Finding Hugh Walpole

I had been thinking about going swimming. It would have been the first time in Lord knows how long since I'd been, but the weather wasn't having it. Initially, the weather report had read full sun and eighty-some degrees. Well, in northern Minnesota, the weather seems to be a different animal than is found anywhere else. So there I was, sitting cross-legged on the end of a dock, bracing myself and my inflatable Justice League pool raft against a persistent wind that whipped the slate-colored waves into angry peaks, looking like a little kid who'd just witnessed his scoop of melting ice cream do the slow-then-speedy slide off the mouth of his waffle cone, before making a messy, Jackson Pollock impact with the concrete.

It was cloudy, it was windy, it was maybe sixty-five degrees, tops, for those brief pockets of mere seconds when the shifting cloud cover permitted some direct sun exposure. Some bleeping vacation, huh? 

No, the round, red apple of summer was starting to show the brown rot of autumn at that point. Which, naturally, put me in the mood for ghost stories. Fall always does that to me.

I had been wanting to wade into a good collection of ghost stories for a while. My foundation in the genre of supernatural/horror fiction is firmly built in the Ray Bradbury/Robert Bloch/Richard Matheson/Charles Beaumont/Marjorie Bowen/Seabury Quinn tradition; i.e. I really like late 19th century and early-to-mid 20th century material. I wanted something in that vein, so I turned to that local light in the dark, Dreamhaven Books. 

When I stumbled across the reprinted All Souls' Night by Hugh Walpole, I knew absolutely nothing about the author. I'm not sure I'd ever even seen or heard his name mentioned before, but the book sold itself as a book of chilling horror tales:

"But it was in the field of the macabre and supernatural that Walpole was at his best, and this collection of sixteen tales contains many of his finest, including the classic werewolf story 'Tarnhelm'; the oft-anthologized 'The Little Ghost'..." (from the back cover).

It was originally published in 1933, so it was right up my alley.

I gave it a shot. 

All Souls' Night does in fact contain ghost stories. And it does contain the shapeshifter tale "Tarnhelm; or, The Death Of My Uncle Robert". But the ghosts in tales like "The Little Ghost" are almost incidental to the tales they haunt, and very rarely do they do much ghosting. There are genuinely dark moments in the stories included in the collection, ranging from a house that decides to look after the best interests of its owner, in "The Staircase;" the aforementioned "Tarnhelm;" and the darkly surreal "The Silver Mask", which, I have to believe Thomas Ligotti read at some point. But by and large, the book is full of character studies and explorations of the human condition that are much more W. Somerset Maugham than H.P. Lovecraft, and frankly I found it amazing.

There are at least two stories about dogs, and what they mean to the people who take care of them, such as "The Whistle" and "Sentimental But True". Dogs are only the impetus, of course, for the dissection of human pride and a look at human relationships, as well as setting up a dare I say modern analysis of the expectations of women dealing with wounded egos in a patriarchal society, as well as a melancholy meditation on how humanity can be lost in translation when people are viewed through the stratified layers of the social classes. 

Another thing that struck me about Walpole's fiction is how little he relies on subtext. It was clear to me  by the time I was a couple of stories in to the collection, that Hugh Walpole had been a gay man in a time when it was illegal to be a homosexual in the United Kingdom, but seemed to write like it didn't matter!   

For example, this blurb from the male protagonists's point of view in the tale "Portrait In Shadow": I liked him at once. Standing there in the new morning sun, the water dropping from him in crystal drops, he was as handsome a man as I've ever seen – more handsome, I sometimes think, than anyone else in the world. 

Again, the male narrator's words about his recently deceased male friend Bond, in "The Littlest Ghost": I believe that he knew me, with all my faults and vanities and absurdities, far better than anyone else, even my wife, did.... I missed him, of course; was vaguely unhappy and discontented; railed against life, wondering why it was always the best people who were taken and the others left;....I had a flashing, almost blinding need of Bond that was like a revelation. From that moment I knew no peace. Everyone seemed to me dull, profitless and empty. Even my wife was a long way away from me, and my children, whom I dearly loved, counted nothing to me at all.

