American Fantastic Tales by Major Women Authors: Chopin, Wharton & Cather

While it is true I have been effusive in my praise of Tanith Lee and Thomas M. Disch on this website, I don't think anybody would mistake MPorcius Fiction Log as the go-to place for celebrating diversity in SF and promoting the publication of more SF by members of marginalized populations.  But maybe today is the day I will get a little absolution from the powers that zhe for my harsh criticism of The Tomorrow People and The Killer Thing.  Because today is the day I read three "tales of the fantastic" by women, women who are iconic members of the American literary canon: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.

It is fair to see this post as a companion piece to my late September post about stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Henry James, because I have also drawn these three stories from The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps.  As was the case with Henry James, I know just about zero about Chopin, Wharton and Cather, not having been required to read them in school and not having sought them out since I bid farewell to the classroom. This will be my first experience of these big name American authors.  I know we're all crossing our fingers hoping I love these things!

"Ma'ame Pelagie" by Kate Chopin (1893)

Fifty-year-old Ma'ame Pelagie and her sister Pauline, thirty-five, live in a cabin on their Louisiana plantation, saving their pennies in hopes of rebuilding the mansion they lived in as children, which has been a ruin since it was wrecked by Union soldiers during the Civil War, some three decades ago.  Maybe in twenty or thirty years they will have amassed enough funds to rebuild the place.

A niece, whom they call "La Petite," comes to stay with the childless unmarried sisters.  La Petite quickly becomes the light of Pauline's life: "...she seems like a saviour; like one who had come and taken me by the hand and was leading me somewhere--somewhere I want to go."  La Petite, who has lived in big cities, tires of life in the little cabin far from her piano and any excitement, and declares she will leave.  Pauline tells Ma'ame Pelagie that "if La Petite goes away I shall die."

In her youth her father impressed upon Ma'ame Pelagie that she must look after her little sister.  So Ma'ame Pelagie abandons her dream of rebuilding the mansion, and instead uses the accumulated money to build a smaller but still fine house.  The house becomes a meeting place for local society, and La Petite and her father are happy to move in permanently.

This is a reasonably good mainstream story about self-sacrifice, moving forward in life, and women's relationships, but what is "fantastic" about it?  I guess the scene in which the title character looks into the ruin and "sees" the big party she attended right before the war.  Or how the ruin seems to brood "like a huge monster."

"Afterward" by Edith Wharton (1910)

The Boynes, engineer Ned and wife Mary, left New York City for Ned’s work and have “endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town.” Ay carumba, this is a horror story!  Thank heavens they finally struck it rich and moved to a country estate in Dorsetshire, England.

Life is good for the Boynes at their English estate, with the garden and the library and the servants and walks in the countryside and all that, but then supernatural disaster strikes! A mysterious man appears, and Ned leaves with him, leaving no word with Mary or the servants as to who the man is, where they are going, and when he will return.  In the event, Ned does not return!  Weeks later, with the arrival in England of an acquaintance of Ned’s, all the clues fall into place and Mary learns the terrible truth.  In the course of striking it rich back in what we now call flyover country, Ned screwed over some business associate (in a way Wharton does not specify) and this joker lost all his money and committed suicide.  It was the ghost of this suicide who came to take away Ned, presumably to some final, fatal, punishment.

One assumes this story is an attack on business or capitalism or the free market or whatever you want to call it.  Wharton portrays businesspeople as unscrupulous and business as a lawless realm beyond concepts of honor and dishonor or good and evil. Mary asks the American visitor, “you accuse my husband of doing something dishonourable?”  His reply is “I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight.  It was business.”  Wharton includes his line twice in the story, to make sure we get the message.  Another clue that this story is about economics as much or more than it is about ghosts is that Ned was spending his retirement in England writing a book with the working title of Economic Basis of Culture.

