Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Saturday, April 6, 2024

The Horror at Red Hook by H. P. Lovecraft


 

 The Horror at Red Hook

 

By H. P. Lovecraft

 

Original Publication: New York: Weird Tales, 1927

 


"The nightmare horde slithered away, led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that now strode insolently, bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man.

"There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead."

—Arthur Machen



I

Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall heavily built, and wholesome looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behavior. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings, before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back, up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight, without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognized him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.

He was, it developed, a New York police-detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden Colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.

So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also, the most learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter incredulity was his portion. Thereafter he held his peace, protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all said, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception—a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds—would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but the logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.

And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted—for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy, and had smiled gently when all the New Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not—despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review—even write a truly interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story—for like the book cited by Poe's German authority, "er lässt sich nicht lesen"—it does not permit itself to be read.




II

To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a fantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and jeering with concealed rottenness as in Aubrey Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humor ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter of the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavor which conventional reading leads us to call "Dickensian." The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbor whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there—a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion.

The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offenses are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighborhood's credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave it—or at least, than leave it by the landward side—and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.



Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priest and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pock-marked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan World, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.




III

It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of things in Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family, possessed originally of barely independent means, and inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grandfather had built in Flatbush when that village was little more then a pleasant group of Colonial cottages surrounding the steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones. In this lonely house, set back from Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and brooded for some six decades except for a period a generation before, when he had sailed for the Old World and remained there out of sight for eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor rooms, which he kept in order—a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls were solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent aspect. The growth of the town and its final absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam, and he had come to mean less and less to the town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the recent population he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes and gold-headed cane earned him an amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as a really profound authority on medieval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.

Suydam became a "case" when his distant and only relatives sought court pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to the outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged observation and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd changes in his speech and habits; wild references to impending wonders, and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn neighborhoods. He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the years, and now prowled about like a veritable mendicant; seen occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words of names as "Sephiroth," "Ashmodai" and "Samael." The court action revealed that he was using up his income and wasting his principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported from London and Paris, and in the maintenance of a squalid basement flat in the Red Hook district where he spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and foreigners, and apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service behind the green blinds of secretive windows. Detectives assigned to follow him reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden section. When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed to preserve his liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and reasonable, and he freely admitted the queerness of demeanor and extravagant cast of language into which he had fallen through excessive devotion to study and research. He was, he said, engaged in the investigation of certain details of European tradition which required the closest contact with foreign groups and their songs and folk dances. The notion that any low secret society was preying upon him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and showed how sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work. Triumphing with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart unhindered; and the paid detectives of the Suydams, Corlears and Van Brunts were withdrawn in resigned disgust.

It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone with them, entered the case. The law had watched the Suydam action with interest, and had in many instances been called upon to aid the private detectives. In this work it developed that Suydam's new associates were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them were known and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants. Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar's particular circle coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organized cliques which smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of Parker Place—since renamed—where Suydam had his basement flat, there had grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red Hook unless publicity forces one to.

These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays as a dance hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest part of the waterfront. Clergy throughout Brooklyn denied the place all standing and authenticity, and policemen agreed with them when they listened to the noises it emitted at night. Malone used to fancy he heard terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far underground when the church stood empty and unlighted, whilst all observers dreaded the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the visible services. Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Tibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan—and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidees, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it certain that these unauthorized newcomers were flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue officers and harbor police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens of the region. Their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at length it was deemed necessary to compute their number, ascertain their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round them up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities. To this task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure of Robert Suydam as archfiend and adversary.




IV

Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened prisoners, learned many isolated facts about the movement whose aspect had become so menacing. The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology. Such of them as worked lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicensed peddlers, though frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner newsstands. Most of them, however, had no visible means of support; and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which smuggling and bootlegging were the least indescribable. They had come in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal and house Malone could not locate, for the memories of his informants were exceedingly confused, while their speech was to a great extent beyond even the ablest interpreters; nor could he gain any real data on the reasons for their systematic importation. They were reticent about the exact spot from which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard to reveal the agencies which had sought them out and directed their course. Indeed, they developed something like acute fright when asked the reason for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds were equally taciturn, and the most that could be gathered was that some god or great priesthood had promised them unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.

The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats to accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying three entire houses and permanently harboring many of his queer companions. He spent but little time now at his Flatbush home, apparently going and coming only to obtain and return books; and his face and manner had attained an appalling pitch of wildness. Malone twice interviewed him, but was each time bruskly repulsed. He knew nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements; and had no idea how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted. His business was to study undisturbed the folk-lore of all the immigrants of the district; a business with which policemen had no legitimate concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old brochure on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening was only momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no uncertain way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels of information.



What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on the case, we shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between city and Federal authority suspended the investigation for several months, during which the detective was busy with other assignments. But at no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what began to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at the time when a wave of kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him. He maintained his new fastidiousness without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech, and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed him. Now frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an elasticity of step and buoyancy of demeanor to match the new tradition, and showed a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye. As the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less conservatively, and finally astonished his few friends by renovating and redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open in a series of receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could remember, and extending a special welcome to the fully forgiven relatives who had lately sought his restraint. Some attended through curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by the dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit. He had, he asserted, accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just inherited some property from a half-forgotten European friend, was about to spend his remaining years in a brighter second youth which ease, care and diet had made possible to him. Less and less was he seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to which he was born. Policemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to congregate at the old stone church and dancehall instead of at the basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and its recent annexes still overflowed with noxious life.



Then two incidents occurred—wide enough apart, but both of intense interest in the case as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet announcement in the Eagle of Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position, and distantly related to the elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the other was a raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a report that the face of a kidnapped child had been seen for a second at one of the basement windows. Malone had participated in this raid, and studied the place with much care when inside. Nothing was found—in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited—but the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things about the interior. There were crudely painted panels he did not like—panels which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a layman's sense of decorum could scarcely countenance. Then, too, he did not relish the Greek inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation which he had once stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read, literally translated: "O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs; who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorge, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!"

When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked bass organ-notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on certain nights. He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a metal basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his nostrils seemed to detect a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere in the neighborhood. That organ memory haunted him, and he explored the basement with particular assiduity before he left. The place was very hateful to him; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the ignorant?



By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a popular newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young children of the lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances had worked up a sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamored for action from the police, and once more the Butler Street station sent its men over Red Hook for clues, discoveries, and criminals. Malone was glad to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on one of Suydam's Parker Place houses. There, indeed, no stolen child was found, despite the tales of screams and the red sash picked up in the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in the attic, all helped to convince the detective that he was on the track of something tremendous. The paintings were appalling—hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabalistic enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a sort of Hebraized Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible demon-evocations of the Alexandrian decadence:


HEL. HELOYM. SOTHER. EMMANVEL. SABOATH. AGLA. TETRAGRAMMATION. AGYROS. OTHEOS. ISCHYROS. ATHANATOS. IEHOVA. VA. ADONAL. SADY. HOMOVSION. MESSIAS. ESCHEREHEYE.


Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found—a pile of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and bearing upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics which also adorned the walls. During this raid the police encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door. Finding nothing relevant, they had to leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note, advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants, and protegés in view of the growing public clamor.




V

Then came the June wedding and the great sensation; Flatbush was gay for the hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the street near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door to highway. No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted the bride and groom to the Cunard pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at least a solid page from the Social Register! At 5 o'clock adieux was waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for widening water spaces that led to Old World wonders. By night the outer harbor was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling above an unpolluted ocean.

Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention, no one can say. Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use to calculate. The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad—as it is, he shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward, when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was murder—strangulation—but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word "LILITH." One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly—as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no real outline met the eye. As proof, the doctor points to his continued sanity.

Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his body—they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure he would die. The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest seaman could think what to do. Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. It was signed by Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message:


In case of sudden or unexpected accident or death on my part, please deliver me or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer and his associates. Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends on absolute compliance. Explanations can come later—do not fail me now.

Robert Suydam.


Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered something to the former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and led the way to the Suydam stateroom. The doctor directed the captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily, till they filed out with their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It was wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that the outlines were not very revealing. Somehow the men got the thing over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it.

The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and ship's undertaker sought out the Suydam stateroom to perform what last services they could. Once more the physician was forced to reticence and even to mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, or to the odor in the sink which showed the hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents. The pockets of those men—if men they were—had bulged damnably when they left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that it ought to know of the horrible affair.




VI

That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea, Malone was very busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir seemed to permeate the place, and as if apprized by "grapevine telegraph" of something singular, the denizens clustered expectantly around the dance-hall church and the houses in Parker Place. Three children had just disappeared—blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets toward Gowanus—and there were rumors of a mob forming among the sturdy Viking of that section. Malone had for weeks been urging his colleagues to attempt a general clean-up; and at last, moved by conditions more obvious to their common sense than the conjectures of a Dublin dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke. The unrest and menace of this evening had been the deciding factor, and just about midnight a raiding party recruited from three stations descended upon Parker Place and its environs. Doors were battered in, stragglers arrested, and candle-lighted rooms forced to disgorge unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, miters and other inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the mêlée for objects were thrown hastily down unexpected shafts, and betraying odors deadened by the sudden kindling of pungent incense. But spattered blood was everywhere, and Malone shuddered whenever he saw a brazier or altar from which the smoke was still rising.

He wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's basement flat only after a messenger had reported the complete emptiness of the dilapidated dance-hall church. The flat, he thought, must hold some clue to a cult of which the occult scholar had so obviously become the center and leader; and it was with real expectancy that he ransacked the musty rooms, noted their vaguely charnal odor, and examined the curious books, instruments, gold ingots, and glass-stoppered bottles scattered carelessly here and there. Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and tripped him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of red liquid. The shock was severe, and to this day Malone is not certain of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures that cat as it scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities.



Then came the locked cellar door, and the search for something to break it down. A heavy stool stood near, and its tough seat was more than enough for the antique panels. A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door gave way—but from the other side; whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralyzed detective, dragged him through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.

Of course it was a dream. All the specialists have told him so, and he has nothing tangible to prove the contrary. Indeed, he would rather have it thus; for then the sight of old brick slums and dark foreign faces would not eat so deeply into his soul. But at the time it was all horribly real, and nothing can ever efface the memory of those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness. Odors of incense and corruption joined in sickening concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes. Somewhere dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the black ground.

Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the fetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungus abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless mooncalves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and AEgipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mold. The world and nature were helpless against such assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgissage of horror which had come when a sage with the hateful locked and brimming coffer of transmitted demon-lore.

Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these fantasms, and Malone heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead. A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight, made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth several dark men bearing a long burden swathed in bedding. They took it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved gold pedestal, and the thing tittered and pawed the bedding. Then they unswathed it, and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a corpulent old man with stubby beard and unkempt white hair. The phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles from their pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they afterward gave the bottles to the thing to drink from.

All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the demoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out of the mockeries of hell in cracked, sardonic bass. In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quiet of the sound—goat, satyr, and AEgipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness—all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne; and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man. The strange dark man danced in the rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his place in this or any world. Then he turned, faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping and shivering as the demon organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and tinkling of the mad procession grew fainter and fainter.

Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors, and shocking croakings afar off. Now and then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would float to him through the black arcade, whilst eventually there rose the dreadful Greek incantation whose text he had read above the pulpit of that dance-hall church.

"O friend and companion of night thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs (here a hideous howl burst forth) and spilt blood (here nameless sounds vied with morbid shriekings), who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs (here a whistling sigh occurred), who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals (short, sharp cries from myriad throats), Gorgo (repeated as response), Mormo (repeated with ecstasy), thousand-faced moon (sighs and flute notes), look favorably on our sacrifices!"

As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds nearly drowned the croaking of the cracked bass organ. Then a gasp as from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated words—"Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!" More cries, a clamor of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of a running figure. The footfalls approached, and Malone raised himself to his elbow to look.



The luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly increased; and in that devil-light there appeared the fleeing form of that which should not flee or feel or breathe—the glassy-eyed, gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no support, but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just closed. After it raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men, and all the dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses. The corpse was gaining on its pursuers, and seemed bent on a definite object, straining with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden pedestal, whose necromantic importance was evidently so great. Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing throng labored on with more frantic speed. But they were too late, for in one final spurt of strength which ripped tendon from tendon and sent its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had been Robert Suydam achieved its object and its triumph. The push had been tremendous, but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy blotch of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and finally careened from its onyx base into the thick waters below, sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus. In that instant, too, the whole scene of horror faded to nothingness before Malone's eyes; and he fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot out all the evil universe.




VII

Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death and transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some oddities of the case; though that is no reason why anyone should believe it. The three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in its most insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while half the raiders and most of the prisoners were inside; and both of the greater number were instantly killed. Only in the basements and cellars was there much saving of life, and Malone was lucky to have been deep below the house of Robert Suydam. For he really was there, as no one is disposed to deny. They found him unconscious by the edge of the night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of decay and bone, identifiable through dental work as the body of Suydam, a few feet away. The case was plain, for it was hither that the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took Suydam from the ship had brought him home. They themselves were never found, or identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with the certitudes of the police.

Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations, for the canal to his house was but one of several subterranean channels and tunnels in the neighborhood. There was a tunnel from this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible things were discovered. The croaking organ was there, as well as a vast arched chapel with wooden benches and a strangely figured altar. The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which—hideous to relate—solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful. Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered the somber question of old Delrio: "An sint unquan daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex tali, congressu proles nasci queat?"

Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and yielded forth a sensational array of sawed and split bones of all sizes. The kidnapping epidemic, very clearly, had been traced home; though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any legal thread be connected with it. These men are now in prison, since they failed of conviction as accessories in the actual murders. The carved golden pedestal or throne so often mentioned by Malone as of primary occult importance was never brought to light, though at one place under the Suydam house the canal, was observed to sink into a well too deep for dredging. It was choked up at the mouth and cemented over when the cellars of the new houses were made, but Malone often speculates on what lied beneath. The police, satisfied that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and alien smugglers, turned over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who before their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidee clan of devils-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive mystery, though cynical detectives are once more ready to combat its smuggling and rum-running ventures. Malone thinks these detectives show a sadly limited perspective in their lack of wonder at the myriad unexplainable details, and the suggestive obscurity of the whole case; though he is just as critical of the newspapers, which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a minor sadist cult when they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's very heart. But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming his nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his terrible experience from the realm of present reality to that of picturesque and semi-mythical remoteness.

Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole.

The scholar's connection with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise have faced. His own end is not much mentioned, and the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle recluse who dabbled in harmless magic and folk-lore.

As for Red Hook—it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses; and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus. The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook's legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand. As of old more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are already rumors of new canals running underground to certain centers of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.

The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces have appeared at night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for no simply explainable purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.

Malone does not shudder without cause—for only the other day an officer overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispering patois in the shadow of an areaway. He listened, and thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again:

"O friend and companion of night thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!" 

 

About the Author

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction--three short novels and about sixty short stories--has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.

Buy H. P. Lovecraft Books at Amazon

Friday, April 5, 2024

Short Story Of The Day: On Your Own by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 


On Your Own

by F. Scott Fitzgerald


 

The third time he walked around the deck Evelyn stared at him. She stood leaning against the bulwark and when she heard his footsteps again she turned frankly and held his eyes for a moment until his turned away, as a woman can when she has the protection of other men’s company, Barlotto, playing ping-pong with Eddie O’Sullivan, noticed the encounter. “Aha!” he said, before the stroller was out of hearing, and when the rally was finished: “Then you’re still interested even if it’s not the German Prince.”

“How do you know it’s not the German Prince?” Evelyn demanded.

“Because the German Prince is the horse-faced man with white eyes. This one”—he took a passenger list from his pocket—“is either Mr George Ives, Mr Jubal Early Robbins and valet, or Mr Joseph Widdle with Mrs Widdle and six children.”

It was a medium-sized German boat, five days westbound from Cherbourg. The month was February and the sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.

K’tap K’tap K’tap K’tap. Barlotto looked like Valentino—since he got fresh in the rumba number she had disliked playing opposite him. But Eddie O’Sullivan had been one of her best friends in the company.

Subconsciously she was waiting for the solitary promenader to round the deck again but he didn’t. She faced about and looked at the sea through the glass windows; instantly her throat closed and she held herself dose to the wooden rail to keep her shoulders from shaking. Her thoughts rang aloud in her ears: “My father is dead—when I was little we would walk to town on Sunday morning, I in my starched dress, and he would buy the Washington paper and a cigar and he was so proud of his pretty little girl. He was always so proud of me—he came to New York to see me when I opened with the Marx Brothers and he told everybody in the hotel he was my father, even the elevator boys. I’m glad he did, it was so much pleasure for him, perhaps the best time he ever had since he was young. He would like it if he knew I was coming all the way from London.”

“Game and set,” said Eddie.

She turned around. “We’ll go down and wake up the Barneys and have some bridge, eh?” suggested Barlotto.

Evelyn led the way, pirouetting once and again on the moist deck, then breaking into an “Off to Buffalo” against a sudden breath of wet wind. At the door she slipped and fell inward down the stair, saved herself by a perilous one-arm swing—and was brought up against the solitary promenader. Her mouth fell open comically—she balanced for a moment Then the man said, “I beg your pardon,” in an unmistakably southern voice. She met his eyes again as the three of them passed on. The man picked up Eddie O’Sullivan in the smoking room the next afternoon.

“Aren’t you the London cast of Chronic Affection?”

“We were until three days ago. We were going to run another two weeks but Miss Lovejoy was called to America so we closed.”

“The whole cast on board?” The man’s curiosity was inoffensive, it was a really friendly interest combined with a polite deference to the romance of the theatre. Eddie O’Sullivan liked him.

“Sure, sit down. No, there’s only Barlotto, the juvenile, and Miss Lovejoy and Charles Barney, the producer, and his wife. We left in twenty-four hours—the others are coming on the Homeric.”

“I certainly did enjoy seeing your show. I’ve been on a trip around the world and I turned up in London two weeks ago just ready for something American—and you had it.”

An hour later Evelyn poked her head around the corner of the smoking-room door and found them there.

“Why are you hiding out on us?” she demanded. “Who’s going to laugh at my stuff? That bunch of card sharps down there?”

Eddie introduced Mr George Ives. Evelyn saw a handsome, well-built man of thirty with a firm and restless face. At the corners of his eyes two pairs of fine wrinkles indicated an effort to meet the world on some other basis than its own. On his pan George Ives saw a rather small dark-haired girl of twenty-six, burning with a vitality that could only be described as “professional”. Which is to say it was not amateur—it could never use itself up upon any one person or group. At moments it possessed her so entirely, turning every shade of expression, every casual gesture, into a thing of such moment that she seemed to have no real self of her own. Her mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries pointing off into a bright smile; she had enormous, dark brown eyes. She was not beautiful but it took her only about ten seconds to persuade people that she was. Her body was lovely with little concealed muscles of iron. She was in black now and overdressed—she was always very chic and a little overdressed.

“I’ve been admiring you ever since you hurled yourself at me yesterday afternoon,” he said.

“I had to make you some way or other, didn’t I? What’s a girl going to with herself on a boat—fish?” They sat down.

“Have you been in England long?” George asked. “About five years—I go bigger over there.” In its serious moments her voice had the ghost of a British accent. “I’m not really very good at anything—I sing a little, dance a little, down a little, so the English think they’re getting a bargain. In New York they want specialists.”

It was apparent that she would have preferred an equivalent popularity in New York.

Barney, Mrs Barney and Barlotto came into the bar. “Aha!” Barlotto cried when George Ives was introduced. “She won’t believe he’s not the Prince.” He put his hand on George’s knee. “Miss Lovejoy was looking for the Prince the first day when she heard he was on board. We told her it was you.”

Evelyn was weary of Barlotto, weary of all of them, except Eddie O’Sullivan, though she was too tactful to have shown it when they were working together. She looked around. Save for two Russian priests playing chess their party was alone in the smoking-room—there were only thirty first-class passengers, with accommodations for two hundred. Again she wondered what sort of an America she was going back to. Suddenly the room depressed her—it was too big, too empty to fill and she felt the necessity of creating some responsive joy and gaiety around her.

“Let’s go down to my salon,” she suggested, pouring all her enthusiasm into her voice, making them a free and thrilling promise. “We’ll play the phonograph and send for the handsome doctor and the chief engineer and get them in a game of stud. I’ll be the decoy.”

As they went downstairs she knew she was doing this for the new man.

