45. L.P. Hartley - 'A Change of Ownership' (1948)

'Laid back, I'll give you laid back'
(Hot Chip, 'Over and Over', The Warning, 2006)

'What fun for him, after these constricted years, to come home to a big house of his own, where he has three or four sitting-rooms to choose from, each of which he may occupy by himself!'

(L.P. Hartley, The Complete Short Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 1973, p.167)

It can never be 'his' front door.

'It was locked all right; but who had locked if?' (p.169)

A real oddity this one, of English gothic vintage. This side of Hartley was discernible in the Belladonna episode of The Go Between, with all its shattering symbolism of innocence and experience, but this is a fully fledged dalliance with the Weird. Making sense of 'A Change of Ownership' is harder than most; it is in many ways a refreshingly recalcitrant read - the sort of short-story where you do have to go back at several points to grasp the underlying narrative of the main character.

Hartley establishes the rather splintered, paranoid personality of 'Mr' Ernest carefully; first, he is seen partly through the eyes of a companion, Hubert - an old friend who gives him a lift back home after they have been to the theatre. Ernest's home is 'semi-rural', a large suburban house overlooking a field on one side. (p.163) His friend's conversation illustrates Ernest's isolation, living alone in this big house (his servants are apparently away), where previously he has lived in shared accommodation: when Ernest says that he is alone 'in a sense', Hubert understandably queries, 'Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance?' (p.164)

Hardly so, as once his friend has departed, Ernest slips into thinking about himself in the third-person, a trend that marks the rest of the narrative. He imagines himself in a strange array of guises and roles while attempting to get to grips with being locked out of his house - which has been done by mysterious means. Internal dialogues convey an authentic sense of madness, and Hartley displays an unerring command of using the present-tense to embroil the reader. The status of the narrative voice is deliberately unclear - at times, as in the epigraph above, it seems as if it is mocking Ernest.

His learning to live alone, 'like other people', is shown to involve a splintering of - or at least, an uncertainty within - his personality. Stithies Court, the house, is a forbidding place and becomes literally inaccessible to him, its presumptive owner. The word presumptive being operative there. Stithies - evocatively, choicely, named - is something of an impregnable, infernal fortress: 'it looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower', the only certainty and constant in this unreliable narrative. (p.164)

LPH delves into the uncanny, and this can be said to fit in very nicely in the English Weird continuum, linking M.R. James and Christopher Priest; I, Haruspex is indeed the short-story covered so far which this most resembles. It is revealed that the figure in the house, keeping down the window with his fingers when Ernest tries to get in that way, initially has a Sapphire and Steel anticipating blankness - its face 'a featureless oval, dimly phosphorescent'. (p.173) This 'simulacrum', it is eventually made clear, is no less than Ernest himself: 'This time the face did not alter. It was Ernest's own face, a hateful face, and the face of a murderer.'

It is, overall, a continually discomfitting, confounding tale, written in an unusual, intriguing style; another fine advertisement for home ownership! Hartley, often facilely bracketed as English Heritage, is indeed, far from that; this is anti-heritage in almost all senses, being concerned with deeper things. As with his great 1953 novel, tradition and hierarchies are destructive; in this case, the old English house itself takes on particular malignance:

'In an old house like this, of course, the floor-boards do contract and expand; they have seen a great deal; they have something to say, and they want to get it off their chests.' (p.168)

8/10

38. Edgar Allan Poe - 'Hop-Frog' (1849)

http://watchinghorrorfilmsfrombehindthecouch.blogspot.com/2009/01/masque-of-red-death.html

'Poor fellow! his large eyes gleamed, rather than shone; for the effect of wine on his excitable brain was not more powerful than instantaneous. He placed the goblet nervously on the table, and looked round upon the company with a half-insane stare. They all seemed highly amused at the success of the king's "joke".'
(Edgar Allan Poe, 'Hop-Frog', The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin, 1982, p.504)

Edgar Allan Poe has been a favourite of mine for some years; perhaps ever since I saw the excellent Roger Corman film from 1964, Masque of the Red Death, which combined that story with elements of 'Hop-Frog', creating a richly Gothic tapestry that bore quite an Ingmar Bergman influence. In 2004, I read the marvel that is 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and, more recently, deft exercises in morbidity such as 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'.

After seeing Corman's film, I decided to read the short-story as part of my English Speaking Board examination - conducted at the end of my first year of Sixth Form College. It should be noted that I was in the last cohort of students to simply do 'A' Levels over two years, before the Advanced Subsidiary (A.S.) came in. One had to chair a debate on a topical issue, do a reading from a work of fiction, poetry etc. and do a short presentation on any topic of interest. At the time, I found the whole thing very difficult, but nevertheless could recognise that it was worth doing; presentation making and public speaking is an area I am now rather well versed in, but then was out of my depth. This forcible projection got me started, inadvertently perhaps leading to where I am today, lecturing after a fashion, engaging an audience of students on topics such as aesthetics, religion / science and changes in modern society. I am also seemingly in demand as a moment's-notice MC at friends' weddings, in lieu of anyone else, although mercifully am one who sticks to the bare essentials of that duty!