“Afterward” is alright, I suppose, but it is no big deal.  It kind of just sits there.  It feels a little long for what it tries to accomplish, and doesn’t generate much feeling; Wharton doesn’t give the reader much reason to like or dislike Mary or Ned or the suicide, or to care what happens to any of them. And of course its politics are hardly interesting or novel; every day we hear broad emotional denunciations of businesspeople and the business world from those who think society would be better off if there was more power in the hands of aristocrats, commissars, or government bureaucrats.

"Consequences" by Willa Cather (1915)

Eastman, an industrious and successful lawyer (sometimes he argues before the Supreme Court in Washington!), and Cavenaugh, a playboy (sometimes he parties til dawn with showgirls!) are bachelors living in the same building in midtown Manhattan.  Oh yes, this is one of those stories which makes me wax nostalgic about "the good old days" when I stalked the streets of New York City, lounging in parks, on street corners, in museums, and at esplanades, stuffing my face with the world's finest pizzas and bagels, watching the girls, the trains, and the ships going by.

Eastman and Cavenaugh exchange stories about suicides they have known. Cavenaugh eventually unburdens himself about his own dark secret: an old man haunts him, appearing at random intervals when he is alone.  This mysterious figure, who wears worn out evening clothes, knows everything about Cavenaugh and his life and puts a bad color on everything:

"...he knows me like a book; everything I've ever done or thought.  But when he recalls them, he throws a bad light on them, somehow.  Things that weren't much off color, look rotten.  He doesn't leave one a shred of self-respect...."     

Is this phantom a cautionary vision of the future Cavenaugh, who regrets his wasted life?  Is it the ghost of Cavenaugh's athletic and ambitious brother Brian, who died young, of who Brian might have become?  Is it a materialization of Cavenaugh's conscience?  

Eastman advises Cavenaugh to quit his idle ways and become a businessman or an engineer or something.  He even helps the playboy get in touch with a ranch in Montana where he can ride horses and shoot guns and do real physical work, far from the decadence of New York.  But it is too late--after a final visit from the old man, Cavenaugh shoots himself.

Even accounting for my New York prejudice, this is easily the best of the three stories I'm talking about today.  Cather's style is more modern: it is clear, smooth, and alive. Eastman and Cavenaugh seem like real people, Cather discusses issues of universal interest, like "how should you live your life?" and "why do people take their own lives?" and exhibits the kind of cynical wisdom I am a sucker for:

"It reminds me of what Dr. Johnson said, that the most discouraging thing about life is the number of fads and hobbies and fake religions it takes to put people through a few years of it."  

"People never really change; they just go on being themselves."   

Perhaps most importantly, for stories in a collection of "fantastic tales," the supernatural element of "Consequences" actually works: it is prominent, interesting, and genuinely creepy.

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I'm sure there are legions of college professors and mountains of books that could explain to me why Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather are the queen bee's knees.  But instead of consulting them I went right to the source material and came up with my own almost totally uneducated assessment.  My brief reconnaissance into the distaff side of the American literary canon has left me with a good impression of Willa Cather and the feeling Edith Wharton is not for me.

In our next episode, more American Fantastic Tales, this time by women whom I don't think are as famous as Chopin, Wharton and Cather--at least I've never heard of them.

Post-War American Tales of the Fantastic: Beaumont, Ligotti & Wolfe

The college library that is within walking distance of the dilapidated and spider-infested house the wife and I rent has a copy of Volume II of The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub and published in 2009.  Volume I, which I read three stories from last week, covers the period before 1940; this one presents work from 1940 to 2007.  A few days ago I borrowed the volume, and early this week read three of the stories therein.

"Black Country" by Charles Beaumont (1954)

Beaumont is one of those writers I have often thought I should read, but whom I have not gotten around to.  So here is my chance.

