E. F. Benson, "The Face"

Although he wrote too many stories too quickly, E. F. Benson showed undeniable skill in four strong works of horror: "The Horror Horn," "The Room in the Tower," "Caterpillars," and "The Face."

Having read Jim Rockhill's book on Sheridan Le Fanu, and having begun to re-read Le Fanu's novellas and stories, I now recognize that Benson's "The Face" is, in effect, his version of a Le Fanu theme.

In Number 5356 of THE SPECTATOR (Saturday, February 21, 1931), Benson wrote:

"There is one author, far too little known by those in search of creepy lore, who seldom fails in his high mission: his name is Sheridan Le Fanu. He produces, page for page, a far higher percentage of terror than the more widely read Edgar Allan Poe, and whether he deals in ghosts direct or in more material horrors, his success in making his readers very uneasy is amazing. Though we may already know the story we select to give us some insupportable moments on a lonely evening, there is a quality about most of his tales which seldom fails to alarm: familiarity with them does not breed comfort. Many ghost stories are efficacious for a first reading, but few, when we already know the worst that the author has to tell us, preserve untainted the atmosphere of horror as do the tales in IN A GLASS DARKLY. The best of these... are instinct with an awfulness which custom cannot stale, and this quality is due... to Le Fanu’s admirably artistic methods in setting and narration....

"As a story-teller, his best work is of the first rank, while as a flesh-creeper he is unrivalled. No one else has so sure a touch in mixing the mysterious atmosphere in which horror darkly breeds."

One motif that appears in Le Fanu is the innocent, faultless woman who suddenly falls prey to a dead man. In "Ultor de Lacey," the innocent woman is victimized as part of an old curse against her family, but in "Schalken the Painter," no reason is given for the innocent woman's fate. She was chosen by a corpse, and he will take her.

In "The Face," Benson develops his own version of this idea. Again, the woman is innocent. Again, no explanation, no connection, no reason is offered for this catastrophe. Again, the story can be read and re-read with no loss of its power.

Benson was rarely a stylist. In passages like this one, he could be tone-deaf. Notice the end-rhymes:

"Her heart hammered in her throat, and then seemed to stand still altogether. A qualm, as of some mental sickness of the soul overcame her, for there in front of her was he who would soon come for her. There was the reddish hair, the projecting ears, the greedy eyes set close together...."

Where Benson excelled was in capturing a sense of place:

"The warning dream, the curtain that was drawn up on the succeeding night, and disclosed the vision she dreaded, was simple and harmless enough in itself. She seemed to be walking on a high sandy cliff covered with short down-grass; twenty yards to the left came the edge of this cliff, which sloped steeply down to the sea that lay at its foot. The path she followed led through fields bounded by low hedges, and mounted gradually upwards. She went through some half-dozen of these, climbing over the wooden stiles that gave communication; sheep grazed there, but she never saw another human being, and always it was dusk, as if evening was falling, and she had to hurry on, because someone (she knew not whom) was waiting for her, and had been waiting not a few minutes only, but for many years. Presently, as she mounted this slope, she saw in front of her a copse of stunted trees, growing crookedly under the continual pressure of the wind that blew from the sea, and when she saw those she knew her journey was nearly done, and that the nameless one, who had been waiting for her so long was somewhere close at hand. The path she followed was cut through this wood, and the slanting boughs of the trees on the sea-ward side almost roofed it in; it was like walking through a tunnel. Soon the trees in front began to grow thin, and she saw through them the grey tower of a lonely church. It stood in a graveyard, apparently long disused, and the body of the church, which lay between the tower and the edge of the cliff, was in ruins, roofless, and with gaping windows, round which ivy grew thickly."

Often with Benson, scenery drives the plot. In "The Face," it fuels anxiety, a sense of dread, of something waiting to strike. Each repetition of that walk up the sandy cliff becomes a step into a trap.

When this trap closes, "The Face" reveals the true skills of E. F. Benson.

The Non-Productive Toilet Of AI

Why flush billions of dollars down the non-productive toilet of AI, when that money could be invested productively: in public schools that create readers and thinkers instead of screen junkies; in free community colleges that train engineers and scientists instead of corporate drones; in universities that study and learn from great minds and great achievements of the past, instead of working hard to erase them from the nation's memory; in a thriving middle class instead of an increasingly-impoverished crowd of digital slaves?

Wait -- you say that Americans once developed a strong and educated middle class, and that this class gave the country unprecedented intellectual achievements and technological innovations? But also that this middle class was perceived by America's plantation-owners as a political and financial threat to their own dreams of oligarchy? And so they destroyed it, to make themselves richer?

Oh, well. Countries go from periods of greatness to declines and falls, and America seems no different. Its collapse will be studied by Iranian, Russian, and Chinese historians of tomorrow. I hope they learn from it. Good luck to them!

Read to Keep the Past Alive

This is how the life of yesterday endures.

You read a book that mentions other, older books. You read those books, too, and they also mention other, older books. And so your steps take you back, to Montaigne, to Francis Bacon, to Thomas Browne, to the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, to Seneca, and then back even further to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.

This is a normal process that keeps the past alive, but it requires you to pick up that first book and to damned well read it.

