Malpertuis: The Novel & Film;
or, We'll Always Have Olympus
commentary by Adam Walter
Jean Ray's Malpertuis was his only novel-length work & the product of many years of revision. Though the novel was clearly an important milestone for Ray, it is also surprisingly lucid & well-paced, not at all overworked. The novel's multiple narratives & "Chinese box" structure are intricate but not distractingly complex. The prose is evocative yet spare, with a minimum of purple passages — hardly enough, in fact, to qualify the story as part of the Gothic tradition. Much of the time Ray spent on the book was clearly dedicated to a careful process of polishing.
Any attempt at summarizing the scope of the novel reveals just how necessary it was for the author to hone a fluid style for this story. The novel's central conceit involves several related manuscripts which are organized for us by one of Jean Ray's alter ego rogues, a well-educated thief who stole the manuscripts from a monastery. With his preface, epilogue & occasional interjections, the thief acts as our textual guide, arranging the narratives into a comprehensible structure. Ostensibly, his only goal is to organize the narratives for greatest clarity, but in fact his true goal, or Ray's true goal — perhaps there is no difference — is to position the story's pieces to evoke the maximum possible dread.
The oldest of the manuscripts presents a short, cryptic tale of a sea voyage & a foreboding vision of the numinous, planting a massive supernatural mystery at the heart of the novel. However, the central narrative takes place several decades later & relates the adventures of young Jean-Jacques Grandsire. The additional narratives serve essentially to draw links between these two stories.
At the beginning of his memoir, Jean-Jacques tells of being summoned, along with a motley company of acquaintances & family, to the death bed of his mysterious Uncle Cassave. Cassave soon dies, leaving his considerable fortune to the fifteen people he has summoned. However, there are stiff terms attached to his gift: The inheritors must all live for the rest of their lives at Malpertuis, Cassave's mansion. Jean-Jacques soon realizes there is something amiss at Malpertuis (a name meaning either "house of evil" or "house of cunning"). There is something odd in the attic, in the labyrinthine hallways, & in the surrounding wood. There is something even stranger about Malpertuis' other inhabitants: the mad hermit Lampernisse who haunts the mansion's dark corridors, the hulking mute Tchiek, & the diabolic taxidermist Philarete, to name only a few. When the secret of Malpertuis is finally brought to light among this bizarre cast of characters, the mansion erupts into a seething cauldron of terror, & both heaven & earth seem to collapse around Jean-Jacques.
The shadow of H. P. Lovecraft falls rather heavily over Malpertuis. An accumulation of similarities point to Lovecraft's landmark story "The Call of the Cthulhu" as a primary source of inspiration. Both are layered stories in which multiple narratives converge on an individual who pieces them together on his own, protected by time & distance from the events, though not from their awful, transcendent dread. Each story, too, hinges upon a fateful sea voyage to a remote island which acts as gateway to a frightful pantheon. Also, using a frequent technique of Lovecraft's, Ray buries his grand tapestry of cosmic threat in the story's background while concentrating our attention on the more immediate confusion of our ill-fated protagonist — thus nesting the general securely within the particular.
Jean Ray, however, is very much his own man & leaves Lovecraft behind him in many respects. Ray provides a rich variety of characters, scenes, & themes that are entirely his own. His macabre images are frighteningly crisp — unlike Lovecraft's occasionally vague imagery, obscured by a profusion of unwieldy adjectives & incomplete descriptions. Ray's images often stop one cold, but always from surprised disbelief — never from confusion.
Again, Ray's novel displays the signs of a carefully trimmed and focused work. There is, however, one glaring instance where the trimming stopped short — that being a rather obvious & mundane werewolf subplot near the end of the novel, which seems intended entirely to deliver a dramatic interlude amid the denouement's sheaves of exposition. The subplot is not woven into the whole cloth of the story & comes off looking like little more than a clumsy patch. Still, this small indulgence is easily forgiven in the aftermath of so horrible, so terrifying, so fine a fantasy.
In 1971, seven years after Jean Ray's death, a Dutch film version of "Malpertuis" was released. The filmmakers do the seemingly sane thing & reduce the story to a single narrative — that of young Jean-Jacques, or "Jan" as he is called in the film. The film's credits play over "La Memoire," Rene Magritte's surreal painting of a stone head with eyes shut & forehead daubed with blood. Cue the weirdness & enter Jan, a sailor, returning to his homeport. Jan is quickly swept from the waterfront through a short, energetic scene in a bordello & on to Malpertuis.
Early in the film, any sensible viewer will likely accept these changes to Ray's story; obviously something had to be done to make it manageable for the filmmakers & accessible for the audience. Fortunately, the film is visually engaging from the very start. The casting is, for the most part, excellent. The sets are extraordinary, filling the screen with an unending stream of vivid detail. Also, the film's cinematography is both aggressive & intelligently creative, employing just the sort of unpredictable perspective necessary to portray the mansion's mystifying interior.
When Jan reaches Malpertuis, the cinematic feast continues. Orson Welles plays the dying Uncle Cassave, delivering the second performance of his career as a large man stuck in a very large bed (the other performance being, of course, in his adaptation of Kafka's "The Trial"). Susan Hampshire gives an admirable performance in four different roles — excellently well disguised & made-over in each — as Euryale, Nancy, Alice, & a nurse.
Disappointments with the film begin small. Jean-Pierre Cassel as Lampernisse does not look the part. Instead of a tall, shadowy, aged-but-ageless, & profoundly mad hermit, he looks like a leper who has wandered off the set of "Ben-Hur." Accompanying Lampernisse is the laughable, high-pitched babble of the "creatures in the attic." In these rare instances, the filmmakers miss by a wide margin the texture of Ray's novel. At other times the film slightly underplays or rushes some of the book's strongest scenes — for example, the two early murders, in the paint shop & in the house of old woman Groulle. Important elements missing from the film entirely are the character Tchiek & the priceless image of Philarete's floating "skin sacks."
The one serious offense, though, is the film's ending. The muddled chaos here is a poor substitute for Ray's synchronized anarchy. The important Christmas Eve dinner scene is missing, & without Ray's multiple narratives the filmmakers are unable to manage a satisfying denouement. Finally, a confusing break from the Malpertuis world is tacked on to the end of the film. Jan wakes up in a modern mental hospital but soon finds himself back in the corridors of Malpertuis, from which he is unable to escape.
This is not to say that the film loses itself completely. The strength of the first hour & more cannot be entirely undermined by the ending. The inspired cinematography & many of the sets, performances, & special effects are truly exceptional. The scenes with little, crazed, mousy Philarete & his morbid workroom are reason enough for the film to exist. Subtlety & humor are here as well, perhaps best represented in the recurring static shot of the inheritors occupying themselves in Malpertuis' small drawing room — an ironic family portrait, the Olympians at rest.
Longtime appreciators of Jean Ray & his novel may find the film a disappointment, though those who have never read the novel will undoubtedly come away with vivid & lasting impressions. Perhaps the film would have the best possible effect on one coming to it fresh from a first reading of the novel. Whatever the case, the average viewer is likely to forget the confused ending almost immediately. Finally, one has to admire a story so tenaciously bound to it's original medium. In this day & age, perhaps every self-respecting work of literature should have built-in safeguards, defeating any cinematic attempts to hijack it.