Jean Ray's My Own Private Spectres
commentary by rbadac
Irvin S. Cobb (of "Fishhead" fame) once met O. Henry in a cafe & asked him where he got all his ideas. Fans shouldn't ask this question, but of course it's perfectly okay between writers. O. Henry said, "Everywhere. There are stories in everything." He then picked up the menu & said, "There's a story in this," & proceeded to outline the structure of "Springtime a la Carte" right there on the spot. That's a raconteur. Try this trick at home.
You can pick up menus, like Mr Porter here, & charm a generation with colorful, well-rendered sentiment & surprise, or you can pick up blackjacks & knives, pipes & whiskey, corpses & amorphous entities, & signposts to streets that don't exist, & scare the hell out of people instead. Prison's not what it used to be, but if you decide to, you might serve a little time for embezzlement as well; try to get a nice minimum-security lockup where they'll actually let you have something to write with, & maybe you too can be another O. Henry or Jean Ray.
Ray is one of our most entertaining genre rogues, & a book of his is safer than hanging out with a real individual of his stripe, who would regale you with improbable stories, get you drunk on some peregrine liqueur, & pick your pocket in the bargain; that is, if you didn't wake up with a curious pain in an unaccustomed place & a tattoo you didn't want. At his worst he's still as good as Munchausen; at his best he achieves Hoffmann-like effects, as I've said before. Jean Ray in English is always cause for cartwheels; as far as I know, this Midnight House title, the recent @las press printing of his 1943 novel Malpertuis (also very highly recommended), & the prankishly elusive Berkley Medallion pb of Ghouls in My Grave from 1965 are all we have. Hopefully this dearth is well on its way to being remedied, as there is plenty yet to be translated for English-reading audiences to enjoy.
The Preface, by translator Hugh Van Calenbergh, is an interesting short piece on the Belgian weird impulse, its reaction to a prevailing social and religious climate, a brief Ray bio & bibliography (including some details on his imprisonment for bilking investors), mention of the Man With The Red Scarf, the "private spectre" of Ray's, & Ray's reading of William Hope Hodgson.
"My Dead Friend" is Ray's experience of being buttonholed by an unsavory character named Uriah Drosselbaum in a bar called The Enchanted Site. Uriah provides startling information about the nature of the patrons, accompanies him down to the docks, & offers him membership in a select company.
In "Twenty Minutes Past Midnight," Heilmacher's hideous clock has animated figures, including a death-dispensing skeleton that is supposed to emerge at midnight, but which is always twenty minutes late. The old Jew who owns it cackles like the bad stereotype he is, his serving-girl Myriam the only one possessed of any common-sense. Told entirely in dialogue.
In "House Of The Storks," the Captain plays host to his old crony Bill Cockspur, who tells him a tale about how he came to reside in the eponymous house, & his duties on behalf of what lives in the room behind the locked door. Lively yarn this, especially done up in the bizarre & amusing cowboy/criminal voice given by Ray/Van Calenbergh to the characters-- the word "ornery" is even used to describe one shifty fellow-- & we get phrases of pseudo-literary sweep like "as I drew nearer to the Brunnenplatz, the idea gradually took on apotheosis-like proportions" (p.30)-- I've no doubt Ray's original French is every bit its equal.
"My Own Private Spectre (The Man With The Red Scarf)" is the round-faced little man in the red scarf that Ray says he sees at various times in his life, who shrinks from him in fear before vanishing, yet seems to want to gain his attention. Ray is not frightened by him; mostly he just wants to "beat the shit out of him," but what with the incorporeal nature of ghosts, he never gets the chance. Supposedly a true story, but well, this is Jean Ray. One wonders if Ray saw this ghost just before he died himself in 1964.
"The Great Nocturnal One" is another of the intercalary universe epics Ray favors, reminiscent of "The Shadowy Street" (or, as it is titled in this edition, "The Tenebrous Alley" -- & again I have to wonder, if this title is more faithful to the original French, if it is really an improvement). Mr Theodule Notte plays checkers with his old friend Hippolyte Baes & reflects on his past love for his godmother Marie, and on his dread of Captain Sudan, who occupied an apartment in the same house, & who carried on an affair with Marie.
In various fugues of displacement, during which Theodule sees visions of past & future he cannot reconcile, there persists the strange Alpha Tavern, another of those places, like St Beregonne's Lane of the other story, which is only seen at certain times by the initiated. The Red Book grimoire in the late Captain Sudan's carefully preserved library enables Theodule to re-establish contact with the long-dead Marie (once he has fulfilled certain requirements of an expected nature), but also puts him in the sphere of The Great Nocturnal One (Le Grand Nocturne, I suppose, resists a less clumsy translation). Ray is quite good at these, the typically convoluted plot abetting the weirdness.