"Black Country" first appeared in Playboy. The story is about jazz.  It's my understanding that Playboy, at least in its early incarnations, was marketed as the magazine for the sophisticated man, and one of the things the Platonic ideal of the sophisticated man of the '50s and '60s cared about and knew about was jazz, and Playboy covered jazz within its pages quite extensively.  (Personally, I know nothing about jazz.)  The cover of the issue in which Beaumont's story appeared is actually adorned not with some hot chick, as has been the norm for decades, but a cartoon depiction of jazz musicians.

"Black Country" is a first person narrative by a member of an African-American jazz band whose talented and charismatic leader, Spoof Collins, plays the trumpet.  The group has a dedicated white fan, Sonny, who takes over for the saxophonist when he is killed in some kind of fracas.  The band later decides to take on a female singer, Rose-Ann.  Rose-Ann falls in love with Spoof, but Spoof loves his trumpet more than anything, and when she gets a little too cloying, Spoof hits her.  Sonny rushes to her aid, staring down Spoof; Sonny is in love with Rose-Ann, and they become an item. Spoof dies soon after (committing suicide because he has cancer) and Sonny becomes leader of the band, shifting from saxophone to trumpet.  The story's climax is when Sonny digs up Spoof's horn from the grave and Spoof's spirit plays through Sonny; the two men, of two different races, who butted heads earlier, are reconciled in their quest to achieve the ultimate, purest jazz.  

This story is just OK.  Maybe I would enjoy it more if I was a jazz aficionado--the numerous scenes describing musical performances ("Spoof lifted his horn and climbed up two-and-a-half and let out his trademark...Jimmy kanoodling the great headwork that only Jimmy knows how to do...Henry did that counterpoint business that you're not supposed to be able to do unless you have two right arms and four extra fingers...." etc.) left me cold.  Maybe others will find the story's racial and sexual politics interesting; presumably Beaumont is arguing for racial harmony here, but some readers might find the way a white man takes over the black band, or even the way Beaumont speaks in the voices of black men, condescending or offensive.

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" by Thomas Ligotti (1990)

A year ago (gadzooks, has it really been that long?) I announced to the world my deep and abiding love for Thomas Ligotti's story "Vastarien."  Can I experience such a love again?  I started this story, which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with hopes that I could.

Ligotti dedicated "The Last Feast of Harlequin" to "the memory of H. P. Lovecraft," and in the introduction to American Fantastic Tales' second volume Straub calls the story "a loving and exacting tribute" to Lovecraft.  Straub's description is perfectly apt; this is a finely crafted Lovecraftian story, carefully emulating the plot structure and themes and tone of Lovecraft's own works.

The story is a memoir or testament, written by an academic anthropologist, describing his investigation of an odd festival in a Midwestern town, a town founded by New Englanders in the nineteenth century.  Like the characters in various Lovecraft stories, our narrator travels around town meeting creepy characters, delves into old newspapers and other old documents for clues, and then learns a horrifying truth before escaping with his life, but not without dreadful psychological scars and the knowledge that something catastrophically terrible awaits him in his future.  In the climactic scene we even get the subterranean ritual of human sacrifice led by an evil wizard or priest which we expect to find in a Weird Tales-style story.

Maybe because I was exposed to so much Marxism in college, and maybe because in my twenties and thirties I spent so much time reading books in which social class is important (like Proust and various 18th-century things like Casanova and Boswell), I am always finding these SF stories to be worthy of some kind of class analysis. "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is perhaps a more appropriate subject of a class-based analysis than most.  The town at the center of the story is split into "desirable sections" of "normal residents" and a darker, uglier, poorer side, "the south end," which the narrator calls a "slum" or "ghetto" and which is home to "lethargic," "gaunt" and "nauseatingly passive" people.  The slum dwellers keep to themselves, and are, in fact, monsters of some type.  Every winter they have a dark, creepy, sinister celebration, and the loud and brightly lit festival in the "normal" part of town is (our narrator theorizes) devised to drown out or distract from the evil celebration of the monstrous freaks.  The narrator, as a professional scientist and college professor, is of course solidly middle-class, but, by putting on a disguise of old shoes, blue jeans and a coat whose pockets he tears and to which he applies stains, he has little trouble infiltrating the dark side of town.

