“ .... as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has been once caught firmly by the end of the finest fiber of his nerve is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am. Yes, Doctor, as I am, for while I talk to you, and implore relief, I feel that my prayer is for the impossible, and my pleading with the inexorable.”
-- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, "Green Tea."
I.
Of the few essential
writers who over the last two centuries established the art of
supernatural fiction, perhaps the least well known is the Irish
author, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – and this despite his being
considered the “father” of the modern ghost story and the writer
who introduced realism to a form once dominated by Gothic and
Romantic conventions. Literary reputation is to some extent a matter
of accident. How many today would know Le Fanu’s American
contemporary, Edgar Allen Poe, if Poe had not been embraced by the
French avant-garde in the 1850's? Sheridan Le Fanu has long been the
horror writer’s horror writer and readers coming for the first time
to Le Fanu’s monumental 1872 collection, In
a Glass Darkly, will find themselves “face
to face” (as the biblical reference of the title has it) with
horror writing at its most original, accomplished, and intense and
with a vision of the horrific that may well be more accessible, if no
less disturbing, today than it was in the middle of the Victorian
Age.
There is much
distinctly modern about Le Fanu’s style and sensibility and the
stories of In a Glass Darkly
seem to anticipate many of the most important developments in
supernatural fiction of the subsequent century. Here is the black
humor of Ambrose Bierce, Henry James’s recognition of terror as
contagious, and H.P. Lovecraft’s vision of cosmic malice. Here too
is M.R. James’s detachment and meticulous control of the effective
detail, narrative structure, and crescendo, as well as most of the
formal innovations associated with the 20th
century’s greatest writer of ghost stories: layers of narration,
pseudo-scholarship, and literary pastiche (none of this is
coincidental; James considered Le Fanu the “master” and was
largely responsible for reviving interest in the Irish writer). The
collection’s opening tale, “Carmilla,” is often named the
greatest of all vampire stories; the inspiration and model for
Dracula, Le Fanu’s
story is more melancholy, psychological, and explicitly erotic than
Bram Stoker’s more straightforward novel. But then, Le Fanu’s
perspective often seems more appropriate to our world – the world
after Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and the horrors of two World Wars –
than to the certainty and orthodoxy of the 19th
century.
II.
Although we know that
great works of imagination have an existence independent of the lives
and minds of their creators, it is hard to resist seeking in an
artist’s biography a “key” to his work. But while an author’s
life rarely explains his work, the work often creates in our minds an
image of the author that we then seek to have confirmed by biography.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s biography is almost ideal: what we know is
enough to make him an archetype of the horror writer (if not, indeed,
the model for his own characters) but is too little to clarify the
profound and disturbing ambiguities which lay at the heart of his
tales.
The Le Fanus were
French Huguenots who fled France for England and, later, Ireland,
after Louis XIV revoked the rights of Protestants in 1685. Le
Fanu’s grandfather and great-uncle married sisters of the renown
dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan whose name and, on occasion,
literary gift would be passed down to generations of Le Fanus.
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born August 28, 1814 in Dublin and
he would live most of his life in that city. He spent much of his
youth in rural County Limerick where his family faced considerable
danger during the “Tithe Wars,” an uprising of Irish Catholics enraged at having to pay tithes to support Anglican clerics such as
Le Fanu’s father. Some claim that Le Fanu absorbed much Irish
folklore during his years in Limerick but there is little
specifically Irish about the folk elements in Le Fanu’s tales. M.R.
James, one of the first to study Le Fanu, does find in the author’s
writing a distinctively Celtic melancholy, imagination, and feel for
evocative landscapes.
Le Fanu earned a law
degree (as well as a reputation as a fierce debater and quick wit) at
Trinity College but by the time he passed the Bar in 1839, Le Fanu
had already published his first story and chosen a life of letters
over the law. He would be primarily a journalist, editor, and
publisher, owning in whole or part a series of Dublin periodicals. In
addition to his horror tales, Le Fanu wrote verse, humorous stories,
and a dozen or so novels. The novels lack explicitly supernatural
elements but nonetheless display Le Fanu’s genius for mystery,
suspense, and intense atmosphere and his most famous book, Uncle
Silas, remains in print today. Le Fanu was
during his lifetime a popular if not famous writer. Charles Dickens,
who as an editor had a major influence on the rise of the ghost story
during the Victorian Age, was impressed by Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”
and published it in All the Year Round
in 1869. In the generation after Le Fanu’s death in 1873 one reads
disdainful references to horror writers who imitate but cannot match
Le Fanu’s style, and the narrator of Henry James’s 1887 short
story, “The Liar,” remarks of a typical English country house,
“There was the customary novel of Mr. Le Fanu for the bedside; the
ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight.”