It also requires you to follow your own interests, and not the recommendations of book clubs or online book-fetish commodity sites. The steps you take into the past will be your own steps. They will certainly take you to different books than the books I found. You might walk past Virginia Woolf to the Bronte sisters, and then to Sappho. Your neighbour might step from George Orwell to Thomas Carlyle, and then to Thomas Hobbes, and then to Cicero. There are no incorrect pathways.

All of these recoveries and survivals depend on the willingness of people to take their initial steps, on the willingness of people to read. When people stop reading, everything known by the past, everything treasured by the past, will die.

If you want to see the septic wounds of its dying, just look around.

William Sansom: THE PASSIONATE NORTH - "A Wedding"

The horror stories of William Sansom are hidden away in his collections, which makes them all the more surprising when discovered. Any given story might seem, at first, an everyday slice of life, until the facade falls apart and something goes wrong. Even the gentler stories are often told with an intensity of vision that suggests paranoia, a sense that the universe itself is out to destroy someone. A few imply the supernatural, while still more describe physical dangers ferocious enough to seem demonic. (One of these, "The Vertical Ladder," made the palms of my hands too sweaty to hold the book.)

Of the more uncanny tales, my favourite is "A Wedding," from THE PASSIONATE NORTH (The Hogarth Press, London, 1950). It not only conveys a vivid setting and sinister mood, 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 the story 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. Like the one piece of a puzzle that suddenly resolves a patch of blue into definite sky or definite sea, the final statement offers a hint of what kind of story this had been from the start.

In his usual style, Sansom builds up visual impressions to make his writing live. The story has 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 terror; in a "Wedding," he also became a master of the final sentence that lingers in the mind.

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Because "A Wedding" is long out of print and hard to find (and not even listed on ISFDB), I can offer a PDF to those who want to read it. You can download the file without having to sign in.

The Pleasures of Literacy

Many discussions about literacy focus on its practical benefits: on the power to develop critical thinking, to pursue knowledge, to seize and to refine those random, scattered notions that flit across awareness and then vanish. All of these points matter, but one detail often missed remains, for me, central: that reading is a source of pleasure.

I often come across a complaint from students: Why bother to read a full text, when a summary in bullet form (often supplied by Artificial Idiot) can provide all of the "information" of a text without the "distractions" of skill and form and art? This takes utilitarianism to absurd lows, but the point is worth considering. Why bother to read?

My answer is that reading, in itself, can be a joy.

Let me offer a few passages from a lifetime's library of pleasure. Please read them aloud; please hear them.

"In vain do individuals hope for Immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the Moon: Men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the Sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The various Cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dogge-starre. While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we finde they are but like the Earth; Durable in their main bodies, alterable in their parts: whereof beside Comets and new Stars, perspectives begin to tell tales. And the spots that wander about the Sun, with Phaeton's favour, would make clear conviction.

"...Man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equall lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature.

"Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus, but the wisedom of funerall Laws found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced undoing fires, unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an Urne."

-- From HYDRIOTAPHIA, by Thomas Browne, 1658.

Sound and sense in combination can provide an intensely aesthetic pleasure, but even I, agnostic and anti-spiritual, can feel Browne's belief through the intensity of his language.

Another example from Thomas Browne, this one more "down to Earth." Again, please read this aloud.

"Whether lampries have nine eyes, as is received, we durst refer it unto Polyphemus, who had but one, to judge it. An error concerning eyes, occasioned by the error of eyes; deduced from the appearance of diverse cavities or holes on either side, which some call eyes that carelessly behold them; and is not only refutable by experience, but also repugnant unto reason. For, beside the monstrosity they fasten unto nature, in contriving many eyes, who hath made but two unto any animal, that is, one of each side, according to the division of the brain; it were a superfluous inartificial act to place and settle so many in one plane; for the two extremes would sufficiently perform the office of sight without the help of the intermediate eyes, and behold as much as all seven joined together. For the visible base of the object would be defined by these two; and the middle eyes, although they behold the same thing, yet could they not behold so much thereof as these; so were it no advantage unto man to have a third eye between those two he hath already; and the fiction of Argus seems more reasonable than this; for though he had many eyes, yet were they placed in circumference and positions of advantage, and so are they placed in several lines in spiders."

-- From PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA (Third Book), by Thomas Browne, 1646-1672.

This is natural history, close observation, skeptical inquiry, fuelled by a wit that no reduction to point form could preserve.

Another example. By all means, read this one aloud!

"But the third sister, who is also the youngest --! Hush, whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybèle, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum -- Our Lady of Darkness."

-- From SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS, by Thomas de Quincey, 1845.

De Quincey moves beyond the natural history and anthropology of Browne into the worlds of imagination, dreams, and dreads, but he relies no less on striking images and organ chords.

A final example.

"A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides --
You may have met Him -- Did you not
His notice sudden is --

"The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on --

"He likes a Boggy Acre --
A Floor too cool for Corn --
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot --
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone --

"Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me --
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality --

"But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone --"

-- Emily Dickinson, ca 1865.

The power, the beauty of great prose and great poetry is that it cannot be paraphrased; it must be read as it is, in full, because its impact relies as much on sound and metaphor, imagery and rhythm, as on what it "says."

Any student of today who prefers bullet form summaries to the joys of reading might be dissuaded by examples like these. It is the task of literate people, who love to read, to show what can be gained by reading for pleasure.