"Streets (A Document)" is a handful of examples of more of this kind of thing, put forth by Ray as "true" & looped together by a coy parascience that does nothing to clarify the mysteries. "Those familiar with the finer points of integral calculus will surely understand me" is the statement of someone who cannot be overly concerned with being understood, not that we would expect otherwise.
It doesn't get much nuttier than "The Marlyweck Cemetery," reachable only by taking a dirty little horsedrawn streetcar that only runs every 102 years. Ray's no-good pal Peaffy is responsible for this outing, & he abandons Ray to the mercy of the mercurial boneyard, where one is greeted by white rabbits & one-legged roosters, & the tombstones move. You just know the whole excursion is a bad idea, & Ray of course does not disappoint. Few authors manage to be scary & funny at the same time, but there's just something about Ray's tone that projects both qualities as if they were synonomous.
"The Mainz Psalter," though the title of an incunabulum, here is actually a ship named after it. According to the mysterious schoolteacher, he found the book in one of his deceased great-uncle's old trunks, sold it, bought this ship with the money, & wishes to hire a crew to sail it into uncharted waters. Apparently Ray really did read Hodgson. This one is also in Ghouls, along with "Shadowy Street/Tenebrous Alley", & both stories Ray wrote while he was in stir for that little run-in he had with the law back in 1927-29 mentioned earlier.
"The Truth About Uncle Timothy" is baleful indeed, as his nephew Richard Forceville relates for us, yet they still get along. When Uncle isn't busy, he enjoys criticizing the reviewers in travel guides. Perhaps it does pay to maintain amicable relations with one's family, especially if there is a possible steady job involved.
"The Pink Terror" may be a nod at Lovecraft; more likely it's Ray waving his arms wildly for help. Disenfranchised sailor Biddy goes a little "pink crazy" when he's left at the abandoned kaolin quarry (pink clay having fallen out of fashion), & the clergyman there is sympathetic-- but for reasons somewhat more ominous than Biddy realizes. Things come to a head rather precipitously. Ray's imagination, never in doubt, gets the better of him sometimes; when it does, he loses control of his material & simply chucks it up in the air, in this case, literally.
"The Uhu": Don't mention its name, particularly on a certain night, or you'll end up writing a story like this one. Lovecraft again, but with tongue more firmly in cheek, & containing a couple of paragraphs which are jewels all by themselves.
"The Spider Master" is another short tale about Topper the sailor & his uncanny rapport with arachnids. Supposedly Ray trained tarantulas too. This one sounds so much like Gerald Kersh I had to look at the book cover again to make sure I hadn't picked up a copy of On an Odd Note by mistake. Now that I think of it, the modus operandi of both gentlemen, the use of exotic locales & detail, the ear for dialogue, the excellent characters, etc. is quite similar. I can just see the two of them in a bar, bending sovereigns with their teeth & trying to yarn-spin each other under the table. Good grief. To be a fly on the wall with a tape recorder at that get-together.
"The Hand Of Gotz von Berlichingen" is a literary allusion. Goethe's play was freely adapted from the life of an actual German knight of the 16th century; his hand, Ray maintains, is a mechanical prosthesis specially made for him so that he could continue to hold a sword after his real hand was cut off. This appendage/automaton survived its owner, and Uncle Kwansuys is convinced it is there in the city of Ghent, & means to find it. He uses alchemy to divine its whereabouts & buys it off three crones who live near the Grauwpoort. Squarely in the tradition of the runaway hand story, the fact that it's metal giving it an extra nasty efficacy.
By now you're probably wondering at the profusion of sailors & uncles in Ray's stories. They're favorite motifs of his; professions traditionally associated with the telling of tall tales. Don't even ask me how often one of these liars picks up "a favorite clay" before launching into another whopper. Not to belabor the O. Henry connection, but Jean Ray picks up his share of menus as well. He dwells in loving detail on food. There is a five-star meal in nearly every one of these stories. One dish item morphs from a "pintado pate" in Van Calenburgh's rendering to a "guinea-hen pie" in Lowell Bair's GHOULS translation. I just wanted you to know how closely I read to write this review, & as soon as I finish raiding the icebox I'll get right back to it.
"St. Judas Of The Night" merits an entire post all to itself, which I cannot provide here. Perhaps some others might care to make it a topic of separate discussion, & if they do, I'll certainly join in. It concerns young Pierre-Judas Huguenin, whose forehead is marked by the tree-like Sign, the malevolent Stein grimoire, the awful Abbey of Six-Tourelles, Father Tranquillin & his quest, & the reliquary of St. Sebald in the church at Nuremberg:
"...entirely covered in gold & silver leaves, & its base is supported by enormous escargots; childlike figurines, surrounded by dogs, are playing with insects. But the simulacra of the twelve apostles at the base are strangely intimidating, probably because they are themselves supported on all four sides by enlongated & receding naked sirens whose lascivious expressions instill temptation of the most vexating kind..."
