The Worst And Best Of H. R. Wakefield

H. R. Wakefield has never been a favourite of mine. For me, he lacks the descriptive clarity of M. R. James or L. P. Hartley, the imaginative power of Sheridan Le Fanu, the dreamlike atmosphere of Walter de la Mare. If I had to use one sentence to describe his work, I would say, "It lacks conviction." If I had to use one word: "Hasty."

For years, I wondered if I was being unfair in my assessment, and so I went back to give several stories another try. The result? I still don't think much of H. R. Wakefield, with the exception of one story that has always impressed me.

The stories that seemed pale and thin years ago seem even duller today. For example, "The Cairn" fails because of needless shifts in point of view, because of the needless introduction of characters who offer little and then vanish, because of a needless insistence on keeping its monster out of sight and out of mind.

"Welland watched the little dark speck climbing steadily towards the cairn till it was but a hundred yards or so from it and then once again put the telescope to his eye. A few minutes later he saw Seebright reach the cairn, slap it with his hand and then turn and face towards the inn and wave his right arm above his head. And then he began rapidly to descend. Welland had started instinctively to wave back and then had smiled at his stupidity. He was just about to put the glass down again when he suddenly became tense and intent. He put the telescope down sharply and rubbed both lenses with his handkerchief, and then he put it to his eye again. For a moment he remained taut and rigid, and then he began to tremble, and then he dropped the telescope to the floor, and then he rushed from the room, out through the front door and down the village street. As it happened there was only one person who saw him pass, old Mrs Elm, who was beating a rug outside her cottage door. When she saw a hatless figure dash hobbling past, and that queer look on his face too, her mouth fell open and the rug dropped from her hands. A moment later she saw this figure turn up the lane and disappear, and then for several minutes she remained staring open-mouthed.

"Now Mrs Elm's brain never exceeded largo in its tempo, and seldom reached it. At the same time she had a sense for the unusual. She went back to her kitchen and wrestled with the problem of what to do. So presently she put her shawl around her head and trotted up to the Hare and Form, where she found Mr Reddle squeezing the digestive apparatus from a chicken.

"'Mr Reddle,' she began, and fiddled with her shawl.

"'Yes, what is it?' asked the landlord, pausing in the midst of his culinary business.

"'Well,' said Mrs Elm. 'I sees one of those young chaps who's putting up here, and I sees him running by in his slippers and without his hat and he turned up Dim Lane. I thought I ought to tell you.'"

But what does Wakefield tell us? Nothing.

As a contrast, consider E. F. Benson's "The Horror Horn": garish, perhaps, but a better development of a similar idea -- better, because it relies on images, a vivid setting, and action:

"Sliding and slipping, with the toes of my skis tripping in the obstacles below the snow, I plunged forward down the hill between the pine-trunks. The low sun already sinking behind some rampart of mountain in the west reddened the snow and the pines with its ultimate rays. My knapsack with the skates in it swung to and fro on my back, one ski-stick had already been twitched out of my hand by a fallen branch of pine, but not a second’s pause could I allow myself to recover it. I gave no glance behind, and I knew not at what pace my pursuer was on my track, or indeed whether any pursued at all, for my whole mind and energy, now working at full power again under the stress of my panic, was devoted to getting away down the hill and out of the wood as swiftly as my limbs could bear me. For a little while I heard nothing but the hissing snow of my headlong passage, and the rustle of the covered undergrowth beneath my feet, and then, from close at hand behind me, once more the wolf-howl sounded and I heard the plunging of footsteps other than my own."

Here, Benson is writing; Wakefield merely puts down words on paper. In story after story, in craftsmanship, in vision, Wakefield falls apart for me.

Another story I tried again was "Lucky's Grove," but after a few pages, I gave up: the prose limped and fumbled, brought nothing to eyes, ears, or skin, and shifted viewpoints from one suddenly-introduced character to another, which kept the story at arm's length and out of focus.

Hours later, I went back to the story, but found no change in its weaknesses. End-rhymes littered the paragraphs. One vague person after another took centre-stage, and then vanished into gloom. Above all, Wakefield strove to give nothing firm, nothing physical, nothing tangible for my imagination to seize.

