she reciprocates), and it appears—thus far Maclean is correct—that we are to understand that Frayser and his mother fled separately west and lived as man and wife. Frayser kills his wife/mother, but she comes back from the dead and murders her son as he lurks by her grave. Any other reconstruction of events will make the epigraph—a passage from the sage Hali—inexplicable: “Whereas in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate” (3.13). Frayser’s mother is the “lich so raised up.” The phrase “natural affection” is interesting; for the mother it suggests merely the blind destructiveness of the undead, but for Frayser it is meant to convey his profoundly unnatural love of his mother. At the end of the story the detective and a sheriff, standing over the murdered body of Halpin Frayser as it lies atop his mother’s grave, hear “the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh . . . a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable!” (3.43; my emphases). Now unless Bierce is deliberately trying to deceive us (something he never does in this precise way) or is suggesting that the two characters are victims of a collective hallucination, this can only be the laugh of the “body without the spirit” that is Halpin Frayser’s mother. To say that this is merely a tale about “zombies” (as Mary Elizabeth Grenander does in dismissing the supernatural interpretation) is both to imply that there is something inherently subliterary about zombies (itself a questionable assertion) and to misconstrue the role of the supernatural here. What we have is a double irony: Halpin Frayser is killed by his own murder victim, not out of simple revenge (for his mother has no “remembrance” of the crime), but by sheer chance—the same sort of chance that trapped Cthulhu in the sinking R’lyeh in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” It is the haplessness (and hopelessness) of human beings against the inexorable course of fate that is at the heart of this story.
The clarity and precision, both of diction and imagery, that are central to Bierce’s actual methodology of writing—his scorn of slang and dialect is too well documented for citation—frequently augment and in some senses even create the sense of horror in his work. Lovecraft censures Bierce for his “prosaic angularity” (SHiL 408), remarking that “many of the stories are . . . marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived from journalistic models” (SHiL 406). I regret to say that the entirety of this statement is false. Oh, Lovecraft is free to regret the lack of “atmosphere” in Bierce, but he seems not to have understood that the harrowing and pitiless clarity of Bierce’s images is the secret to much of his effectiveness. More surprisingly, Lovecraft appears to have been unaware that Bierce’s style is, fundamentally, modelled upon the same eighteenth-century idiom that served as the basis for his own style. But whereas Lovecraft’s Asianic, densely textured prose drew from Johnson and Gibbon, the spare, laconic, Attic style of Bierce derives from Swift and Addison. Clarity was Bierce’s hallmark. There is never an imprecise sentence or image in his work, never a time when we do not know exactly what is going on. One tale in particular, “The Moonlit Road,” emphasises this tendency in an especially satisfying way. Jack Sullivan remarks—rather oddly, I think—that the story “achieves an almost mind-numbing complexity by emerging from three fragmented points of view,”[138] but Sullivan is mistaken if he thinks obfuscation is Bierce’s aim. Each character—even the murdered Julia Hetman, “through the medium Bayrolles” (3.74)—tells his or her side of the story, and only by combining these three accounts can we arrive at the truth of the matter. Joel Hetman, Julia’s son, begins the tale. He has been summoned home from college because, as his father says, his mother has been murdered by an intruder who was seen entering the house but escaped undetected. Later, as he and his father walk along a moonlit road, the father sees an apparition, but the son sees nothing; the father then disappears. The father (under the pseudonym Caspar Grattan) then takes up the narrative. He was a jealous man and wished to test his wife’s faithfulness. He told his wife he would be away until the next afternoon, but returned home in the evening to see someone enter through the back door. Enraged, he burst in and killed his wife, who was cowering in a corner of a room. It is the apparition of his wife that he sees on the moonlit road, and he flees in terror. Julia Hetman now reports that the intruder was just that—not a lover but a burglar who was frightened away by the return of her husband. But she, imagining that the burglar has returned, tries to hide in the dark. She does not know who killed her, and when her spirit meets her husband and son on the moonlit road it is to express her “great love and poignant pity” (3.78), not her hatred or revenge. Here again the supernatural is used in almost a clinically precise way to fill in the missing gaps in the story. And yet, this tale finally becomes a testament to Bierce’s authorial supremacy: only he (and, now, the reader) knows the true circumstances of the story; each of the characters is missing some vital element of the picture, even the deceased Julia Hetman, since “the sum of what we know at death is the measure of what we know afterward of all that went before” (3.77).