I haven't done a deep dive on Hugh Walpole, I don't know much about his personal life and struggles as a gay man during a time when simply being one meant punishment by law and social persecution, but damn if it didn't seem ballsy as all hell to put such blatant prose into his work. It's the literary equivalent of beating the reader over the head with a cast iron skillet, and you'd have to be as obtuse as hell or have the mental acumen of a rutabaga to not pick up what he's laying down.

Hats off the Hugh Walpole! For the horror reader, there are some genuinely good chillers in the collection, including "The Silver Mask", "The Staircase", "Tarnhelm", "Seashore Macabre. A Moment's Experience", and "Mrs. Lunt." The remaining eleven stories in the collection of sixteen, are incredibly cognizant distillations of human folly and frailty, hubris and ignorance, in the guise of short stories about seaside vacations, marriage proposals, dogs and more. Recommended if you're a fan of Maugham or the short fiction of Roald Dahl, minus the humorous twist endings or shock value accoutrements. 

I was tricked, when I bought into the ad text on the back of Valancourt Books' 2016 edition of Hugh Walpole's All Souls' Night. It isn't a book of macabre ghost stories. It isn't anything like what I had initially wanted it to be when I purchased it; and I was treated in the best possible way.

Dialing Back The Phone

 

Perhaps one of the most underrated songs by The Rolling Stones, in my humble opinion, comes off of their 1974 album It's Only Rock 'N' Roll, which saw the group in a transitional period, experimenting with new production methods and a sound somewhat more nuanced than the strictly blues-rock based material that they rode to stardom the decade prior. And it isn't the title track, which is largely what remains in the public consciousness of the album these days by anyone but a dedicated Stones enthusiast. It's actually the album's fifth track (the final cut on the A side, for vinyl hounds): Time Waits For No One. 

Time waits for no man, and it won't wait for me / Time waits for no one, and it won't wait for thee 

Drink in your summer, gather your corn / the dreams of the nighttime will vanish by dawn

Perhaps it's more cornball than those stale, sticky, spherical wads of glucose-coated popcorn that tend to get left on the kitchen counter after the trick or treat bag has been emptied and sorted, but the sentiment remains. Maybe it's just me noticing the once all-but-ignored clock of mortality we all walk around with, tick-tocking a little louder for me these days. It's wound differently for each of us, no one knowing exactly when their alarm is to go off, and having turned 40 recently, I find myself watching that second hand with nervous, wincing eyes. 

As a painfully self-aware individual, I've a tendency to sit on occasion and try to take a peek at myself from an outside perspective and assess what I see. Frankly, for a man whose life is likely a slice more than half over, I'm finding my behavior ridiculous and self-defeating. And, of course, what I'm talking about is my use of that limited commodity known as spare time. You may have surmised, based on the title of the post, that this time suck involves that 21st Century deity the cell phone.

It's true, I've fallen to the lure of the dopamine-dispensing data stream device. Prior to a few years ago, 10pm on any given evening would have found me in bed reading a book. Now I find myself in bed, propped against the headboard with a pillow wedged in the crook of my neck, scrolling through some dreck on Instagram or CNN or Youtube or Reddit that I find neither interesting nor informative.  But I just keep scrolling, index finger endlessly tracing upward in the same spot on the dumb little screen like I'm trying to itch a groove into it, or flick away a piece of lint that refuses to move. Mornings, in the before-times, I was prone to reading or doodling, or simply reviewing what it was I needed to accomplish that particular day while at the breakfast table. Now I find myself checking to see who, if anyone, has commented or "hearted" whatever painting or drawing I've posted somewhere, or to check the tracking updates on that set of spark plugs I bought online, for the 400th time. 

