William Sansom and One of His Best: "A Wedding"

William Sansom, "A Wedding." From The Passionate North, The Hogarth Press, London, 1950.

This is not only one of my favourite stories, it also reveals how a frame can be used to broaden our perspective on what might seem, at first glance, a small, isolated event, and to allow for a narrator who tells the tale without understanding what it means.

Sansom loads the weight of his frame onto the final sentence, but not on a twist ending. A twist can be useful in the middle of a story, when space remains to explore the implications of the twist; it can be fatal at the story's end, where it often seems more of a gimmick than a thoughtful resolution. Sansom avoids any twist, but offers, instead, one final, unexpected detail, the meaning of which the narrator has never grasped.

In his usual style, Sansom presents keen visual impressions to make his writing live. Given the story's brevity, there is no room for any detailed exploration of character (and none is needed, in this context), but the setting, and the actions within, are vividly conveyed:

"At last the door swung open, two men swathed in greatcoats came out carrying torches high. There followed the others: and last of all came the new husband and his bride.

"She seemed to lean on his arm. Perhaps as though she had almost fainted ? It was difficult in that light, the light of moon and torches, for the janitor to be sure of what he saw. Or perhaps that strange young man held her imprisoned by his own strong arm? So many dark figures moving there in the snow! So much whispering, such stamping, such a muffling of bunched furs! And now they had all moved over to a part of open ground away from the church, a place where tombstones lurched in the snow. There they stood and pointed to the ground -- they seemed to be discussing the place for a grave. Only the bride’s face was averted, she stood a frailer figure than the others, turning herself away from what they were most plainly trying to show her....

"In a few minutes all were gone. The silence of the snows again descended. The bell had ceased tolling, the lights in the church had been extinguished. Nothing stirred. Only the dark blue moonlight fell widely everywhere, sparkling a tinsel from iced birch-branches, bringing a great stillness to the black fir-clumps grouped like figures conferring against the white."

Still and cryptic, the winter landscape is a perfect setting for terrible events. William Sansom was a master of terrible events; in a "Wedding," he also became a master of the eerie final sentence.

The Need To Be Useful, To Be Needed

Does it make any sense to distinguish the needs of men from the needs of women?

I suspect, instead, that different types of personality have different needs, and that these types are distributed between men and women alike.

As I keep this in mind, I can only express my need to be useful, to be necessary. Perhaps not every man feels the need; perhaps many women do. I have no idea.

I do know this: decades have taught me that efforts to be useful are, in isolation, useless. What is the use of a man's love to a woman with no need for love? What is the use of a man's loyalty, constancy, and memory to a woman who wants only to walk away and to never look back?

What is the point of writing without readers? One might as well toss bottles into the sea.

These are questions posed to the wind at night, but the wind moves on, the stars fade. Questions useless, unnecessary, because I already have my answers.

We love because we must. We remain loyal because we must. We treasure memories because we must. We toss bottles into the sea because isolation is the curse of a lifetime, and because we must live as if our curses were a lie.

The Purpose Of Genocide Nightmares

In a time of genocide, our terrible nightmares of murdered children are just the brain's way of compelling us to face the world as it is right now:

"Wake up. For the sake of humanity, wake up. Stop acting as if life were still normal. Wake up!"

ChatPTSD Tells Us All About M. R. James

Hey there, ChatPTSD! What can you tell us about the great British icon of supernatural stories, M. R. James?

"M. R. James is a notable writer of mysteries, whose most famous book, GREYBEARD, was filmed as THE CHILDREN OF BRIAN ALDISS.

"James also collaborated with Truman Capote to write THE INNOCENTS, which was filmed by Luchino Visconti as L'INNOCENTE. This film starred creepy child actor Martin Balsam, who would later go on to fame in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. His co-star in L'INNOCENTE, Deborah Kerr, was married to British bomber pilot Burt Lancaster, who would also appear in a famous Visconti epic, BORN FREE, in which Elsa Lanchester played a leopardess.

