The Mummy, by Riccardo Stephens

"You gave me to understand that you came to me because you heard I was honest. Doesn't the quality please you on closer acquaintance? I find it most confoundedly inconvenient myself, at times." -- from the narrator of The Mummy (p. 83)

Spoilers for The Mummy and the Gloria Stuart film Secret of the Blue Room (1933). I hope that isn't itself a spoiler!

Another fine impulse buy from the esteemed Valancourt Books, this 1912 novel makes use of the topical interest in Egyptology to drive an off-beat thriller. The narrator, Dr. Armiston, presents himself as something of a slacker, living a mostly contented life of lowered expectations, with a general practice catering to the better-paid servant class. When the employer of one of his patients dies, he is called to the scene, and becomes drawn into a mysterious high-society club of Plain Speakers, in which a sub-group may have run afoul of a mummy's curse.

Reminiscent of some the doctors in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction, I found Armiston an interesting point of view character. He's always harping on his advanced age, relative to his new circle of friends, and comments about his regular club that he was "admitted ... on insufficient evidence, at a time when the committee wished to increase the membership" (78). He sometimes has a cynical air, as when he comments that "we all sighed for the Simple Life and to go Back to the Land. Duchesses did so, for week-ends, with the result that rents rose in the country, and the roses, particularly on Sundays, smelt of petrol and were covered in dust" (164). Throughout the novel, investigating the supernaturally-tinged mystery seems to have an invigorating effect on him, distracting him from his disillusioned state and taking more of an interest in life. 

While this is exactly the kind of book that might have its status as a "classic" disputed, there's much interest to be had. The villain ends up a frothing megalomaniac who could easily be played by Bela Lugosi, crying "Madness! Crimes! ... Merely words applied by fools to the unconventional ... before they stamp it out" (221). The heroine, like a modern activist, is appalled at the cavalier treatment of the female mummy as an artifact, when she should be returned to her people and decently buried. And it was interesting to get casual period details, like the cigarettes treated with asthma medication, and the development of Indian restaurants in England, for the Anglo-Indians who had "come home cursing India and all its ways" (82) but then rushed out to eat curry and chutney.

Over Halloween I watched the film Secret of the Blue Room for the first time, and was struck by a general similarity in the two story lines. In both works, a group of men try to prove their lack of superstition -- in one, by bringing a possibly-cursed mummy case into their homes; in the other, by sleeping in a supposedly haunted room -- who then die mysteriously. In each case, the presence of an attractive young heiress in their midst proves to be not at all coincidental, creating a motive for one of her aspiring suitors to use the supernatural against his potential rivals. It made me wonder how common of trope this was in the writing of the period, since it seems unlikely to have been directly inspired.

What is coincidental is that the Mummy's heiress, Miss O'Hagan, has an elder companion named -- what else? -- Mrs. Vavasour (see here and here). Seriously, what is the deal with this name?

This volume was edited, with an introduction, by Mark Valentine, one of my cronies from the Friends of Arthur Machen, which I did not realize when I started it.  

Note: the text contains some racial slurs by the British, particularly against  the Malays, expected for the period but still unfortunate.

Stephens, Riccardo. The Mummy. Edited by Mark Valentine. Richmond, Virginia: Valancourt Books, 2016.



(Photo from Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, published on 10 April 2016 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).

New Grub Street, by George Gissing

"The world has no pity on a man who can't do or produce something it thinks worth money. You may be a divine poet, and if some good fellow doesn't take pity on you you will starve by the roadside. Society is as blind and brutal as fate." -- Struggling novelist Edwin Reardon tries to explain the reality of the situation to his wife in New Grub Street (p. 230)

I started off merrily underlining satirical comments by the ambitious young writer Jasper Milvain, thinking how much I was already enjoying this book. Before I knew it, it turned into one of the most depressing novels I've read in a long time. Not Hans Christian Andersen depressing, but still.

Published in 1891 but set a decade earlier, the novel follows a cross-section of characters who are "dwellers in the valley of the shadow of books" (48). The realistic Milvain is willing to follow whatever trend presents itself, saying "let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives" (43), in contrast with the romantic Edwin Reardon, a sensitive scholar who strives to produce work of value, but whose young wife, originally proud of her literary husband, is completely unprepared for the struggle that ensues. Writers, editors, men and women, young and elderly, all those involved are ground down by "the business of literature" (53).

There's a whole subplot about the incompatibility of Reardon and his wife, Amy. Gissing seems pretty unsympathetic to her situation, especially once they have a child to support, but it's somewhat redeemed by the critique of attitudes about divorce. After what's supposed to be a temporary separation, Reardon writes: "You have no love for me, and where there is no love there is no mutual obligation in marriage ... Have more courage; refuse to act falsehoods; tell society it is base and brutal, and that you prefer to live an honest life" (418).

Early on, when he was still hopeful of success as a novelist despite his noncommercial style, Amy advised him to"do a certain number of pages every day. Good or bad, never mind; let the pages be finished" (86). Just like Nanowrimo! (Except he has to get his straight-away to his publisher, so there's a bit more pressure).

Probably my favorite character was the ineffectual Mr. Biffen, who toils throughout the novel on a hyper-realistic novel called Mr. Bailey, Grocer, which he knows full well will have zero success. If it existed, I'd put it on my Classics Club list right now!

Gissing, George R. New Grub Street.. Ed, Intr. by Bernard Bergonzi. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1985.

