To Walk the Night by William Sloane

For the first time I admitted to myself that there was a possibility of connection between small, disturbing things in the past and the present fact of Jerry's death.  What that common denominator was I did not know, but I was certain that I did not want to find it out.

The copy I read looked more or less like this

What does cosmic horror mean to you?  To me, cosmic horror is the horror of the realization of man's true place in the universe; cosmic horror, if only metaphorically through the medium of stories about alien monsters, refutes the thinking of men of religion (who claim the universe is orderly because God orders it, and God loves us and guides us and enforces justice) and men of science (who claim the universe is orderly because it follows laws we can comprehend, and comprehension of these laws can improve our lives.)  In a classic story of cosmic horror the characters come to realize that the universe and/or "gods" are indifferent or actually inimical to us, our lives are meaningless, the universe is essentially incomprehensible, and what knowledge we can acquire threatens our sanity and our society.

In 2015 the people at New York Review of Books released a new edition of The Rim of Morning, a 1964 omnibus of two 1930s novels by William Sloane; the NYRB volume has the subtitle "Two Tales of Cosmic Horror."  I am a fan of cosmic horror, so I thought it worthwhile to check out at least one of Sloane's novels.  In a piece of good fortune that perhaps undermines my suspicions that all the tenets of cosmic horror are true, there was actually a copy of The Rim of Morning at a library nearby MPorcius headquarters here in suburban Maryland.  I borrowed said volume and today discuss 1937's To Walk the Night.

The first and last chapters of To Walk the Night, which is like 215 pages long in this edition, are a sort of frame for the main body of the tale.  As we meet him, our narrator Berkeley M. Jones, after three days on a train from the desert of the SouthWest, is returning to the Long Island house of Dr. Lister, the house in which he grew up with his best friend Jerry Lister, the doctor's son.  (Jones's own mother, whom he calls by her first name, "Grace," is an artistic woman about town who had no time for or interest in raising her own son and was happy to hand her kid over to the stable and respectable medical man Lister.)  Jones, or "Bark" as his friends call him, has horrible news to tell the man he calls "Dad": out West, Jerry, while Bark and Jerry's wife Selena watched, shot himself in the head!

This first chapter directly addresses the cosmic horror themes I outlined above.  Dr. Lister, a man of science and logic, wants Bark to tell him all the details he knows of Jerry's life out West, to try to figure out why a dependable and decent young man like Jerry would take his own life, presumptively an act of cowardice and selfishness and weakness.  Bark resists telling him all the details, saying that thinking and logic cannot solve this problem, even arguing that thinking over what has happened could be dangerous:

"I don't want to die.  Jerry thought this thing through, and that's why he's not alive now."

Bark, of course, relents, or we wouldn't have a novel.  As they sit on the porch of that big Long Island home, the hissing of the surf audible in the near distance, Bark tells Dr. Lister everything, starting two years ago, his tale of the uncanny Selena and her relationships making up the bulk of the succeeding 13 of the novel's 15 chapters.

Two years after graduation, and two years before Jerry's death, Jerry and Bark visit their alma mater which is like two hours from New York City.  (Sloane never specifies what state or town the university is in, not what arid state in the SouthWest Jerry commits suicide in.)  After taking in a football game they call on the world famous mathematician and astronomer LeNormand, whose assistant Jerry, a math whiz, had been as a student.  As they enter the observatory they catch sight of LeNormand as he is burned to death in a mysterious fire that doesn't burn the chair he is sitting on.  The book at this point takes on much of the apparatus of a locked-room detective story--presumably somebody murdered the scientist, but how could they have gotten out of the observatory without Jerry and Bark seeing him?--with policemen and detectives looking for footprints and considering possible suspects and all that jazz.

Almost as shocking as LeNormand's bizarre death is the fact Jerry and Bark learn from the University President whom they (Chappaquiddick-style) summon before calling the cops--just three months ago the reclusive and solitary LeNormand, who had apparently had no use for women and spent all his time and energy coming up with theories contravening Einstein, married a beautiful woman named Selena!  (Selena's very name, of course, signals to us readers that she is of another world and of superior rank and power.)  When Bark meets this female, he can't deny that she is a striking beauty, but also has the nagging feeling that there is something cold and emotionless about her, that she lacks personality and expression--that is until she gets a load of Jerry.  Jerry seems to bring her to life!   And the feeling is mutual!  LeNormand's blackened corpse is hardly in the ground before Selena has moved to New York, where Jerry and Bark live as roommates, and hanging around with them; in a few weeks it becomes clear to everybody that Jerry is going to marry this woman, even though she refuses to say anything about her family or her past!

Bark can sense that this chick is bad news, but he has no luck getting the bros before hos message across to his bro.  Jerry enlists the fashion forward Grace to guide Selena in picking out new clothes--though she obviously has a powerful analytic mind, Selena seems naive and ignorant of fashion, art and culture: she makes a cogent assessment of a Brancusi in Grace's apartment in seconds, but apparently has never heard of Brancusi before; nor is she familiar with Noel Coward or even Shakespeare!  Grace doesn't like Selena, either, remarking on how she has a flawless young body but the eyes of an older woman, eyes that are "cool and wise."  Bark begins thinking of her as being like a foreigner who has little knowledge of American life, and we readers of course begin thinking of her (if we haven't been thinking this already) as being a space alien with little knowledge of human life.