"M. R. James would later become Provost of Eaton's, a chain of Canadian department stores that specialized in antiquarian relics. No longer a mistress of mysteries, she became a ghost writer. Her most famous book, THE CASTER OF THE RUNES, was published under a pseudonym, J. G. Salinger, and went on to inspire the David Cronenberg film, RAISE HIGH THE DROWNED WORLD, CRASHERS.

"James then became a dentist on Her Majesty's buccal service, with a driver's licence to kill after dark in the parking fields -- truly, a warning to the carious."

AI? Aieeeee!

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Twists and THE TWILIGHT ZONE: "Ring-A-Ding Girl," and "Nightmare As A Child"

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"Ring-a-Ding Girl" (1963), written by Earl Hamner, Jr. Directed by Alan Crosland, Jr.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE was always inconsistent. Its great episodes remain powerful and beautifully-crafted to this day, but the quality of the rest veered from mediocre to downright painful.

A primary strength and weakness of the series is Rod Serling. Many of his episodes become sermons on the hatefulness of human beings; others depend on a final moment twist that undermines any point the story might have made. This is why, for me, his best episodes avoid any twist. "And When The Sky Was Opened," for example, relies on nothing more, and nothing less, than a relentless march towards doom.

Elsewhere, in stories by Serling and his other TWILIGHT ZONE writers, the twist does no damage because it changes nothing about the fate of its people ("The Midnight Sun"), or because the twist appears halfway through the story, which then explores the implications of that twist ("In His Image"). But one story that seems at first to rely on a twist, employs, instead, a delayed revelation of context -- a context that cannot be explained.

This episode, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" by Earl Hamner, Jr, caught me off guard when I first watched it decades ago, and works even more for me today.

Many commenters online have complained that the story makes no sense. I disagree; I would argue that if the supernatural existed, we should not expect it to follow our expectations of causality, nor should we expect the supernatural to conform to our notions of time. What makes "Ring-A-Ding Girl" so haunting for me is that it relies not on causality, not on the consistent passage of time, but on consistency of character.

The protagonist of the story is an actress who, like so many people who perform to crowds, has a public and a private face. Here we see both: the false bravado of the public face, the confusion, the anxiety of the private face. Apparently baffled by what is going on, this actress begins to improvise, and the results of her decision become clear only at the story's end.

In the wrong hands, "Ring-A-Ding Girl" could have become a sentimental, consolatory script. Instead, I find the story honest and sad, and its final shot of the protagonist both eerie and heart-breaking.

Even if we could never understand the supernatural, we might still have the freedom to respond to it in our own fashion, for evil, for good, as ourselves. This would seem to be the point of "Ring-A-Ding Girl," and for me, it makes perfect sense.

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"Nightmare As A Child" (1960), written by Rod Serling. Directed by Alvin Ganzer.

Very few TWILIGHT ZONE episodes actually scare me. "And When The Sky Was Opened" never fails to scrape a nerve, but another episode that unsettles me is "Nightmare As A Child." As a ghost story that deals less with the supernatural than with the psychological, it uncovers a sense of dread in its down-to-Earth aspects of lost memory and life-long stalking.

It also veers away from the disappointment of a final twist. Most viewers will understand what is going on within five minutes; I suspect that Serling knew this, and so he relied not on a twist, but on a mid-story confirmation of what the viewer has already grasped. This confirmation allows the story to move beyond its ghost elements into a more disturbing tale of psychopathology, with no lapse of tension.

One of the biggest challenges of this approach is to find an effective ending. While I do feel that Serling could have dreamed up a stronger finale, I can accept the one offered here as appropriate to the story and to its implications. Elsewhere, the episode benefits from its acting, its blocking of action, its direction, and especially from a quiet score by Jerry Goldsmith, whose music oscillates between deceptive gentleness and sinister evocation of a threat that lurks in the background while waiting to strike: a description that applies well to the whole episode.