She wanted to play to him, show him what a good time she could give people. With the phonograph wailing “You’re driving me crazy” she began building up a legend. She was a “gun moll” and the whole trip had been a I frame to get Mr Ives into the hands of the mob. Her throaty mimicry flicked here and there from one to the other; two ship’s officers coming in were caught up in it and without knowing much English still understood the verve and magic of the impromptu performance. She was Anne Pennington, Helen Morgan, the effeminate waiter who came in for an order, she was everyone there in turn, and all in pace with the ceaseless music.

Later George Ives invited them all to dine with him in the upstairs restaurant that night. And as the party broke up and Evelyn’s eyes sought his approval he asked her to walk with him before dinner.

The deck was still damp, still canvassed in against the persistent of rain. The lights were a dim and murky yellow and blankets tumbled awry on empty deck chairs.

“You were a treat,” he said. “You’re like—Mickey Mouse.”

She took his arm and bent double over it with laughter.

“I like being Mickey Mouse. Look—there’s where I stood and stared you every time you walked around. Why didn’t you come around the fourth time?”

“I was embarrassed so I went up to the boat deck.”

As they turned at the bow there was a great opening of doors and a flooding out of people who rushed to the rail.

“They must have had a poor supper,” Evelyn said. “No—look!”

It was the Europa—a moving island of light. It grew larger minute by minute, swelled into a harmonious fairyland with music from its deck and searchlights playing on its own length. Through field-glasses they could discern figures lining the rail and Evelyn spun out the personal history of a man who was pressing his own pants in a cabin. Charmed they watched its sure matchless speed.

“Oh, Daddy, buy me that!” Evelyn cried, and then something suddenly broke inside her—the sight of beauty, the reaction to her late excitement choked her up and she thought vividly of her father. Without a word she went inside.

Two days later she stood with George Ives on the deck while the gaunt scaffolding of Coney Island slid by.

“What was Barlotto saying to you just now?” she demanded.

George laughed.

“He was saying just about what Barney said this afternoon, only he was more excited about it.”

She groaned.

“He said that you played with everybody—and that I was foolish if I thought this little boat flirtation meant anything—everybody had been through being in love with you and nothing ever came of it.”

“He wasn’t in love with me,” she protested. “He got fresh in a dance we had together and I called him for it.”

“Barney was wrought up too—said he felt like a father to you.”

“They make me tired,” she exclaimed. “Now they think they’re in love with me just because——”

“Because they see I am.”

“Because they think I’m interested in you. None of them were so eager until two days ago. So long as I make them laugh it’s all right but the minute I have any impulse of my own they all bustle up and think they’re being so protective. I suppose Eddie O’Sullivan will be next.”

“It was my fault telling them we found we lived only a few miles from each other in Maryland.”

“No, it’s just that I’m the only decent-looking girl on an eight-day boat, and the boys are beginning to squabble among themselves. Once they’re in New York they’ll forget I’m alive.”

Still later they were together when the city burst thunderously upon them in the early dusk—the high white range of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge, rising again into uptown New York, hallowed with diadems of foamy light, suspended from the stars.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Evelyn sobbed. “I cry so much lately. Maybe I’ve been handling a parrot.”

The German band started to play on deck but the sweeping majesty of the city made the inarch trivial and tinkling; after a moment it died away.

“Oh, God! It’s so beautiful,” she whispered brokenly.

If he had not been going south with her the affair would probably have ended an hour later in the customs shed. And as they rode south to Washington next day he receded for the moment and her father came nearer. He was just a nice American who attracted her physically—a little necking behind a lifeboat in the darkness. At the iron grating in the Washington station where their ways divided she kissed him good-bye and for the time forgot him altogether as her train shambled down into the low-forested clayland of southern Maryland. Screening her eyes with her hands Evelyn looked out upon the dark infrequent villages and the scattered farm lights. Rocktown was a shrunken little station and there was her brother with a neighbour’s Ford—she was ashamed that her luggage was so good against the exploded upholstery. She saw a star she knew and heard Negro laughter from out of the night; the breeze was cool but in it there was some smell she recognized—she was home.

At the service next day in the Rocktown churchyard, the sense that she was on a stage, that she was being watched, froze Evelyn’s grief—then it was over and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Then as they turned from the graveside her eyes fell on George Ives who stood a little apart with his hat in his hand. Outside the gate he spoke to her.

“You’ll excuse my coming. I had to see that you were all right.”

“Can’t you take me away somewhere now?” she asked impulsively. “I can’t stand much of this. I want to go to New York tonight.”

His face fell. “So soon?”

“I’ve got to be learning a lot of new dance routines and freshening up my stuff. You get sort of stale abroad.”

He called for her that afternoon, crisp and shining as his coupe. As they started off she noticed that the men in the gasoline stations seemed to know him with liking and respect. He fitted into the quickening spring landscape, into a legendary Maryland of graciousness and gallantry. He had not the range of a European; he gave her little of that constant reassurance as to her attractiveness—there were whole half-hours when he seemed scarcely aware of her at all.

They stopped once more at the churchyard—she brought a great armful of flowers to leave as a last offering on her father’s grave. Leaving him at the gate she went in.

The flowers scattered on the brown unsettled earth. She had no more ties here now and she did not know whether she would come back any more. She knelt down. All these dead, she knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with hard blue flashing eyes, their spare violent bodies, their souls made of new earth in the long forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century. Minute by minute the spell grew on her until it was hard to struggle back to the old world where she had dined with kings and princes, where her name in letters two feet high challenged the curiosity of the night A line of William McFee’s surged through her:

O staunch old heart that toiled so long for me
I waste my years sailing along the sea.

The words released her—she broke suddenly and sat back on her heels, crying.

How long she was staying she didn’t know; the flowers had grown invisible when a voice called her name from the churchyard and she got up and wiped her eyes.

“I’m coming.” And then, “Good-bye then Father, all my fathers.”

George helped her into the car and wrapped a robe around her. Then he took a long drink of country rye from his flask.

“Kiss me before we start,” he said suddenly.

She put up her face towards him.

“No, really kiss me.”

“Not now.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“I don’t feel like it, and my face is dirty.”

“As if that mattered.”

His persistence annoyed her.

“Let’s go on,” she said.

He put the car into gear.

“Sing me a song.”

“Not now, I don’t feel like it.”

He drove fast for half an hour—then he stopped under thick sheltering trees.

“Time for another drink. Don’t you think you better have one—it’s getting cold.”

“You know I don’t drink. You have one.”

“If you don’t mind.”

When he had swallowed he turned towards her again.

“I think you might kiss me now.”

Again she kissed him obediently but he was not satisfied.

“I mean really,” he repeated. “Don’t hold away like that. You know I’m in love with you and you say you like me.”

“Of course I do,” she said impatiently, “but there are times and times. This isn’t one of them. Let’s go on.”

“But I thought you liked me.”

“I won’t if you act this way.”

“You don’t like me then.”

“Oh don’t be absurd,” she broke out, “of course I like you, but I want to get to Washington.”

“We’ve got lots of time.” And then as she didn’t answer, “Kiss me once before we start.”

She grew angry. If she had liked him less she could have laughed him out of this mood. But there was no laughter in her—only an increasing distaste for the situation.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “this car is very stubborn. It refuses to start until you kiss me.” He put his hand on hers but she drew hers away.