"Their dreams were harsh and unhallowed, yet oddly related, being concerned with dim, uncertain, and yet somehow urgent happenings in and around the house, as though some thing or things were stirring while they slept and communicated their motions to their dreaming consciousness. They awoke tired with a sense of unaccountable malaise."

Unaccountable. Sounds right to me.

As in too many of his other stories, Wakefield, here, seemed unable to describe events on the page. Instead, he withdrew into his turtle-shell of abstraction.

"If on the preceding night the rest of the sleepers had been broken by influences which had insinuated themselves into their dreams, that which caused the night of that Christmas Eve to be unforgettable was the demoniacal violence of the elements. The north-easter had been waxing steadily all the evening and by midnight reached hurricane force, driving before it an almost impenetrable wall of snow. Not only so, but continually all through the night the wall was enflamed, and the roar of the hurricane silenced, by fearful flashes of lightning and rattles of thunder. The combination was almost intolerably menacing."

Almost? Almost.

"As the great house shook from the gale and trembled at the blasts and the windows blazed with strange polychromatic balls of flame, all were tense and troubled. The children fought or succumbed to their terror according to their natures; their parents soothed and reassured them."

What I miss, here, is any sense of living inside the story as a participant, as a dreamer. Wakefield offered nothing for my imagination; he offered lectures. Instead of making me feel events, he told me how I should feel about them.

Even during the few passages where he did offer something vaguely tangible, he hurried past the moment as if any hint of sensory detail embarrassed him.

"He went to the windows and flung another open, and as he did so he glanced out. His room looked over the rock garden and down the path to the maze. Something moving just outside it caught his eye. He thought he knew what it was, that big Alsatian which had been sheep-worrying in the neighbourhood. What an enormous brute. Or was it just because it was outlined against the snow? It vanished suddenly, apparently into the maze."

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"The last scene was meant as an appropriate prelude to the climax of the festivities. It showed Curtis and his crew digging up the tree from Lucky's Grove. Out they came from the holm-oaks straining under their load, but close observers noticed there was one who remained behind, standing menacing and motionless, a very tall, dark, brooding figure."

This is dull, dead prose, and the result, for me, is yet another dull, dead story. When someone writes as if he had no interest in writing, how can I take interest in reading him?

Still, few writers can be lousy every time, and even H. R. Wakefield actually wrote something worth revisiting: "Look Up There!"

Like "The Cairn," like too many of his other stories, "Look Up There!" refuses to confront its nightmares. Yet here, to my surprise, the effect works. "Look Up There!" takes the old concept of indescribable horror, and makes it lively on the page.

"I do not remember whether I spoke a word throughout that meal, but I do know that I was under such a strain that I had to grip my chair to stop myself running from the room. The women were on the verge of hysteria, the men drank feverishly and, as time went on, a dreadful vague, inane babble came from all of them. The woman on my right -- she had a high, thin voice -- suddenly gulped down a full glass of champagne, some of which swilled over her chin and neck, and shouted, 'Well, when does it begin?' and then went off into peals of hysterical laughter. We did not move from the table, and from half-past ten onwards, Relf kept getting up to ring the bell, but no servant appeared. 'Where are those bloody slaves?' he cried each time, and staggered back to the table and filled his glass again. From half-past eleven I was no longer master of myself. The room was thick with smoke which wreathed itself into fantastic patterns. The pressure grew unendurable, and suddenly my resistance broke, and I ran from the Great Hall up to my room and lay cowering on my bed. I could still hear the crazy, chaotic babble from those I had left, and then a great bell crashed out. One-two-three -- and each mighty stroke followed so hard on its predecessor that the vile jangle almost seemed an undivided sound. It was as if a murderer was hammering in my brain. Suddenly it ceased, and I heard no sound from below, and then came one high, piercing scream from a woman: 'Look up there!', and then every light in the house went out."

"Look Up There!" is that rarest of things, a story by H. R. Wakefield that unsettled me. If you find his work unimpressive, unconvincing, or just plain dull, I recommend this one for its unexpectedly powerful use of evasion.

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.