"The Dead Woman," "The Golden Bough" and "The Typewriter" by David H. Keller

Recently we read two stories by David H. Keller, the psychiatrist who turned his hand to writing weird fiction.  Let's read three more, stories I have selected because H. P. Lovecraft mentioned them in his correspondence.  These stories are all about one of my favorite topics--the disastrous sexual relationship, in this case catastrophically failed marriages.

"The Dead Woman" (1934)

In letters you can find in Volume 9 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, HPL calls "The Dead Woman" "excellent" and "splendidly realistic."  "The Dead Woman" was first printed in Fantasy Magazine, a fanzine; I am reading a reprint of the story in a scan of a 1939 issue of Strange Stories.  You might recognize this issue of Strange Stories because it contains Henry Kuttner's "Cursed Be the City," which I read early last year, and "Bells of Horror," which I read long ago and often think of rereading.

Most of the text of "The Dead Woman" is the testimony of a Mr. Thompson, a middle-aged accountant in the employ of some business firm, to a doctor.  From the title of the story, and obvious clues in the first few introductory third-person paragraphs of the tale, we know he has killed his wife with a knife, though Keller doesn't come out and say it.  The first-person narration makes clear that the Thompson marriage was in trouble--they were unable to have children, which was heartbreaking for Mrs. Thompson, and a distance was growing between them, and Mr. Thompson was getting distracted and making mistakes at work, perhaps putting his job and their financial security at risk.  They started sleeping in separate rooms, ostensibly because Mrs. Thompson's coughing kept Mr. Thompson awake and he needed to be alert at the office, and Mrs. Thompson stopped speaking to Mr. Thompson.  When Mrs. Thompson's cough went away he began to see signs she was actually dead, even though she was still able to walk around and when he brought in doctors to look at her they said she was more or less healthy.  These signs--most remarkably the flies that are attracted to his wife, and the "little worm" he sees crawl out of her as she sleeps--are, I guess, hallucinations suffered by Mr. Thompson that reflect, metaphorically, that their marriage is dead, or one or the other (or both of them) is "dead inside."  Believing his wife should be laid to rest, Thompson decided to put her in a trunk, but the trunk was too small, so he carved her up with a knife so she would fit inside, literally killing her.     

This is a pretty good story--a mainstream story with no magic or space aliens--with interesting psychological and sociological angles.  An example: Mr. Thompson starts washing the dishes obsessively, a reflection of his own mental state and the fact that his wife has abandoned her half of the marriage bargain, doing no house work and instead just sitting around listlessly, looking out the window, so that Mr. Thompson has to look after their home as well as toil outside to bring in the needed money.  In 1936 "The Dead WOman" was included by Christine Campbell Thomson in her anthology Nightmare by Daylight.

"The Golden Bough" (1934)

Here we have a candidate for "lamest
WT cover of all time." 

This one appeared in Marvel Tales; in a December 7, 1934 letter to F. Lee Baldwin, Lovecraft says it is "the best story [in that issue of Marvel Tales] by a long shot," and in a letter written on December 29 of the same year to William F. Anger he declares "The Golden Bough" "...the only really good thing in the issue."  Weird Tales in 1942 reprinted the story, and it is in a scan of that magazine that I am reading it.

This story is like a (dark) fairy tale.  Paul Gallien is a prince, but no longer has a throne--maybe the commies took over his country?  As suits a fairy tale, the political and geographic background of this story is pretty vague--it takes place in a sort of neverland.  Fortunately, Gallien is still rich.  He has just married a woman, Constance Martin, about whom he knows little.  The night after their wedding Constance has a dream of a house in a forest, and declares she wants to live there.  So Gallien gets behind the wheel and they drive at random through Europe, more or less eastward, expecting to stumble on the house of Constance's dream.  Eventually, they do--it is an old castle on a hill in a deep forest.  The caretaker of the castle is an old woman who says when she was young that the owner of the castle, her lover, went off to war and never returned.  What country the castle is in and what war the lover is supposed to have fought in is not clear, at least to me, though the old woman is Italian, or at least speaks Italian.

The Galliens move in--Constance doesn't ever want to leave and even makes Paul push the car off a cliff (!).  The main plot of "The Golden Bough" involves a pipe-playing guy (whom Keller eventually comes out and tells us is Pan) who lives in the woods, whose nightly serenade draws Constance out of bed to him.  She dances with this weirdo and his troupe of dancing goats and geese while poor Paul sleeps unawares.  The piper convinces Constance to perform an elaborate spell, getting mistletoe from a special tree and water from a special pool and cultivating a vine on the post of her and Paul's bed.  At night the leafy vine embraces Constance, filling her with joy.  When Paul realizes what is going on he hires some laborers and buys lead pipes in the village and drains the pool; the vine needs daily watering and withers tout suite.  When she cries and demands to know why her husband drained the pool, Paul tells Constance it was because he was worried about malaria, which I thought was pretty funny.