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. , by John Donne

"We die, and cannot enjoy death."
-- from Devotion I: Insultus Morbi Primus, Meditation (p, 3)

"How manifold and perplexed a thing, nay, how wanton and various a thing, is ruin and destruction."
-- from Devotion 9: Medicamina Scribunt, Meditation (p. 52)

"This whole world is but an universal churchyard, but our common grave, and the life and motion that the greatest persons have in it is but as the shaking of buried bodies in their grave, by an earthquake."
-- from Death's Duel (p. 160)

I've always felt about John Donne's writings the way I do about the films of Guillermo del Toro: I respect them, and admire the obvious artistry in them, but I just don't love them. I wish I did, but despite their often Goth flavor, I don't have the wild enthusiasm for them that I do for sometimes obviously lesser works. There's something about them that puts me at a remove.

Since I knew Donne as a poet from my undergraduate days, I'd always meant to give his prose a fair trial, and settled on the Devotions, written during a serious illness in 1623, along with his final sermon "Death's Duel," preached in 1631. This particular edition, from the Vintage Spiritual Classics series, with biographical material by Izaak Walton, quietly edits the words into modern spelling. While there are, of course, some doozies of beautiful language, and some fantastically quotable stuff -- the "no man is an island" passage is worth its fame -- in the end, I still didn't love Donne the way I hoped I would.

Each devotion is in three segments, an opening "Meditation," a middle "Expostulation" (be aware that this is the part where he quotes and paraphrases scripture, so it's the most like the traditionally boring parts of church), and a closing "Prayer." My favorite bits tend to come from the Meditations, where Donne ponders illness and mortality from all sorts of angles.

As a fan of the Friday the 13th films, I was amused by this quote: "There is scarce anything which hath not killed somebody; a hair, a feather hath done it" ( 40). And as a fan of The Matrix, I found an echo of Agent Smith: "Man hath no center but misery; there, and only there, he is fixed, and sure to find himself" (133).

There are also a few places where I wrote "thank you!" in the margins, for their theological value; for example, "If there had been no woman, would not man have served to have been his own tempter?" (132). Thank you! There's also a great section about how, while God may be a literal God, "thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too ... How often, how much more often, doth thy Son call himself a way, and a light, and a gate, and a vine, and bread, than the Son of God, or of man? How much oftener doth he exhibit a metaphorical Christ, than a real, a literal?" (118, 119). Again, thank you!

(This famous portrait of Donne appears to be solidly in the public domain).

Overall, I'd say I have a more grounded respect for Donne now, and am glad I had the Classics Club to prod me to read more of his work.

Donne, John, and Izaak Walton. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death's Duel. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999.

Celestina, by Charlotte Smith

"She desired nothing but to be permitted to live single; and be mistress of her time and herself." -- from Celestina (p. 459)

Abandoned in a French convent, young Celestina is rescued by a Mrs. Willoughby and whisked off to England, where she grows into a beautiful woman of rational mind and sound moral fiber. This all makes her irresistible to the sensibly-minded son of the house. Defying financial concerns and social convention, the two are about to marry and embark on what his frivolous sister calls  an "insipid domestic life" (147) when circumstances abruptly change, and Celestina is left alone to take care of herself and the people she cares about, with a small income, limited options, and a desire to maintain propriety at all times.

The heroine in this 1791 novel, a single woman with no family (and thus neither male protectors or proper female chaperones), finds herself in a plethora of awkward social situations, "distressed by civility" (209), caught in a tension between being polite to people she can't afford to antagonize, and needing to guard herself from unwanted male attention.

SPOILERS for Celestina, Pride and Prejudice, and Veronica Mars (really!)

When Willoughby rushes off the night before their wedding, to clear up a mystery he refuses to explain even to his closest friends, I was absolutely certain of where the story was going. And I was right, both about what Willoughby had been told, and the veracity of it. I was very much hoping that the storyline would go full Veronica Mars and reclaim Willoughby's best friend Vavasour, a charismatic rake with a potential heart of gold, a la Logan Echolls, so that those two could end up together.

Alas, despite some subversive elements, it's still an 18th century novel in the end, and Vavasour is revealed as just a creep who's been living with a mistress the whole time he was pledging his undying love for Celestina, and scoffs at her "prudery" about the situation. He insists, as some still do, "Don't I know that women all like the very libertinism they are pleased outwardly to condemn" (406), but Celestina, always feeling "a consciousness of hereditary worth, an innate pride" (104) proves him wrong.

Nobody else blinks at the information, though, as if Celestina should expect any man courting her to be doing the same, and Vavasour is practically considered a saint for being nice to the consumptive Emily, the woman he's been in a long-term sexual relationship with -- less to his credit, than to the condemnation of his society. That subversive element comes in, though, because it seems clear that Vavasour could have happily married Emily, if other people would just mind their own businesses and not condemn a woman for life because she was  lied to and "ruined" by an older man when she was 15.

Jane Austen was known to have read Smith's work, and scholars believe that Celestina inspired some elements of Sense and Sensibility. Even more noticeable to me, Emily's subplot strongly prefigures the story of Lydia and Wickham in Pride and Prejudice (1813), down to the detail of the sister's suitor trying to track the couple down. Of course, the situation was rendered comically in Austen's novel, where here, the single rash act dooms Emily to a life of prostitution, severed from her family and any hope of reclamation by polite society.

Speaking of Vavasour, it's a total coincidence that I started this right after Can You Forgive Her?, which features protagonist Alice Vavasor and her family. Weird.

Smith indulges in much entertaining criticism of polite society and its hypocrisies, which, while times have changed considerably, are still apt as social satire, like the wealthy young woman described as "considering half the world as beings of another species, whose evils she could not feel for, because she was placed where it was impossible she should ever share them" (89).

Interestingly, we also see up-close a case in which a young man of means is pressured to marry a woman he doesn't love, and he doesn't like it any more than our heroines generally do.

As always, the Broadview Press edition is excellent, with editor Loraine Fletcher providing an in-depth introduction and supporting material that help contextualize the novel.

Smith, Charlotte, and Loraine Fletcher. Celestina. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004.