Weirdo Writer #2: Hugh Walpole -- Garbo

Like Tanith Lee and other writers of the fiction genre known as The Weird, Hugh Walpole was bullied at school. A descendant of Gothic novelist Horace Walpole, the 20th century author was separated from his family by attending boarding school in England while his family remained in New Zealand, where his Anglican clergyman father had taken a post. Young Horace had a hellish experience at school, and because his parents were across the ocean, it took time for them to realize their son needed rescuing. They did move him to a somewhat-less-scary school, but Walpole was a "day boy," and looked down on by the boarding students. British schools taught boys a lot, and most of it wasn't Latin and maths. 


Walpole said of himself that he was bullied because he was "ugly," but photos show him to be a fairly ordinary-looking man. Perhaps he was a bit Lovecraftian in his early adult years, mouth drawn tight and eyes full of misery, but in later life the writer had a more humorous, easy-going look -- a cross between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Kelsey Grammer.

I suspect that blaming the childhood bullying on looks -- what can one do about that? -- was easier than extensive self-examination, which could have proved painful. Very human of him.

In addition to a history of childhood victimization, Hugh Walpole had something else not uncommon in authors who write weird stories:  the craving for recognition, gotten from innate talent alone, usually stemming from a feeling of specialness instilled alongside abuse.

Only a few of Walpole's works really behong with the limits of truly Weird. While tales of The Weird can be short and sharp and honed, they are often atmospheric, meandering, and a bit wordy. Most of Walpole's works are like that. They do take the reader places and stir deep feelings, but one senses that Walpole could have been a Dickens or an Edith Wharton but didn't rise to his full potential. Frankly, he just didn't want to sit at his desk that long, so he did one draft per story, submitted the manuscript, and mostly let artisanship go. Walpole intensely felt the urge to leave the solitary writing room and find Life among other people, because he was a lonely guy.

Loneliness, like childhood trauma and a feeling of being special, is often a characteristic of authors who work within The Weird. It was Walpole's constant companion throughout life. His characters, more often than those of other writers, explicitly express feelings of isolation and aloneness. 

Walpole seems to have been a disappointment to his clergyman father, having failed to become either a clergyman himself or a respected academic. Also, his family lived hundreds of miles away for much of his youth. On top of this, Walpole was gay at a time when his partnerships and liaisons were theoretically illegal and necessarily hidden, forcing a wall of privacy to cut the author off from much of everyday society.

In terms of his career, Walpole lucked out. The class system in Britain at that time was a fine thing for young men from a comfortable background, whether he was dedicated and meticulous or not, and Hugh was able to work as a writer his entire life, with new books always in print and a respectable readership -- even if his writing peers didn't think much of his talents.  In the thirties he even came to America and added a couple of Hollywood screenplays to his extensive resume.

Walpole didn't work within a particular genre. His lifelong pattern, in relationships and career and social connections as well as writing, was to participate in life, being a fellow somewhere doing something, and then to relocate and be a fellow doing something else. Walpole was not quite Mr. Toad -- he produced a considerable body of work -- but during his lifetime he wasn't recognized as a true master of any particular type of tale. 

Of course, the 1930s, his most productive years, were a turbulent time, so maybe timing was a factor in not specializing in a type of work and sharpening his writer's pencil a bit. Interestingly, by the end of Walpole's life, he'd wandered fictionally into a kind of story which pre-dated the coming wave of noir in fiction and film. 

The original cover art (above) for The Killer and The Slain (1942) showed the mountain-lake setting from Walpole's best-known works, but a later cover artist gave the book a decidedly more noir take (below). Would Walpole's reputation fared better if he'd lived ten or twenty years longer and he'd found his perfect niche?

Lest I paint Walpole as hapless, he was actually a world traveler with much intense life experience. He worked as a combination spy and fact-gatherer for the British government during both World Wars, having tried to enlist and been rejected due to poor eyesight.  Walpole was knighted in 1937; he was actually Sir Hugh Walpole. And he completed a well-regarded historical-fiction series about the Herries family's dramatic doings over two centuries of life in the Lake District of England. Both critics and the reading public enjoyed the Herries novels, and even Walpole's literary peers, often slow or faint in their praise of his work, lauded the series.

The Lake District, in  Britain's northwest region, is full of jagged mountains and cliffs and glacial lakes (tarns). Besides the Herries books, the  area (also known as Lakeland) is  the setting for Hugh Walpole's short story "The Tarn." This is the work most associated with The Weird. Here's an audio version from YouTube: 

Though "The Tarn" has more than a little of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" in it, mixed perhaps with the folk tale of The Two Sisters (also known as The Bonny Swans), it's also strange and mystical enough to be part of The Weird. Mild Nature, as observed by two colleagues on a walk to a lake, becomes an elemental force which swallows up one of the two, and follows the other as he tries to escape inside his home and shut the door against it. The dark at the bottom of the lake has risen up and merged with the other's man's soul, so that when his water jug is knocked over and spills, it seems as though there is no way to keep a freezing deadly lake out from anywhere it feels invited to be. 