That night Constance's long hair comes to life and murders Paul.  Constance hears the piper's serenade and cuts her hair off with the shears Paul used to cut down the dead vine, and goes out to dance with Pan and his menagerie.  Pan turns out to be an even bigger piece of shit than we thought, though--he draws the widow over to the cliff and tricks her into falling down to where lies Paul's car, so her shattered body is integrated with the shattered pieces of the automobile.  Pan then has a good laugh.

I guess the point of this story is that the gods are capricious and cruel, women are both gullible and manipulative, and men are at the mercy of these selfish, pitiless and emotional beings, even men who are rich, even men who always try to do the right thing.  This is the kind of knowledge you gain just by living with your eyes open, but of course probably shouldn't vocalize in mixed company.

"The Golden Bough" is an acceptable filler story.  Personally, I'm generally not crazy about stories that feel like a fable or fairy tale.  Maybe we should consider how this story fits into the standard Lovecraftian view that life is meaningless and the universe is inexplicable and good and evil are merely opinions with no concrete value.  I have to admit I expected the piper to just use Constance for sex and derive enjoyment from humiliating rich sucker Paul; when Paul got killed I was somewhat surprised, and when Constance was killed I was even more surprised--this wasn't just a story about women betraying men and men exploiting women, as I had been coming to expect, but an all out "we are doomed no matter how we behave" piece of nihilism.  Ouch! 

Though never anthologized, "The Golden Bough" has appeared in Keller collections like Arkham House's 1952 Tales from Underwood and Ramble House's 2010 Keller Memento--these collections also include "The Dead Woman."   

"The Typewriter" (1936)

I really like the cover,  by Clay Ferguson, Jr,.
 on the sole issue of Fanciful Tales

Here's a story that has only ever appeared in one place, a fanzine edited by that towering figure among the pantheon of SF editors, Donald A. Wollheim.  H. P. Lovecraft got a hold of three copies of Fanciful Tales (it includes a reprint of Lovecraft's own 1921 "The Nameless City") and in a December 13, 1936 letter to Wilson Shepherd wrote of the 'zine:

I like the contents immensely--especially R E H's splendid posthumous poem.  Derleth's story is good, though Keller's is rather undistinctive.*

HPL also helpfully points out that there are 59 "misprints" in "The Nameless City" as it appears in Fanciful Tales.  I'm not surprised, because the reader of "The Typewriter" is subjected to a ferocious barrage of typos and spelling errors.

"The Typewriter" is an acceptable Twilight Zone-style story.  It starts like a mainstream story, with a woman complaining to her husband that he doesn't spend enough time with her, that he is always sitting in his library, reading, thinking, and typing, that he never goes out to see friends or eat nice meals or whatever, that everything in his life revolves around his work as a writer.  It comes out that the writer's big best-selling book was a love story featuring a female character who has captured the public's imagination and become a sort of symbol of the perfect woman and the perfect love--the writer's wife is jealous of this woman, thinks her husband is spending all his time thinking about this fictional woman instead of his flesh and blood wife.

We learn about the writer's bizarre career path.  He was a bond salesman, but all his life wanted to write.  In a dream he saw a typewriter in a pawn shop--he went to the shop and found that the machine was really there!  He quit his job and wrote his novel on this special typewriter--it was as if the female protagonist of the book was telling him what to write!  He easily sold the book and since then he has made far more money than he would have as a bond salesman.  And he has not stopped receiving brainwaves from the exemplar of the female--he is now typing the sequel!

Wifey puts a sedative in her husband's coffee.  It is clear that the typewriter is the key to all this, so she takes an axe and chops the typewriter.  As the blow lands she hears a woman's scream and then hubby staggers into the room with a wound in his skull and collapses over the smashed typewriter.

Having the writer suffer an injury from the typer getting wrecked is a bit much--I'm afraid that the weird elements of this story are a little half baked.  But otherwise this story isn't bad, a psychiatrist's view of female psychology and marriage that rings true (at least to me.)

*Robert E. Howard's "Solomon Kane's Homecoming" and August Derleth's "The Man from Dark Valley."

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One good, two acceptable--not a bad record.  Maybe we'll read more Keller in the future.

I feel like we've had a long string of weird and fantasy stories--well, all you members of the slide rule club will be glad to hear that the next blog post will be about 1930s stories which, I think, will be about hard science!