Click on the two photos at the St Sebald web page Here! for a look at Peter Vischer's masterwork. Sebald, the patron saint of the city of Nuremberg, was a minor (and, I might as well note, an initially disputed) saint who supposedly had the power to turn icicles into firewood. Other than this, not much is known of him, which is why Ray's story is so educational (grin).
At longer lengths, as again in "Shadowy Street/Tenebrous Alley", Ray becomes hallucinogenic. He samples the narrative wherever & whenever he pleases, & does not pause for the reader to catch up. Consequently, the reader is forced to take a lot of what he reads pretty much on faith; without tangible connections loose threads percolate in the subconscious & only convene at the end, from all sides, when it is too late to escape.
"Gold Teeth" is the third story here that overlaps with the earlier collection, but in this new translation overlap hardly counts. Ray's original text was a bit salty, & did not survive unbowlderized in the 1965 version. Very amusing, maybe even practical essay on grave-robbing for dental work. Most useful tip: when blowtorching through the metal coffin liner around the corpse's face, don't take deep breaths.
Now, La ruelle tenebreuse -- I'm willing to grant that a ruelle is probably more at "alley" than "street", but it loses the swing of the earlier title. Still, Van Calenbergh has done a fine job with the text as a whole, so "Tenebrous Alley" it is. Those of you who are curious about Lowell Bair's translation of "The Shadowy Street" can find it also in Hartwell's FOUNDATIONS OF FEAR (and its paperback breakdown volume SHADOWS OF FEAR), & in Marvin Kaye's DON'T OPEN THIS BOOK ("The Mainz Psalter" is in his WITCHES & WARLOCKS anthology).
I guess the synopsis from my old Ghouls article is still good:
'...the story a product of two manuscripts, in German & in French, found by the narrator in a shipment of scrap paper on a ship in the Rotterdam dock. Both letters deal with the same event from two perspectives; that of an alternate-universe in the city of Hamburg, reached via a street known as Saint Beregonne's Lane, which is only visible to a select few persons, & leads to a spectral world of curiously duplicated houses, populated at night by a horrible race of ghost-vampires which filter through to Hamburg at nighttime to create a reign of grisly murder & kidnapping that saturates the story until its final conflagratory climax...'
Um, okay. Rather like an M.P. Shiel 'Vaila/House Of Sounds' situation, it's an entertaining exercise to sit down with a copy of Private Spectres & a copy of Shadows of Fear (or Ghouls) to compare the translations of Van Calenbergh, who has this Baroque, loopy approach I suspect echoes Ray's own, & Bair, whose style is much simpler, & strangely poetic. Here's just one example, at the end of the German manuscript portion of the story:
{Van Calenbergh}
"We're burning, all of us-- doomed forever !" Meta gasped.
In the split second where all & everything were going to succumb to the lapping flames, the door was opened. A tall, nay, immense old woman, whose terrible eyes were a radiant green, entered. My left hand caught fire, & with a desperate effort I managed to crawl away from the heart of the blaze. I caught a final glimpse of Meta. She was still standing, but her features were distorted by a bizarre rictus: clearly, her soul had already fled her body. The monstrous crone looked at the blazing room triumphantly, & then averted her eyes. Finally, she spotted me.
I am writing these lines at a desk in a strange little house. Where am I ? I do not know, but I am alone. There is motion & a tumultuous fracas, & the place seems to be haunted by a busy, if invisible, presence. Has 'it' followed me here ? From time to time I think I hear 'it' call me by name in its soft albeit callow fashion...
(Here the German manuscript ends abruptly.)
{Bair}
"We're burning !" cried Meta. "All of us together !"
At that moment, when everything was about to sink into death, the door opened. An immensely tall old woman came in. I saw only her terrible green eyes glowing in her unimaginable face.
A flame licked my left hand. I stepped back as much as my strength allowed. I saw Meta still standing motionless with a strange grimace on her face, & I realized that her soul, too, had flown away. Then the monstrous old woman's eyes, without pupils, slowly looked around the flame-filled room & came to rest on me.
I am writing this in a strange little house. Where am I ? Alone. And yet all this is full of tumult, an invisible but unrestrained presence is everywhere. He has come back. I have again heard my name spoken in that awkward, gentle way...
Here ends the German manuscript, as though cut off with a knife.
As a frontispiece Allen Koszowski provides a great drawing of Ray, so creepy-looking he had to sneak up on his shoes. His moody dust jacket illustration, though dated '91, is amazingly appropriate-- it's almost as if he knew it would eventually grace a book of Jean Ray's. Note to John Pelan: I don't think 350 copies of this are quite enough.
Avec Jean Ray, on ne sait jamais.