Halfway through the novel, four weeks or so after the murder of Dr. LeNormand, the detective in charge of that case reenters the story, summoning Bark to his office, and we learn where Selena's body came from--just two days before Selena and LeNormand got their marriage license a twenty-something retarded woman who looks just like Selena disappeared while her impoverished parents, driving through the area, were temporarily distracted.  (Of course, in this 1937 book the characters don't say this poor missing woman is "retarded," they say she is an "idiot.")  The idea that genius Selena is really this developmentally disabled woman who couldn't talk or even feed herself four months ago is so incredible that the gumshoe and Bark don't share it with anybody.

Little events occur that let us readers know that Selena can read minds and hypnotize people and see around corners and that sort of thing, though the narrator doesn't put two and two together.  After Jerry and Serena get married Jerry gets bored at his job at a statistics firm, and decides to become a math professor.  He publishes an article in a scholarly journal and moves to the desert in the SouthWest to work on his thesis, which is apparently based on LeNormand's controversial theories which go against Einstein.  Selena simultaneously assures everyone that Jerry's math theories are correct and discourages him from pursuing them.

Over a year after moving to the desert Jerry summons Bark via telegram, and Bark makes the long train ride to the barren Southwest; Sloane puts a lot of effort into describing how barren and uncomfortable and depressing the desert is--the heat, the vast lifeless spaces, the tiny ugly town with zero culture or sophistication or amenities.  (Maybe we should see this as a parochial New Jersey/New York view--Sloane went to college at Princeton and worked for Rutgers University Press and other publishers for most of his career.  As I know from bitter experience, leaving the NY/NJ area for the provinces can be a painful, even soul-crushing, experience.)  While Bark is visiting, Jerry suddenly figures out LeNormand's equations and Selena's true nature and kills himself tout suite, before he can explain to Bark.  Selena slips out and, after he deals with the inquest and funeral, Bark rides the train back to New York to see Dr. Lister.

In the novel's fifteenth and final chapter Bark, having reviewed all the clues, including Selena's response to reading Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid," figures out that Selena must be an immaterial mind from another time and/or planet who inhabited the retarded girl's body and sought out mathematical geniuses like LeNormand and Jerry.  Unfortunately, when those math whizzes' calculations led them to realize that minds can move between times, Selena felt threatened--those brainiacs had to be neutralized, lest the world know of the possibility of such alien invasion.  Selena appears at the seaside Lister house, and explains herself; the author mitigates her responsibility to some extent--Selena only killed LeNormand by mistake, the collective psychic force of that nearby football game increasing the power of her effort to erase data from LeNormand's mind.  As for Jerry, it is suggested that Selena's husband killed himself because he couldn't face the reality that he fell in love with and had sex with an alien who had hypnotized him.  Selena feels no need to kill Bark and Dr. Lister because, without the mathematical evidence, nobody will believe their crazy story that an alien mind came to Earth to take over an idiot's body.  Selena leaves the house, and a sort of epilogue lets us know that Selena must have left this planet or time or whatever because the beautiful body, that of the idiot, returns home to her loving parents, just as idiotic as before.

The big name in cosmic horror, of course, is H. P. Lovecraft.  A major reason famous French novelist and Lovecraft fan Michel Houellebecq cites for his fascination with Lovecraft is that the Rhode Islander doesn't write much about sex and money, a central facet of most of our lives and a prominent topic in much literature.  As anybody who has been following this blog knows, I find sexual relationships, and the challenges and problems they cause, fascinating, and so I very much appreciated that To Walk The Night integrates with its cosmic horror themes the themes of irresistible, inexplicable and unhealthy sexual relationships, and the way the appearance of a woman can wreck the warm and life-affirming relationships men can have with each other.  Many men have the experience of being manipulated by women, of taking stupid risks and making foolish sacrifices because they desire some woman only to later find their reckless devotion incomprehensible*, and Selena, an inexplicable alien who can read your mind and hypnotize you, is a good allegory for that common but mystifying phenomenon.

*Remember the last lines of Part II of Swann's Way: "To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!" (trans. Lydia Davis)

(One might see To Walk the Night as being pretty hard on women, especially smart women; besides the life-destroying alien Selena we have Grace, who cares more about interior design and fashion and social functions than her own son.  The relationship we see between Grace and Bark, now an adult, is also pretty odd--they seem to be flirting with each other in a way that I found sort of uncomfortable.  Selena as femme fatale, of course, is another connection of To Walk the Night with detective fiction.)

I liked To Walk the Night, but I didn't love it.  Each individual scene is good, but taken as a whole the novel feels long--the scenes can be a little redundant, Sloane belaboring his points a bit.  There are multiple scenes about how nobody knows about Selena's past, multiple scenes in which Selena's psychic powers manifest themselves, multiple scenes in which Selena discourages Jerry from digging too deeply into LeNormand's equations.  Once Sloane has transmitted this info to us, and made clear that Jerry and Bark haven't picked upon the info, there's not much value in presenting similar scenes that achieve the same goal.  There is also a sort of plot hole at the end--it appears that Selena needs to be near a mathematical genius to thrive; after LeNormand's death and before she meets Jerry, Selena is without character or personality.  As Bark says in Chapter 15:

When we met her first, after his [LeNormand's] death, she was dull and stupid, almost in a trance, till she met Jerry.

But after Jerry's death she isn't dull and lifeless; Selena destroys Jerry's notes, makes her way to Long Island from the SouthWest, and is clever and emotional when she talks to Bark and Dr. Lister, claiming she loved Jerry and criticizing us humans for thinking we are special ("Did you suppose...that you were one in the enormous spaces of the universe?  Do you believe that you are the ultimate product of creation?  There is nothing unique about you.")  Oh, well.   

A solid piece of work, but perhaps not as terrific as advertised.  These end of year holidays and the demands of the pursuit of remuneration have severely cut down on the time I have to read and write, but I hope to read Sloane's other novel, The Edge of Running Water, soon.