The premature death
in 1858 of Le Fanu’s dearly loved wife Susan was a watershed event
for Le Fanu, although it is not clear that it greatly affected his
writing. His distinctive vision, style, technique, themes, and even
plots (like many hardworking writers, Le Fanu was known to recycle
good ideas) are apparent in his earliest stories, although the
author’s most intense and controlled work, including the stories of
In a Glass Darkly, were written after his wife’s death. Le Fanu the
man did change dramatically after 1858. A well known figure in
Dublin, Le Fanu withdrew from public life, confining his
relationships to family, close friends, and colleagues. So remarkable
was the change that he was nicknamed “The Invisible Prince.” He
was rarely seen, and then only in the evening, “looking like the
ghost of his former self” as he returned from his newspaper to his
home at 18 Merrion Square or haunted book shops in search of ghost
stories and volumes of Astrology and Demonology. Le Fanu’s
interest in the occult grew during these years but it seems doubtful
that he was a true believer. Le Fanu’s use of esoteric ideas read
more as satire and parody than earnest belief and at least one of Le
Fanu’s friends reports such to have been the case.
While the widower Le
Fanu carried on with life and the work of running a newspaper and
raising four children, he developed some odd habits. According to his
son, Brinsley, the author did his writing in bed very late at night,
fortified, like the Rev. Jennings of the eponymous tale, with copious
amounts of green tea. He became increasingly troubled by dreams and
in particular by a recurring nightmare in which a large Victorian
house collapses on him while he sleeps, killing him. In 1873, shortly
after writing a novel entitled Willing to Die,
Le Fanu was discovered in his bed, dead of a heart attack, his eyes
bugged out and his face contorted with a look of terror. “I feared
this,” his physician is reported saying. “The house fell at
last.”
III.
We cannot know
whether Le Fanu believed in or experienced the supernatural but it
does not seem excessive to suggest that his sensibility and
experience allowed him to imaginatively enter into the hearts of
characters caught in the “machinery of hell.” A major element of
Le Fanu’s greatness is his unmatched ability to portray, in a
manner both ruthless and deeply compassionate, souls haunted not only
to a state of terror, but beyond, to despair. And La Fanu’s
exploration of the reasons – or, perhaps, lack of reason – for
the persecution experienced by his characters is even more
disturbing. While a writer such as M.R. James attempts to make the
supernatural real by taking it for granted and completely eschewing
all philosophy and explanation of his demonic entities, Le Fanu’s
stories burst with the speculations and diagnoses of the distraught
victims, their family, friends, and the various “professionals”,
physicians and clergymen, from whom the afflicted seek assistance.
Every kind of explanation for the victim’s distress is explored:
medical, psychological, theological, moral, metaphysical, etc. Le
Fanu once wrote of a story that he was striving for “the
equilibrium between the natural and super-natural,
the super-natural phenomena being explained by natural theories –
and people left to choose which solution they please.” This is
accurate as far as it goes but while Le Fanu never offers an
authorial statement as to the evil that haunts his characters, he is
unrelenting in undercutting the explanations and theories offered by
his characters.
Indeed, the various
explanations for horror are a source of dark comedy for Le Fanu and
in no case more than with the self-serving prognostications of the
sometime narrator, Dr. Hesselius, the advocate of “Metaphysical
Medicine” whose fictional papers and case studies are the “source”
of the tales of In a Glass Darkly.
A classic 19th
century spiritualist, Hesselius offers contradictory and wildly
speculative diagnoses and insists that his therapy is always
successful when in fact he saves no one. Le Fanu is hardly less
severe with conventional “scientific” physicians – or with
religious authorities. In “The Familiar,” Barton, harried by a
demonic figure, seeks help from a renown theologian who advises the
desperate man that his depression is caused by “purely physical
causes” and he should try a “few tonics.” Not that devotion,
prayer, or faith prove more effective. In “Green Tea,” rightly
regarded as one of the greatest horror tales, a good and pious
clergyman is haunted to a horrible end by a malevolent invisible
monkey. When science, religion, and even occult pseudo-science fail
them, Le Fanu’s protagonists tend, in a desperate need for some –
any -- explanation of their persecution, to blame themselves and
believe that they are being punished for some transgression. But the
guilt rarely feels justified and even the guilt-ridden victims sense
that the retribution, if that is what they are experiencing, fits no discernible moral equation. In the end they feel damned
by a force that is omnipotent but malevolent rather than divine, a
force whose reasons and purposes, if it has any, are
incomprehensible.
In a Glass Darkly
is the rare work of horror that becomes more weird, more disturbing
with every re-reading as one discovers (albeit less painfully than
do Le Fanu’s protagonists) how the author meticulously undercuts
not only every effort to explain the horrible events but the very
idea that there is an explanation. Le Fanu creates what one might
call existential horror, a terror whose literary history is as old as
the Book of Job and Oedipus Rex
and but which we tend to associate with such modern masters as Franz
Kafka and (another Irishman) Samuel Beckett. To read Sheridan Le Fanu
is to experience, in the famous words of (yet another Irishman),
William Butler Yeats, that “Things fall apart; the center cannot
hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
© 2006 Christopher Breyer
© 2006 Christopher Breyer