The surprise at the end of the story, which is not really a surprise to careful readers because Ligotti foreshadows it quite clearly, is that the anthropologist is, previously unknown to himself, one of the freaks.  "He is one of us....He has always been one of us" says the wizard/priest, who turns out to be the narrator's mentor back from his days at his New England university.  This kind of class anxiety strikes a chord with me because of similarities to my own life.  My parents are working class, and my mother expresses hostility to white collar workers and complains when she sees me in my J. Crew outfits ("Why don't you wear jeans and sneakers?  Does Joe College think he is better than the rest of us?")  Does my own college degree, my intellectual hobbies and time spent working in universities and offices make me middle-class, or does my blood and the time I've spent working in machine shops, warehouses, and the stock rooms of stores make me working-class?

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" is like a smoothly running clock, each of its glittering gears rotating in harmony with every other.  Every paragraph serves a purpose and serves that purpose well.  I can enthusiastically recommend this story to Lovecraft fans, who may enjoy picking out all the little Lovecraftian elements and themes.   Because it is so good, I would also strongly recommend the story to people curious about Lovecraft's influence on later "weird" writers.  

I didn't like "The Last Feast of Harlequin" as much as "Vastarien," however.  It is so like a finely polished, exquisitely constructed exemplar of a Lovecraft story (dare I use the phrase "Platonic ideal" twice in one blog post?) that it is a little lacking in the surprise and novelty department.  Ligotti here has put together a masterpiece of an homage; it feels like the best possible version of something we've seen before, rather than something original or new.  I thought "Vastarien," while definitely Lovecraftian in feel, had something new to say and was more challenging, more mysterious, making for a more powerful reading experience.

"The Little Stranger" by Gene Wolfe (2004)

I'm one of those people who thinks of Gene Wolfe as his favorite writer and who thinks Wolfe is a strong candidate for "best" or "greatest" or "ultimate" SF writer of all time, so for me reading a Wolfe story that is new to me is always a significant event in my intellectual life.

This is actually the second time I've read "The Little Stranger;" when I checked out the book I thought it was new to me, having forgotten the title, but by the second page I realized I had read it before.  Perhaps I read it in Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber's Fantasy: The Best of 2004; I used to get those anthologies at the New York Public Library all the time.  I'm sure I didn't read it in its first place of publication, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  

The story begins on a heartbreaking note: the tale is a series of letters written by a terribly lonely old woman, Ivy, to a dead cousin.  "Please forgive me for troubling you with another letter....You are the only family I have, and as you are dead you probably do not mind."  The story quickly becomes light-hearted, however.  The conceit of the story is that everybody thinks Ivy is a witch, and various coincidences, like a black cat joining her household and two little kids named Hank and Greta coming to visit her "gingerbread house," reinforce this idea and provide an opportunity for Wolfe to make jokes (of Hank and Greta our narrator says, "[they] are such sweet little strangers.  I could just eat them up!")  It is strongly suggested that Ivy's house is haunted or somehow alive, and also lonely, and manipulates events to relieve its own loneliness as well as Ivy's.  There are also hints that Ivy is hundreds of years old.

While I have suggested the story is light-hearted, at the same time we are constantly reminded that the world is full of evil.  Ivy often worries about thieves and burglars, and is very concerned that business people will cheat her.  There are gypsies in the story (our narrator doesn't use that word, but I think all the clues point to them being gypsies) and they have a contentious relationship with the authorities: one of the female gypsies opens a fortune telling business and is investigated by the police bunco squad, while the others flee into the woods at the very sight of the police. Readers may recall that I had the same attitude about Wolfe's 1990 novel Pandora by Holly Hollander; that it was outwardly fun, but full of reminders of war, crime, and broken families.