The sound of one's own voice; something you have to be comfortable with in many spheres - acting, politics, teaching and foolery. The eponymous Hop-Frog, is, as required by court jesters, silver tongued in his ability to provoke amusement with his jesting. As in Lear, where the Fool imparts sometimes harsh truths with the impugnity accorded by his position and attire, 'Hop-Frog''s titular protagonist lambasts and ribs royalty - but safely, within the confines of a 'game'.

Poe takes this scenario and portrays the nobility going too far, and the jokes becoming less 'safe' as a result and instead leading to a deliciously macabre denounement. There is the eeriness of sounds in Poe's description, conveying a subtle link to Beckett's Embers: 'There was a dead silence for about half a minute, during which the falling of a leaf, or of a feather, might have been heard. It was interrupted by a low, but harsh and protracted grating sound which seemed to come from every corner of the room.' (p.505) Horror - the myserious and unexplainable - seems to reside in this recurring (see p.508), bodiless noise.

This uncanny sound must - though seems not to - emanate from the dwarf Hop-Frog; it goes beyond his corporeal being: ' "The sound appeared to come from without," observed one of the courtiers. "I fancy it was the parrot at the window, whetting his bill upon his cage-wires.' '

I shall not go into the precise manner of the jester's revenge, other than to say that it revolves upon a masquerade - a role's reverse, which shows up the evil and corrupt as they really are. Hop-Frog assumes the role of master of a righteously macabre ceremony; Poe's use of italics indicate the shrill emphasis in this ritual performer's performance, shattering the institutions that bound and abused him:

"I now see distinctly," he said, "what manner of people these maskers are." (p.509)

In the end, the opening sentences reveal themselves astypically sardonic: 'I never knew any one so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking.'

9/10

26. William Makepeace Thackeray - 'The Devil's Wager' (1836)

'it appeared that the holy father could not manage the desired prayer.'
(Peter Haining, ed., Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance 1765-1840, Penguin, 1973, p.492)

This is the first of two stories drawn from a Peter Haining curated anthology of 'Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance'. Unsurprisingly, given its moniker, this tale tends towards emphasising the horror side of things.

Thackeray opens with a Gothic flourish which surely even in 1836 had an element of the parodic - presumably deliberate. It is a florid, archetypal setting of the scene that deserves quoting in full:

'It was the hour of the night when there be none stirring save churchyard ghosts - when all doors are closed except the gates of graves, and all eyes shut but the eyes of wicked men.
When there is no sound on the earth except the ticking of the grasshopper, or the croaking of obscene frogs in the pool.
And no light except that of the blinking stars, and the wicked and devilish wills-o'-the-wisp, as they gambol among the marshes and lead good men astray.
When there is nothing moving in heaven except the owl, as he flappeth along lazily; or the magician, as he rideth on his infernal broomstick, whistling through the air like the arrows of a Yorkshire archer.
It was at this hour (namely, at twelve o'clock of the night,) that two things went winging through the black clouds, and holding converse with each other.'
(pp.485-6)

He then breaks with this studiously ominous prose style; there is an almost debunking bathos in his reversion to a duologue remisicent of one of Poe's more philosophical asides: reminding me of 'Mesmeric Revelation' (1844), for example. This dialogue is established between a demon-messenger, Mercurius, and the soul of Sir Rollo, a dead knight in purgatory, whom the demon is supervising, indeed keeping him in line through winding his tail around his neck. The two establish a wager that would enable Rollo to ascend to heaven - if only he can get a living person to save an ave (prayer) for him, given three opportunities. First he tries his niece, who is startled by the visitation 'and of course fainted' (p.486) and when revived refuses to save the ave because the knight goes on to insult her current suitor, Edward. In a move which sums up the freewheeling style of this tale, Thackeray spells the niece Matilda's name in at least three different ways.

Next the pair intrude upon a friar, Father Peter, and his drunken company, who are predictably most amused by the spectacle: 'a person with hoofs, horns and a tail rather distubred the hilarity of the company.' (p.491) As is clear in my epigraph, this inebriated friar is unable to utter a prayer, and indeed is manipulated by Mercurius - who edits the hymnbook - into singing a satirical, anti-Church song:

'My pulpit is an ale-house bench,
Whereon I sit so jolly
A smiling rosy country wench
My saint and patron holy.'
(p.492)

A decided dose of satirical humour is evident throughout this tale, bringing this horror tale perhaps surprisingly into the orbit of WMT's novel, Vanity Fair (1847-8). The third visit is to Rollo's brother, a prior who had entered into a pact with the devil 'never to say a prayer.' The dead knight is by this point unable to contemplate winning the wager, faced with a gloating Mercurius, cutting 'a hundred jokes at the expense of his poor associate.' (p.493)

He enters the room of his brother, a 'wicked and maligant sorcerer', with no hope; as amusingly put by WMT: 'he entered his brother's room more for the five minutes' respite than from any hope of success.' (p.494) Yet, Rollo manages to develop a more wily strategy, taking Father Ignatius into his full confidence and then tricking him into saying the ave, and thus leading to his brother taking his place in hell. Thackeray's vivid tableau at the end includes a memorable description of the miserable Ignatius being dragged downwards by Mercurius towards hell: by his long beard.

This story was enjoyable, much like one of the tales inserted by Dickens within hihumours contemporaneous saga, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7). Thackeray tells a basically moral tale, but invests it with enough diabolic incident and satiric good humour to make it a worthwhile read.

7/10