“Now look here.” Her temper mounted into her cheeks, her forehead. “If there was anything you could do to spoil everything it was just this. I thought people only acted like this in cartoons. It’s so utterly crude and”—she searched for a word—“and American. You only forgot to call me „baby“.”

“Oh.” After a minute he started the engine and then the car. The lights of Washington were a red blur against the sky.

“Evelyn,” he said presently. “I can’t think of anything more natural than wanting to kiss you, I——”

“Oh, it was so clumsy,” she interrupted. “Half a pint of corn whisky and then telling me you wouldn’t start the car unless I kissed you. I’m not used to that sort of thing. I’ve always had men treat me with the greatest delicacy. Men have been challenged to duels for staring at me in a casino—and then you, that I liked so much, try a thing like that. I can’t stand it——” And again she repeated, bitterly “It’s so American.”

“Well, I haven’t any sense of guilt about it but I’m sorry I upset you.”

“Don’t you see?” she demanded. “If I’d wanted to kiss you I’d have managed managed to let you know.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” he repeated. They had dinner in the station buffet. He left her at the door of her pullman car.

“Good-bye,” she said, but coolly now, “Thank you for an awfully interesting trip. And call me up when you come to New York.”

“Isn’t this silly,” he protested. “You’re not even going to kiss me good-bye.”

She didn’t want to at all now and she hesitated before leaning forward lightly from the step. But this time he drew back.

“Never mind,” he said. “I understand how you feel. I’ll see you when I come to New York.”

He took off his hat, bowed politely and walked away. Feeling very alone and lost Evelyn went on into the car. That was for meeting people on boats, she thought, but she kept on feeling strangely alone.

II

She climbed a network of steel, concrete and glass, walked under a high echoing dome and came out into New York. She was part of it even before she reached her hotel. When she saw mail waiting for her and flowers around her suite, she was sure she wanted to live and work here with this great current of excitement flowing through her from dawn to dusk.

Within two days she was putting in several hours a morning Umbering up neglected muscles, an hour of new soft-shoe stuff with Joe Crusoe, and making a tour of the city to look at every entertainer who had something new.

Also she was weighing the prospects for her next engagement. In the background was the chance of going to London as a co-featured player in a Gershwin show then playing New York. Yet there was an air of repetition about it. New York excited her and she wanted to get something here. This was difficult—she had little following in America, show business was in a bad way—after a while her agent brought her several offers for shows that were going into rehearsal this fall. Meanwhile she was getting a little in debt and it was convenient that there were almost always men to take her to dinner and the theatre.

March blew past. Evelyn learned new steps and performed in half a dozen benefits; the season was waning. She dickered with the usual young impresarios who wanted to “build something around her”, but who seemed never to have the money, the theatre and the material at one and the same time. A week before she must decide about the English offer she heard from George Ives.

She heard directly, in the form of a telegram announcing his arrival, and indirectly in the form of a comment from her lawyer when she mentioned the fact. He whistled.

“Woman, have you snared George Ives? You don’t need any more jobs. A lot of girls have worn out their shoes chasing him.”

“Why, what’s his claim to fame?”

“He’s rich as Croesus—he’s the smartest young lawyer in the South, and they’re trying to run him now for governor of his state. In his spare time he’s one of the best polo players in America.” Evelyn whistled. “This is news,” she said.

She was startled. Her feelings about him suddenly changed—everything he had done began to assume significance. It impressed her that while she ad told him all about her public self he had hinted nothing of this. Now she remembered him talking aside with some ship reporters at the dock.

He came on a soft poignant day, gentle and spirited. She was engaged for lunch but he picked her up at the Ritz afterwards and they drove in Central Park. When she saw in a new revelation his pleasant eyes and his mouth that told how hard he was on himself, her heart swung towards him—she told him she was sorry about that night.

“I didn’t object to what you did but to the way you did it,” she said. “It’s all forgotten. Let’s be happy.”

“It all happened so suddenly,” he said. “It was disconcerting to look up suddenly on a boat and see the girl you’ve always wanted.”

“It was nice, wasn’t it?”

“I thought that anything so like a casual flower needn’t be respected. But that was all the more reason for treating it gently.”

“What nice words,” she teased him. “If you keep on I’m going to throw myself under the wheels of the cab.”

Oh, she liked him. They dined together and went to a play and in the taxi going back to her hotel she looked up at him and waited.

“Would you consider marrying me?”

“Yes, I’d consider marrying you.”

“Of course if you married me we’d live in New York.”

“Call me Mickey Mouse,” she said suddenly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know—it was fun when you called me Mickey Mouse.”

The taxi stopped at her hotel.

“Won’t you come in and talk for a while?” she asked. Her bodice was stretched tight across her heart. “Mother’s here in New York with me and I promised I’d go and see her for a while.”

“Oh.”

“Will you dine with us tomorrow night?”

“All right.”

She hurried in and up to her room and put on the phonograph.

“Oh, gosh, he’s going to respect me,” she thought. “He doesn’t know anything about me, he doesn’t know anything about women. He wants to make a goddess out of me and I want to be Mickey Mouse.” She went to the mirror swaying softly before it.

Lady play your mandolin Lady let that tune begin. At her agent’s next morning she ran into Eddie O’Sullivan.

“Are you married yet?” he demanded. “Or did you ever see him again?”

“Eddie, I don’t know what to do. I think I’m in love with him but we’re always out of step with each other.”

“Take him in hand.”

“That’s just what I don’t want to do. I want to be taken in hand myself.”

“Well, you’re twenty-six—you’re in love with him. Why don’t you marry him? It’s a bad season.”

“He’s so American,” she answered.

“You’ve lived abroad so long that you don’t know what you want.”

“It’s a man’s place to make me certain.” It was in a mood of revolt against what she felt was to be an inspection that she made a midnight rendezvous for afterwards to go to Chaplin’s film with two other men—“because I frightened him in Maryland and he’ll only leave me politely at my door”. She pulled all her dresses out of her wardrobe and defiantly chose a startling gown from Vionnet; when George called for her at seven she summoned him up to her suite and displayed it, half hoping he would protest. “Wouldn’t you rather I’d go as a convent girl?”

“Don’t change anything. I worship you.” But she didn’t want to be worshipped.

It was still light outside and she liked being next to him in the car. She felt fresh and young under the fresh young silk—she would be glad to ride with him for ever, if only she were sure they were going somewhere.

… The suite at the Plaza dosed around them; lamps were lighted in the salon.

“We’re really almost neighbours in Maryland,” said Mrs Ives. “Your name’s familiar in St Charles county and there’s a fine old house called Lovejoy Hall. Why don’t you buy it and restore it?”

“There’s no money in the family,” said Evelyn bluntly. “I’m the only hope, and actresses never save.”

When the other guest arrived Evelyn started. Of all shades of her past—Colonel Cary. She wanted to laugh, or else hide—for an instant she wondered if this had been calculated. But she saw in his surprise that it was impossible.

“Delighted to see you again,” he said simply.

