L P Hartley - The Travelling Grave

[weirdmonger]

Sept 1, 2022 21:07:15 GMT helrunar said:

I've started reading an electronic edition of this collection. The most attractive element for me thus far (and I am at best an idiosyncratic reader) is Hartley's narrative voice. The desert-dry, implicit wit is quite the breath of fresh air in this 21st century of "dumb and dumberer."

Reading "Podolo," and now in the midst of the one about two Brits on their way in a gondola to have dinner with one of the many Counts of Venice when they fish a corpse out of the lagoon, I find myself wondering how any English-speaking tourists (I include Americans, obviously) survive longer than a single afternoon when visiting Venice. It all makes me think of an English woman who exclaims in one of Simon Raven's novels "Venice is suppurating." And it's well furnished in corpses and monstrosities to live up to that formidable adjective.

H.

My favourites in this collection: THE ISLAND, CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP and THE THOUGHT.

[weirdmonger]

THE SHADOW ON THE WALL by L.P. Hartley (not in the Travelling Grave collection) is a decidedly strange story, so strange, it outdoes Aickman, and is far more frightening than it seems at outset, indeed genuinely frightening in spite – or because – of the intrinsic absurdisms, as we follow Mildred Fanshawe, “a bachelor woman” and interior decorator to a stay-over-night house party, a house she had done some work in for a widow called Joanna. A house like a hollow E, whatever that means! Mildred, being famous for her neuroses, she is for some reason put into a room next to a single gentleman who makes the party into an 8. Mildred thus under his protection as it were in a separate wing of the E from the other guests, a wing with two rooms each with doors to the corridor and a shared lockable partition door. There is so much here of an oblique fish-gaping nature, and the more mundane muddy boots outside in the corridor, and snake-like blood coils, and that shadow on the wall while Mildred sits in the bath, and involving reconnaissances between rooms with or without a torch, and was there one man in the bed next door, or two? — and other disarming or disconcerting strangenesses galore, and I cannot really do justice to the tantalisingly inexplicable scare-power of this story as a whole.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Sept 5, 2022 15:39:55 GMT weirdmonger said:

A house like a hollow E, whatever that means!

An "E" without the line in the middle.

[weirdmonger]

Sept 5, 2022 19:24:29 GMT Jojo Lapin X said:

Sept 5, 2022 15:39:55 GMT weirdmonger said:

A house like a hollow E, whatever that means!

An "E" without the line in the middle.

Ah, a spook spoke!

And sorry, muddy suede shoes, not boots! And so much more I should have picked out from this story’s hollow excrescences.

[helrunar]

I read "Feet Foremost" over today's lunch break and commute home. The ethnography, for lack of a better word, of the house party was one of the angles of this tale that I found particularly fascinating. This and the elements of "folk horror" in Maggie's reading of the old chronicle and how it echoed various streams of old belief added an element of the uncanny that became more pronounced as the story wound onwards.

I found the final pages really quite gripping.  The ending may give rise to adverse remarks from some; I thought it quite pleasing.

H.

[weirdmonger]

Sept 7, 2022 1:19:11 GMT helrunar said:

I read "Feet Foremost" over today's lunch break and commute home. The ethnography, for lack of a better word, of the house party was one of the angles of this tale that I found particularly fascinating. This and the elements of "folk horror" in Maggie's reading of the old chronicle and how it echoed various streams of old belief added an element of the uncanny that became more pronounced as the story wound onwards.

I found the final pages really quite gripping.  The ending may give rise to adverse remarks from some; I thought it quite pleasing.

H.

Re the aeroplane, I found it fruitful comparing this story with Aickman’s ‘Compulsory Games’.

[helrunar]

"The Cotillion" is a variant upon a very familiar theme in the canon of old English ghost stories; the spectre at the ball (found a great deal on the Continent as well, I think). The sometimes overwrought tone of the writing was distracting in the latter part of the tale, but I still couldn't stop reading.

My interpretation of the enigmatic final image was 

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler} that it was a cloven hoofprint. The fact that no explanation was offered or intimated made this an odd note on which to end; it added a peculiar question mark as a final punctuation mark upon a scene that, up till then, had been one of clearly conveyed horror.

H.

[Michael Connolly]

Sept 7, 2022 1:19:11 GMT helrunar said:

I read "Feet Foremost" over today's lunch break and commute home. The ethnography, for lack of a better word, of the house party was one of the angles of this tale that I found particularly fascinating. This and the elements of "folk horror" in Maggie's reading of the old chronicle and how it echoed various streams of old belief added an element of the uncanny that became more pronounced as the story wound onwards.

I found the final pages really quite gripping.  The ending may give rise to adverse remarks from some; I thought it quite pleasing.

H.

Why adverse remarks? I remember "Feet Foremost" being very good. I also remember an updated TV version on Shades of Darkness from 1983 (that I probably saw as a repeat) starring the very nice Carol Royle. Here it is: youtu.be/zUUj_doApAo

[helrunar]

I finished the book a few days ago. "The Killing Bottle" was a standout story, and I enjoyed the dry, rasping afterthought of the final lines. This story was adapted for the Hammer studios television series Journey to the Unknown back in 1968, with lots of changes; Roddy McDowall's florid performance as Rollo is quite different from how the character appears in the original tale, and same goes for the protagonist becoming a rather naff composer of would-be pop ballads in the TV film version.

