Charles Loring Jackson's
The Gold Point & Other Strange Stories
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Some while ago I found a copy of Charles Loring Jackson's The Gold Point & Other Strange Stories (Boston: Stratford Company, 1926). Its red binding had a stain & a dent, but it was the first copy I had ever seen, & I didn't expect soon to see another.
Jackson must have been a college student as there is something of a fixation on youth & fad. The stories are remarkable for originality. In the title story, a college sorcerer puts a hex on his athletic foe so that he cannot be seen or heard, & cannot leave the gymnasium; the poor guy seems to have been transformed into a living ghost. Then he finds, in the gym, a strange small object that looks rather like a guitar pick, & it releases him from his curious state.
He continues to live in terror of his foe's powers, until the sorcerer puts the evil spirit of a serpent into the athlete's body, hoping to turn him from a good fellow loved by all into a wretch like the sorcerer himself. But under the evil inspiration of the serpent, the athlete sends the little amulet forth into the night, & it zips about the outside of the sorcerer's lodging on campus, chipping away at the mortar until the sorcerer's room collapses. Our hero is released from the evil serpent at the moment the sorcerer is crushed.
The plot is even more baroque than my synopsis, & could have been brilliant had the author been capable of a more mature style. The story rather begs a florid "yellow nineties" type of prose, rather than this declarative schoolboy approach. Most of the stories are equally innovative & bizarre, but it is the simplest stories that seem best somehow, for these required no pyrotechnics of language.
Jackson's workmanlike prose functions best when he starts with a straightforward haunted house story, such as "An Uncomfortable Night," which only toward the climax transforms itself innovatively: the chairs & other objects in the house come alive & begin to molest the protagonist sexually. I can think of only two other stories that are at all similar, one by Gautier in which his ghostly lover turns out to be a teapot, & a tale by Irving in which a soldier attempts to join in a dance with gaily animated furniture.
Throughout The Gold Point, the author gets an A+ for imaginativeness, but a C- for the technicalities of writing.
copyright © by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, all rights reserved
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