As they sat down at table Mrs Ives remarked:

“Miss Lovejoy is from our part of Maryland.”

“I see,” Colonel Cary looked at Evelyn with the equivalent of a wink. His expression annoyed her and she flushed. Evidently he knew nothing about her success on the stage, remembered only an episode of six years ago. When champagne was served she let a waiter fill her glass lest Colonel Cary think that she was playing an unsophisticated role.

“I thought you were a teetotaller,” George observed.

“I am. This is about the third drink I ever had in my life.”

The wine seemed to clarify matters; it made her see the necessity of anticipating whatever the Colonel might afterwards tell the Ives. Her glass was filled again. A little later Colonel Cary gave an opportunity when he asked:

“What have you been doing all these years?”

“I’m on the stage.” She turned to Mrs Ives. “Colonel Cary and I met in my most difficult days.”

“Yes?”

The Colonel’s face reddened but Evelyn continued steadily.

“For two months I was what used to be called a „party girl“.”

“A party girl?” repeated Mrs Ives puzzled.

“It’s a New York phenomenon,” said George.

Evelyn smiled at the Colonel. “It used to amuse me.”

“Yes, very amusing,” he said.

“Another girl and I had just left school and decided to go on the stage. We waited around agencies and offices for months and there were literally days when we didn’t have enough to eat.”

“How terrible,” said Mrs Ives.

“Then somebody told us about „party girls“. Businessmen with clients from out of town sometimes wanted to give them a big time—singing a dancing and champagne, all that sort of thing, make them feel like regular fellows seeing New York. So they’d hire a room in a restaurant and invite a dozen party girls. All it required was to have a good evening dress and to sit next to some middle-aged man for two hours and laugh at his jokes and maybe kiss him good night. Sometimes you’d find a fifty-dollar bill in your napkin when you sat down at table. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it—but it was salvation to us in that awful three months.”

A silence had fallen, short as far as seconds go but so heavy that Evelyn felt it on her shoulders. She knew that the silence was coming from some deep place in Mrs Ives’s heart, that Mrs Ives was ashamed for her and felt that what she had done in the struggle for survival was unworthy of the dignity of woman. In those same seconds she sensed the Colonel chuckling maliciously behind his bland moustache, felt the wrinkles beside George’s eyes straining.

“It must be terribly hard to get started on the stage,” said Mrs Ives. “Tell me—have you acted mostly in England?”

“Yes.”

What had she said? Only the truth and the whole truth in spite of the old man leering there. She drank off her glass of champagne.

George spoke quickly, under the Colonel’s roar of conversation: “Isn’t that a lot of champagne if you’re not used to it?”

She saw him suddenly as a man dominated by his mother; her frank little reminiscence had shocked him. Things were different for a girl on her own and at least he should see that it was wiser than that Colonel Cary might launch dark implications thereafter. But she refused further champagne.

After dinner she sat with George at the piano.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have said that at dinner,” she whispered.

“Nonsense! Mother know everything’s changed nowadays.”

“She didn’t like it,” Evelyn insisted. “And as for that old boy that looks like a Peter Arno cartoon!”

Try as she might Evelyn couldn’t shake off the impression that some slight had been put upon her. She was accustomed only to having approval gad admiration around her.

“If you had to choose again would you choose the stage?” Mrs Ives asked.

“It’s a nice life,” Evelyn said emphatically. “If I had daughters with talent I’d choose it for them. I certainly wouldn’t want them to be society girls.”

“But we can’t all have talent,” said Colonel Cary.

“Of course most people have the craziest prejudices about the stage,” pursued Evelyn.

“Not so much nowadays,” said Mrs Ives. “So many nice girls go on the stage.”

“Girls of position,” added Colonel Cary.

“They don’t usually last very long,” said Evelyn. “Every time some debutante decides to dazzle the world there’s another flop due on Broadway. But the thing that makes me maddest is the way people condescend. I remember one season on the road—all the small-town social leaders inviting you to parties and then whispering and snickering in the corner. Snickering at Gladys Knowles!” Evelyn’s voice rang with indignation: “When Gladys goes to Europe she dines with the most prominent people in every country, the people who don’t know these backwoods social leaders exist——”

“Does she dine with their wives too?” asked Colonel Cary.

“With their wives too.” She glanced sharply at Mrs Ives. “Let me tell you that girls on the stage don’t feel a bit inferior, and the really fashionable people don’t think of patronizing them.”

The silence was there again heavier and deeper, but this time excited by her own words Evelyn was unconscious of it.

“Oh, it’s American women,” she said. “The less they have to offer the more they pick on the ones that have.”

She drew a deep breath, she felt that the room was stifling.

“I’m afraid I must go now,” she said.

“I’ll take you,” said George.

They were all standing. She shook hands. She liked George’s mother, who after all had made no attempt to patronize her.

“It’s been very nice,” said Mrs Ives.

“I hope we’ll meet soon. Good night.”

With George in a taxi she gave the address of a theatre on Broadway.

“I have a date,” she confessed.

“I see.”

“Nothing very important.” She glanced at him, and put her hand on his. Why didn’t he ask her to break the date? But he only said:

“He better go over Forty-fifth Street.”

Ah, well, maybe she’d better go back to England—and be Mickey Mouse, He didn’t know anything about women, anything about love, and to her that was the unforgivable sin. But why in a certain set of his face under the street lamps did he remind her of her father?

“Won’t you come to the picture?” she suggested.

“I’m feeling a little tired—I’m turning in.”

“Will you phone me tomorrow?”

“Certainly.”

She hesitated. Something was wrong and she hated to leave him. He helped her out of the taxi and paid it.

“Come with us?” she asked almost anxiously. “Listen, if you like——”

“I’m going to walk for a while!”

She caught sight of the men waiting for her and waved to them.

“George, is anything the matter?” she said.

“Of course not.”

He had never seemed so attractive, so desirable to her. As her friends came up, two actors, looking like very little fish beside him, he took off his hat and said:

“Good night, I hope you enjoy the picture.”

“George——”

— and a curious thing happened. Now for the first time she realized that her father was dead, that she was alone. She had thought of herself as being self-reliant, making more in some seasons than his practice brought him in five years. But he had always been behind her somewhere, his love had always been behind her—She had never been a waif, she had always had a place to go. And now she was alone, alone in the swirling indifferent crowd. Did she expect to love this man, who offered her so much, with the naive romantics of eighteen. He loved her—he loved her more than any one in the world loved her. She wasn’t ever going to be a great star, she knew that, and she had reached the time when a girl had to look out for herself. “Why, look,” she said, “I’ve got to go. Wait—or don’t wait.” Catching up her long gown she sped up Broadway. The crowd was enormous as theatre after theatre eddied out to the sidewalks. She sought for his silk hat as for a standard, but now there were many silk hats. She peered frantically into groups and crowds as she ran. An insolent voice called after her and again she shuddered with a sense of being unprotected. Reaching the corner she peered hopelessly into the tangled mass of the block ahead. But he had probably turned off Broadway so she darted left down the dimmer alley of Forty-eighth Street. Then she saw him, walking briskly, like a man leaving something behind—and overtook him at Sixth Avenue.