Clarity of expression is the key to another story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This tale is a masterwork because of the almost mathematically exact way in which the style leads us to reverse the period of waking and dreaming in Peyton Farquhar. The first section of the tale is the “waking” part, with the grim preparations for an all too real execution; but Bierce presents it almost as if it were a dream (or nightmare) of Farquhar’s: we are not told here the crime for which he is being executed; Farquhar’s sensations seem both dulled (“A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!” [2.30]) and preternaturally heightened (the ticking of his watch sounds like “the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil” [2.31]). But in the brief second section we learn that Farquhar was convicted of passing on information to the enemy, and in the third section (Farquhar’s delusion) every image is crystal clear: he feels a “sharp pain in his wrist” (2.36) from the ropes; as he struggles in the water to free himself “his whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish!” (2.37). Freed, he finds himself
now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf—saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon-flies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat—all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water. (2.37–38)
And it goes on—in the split second before his death Farquhar’s mind conjures up images far more lucid and precise than in the minutes before his execution.
Bierce was a satirist, and a great one. In the final analysis, I am not sure that Bierce’s satire—or any satire—requires a philosophical justification: it will be valid insofar as it is skilfully manipulated. For Bierce, satire is philosophy; his whole world view can be inferred from it. More, it is satire that links the whole of his literary work—war stories, Swiftian satires, supernatural tales, journalism, poetry, and those two masterpieces of wit, Fantastic Fables and The Devil’s Dictionary. This overarching satiric tendency may help to explain certain anomalies in the horror tales as well as to redeem certain of Bierce’s lesser stories. But first a curiosity about Bierce’s satiric method: all his satire has an undercurrent of violence. In a sense, of course, this may be said of satire generally, but even to call Bierce’s satire Juvenalian is a little mild. Note the degree of viciousness in even so harmless a thing as a parody of conventional greetings in The Land Beyond the Blow:
The tigerherd having perceived me, now came striding forward, brandishing his crook and shaking his fists with great vehemence, gestures which I soon learned were, in that country, signs of amity and good-will. But before knowing that fact I had risen to my feet and thrown myself into a posture of defense, and as he approached I led for his head with my left, following with a stiff right upon his solar plexus, which sent him rolling on the grass in great pain. After learning something of the social customs of the country I felt extreme mortification in recollecting this breach of etiquette, and even to this day I cannot think upon it without a blush. (1.131)
Bierce’s satire is always of this sort: it is just on this side of gratuitous nastiness. When, in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar is struggling in his mind to free himself from his bonds, Bierce obtrudes this incredible aside: “What splendid effort!—what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah. that was a fine endeavor! Bravo!” (2.36). This would be bad enough for one who is actually fighting for his life but is particularly unnerving for one who is only hallucinating. “The Applicant,” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, is neither a war story nor a horror tale but a satire: it paints the grim picture of a man turned away from a “Home for Old Men” (“‘The trustees,’ Mr. Tilbody said, closing more doors than one, and cutting off two kinds of light, ‘have agreed that your application disagrees with them’’’ [2.287]), for the man is the once-prosperous benefactor of the home. The mere inclusion of this tale may point to the fact that satire is the real underlying body of unity in this collection.