It's all rather stupid, really. The basic function for a telephone–cellular or otherwise–is to place and take phone calls. I know that definition has altered greatly over time, now that the noun "phone" is synonymous with "pocket computer", the way that Alanis Morissette managed to get the definition of the adjective "ironic" to be a synonym of the adjective "unfortunate" through a brain-cell killingly insipid pop song,  but the core function still remains. And the thing of it is, no one calls me. That's not a complaint, merely an observation. Once in a while I'll get a voicemail from some robo-marketer who claims to want to make an offer on my house, sight unseen, to add to their brokerage firm's investment portfolio, and on a rarer occasion I'll get a ring from one of my parents checking in, but truth be told...no one fucking calls me! And I don't call anyone either! Why do I have this thing? It does come in handy on occasion, when I need directions to a place I've never been before, but that's about it. 

I know it's the empowering tool of the everyman, cutting out the barriers of the entitled content makers, allowing each individual to be a broadcaster, actor, artist and journalist, which is why every second of everyone's life is filmed, every sandwich requires a photo shoot and anyone with an opinion is a journalist (note: I've never referred to myself as a journalist). Social media is all about self promotion, and when you've got nothing to sell or nothing the public wants to buy, you're just another fuzzy crackle in the sea of white noise, so you start staging shit. And then you're not living your life, you're tailoring your faux reality to match the brand version of you you're trying to sell for "views" or "likes" or cryptocurrency or whatever. So much chatter, so much self-obsession, so many people obsessed with other people's self-obsession. The value of analysis and information is below rock bottom these days, folks can't give it away; and apparently it's all subjective, unless you question or challenge it. Then it's defensible as subjective "truth". The trouble is, folks seem to be having a problem distinguishing between subjective and objective, truth and opinion these days. And it isn't endemic to any one age group or political stripe. Now, since there's a global network of fellow morons in their pockets to back them up, anyone can double down on their ignorance without ever having to reassess their behavior or viewpoints. Most of what passes for news on the aforementioned CNN, and other major news websites, isn't actual news, but op-ed pieces about hot button topics, distilled through the fervor of media outrage, and repurposed information on current click-baiting headlines reiterated endlessly into "new" stories, which are just subsequent repackaging of the same information to make people think they're reading something new, so they keep clicking. More page views means more advertiser income. 

And this is what I'm piddling away the limited remaining hours of my life on? So why am I reading it? To stoke my anxiety? 

It's irritating to sit and watch others around me as well; necks eternally bent, constantly detached from whatever is going on around them, faces glues to their phones. The realization that that's what I look like sends trickles of ice water into my veins and leaves me running for my Trazodone. A side-effect of this allegiance to these devices, subsequently, is the complaint about a lack of free time, as I've just myself complained about. The whole purpose of this long, whiny op-ed post, in fact! And the culprit is clear when you watch someone brushing their teeth for 20 minutes because they're not actually brushing their teeth. They have the brush in their mouth and one hand is gripping the handle, but their other hand is hoisting a cell phone mere inches from their eyeballs and they're more engaged with Twitter than toothpaste. And then comes the complaint about never being able to get to bed on time. How about watching someone pantomime spooning cereal to their face like a Romero zombie, while gazing stupidly at some dipshit's 11 second comedy video on TikTok on loop, followed by twenty others just like it,  and then bitching about how they never have enough time to get ready in the morning? Cut and paste these scenarios into walking the dog, cooking dinner, watching a movie, etcetera ad infinitum. Maybe the bleakest permutation of this is having been at a friend's house, watching people engage in feigned group activities while ogling their apples and androids. Imagine a birthday party where everyone in attendance barely acknowledges each other unless it's to pose them for pictures for their Facebook page.

But I can't change other people, and it's not my place to. To throw another cornball into the mix, I need to be the change I want to see. Essentially, I just need to put the damn thing away and reclaim what little time I have left on this burning planet by actually engaging in things that I enjoy doing, that make me a healthier and happier jaded old man blogger who occasionally posts pictures of paintings he's worked on. 

We'll see how long that resolution lasts.

Now get off of my digital lawn, I need to rake it. Hopefully, without a cell phone in my hand.