“George,” she cried.

He turned; his face looking at her was hard and miserable. “George, I didn’t want to go to that picture, I wanted you to make me not go. Why didn’t you ask me not to go?”

“I didn’t care whether you went or not.”

“Didn’t you?” she cried. “Don’t you care for me any more?”

“Do you want me to call you a cab?”

“No, I want to be with you.”

“I’m going home.”

“I’ll walk with you. What is it, George? What have I done?” They crossed Sixth Avenue and the street became darker. “What is it, George? Please tell me. If I did something wrong at your mother’s why didn’t you stop me?” He stopped suddenly. “You were our guest,” he said. “What did I do?”

“There’s no use going into it.” He signalled a passing taxi. “It’s quite obvious that we look at things differently. I was going to write you tomorrow but since you ask me it’s just as well to end it today.” “But why, George?” She wailed, “What did I do?” “You went out of your way to make a preposterous attack on an old gentlewoman who had given you nothing but courtesy and consideration.” “Oh, George, I didn’t, I didn’t… I’ll go to her and apologize. I’ll go tonight.”

“She wouldn’t understand. We simply look at things in different ways.”

“Oh—h-h.” She stood aghast.

He started to say something further, but after a glance at her he opened the taxi door.

“It’s only two blocks. You’ll excuse me if I don’t go with you.”

She had turned and was clinging to the iron railing of a stair.

“I’ll go in a minute,” she said. “Don’t wait.”

She wasn’t acting now. She wanted to be dead. She was crying for her father, she told herself—not for him but for her father.

His footsteps moved off, stopped, hesitated—came back.

“Evelyn.”

His voice was close beside her.

“Oh, poor baby,” it said. He turned her about gently in his arms and she clung to him.

“Oh yes,” she cried in wild relief. “Poor baby—just your poor baby.” She didn’t know whether this was love or not but she knew with all her heart and soul that she wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe for ever.


 

Notes

“On Your Own” was written as “Home to Maryland” in the spring of 1931 after Fitzgerald’s return to Europe from his father’s funeral, a strongly emotional event for him. Edward Fitzgerald was buried in the little cemetery of St Mary’s Catholic Church on Rockville, Maryland—changed to “Rocktown” in the story—now a suburb of Washington, but then the sleepy county seat where he had been raised during and after the Civil War. “Then it was over,” the story says, “and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws.”

This story shows the way Fitzgerald took an emotion and wove his hyperbolic magic around it. Though he had no ancestors named Lovejoy or Crawshaw, he was indeed descended from a long line of imposing Dorseys going back to the original Edward, who moved to Maryland from Virginia in 1650. Not a Dorsey is buried at St Mary’s but a few Scotts, with whom they intermarried, are, inspiring the line repeated in Tender Is the Night, “It was very friendly leaving Mm there with all his relations around him.” Later in the story, the heroine is asked why she doesn’t buy and restore “a fine old house called Lovejoy Hall” in “St Charles County”, which had belonged to one of her Lovejoy forebears. This is a reference to “Tudor Half, home of Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandfather Philip Key, a member of the Continental Congress, in the southern Maryland county of St Mary’s. It was for sale at that time, as he must have heard from relatives at the funeral.

Over the five years after it was written, “On Your Own” was declined by seven magazines, the first time this had happened to a Fitzgerald story since his apprentice days. It is one of the stories he “stripped” for his Notebooks, salvaging favourite passages for later use. “On Your Own” is included here because it is the only remaining unpublished story bearing, in his words, that “one little drop of something … the extra I had.” 

 

About the Author 

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

How to Write a Fiction Book: 10 Steps You Can't Miss!

How to Write a Fiction Book: 10 Steps You Can't Miss!

Monday, February 12, 2024

A Handbook of Short Story Writing, by John T. Frederick (John Towner), Foreword by Olivia Salter

A Handbook of Short Story Writing

 

A Handbook of Short Story Writing

 

by John T. Frederick (John Towner)

 

FOREWORD BY OLIVIA SALTER


In our age of endless distractions and fleeting attention spans, there remains a timeless art form that captivates and inspires readers across generations—the short story. Its brevity, precision, and unwavering ability to evoke rich emotions make it a powerful literary medium. And within the realm of short story writing, few have delved as deeply into the craft as the esteemed John T. Frederick.

As I hold this invaluable handbook in my hands, I am struck by the immense knowledge and passion that Frederick brought to the art of writing. His distinguished career as a writer and editor, coupled with his unconditional love for storytelling, shines through every page. Within these chapters, Frederick generously shares his wisdom, offering valuable insights, techniques, and practical advice that will guide aspiring writers on their journey towards mastering the elusive art of the short story.

In this comprehensive handbook, Frederick explores the fundamental elements of storytelling with meticulous detail. From crafting compelling dialogue and developing nuanced characters to building tension and creating vivid settings, he leaves no stone unturned. Drawing upon classic works of literature, Frederick illuminates the essence of storytelling through a wealth of examples, urging writers to embrace the power of language and the art of storytelling to convey profound human experiences.

Yet, beyond technical advice, this handbook resonates on a deeper level. Frederick hones in on the emotional core of storytelling, emphasizing the need for authenticity and vulnerability. He invites writers to explore the depths of their own past, observing that the richest stories often derive from personal experiences and raw emotions. Through his guidance, aspiring authors are encouraged to reflect on the essence of being human and to infuse their stories with genuine humanity.

Moreover, Frederick's keen understanding of the writing process allows him to address the hurdles and challenges that writers face along their creative journey. Whether it be the dreaded writer's block, self-doubt, or the daunting task of revising and editing, he offers invaluable strategies to overcome these obstacles, encouraging writers to persist in their pursuit of excellence.

It is clear that this handbook is a labor of love—a testament to John T. Frederick's unwavering dedication to the craft of storytelling. His words will undoubtedly serve as a guiding light for aspiring writers and a source of inspiration for seasoned veterans. As we traverse the pages of this invaluable guide, we embark on a transformative adventure, one that will challenge us, enlighten us, and ultimately lead us to become better storytellers.

May this handbook find its way into the hands of all those who dream of unraveling the beauty of the short story. Let us be guided by John T. Frederick, a writer whose legacy lives on through his words, seeking to create stories that will endure long after they are read.

Olivia Salter

02/12/2023



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👉How to Write a Short Story: 10 Good Tips for Writers

 

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade? by N. Bryllion Fagin (PDF) Foreword By Olivia Salter


Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade? by N. Bryllion Fagin (PDF)

Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade?

 

by N. Bryllion Fagin (PDF)

 

FOREWORD BY OLIVIA SALTER


Short story writing has long been a captivating and versatile form of literature, captivating readers with its ability to convey powerful narratives in a condensed format. But what lies at the heart of this craft? Is short story writing an artistic endeavor that requires inherent skill and imagination, or is it something that can be learned and honed through trade-like techniques?