Two tales in Can Such Things Be? illustrate Bierce’s graveyard humour at its best. One is supernatural, the other non-supernatural; but the horror is produced by satire, not the supernatural or the lack of it. “One Summer Night” tells the grisly tale of two graverobbers who plunder the tomb of the recently deceased Henry Armstrong. Armstrong, however, refuses to acknowledge the fact of his death and sits up in his grave when it is unearthed. One robber flees, but the other “was of another breed”: he kills the corpse again with his shovel, takes it to the local medical college that uses his services, and calmly demands his pay. In “John Mortonson’s Funeral” (actually a tale by Bierce’s son Leigh, but one that Bierce extensively polished and prepared for publication) the sombre obsequies of Mortonson are rudely interrupted when the mourners flee in terror at the sight of the deceased’s face. The coffin falls over and the glass shatters: “From the opening crawled John Mortonson’s cat, which lazily leapt to the floor, sat up, tranquilly wiped its crimson muzzle with a forepaw, then walked with dignity from the room” (3.254). There is nothing supernatural about this; it is merely a macabre joke. This lone exception to the supernaturalism of Can Such Things Be? is again explicable only if we regard satire as the unifying feature of the volume. “One Summer Night” is also a macabre joke, but the supernaturalism is not an important component of it. Or, rather, while the supernatural itself is significant (the joke depends on the double death of Henry Armstrong), there is no need—and Bierce makes no attempt—to account for the supernaturalism, either pseudo-scientifically or in any other way.
But Bierce has gained the greatest notoriety—and, indeed, opprobrium—for the graveyard humour of the four tales included in volume 8 of the Collected Works under the heading “The Parenticide Club.” Perhaps the most amusing thing about them is the outrage they have elicited among some of Bierce’s critics.[139] But we will not understand these tales unless we ascertain whom the satire is directed against. “My Favorite Murder” opens with “Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity” (8.147); in “Oil of Dog” we learn that the narrator “was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babies” (8.163); and so on. Who is being satirised here? Who but the reader? It is as if Bierce is daring us to find these things funny. Bierce can’t lose: if we are revolted, then he can merely chuckle and heap contempt upon us for our squeamishness; if we laugh, we stand self-condemned as sadists. I do not know whether any other works of literature offer an experience parallel to this. It could even be said that this sort of thing—in milder (or subtler) form—colours the whole of Bierce’s fiction. What varies, of course, is tone. The bizarre authorial intrusion we noted in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is unusual in its bluntness; in the other war tales Bierce’s ice-cold style alone produces shock and horror. Perhaps the trick ending we noted in “The Coup de Grâce,” and which in various forms occurs frequently in Bierce, can be accounted for by appealing to his satiric intent: all he is interested in is a certain type of tableau in which a character is pitilessly placed in a grotesque or unbearable position. This is why so many of his tales—whether of war or of the supernatural—have irony as their central feature: the irony of a man killing his own father in battle; the irony of a husband killing his wife on a false suspicion of adultery; the irony of a man frightened to death by a stuffed snake. It is clear that these are the focal images that came to Bierce’s mind at the moment of inspiration; and he concocted a scenario of events—whether plausibly or not—to work these images into a narrative.
If Bierce is to be termed a misanthrope, it will not be from his avowedly philosophical utterances but from the philosophy that is implicit in his tales. When faced with a crisis, his characters always fail; they fear what should not be feared, act with irrational violence, and collapse in weakness when they should hold firm. If this is Bierce’s picture of humanity, then it is a sufficiently bleak one, and the rapier-strokes of his prose seem to take a perverse glee in augmenting the horror of his conceptions. Bierce’s importance in weird fiction rests upon his role as a satiric horror writer—or a horrific satirist. As such he simultaneously founded and closed a genre; he has no successors.
6. H. P. LOVECRAFT
The Decline of the West
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island. When he was three his father suffered a paralytic attack, dying five years later. The boy’s upbringing was left to his overprotective mother, his two aunts, and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, a wealthy industrialist. A precocious boy, Lovecraft was reading at two, writing poems and horror stories at seven, and learning Latin and Greek at eight.
The family’s fortunes suffered a reversal in 1904, and Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move into smaller quarters in Providence. Distressed at the loss of his birthplace, the young Lovecraft immersed himself in intellectual pursuits. His formal education was sporadic because of chronic ill health, and in 1908 he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown that prevented him from graduating from high school and enrolling at Brown University. The next five years were spent in relative hermitry, as Lovecraft continued to pursue an impressive self-education in literature, science, and philosophy.