In addition to "The Tarn," Walpole described some of his other work as "macabre," "creepy," or "strange." I feel that the term "weird" well describes a select few of the supernatural/ghostly tales within two of Walpole's best-known story collections, both published in the 1930s. 

Let us consider "The Snow," for example. Here's an audio version:

The main character (Mrs. Ryder) in "The Snow," as drawn by the son of a clergyman, has a tremendously deep conflict about the cathedral in Walpole's version of Durham, England, presented as the town of "Polchester."  (Interior and exterior shots of Durham Cathedral, by the way, served as the model for Hogwarts School, by the way.)

As the story begins, it is Christmas Eve and Mrs. Ryder has just had a fit of temper which has led to yet another argument with her husband, Herbert. But for a moment, the couple is drawn together as young boys from the cathedral choir have come caroling. But after the children have ben rewarded and have tumbled out into the snow like "feathery birds," there is no peace in the house. 

These arguments have happened many times, but this time Herbert Ryder will not forgive his wife. She's gone too far, and she is not loving as his first wife, Elena, had been. 

Predictably, this remark fans the flames of the anger Mrs. Ryder had felt toward her husband, who moments before she'd mentally wished "peace and goodwill" because of the bonding of good feelings from the carolers' visit. 

What follows is a lot of psychological internal warfare, with mentions of finding better specialists, and seeing someone who is either a hallucination or a ghost. It's all very Henry James for a bit. 

But the same sense of elemental force we found in "The Tarn" is here, but this time the water is frozen into snow. In the past, it has felt to Mrs. Ryder as though there is another version of herself, "underwater," who appears when arguments happen at home. Now this water has transformed itself into blowing snow which is sticking to the walls of her once-cozy home, melting and running down to soak into the carpet. And this is definitely  the first time another Presence has appeared. This one, with its flowing gray hair, ragged cape, and glistening wedding ring, is definitely NOT part of Mrs. Ryder.

When unseen evil lurks, a believer might pray but Mrs. Ryder has said to herself man times that the cathedral is "just a building." Though the family butler finds solace in church music and her husband and his former wife shared a devotion to the cathedral, Mrs. Ryder's sense of religion is that it's  all about rules and limits and terrible punishments for those who overstep. There is no forgiveness and no undoing the path to apparent damnation.
"You were warned," says a Spirit who may be Death, a dark angel, the voice of God, the ghost of Herbert's first wife, a frightful religious figure from Mrs. Ryder's own past, or possibly one of the Dementors who will try to invade the cathedral/wizarding school many decades hence. No, wait -- Dementors don't talk. So it is probably the Angel of Death. 

Mrs. Ryder, rattled by the ghostly warnings she has received, is unable to heed the very real warning from her very real butler that there is a tremendous snowstorm outside. She seeks safety in the cathedral, a place where she won't be alone now that her husband has shut the door between them for good. She will be surrounded by worshipers at the Christmas Eve service. 

But alas, Mrs. Ryder's rushed out across the cathedral green in her indoor clothing, without boots or a coat. And as she nears the ancient structure,  the stone giant no longer seems like a sanctuary, but a "great hulk," now alive like " a crouching beast licking its lips over the miserable sinners it was forever devouring." And since this is a Weird story, the lion-like monster turns out to be a chimera as Mrs. Ryder collapses into the cold smothering drifts of snow: "The cathedral rose like a huge black eagle and flew towards her."

To me, what separates "The Snow" from a tale about the nature of madness versus the nature of hidden perception ("The Yellow Wallpaper," "The Turn of the Screw") is the possibility of energy-beings, real entities conjured by intense feelings or a fixation which brings repetitive thoughts to mind. Mrs. Ryder decides the gray figure she sees and hears is neither a hallucination nor a ghost: "She had created this thing out of her own imagination, of Elena's hatred of her and her own hatred of Elena.  It was true that they'd never met but who knew not that the spiritualists were right. . ." 

Even the lamps and tables and chairs are changed, with a energetic vibrancy that can be used against the woman who once arranged the room to make it cozy: "All the familiar things...were different now, isolated, strange, hostile -- as though won over by some enemy power." Once everything and everyone is united against one as one tremendous force, the battle is lost, but one flees into the snow senselessly, because being deserted and left with the loneliness of solitary terror is too much.

  
Since The Weird became a recognized genre in the last ten years or so, Hugh Walpole's published fiction has been revived and re-marketed within that category. Is it a perfect fit? No. I wonder what would have happened if Walpole's personal timeline could have shifted ten years later, and he might have found lasting success in merging the weird with the macabre, the creepy, and the strange within gritty crime dramas. But as it stands, Walpole's collected works are just weird enough to make room for him within this series of "Weirdo Writer" posts. 

This site has the history of the murder ballad The Two Sisters (The Swans Swim So Bonny-O), which to my mind colors the plot of "The Tarn."

Here's one blogger's thumbnail overview of "The Tarn"





The online version of The Washington Post has this article on why Walpole's work is beginning to be remembered. 


Next time: Angela Carter

Garbo

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