In "Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade?" N. Bryllion Fagin delves deep into this age-old discussion, offering valuable insights and perspectives that shed light on the intricate nature of this compelling literary form. With a commendable blend of scholarly analysis and practical advice, Fagin navigates the reader through the nuances of short story writing, examining both the artistry and the craftsmanship required to succeed in this pursuit.

Fagin brilliantly captures the essence of short stories as a means of capturing fleeting moments and evoking powerful emotions within a limited space. Each story, like a brushstroke on a canvas, holds the power to paint vivid pictures that resonate with readers for a lifetime. Fagin's exploration of the artistic aspect emphasizes the role of creativity and intuition in crafting impactful tales, reminding us of the beauty and magic that lie within the realm of storytelling.

However, Fagin also acknowledges the practical side of short story writing. Like any trade, there are techniques, strategies, and tools that can be adopted to refine one's skills. Through meticulous research and astute observations, Fagin uncovers these underlying structures that enhance the narrative flow, the character development, and the overall impact of a short story. The author's ability to dissect these elements and present them to the reader in a comprehensive manner is a testament to their profound understanding of the craft.

"Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade?" is not merely a theoretical discourse, but a practical guide for aspiring writers and literary enthusiasts alike. Fagin's wealth of knowledge is shared generously through insightful tips and prompts that encourage experimentation and growth. By providing a range of examples from renowned short story authors and their contrasting approaches, Fagin contributes to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the creative process, igniting inspiration in the minds of those who long to tell their own tales.

Whether you are a seasoned writer seeking to refine your techniques or someone who wishes to explore short story writing for the first time, this book serves as an invaluable resource. Fagin's eloquent prose, combined with their passion for the subject, creates an engaging and thought-provoking read that invites readers to critically examine their own writing practice while developing the skills necessary to excel in this captivating craft.

In "Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade?", N. Bryllion Fagin elevates our understanding of short story-writing by deftly merging the realms of artistry and trade. By doing so, they inspire us to appreciate the inherent beauty of storytelling while emphasizing the necessity of honing our craft. I am honored to introduce you to this remarkable work, confident that its pages will empower and enlighten all who embark on the fruitful journey of short story creation.

 

Olivia Salter

02/04/2024


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👉Fiction Writing books at Amazon

👉How to Write a Short Story: 10 Good Tips for Writers

 

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Writing Conflict: External Conflict in Literature by Olivia Salter


Writing Conflict: External Conflict in Literature

 

by Olivia Salter

 

External conflict is a crucial element in literature that drives the  story forward and creates tension and drama. It involves the protagonist facing challenges or obstacles that come from outside sources, such as other characters, society, nature, or supernatural forces. These conflicts serve to test the strength and resolve of the main character, forcing them to confront their fears, make difficult decisions, and ultimately grow and evolve throughout the story.

One of the most common forms of external conflict in literature is man vs. man, where the protagonist is pitted against another character or group of characters. This type of conflict can take the form of physical confrontations, verbal sparring, or even psychological warfare. Through these interactions, the protagonist's values, beliefs, and morals are tested, leading to inner turmoil and self-discovery.

Another form of external conflict is man vs. society, where the protagonist must navigate the expectations, norms, and rules of the world around them. This can involve challenging societal injustices, fighting against oppressive systems, or simply trying to fit in and find their place in society. By confronting these external forces, the protagonist can bring about change, challenge the status quo, and inspire others to do the same.

Nature can also serve as a source of external conflict in literature, with the protagonist facing the elements, natural disasters, or dangerous wildlife. These challenges force the protagonist to rely on their survival instincts, adapt to their surroundings, and overcome adversity in order to survive. Nature can be a powerful symbol of both beauty and danger, reflecting the fragility and resilience of the human spirit.

Finally, external conflict can also take on a supernatural or otherworldly form, where the protagonist must battle supernatural beings, mystical forces, or otherworldly creatures. These conflicts often test the protagonist's belief in the unknown, their faith in themselves, and their ability to confront the mysteries of the universe. By delving into the realm of the supernatural, authors can explore themes of magic, destiny, and the power of belief.

In conclusion, external conflict plays a vital role in literature by challenging the protagonist, driving the plot forward, and highlighting the complexities of human nature. By incorporating various forms of external conflict into their stories, authors can create engaging narratives that captivate readers, provoke thought, and inspire change. Ultimately, it is through the protagonist's struggles and triumphs against external forces that the true depth of their character is revealed, leaving a lasting impact on readers long after they have finished the story. 

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Thursday, February 1, 2024

Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction by William Dudley Foulke

Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction by William Dudley Foulke

 


MASTERPIECES OF THE MASTERS OF FICTION

 

BY


WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE


NEW YORK


THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
William Dudley Foulke

PREFACE

A short time ago I determined that instead of taking up any new works of fiction I would go over the masterpieces which I had read long since and see what changes time had made in my impressions of them. To do this I chose some forty of the most distinguished authors and decided to select one story from each,—the best one, if I could make up my mind which that was—at all events, one which stood in the first rank of his productions. I determined to read these in succession, one after another, in the shortest time possible, and thus get a comprehensive notion of the whole. Of course under such conditions exhaustive criticism would be out of the question, but I thought that the general perspective and the comparative merits and faults of each work would appear more vividly in this manner than in any other way.

The productions of living authors were discarded, as well as all fiction in verse.

Arranged chronologically, the selections I made were as follows:

1535Rabelais“Gargantua”
1605-1615Cervantes“Don Quixote”
1715-1735Le Sage“Gil Blas”
1719Defoe“Robinson Crusoe”
1726Swift“Gulliver’s Travels”
1733Prévost“Manon Lescaut”
1749Fielding“Tom Jones”
1759Johnson“Rasselas”
1759Voltaire“Candide”
1759-1767Sterne“Tristram Shandy”
1766Goldsmith“The Vicar of Wakefield”
1774Goethe“The Sorrows of Young Werther”
1787Saint Pierre“Paul and Virginia”
1807Chateaubriand“Atala”
1813Austen“Pride and Prejudice”
1813Fouqué“Undine”
1814Chamisso“Peter Schlemihl”
1820Irving“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
1820Scott“Ivanhoe”
1827Manzoni“The Betrothed”
1835Balzac“Eugenie Grandet”
1841Gogol“Dead Souls”
1845Dumas“The Three Guardsmen”
1847Brontë“Jane Eyre”
1847Merimée“Carmen”
1850Dickens“David Copperfield”
1850Hawthorne“The Scarlet Letter”
1852Thackeray“Henry Esmond”
1852Stowe“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
1853Gaskell“Cranford”
1856Auerbach“Barfüssele”
1857Von Scheffel“Ekkehard”
1857Feuillet“The Romance of a Poor Young Man”
1857Flaubert“Madame Bovary”
1859Meredith“The Ordeal of Richard Feverel”
1861Reade“The Cloister and the Hearth”
1862Hugo“Les Misérables”
1863Eliot“Romola”
1866Dostoyevsky“Crime and Punishment”
1868Turgenieff“Smoke”
1869Blackmore“Lorna Doone”
1878Tolstoi“Anna Karenina”
1883Stevenson“Treasure Island”


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