As usual with Wolfe, an economical and dense story worth rereading, with an odd, novel premise.

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I'm not the audience for the Beaumont story, but these three stories are all worthwhile reads.  While I, an inveterate cheapo, have borrowed the two volumes of American Fantastic Tales from libraries, I hope other people who care about genre literature have been purchasing them.  We certainly want to encourage The Library of America and other organizations to continue producing books like this, books full of stories about ghosts, witches, and evil cults but composed of fine paper and fine bindings, with attractive and easy-to-read typefaces and no typographical errors.  (Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick have volumes of The Library of America dedicated to them--if I eat my broccoli maybe I'll live to see similarly handsome volumes of Gene Wolfe's work.)

Stories of the Fantastic by Important American Authors: Hawthorne, Melville, & James

You and I, dear reader, may recognize that Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson and Thomas Disch are important American writers, but I fear many ordinary people have never heard of them, while many "educated" people would dismiss them as mere genre writers who wrote for money and perhaps had suspect politics.  But this weekend I read short stories that qualify as what we now call "speculative fiction" by writers nobody would deny recognition as major figures in the American literary canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James.

I found these stories in a public library copy of the first volume of The Library of America's 2009 anthology American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.  I'm not crazy about the jacket of the book; the photos seem too contemporary for the contents (stories from before 1940), and their colors are irritatingly garish.  I have no opinion of Straub, whose fiction I've never read, but his intro to the volume has interesting things to say about the use of allegory in speculative fiction (he argues that "to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality") and American attitudes toward independence ("For Americans of all decades, it seems, the loss of agency and selfhood, effected by whatever means, arouses a particularly resonant horror") and Nature ("the belief that the natural world itself deludes, tempts, misleads, wishes to devour careless human beings, takes a commanding role here [in several of the stories in the volume.]"

"Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)

I was the worst kind of student in grammar school and high school, totally lazy and disconnected, absorbed in my own thoughts and hobbies, but just clever enough and obedient enough to get passing grades while doing almost no studying.  I would learn things long enough to pass the test, and then absolutely forget them.  As a result, I gained very little knowledge in school, and very little experience of, or respect for, hard work.  Like a lot of the books we were assigned, I passed tests on The Scarlet Letter, but today I know almost nothing about it.

I'm not sure whether "Young Goodman Brown" is about the ubiquity of human evil and hypocrisy, or the way unfounded suspicions can sabotage your happiness, or both.  Brown leaves his wife Faith to walk in the woods in the evening--he has an appointment with the Devil!  The Devil reveals that everybody in the town is a worshipper of his, even those who are the most outwardly pious, like the town's religious leaders and the woman who taught Brown his catechism.  A sort of black mass is taking place, and even Faith appears, to be baptised with blood along with her husband.

It seems that, to at least some extent, this is merely a dream from which Bown awakes before the baptism of evil is accomplished.  But is it a dream that reflects the reality that the human race is fallen, and people are all hypocritical sinners, or one that simply reflects Brown's own irrational anxieties?  Whatever the case, we are told that after this event Brown becomes "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man," unable to enjoy a happy relationship with his wife and neighbors.  Is it his accurate knowledge of human evil that cripples his emotional life, or vain scruples and unfounded suspicions?

Of the three stories I read in Volume I of American Fantastic Tales, this is the least remarkable, the one that feels most conventional in style and content.  It's not bad,  but it's no big deal, either.  

"The Tartarus of Maids" by Herman Melville (1855)

I'm a big fan of Moby Dick, which I have read multiple times as an adult.  So I had high hopes for this story, hopes which were realized.  "The Tartarus of Maids" is a great little story, full of terrific sentences, images, metaphors, and ideas.  I can highly recommend this one, especially to people interested in industrialism and women's issues.