I'd somehow skipped over "The Thought." It took a while to get going, and there was an abrupt shift of orientation and focus about two thirds of the way through. The ending represented an intrusion of the supernatural that seems rare in the work of this author.

I'm hoping the library where I am employed owns a copy of the Collected Macabre Tales--would really enjoy reading more from Hartley.

H.

[weirdmonger]

Sept 22, 2022 14:08:50 GMT helrunar said:

I'd somehow skipped over "The Thought." It took a while to get going, and there was an abrupt shift of orientation and focus about two thirds of the way through. The ending represented an intrusion of the supernatural that seems rare in the work of this author.

H.

That’s interesting. I thought it was the best story in the collection! I shall have to read it again…

[helrunar]

I did think "The Thought" was very good--but a type of tale quite specific to this author's voice. That's awkwardly expressed but can't think of a more articulate way of writing what I think about this particular "thought." I wondered if the ending was a reference to a striking detail found as one meanders through Dante's poem, "Inferno," so wittily translated by Dorothy L. Sayers as Hell.

The most puzzling entry for me was "Conrad and the Dragon." Once I was able to set aside my own reservations about it, I enjoyed it for what it was. It just seemed like a peculiar thing to include in this collection. I wonder if Derleth personally signed off on it or if he simply accepted it as part of what Mr Hartley had sent him. I guess the major revelation at some point around halfway through.

H.

[weirdmonger]

THE CORNER CUPBOARD by L.P. Hartley (not in the ‘Travelling Grave’ collection): “Death could breathe out without ever breathing in.”
This is a very very very very strange story. You feel as if you, too, become mentally woven into its red carpet. About a gentleman called Philip who has many medicines, moves to one of the many large houses in this country called ‘Old Rectory’ and this happens during the Second World War, and the house is too large for him, and he employs a household servant called Mrs Weaver, and just this very second while writing this, I noted her connection by name to the carpet, while I didn’t do so when reading the story itself! She is haunted, it seems, by her late husband who died during the First World War, and I inferred that she nursed him through a form of insanity caused by shell shock, and he played with his toy soldiers to the very end. And Mrs W’s own phobia of tortoiseshell notwithstanding, with, say, a tortoiseshell clock thus placed in the eponymous cupboard (just noticed just this second the apt pairing there of tortoise and clock!) — Philip sees his medicine bottles seem to be meticulously and oddly regimented within the same cupboard, with cottonwool body-shapes as if ripe for voodoo, but we also sense this is a modern art installation (“odd, surrealist effects”) that matches his own methodical mystique with objects, small things as well as big as the aforementioned carpet. Who is madder here, I wondered — Mrs W or her master with whom she falls in love? And which of them a go-between? And she nags him to allow her to rub his body all over with lineament from the cupboard when he has ague. Don’t go there! (Oh, I must not forget to mention the gassing and, yes, the meat skewer, for fear of this story’s own voodoo curse upon anyone who deliberately forgets meticulously to mention such things when reviewing it!)

[weirdmonger]

THE PYLON by L.P. Hartley (not in the Travelling Grave collection) — is it an early example of a modern psychosexual horror story?
“dreams go by contraries”
A very disturbing story, whatever one’s mien. But not healthily disturbing like normal scary horror stories were before this one was written. Black static not white, I sensed. An artificial story in a positive way as well as negative, ironically structured by Mother Nature, as well as electrically by giant live Meccano, a story about a boy called Laurie, and his complexes arguably about his puberty (Freud and Oedipus are specifically mentioned) and his dreams regarding the pylon situated close outside the house where his family lives. Taken down and now being rebuilt even bigger. At first a symbol of his purpose in life, later his greatest fear with nightmares about climbing the Oedipyl. Indeed, despite ‘pylon’ also being a massive opening or gateway to a temple, Laurie sometimes sleeps with his Dad (a man perhaps purposely named Roger?), ostensibly to make Laurie feel more secure when he wakes up from such nightmares…. one day he wakes up and sees…
“Standing in front of the low casement window, Roger’s tall figure blotted out the daylight. The outline of his arms down to his elbows, his shield-shaped back and straddled legs showed through the thin stuff of his pyjamas;…”

[helrunar]

Well, Des, I suppose sometimes a pylon is just a phallic symbol (to paraphrase Freud, or somebody).

I really like Hartley's writing. Even when he goes off the rails, he has a way of twisting things up that holds one's interest.

H.

[weirdmonger]

Sept 29, 2022 15:02:12 GMT helrunar said:

Well, Des, I suppose sometimes a pylon is just a phallic symbol (to paraphrase Freud, or somebody).

I really like Hartley's writing. Even when he goes off the rails, he has a way of twisting things up that holds one's interest.

H.

As I understand it, a pylon is also an opening to a temple.