A businessman who purchases vast quantities of paper for his firm's operations visits a paper manufacturer in a remote region of New England to make a deal and to tour the factory.  Melville's descriptions of the pale white women who work there, the blank white paper that is produced, and the  complicated black machines and intricate processes involved in paper production are very evocative.  The journey of raw pulp through a machine that turns it into usable paper seems to be a metaphor for our journey from conception to birth, and perhaps to the course of our lives in a deterministic universe.  The narrator inquires why female factory workers are always called "girls," no matter their age.  The names of all the people and places in the story seem to have been carefully selected to give clues as to what Melville is thinking. There's a lot of thought-provoking stuff going on in this little story!

Very good.  "The Tartarus of Maids" is a companion piece to another story, "The Paradise of Bachelors," and apparently they are usually printed together as a single story in two parts.  For whatever reason, this volume only includes "The Tartarus of Maids;" I should track down the other component of the pair ASAP.

"The Jolly Corner" by Henry James (1908)

Henry James is one of those writers, like Jane Austen, whose work I am familiar with only through TV adaptations.  (Specifically, a 1972 six-hour BBC presentation of The Golden Bowl which I bought for my wife, then my girlfriend, back in the VHS era.) So this will be my first taste of what Henry James is really all about.

Oy, these are some long convoluted sentences!  I'm having flashbacks to my first reading of Swann's Way!  This is no light reading--it seems that you really have to focus when reading Henry James!

Spencer Brydon grew up in a mansion on a corner in Manhattan.  As an adult he went to Europe to experience culture, and after three decades there has returned to New York, in his fifties, to look over his properties.  Supervising the construction of a massive apartment building on one of his lots, he realizes he has a talent for managing such business, and suspects that, if he had stayed in America instead of gallivanting across Europe ("leading...a selfish frivolous scandalous life"), he might have become a real estate billionaire, a sort of Victorian Donald Trump!

Brydon tells a woman he is courting, Alice Staverton, that he senses within himself an "alter ego" which, under different circumstances, might have blossomed into a man of power.  He wonders if Staverton might prefer a super rich industrious Brydon to the current art lover Brydon, who is merely rich.  Can he start a new career, still become that man of greatness?

Our hero takes to haunting his childhood house late at night, during what the woman who comes over to the mansion everyday to sweep calls "the evil hours"--she is afraid to go there at night, sensing some kind of weird presence!  Brydon's family is extinct, and the house is almost entirely empty of furniture, and he stalks the physically barren but emotionally resonant rooms for hours, sure that the ghost of who he might have been lurks somewhere among one of the shadows of one of the mansion's four vacant floors.  Brydon compares hunting for this ghost to hunting a dangerous tiger or bear: "...he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone."  Is he hunting the ghost, or is the ghost hunting him?

They say sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you, and when Brydon finally confronts the ghost he loses his nerve and retreats, and then collapses in a swoon.  He is awakened by the tender touch of Miss Staverton.  She also saw real-estate-magnate-Brydon, the Brydon who might have been, in a dream, and took it as a signal to come looking for real-life artsy-fartsy Brydon.  "...I knew it for a sign. He had come to you."

Brydon's lady friend kisses him and assures him she loves him regardless of whether he is a powerful mover and shaker in New York business circles or just a rich slacker who loafs at art museums and nice restaurants all day.  The reader presumes these two aesthetes live happily ever after, and that the point of the story is that if you were born on third base, it makes no sense to work hard to get to home plate, if you will permit me to repurpose one of those cliches lefties love.

This plot of "The Jolly Corner" is fine, and I support any story that tells me I should avoid real work and devote my life to experiencing culture, but it feels long and difficult.  James's style is quite challenging.  I'll make sure to eat my Wheaties before tackling another of his works.

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The Melville is the standout, but all three of these stories are worth reading.  And even if I think the jacket is bad, I like Straub's introduction, and the way the book itself has been produced, the fonts, and the paper, and binding and all that.  American Fantastic Tales is a good piece of work, and I will certainly read more stories from Volume I and get my hands on Volume II when I have the chance.