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August Derleth Pages / Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes |
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THE GHOSTS OF SAUK COUNTY During the late 1920s and early 1930s, August Derleth (1909-71) was making a name for himself as a writer of competent and enjoyable horror fiction for such magazines as Weird Tales (1). However, by about 1930 he was also setting out on his lifelong career as a writer of 'serious' fiction, most of which came to form his Sac Prairie Saga -- a loose series of some fifty books of fiction, poetry, journals, and autobiography set in his native Sauk City and Prairie du Sac region of Wisconsin. Inevitably, Derleth's parallel careers occasionally came together. His early mentor, H P Lovecraft, characteristically recognised this when he wrote: As for Derleth -- I don't wonder you find his W.T. stuff mediocre! He holds all records for leading a literary double life... He despises his pot-boilers utterly & eloquently -- but continues to write them because they bring in highly welcome cheques. His real work is of a minor-keyed, delicate quality -- brooding memories & impressions woven together as they impinge on a single life-stream, & brief tragic vignettes of hidden lives & strange, lonely people. Some day he will probably go farther in literature than anyone else in the whole W.T. crowd. (2) Derleth always had an eye for the strange and offbeat in the lives of those around him, and his journals, poems, and autobiographical books contain many recollections of 'odd' people and incidents.(3) Several of Derieth's early historical novels contain atmospheric portraits of obsessed and disturbed people, encountering madness and dislocation in themselves and others. The late novel The Shadow in the Glass (1963) is based on the life of Nelson Dewey, the first Governor of Wisconsin after Statehood was attained in 1848. As an old man, forgotten and near the end of his life, he gets up during the night in order to prepare to travel to a welcome for President Cleveland. As he looks in his mirror, he sees, not his old face, but the face of the vigorous and idealistic young man that he once was: It was not really an old man he saw there. His beard, his wrinkles, his bushy brows, his graying hair -- all were invisible, only the eyes came through -- and his brow, and the shadow in the glass that was the face of a young man... And once again, in the glass, he saw with his mind's eye the face of the young man he had been, and all his being cried out voicelessly -- What happened? What happened to us? He could not bear to look. The ‘ghostly’ face in the glass frames Dewey's career, which ends with him being a revenant in what was his own world. The famous artist of the macabre, Frank Utpatel, provided a sensitive cover drawing for The Shadow in the Glass.(4) Derleth's first 'serious' book was a collection of four novellas, Place of Hawks, published in 1935. Derleth himself -- presumably -- later described these stories as dark, brooding tales of old families in the Sac Prairie country just after the turn of the century, stories of tragedy and madness, of people caught and helpless in the web of environment and heredity...(5) The stories are not weird or macabre, in the sense of involving the fantastic or the supernatural, as Derleth's Weird Tales work usually did. But they have much in common, even though the quality of the writing was usually higher: evidence of the seriousness with which Derleth took this aspect of his work, and his growing vision of the Sac Prairie Saga. (6) Throughout his career, Derleth kept returning to the Wisconsin countryside, and he developed a third type of story --similar in feel to those in Place of Hawks, but with a definite horror, or possibly supernatural, content. Such stories are Derleth's dark jewels: brooding and grim, yet with all the exhilaration and joy that idyllic and well-loved settings produce. But, of course, the idyll, whether of the Wisconsin countryside itself, or of the living in it, is far from being the whole story. Sauk County has its rural and small-town life. It also, possibly, has its ghosts. ***** Two stories of this type which I want to examine date from the 1940s, and appeared in Derleth’s collection Sac Prairie People, published in 1948.(7) "Where the Worm Dieth Not" shares several characteristics with the Place of Hawks stories, and later tales which are similar to them. It is a story told across the years, as the recollections of Jasper Grendon, the Sac Prairie doctor, to his grandson Steve (a recurring character throughout Derleth's work, and very much an alter ego). Dr Grendon stands apart from the story's events, but he is able to play a decisive part in its resolution. He interprets and comments on the motives and actions of the participants as well. The passage of the years seems irrelevant as Dr Grendon recalls events, and brings them to Steve (and so to the reader), with freshness and immediacy. "Where the Worm Dieth Not" opens with Dr Grendon seeing Burdace Nohr and his wife pass the window: Little by little, then, the story would come out, the story of Burdace Nohr and Laura -- and Anson Nohr: the story Dr Jasper Grendon had pieced out, the story partly told by Burdace himself, and hearing it, you would go back in memory, back over those years past, back twenty years to a February night... a night of wind and wet snow falling, and the smell of thaw already in the air... (8) Burdace comes to stay at his uncle Anson's farm, after Anson's wife Emma has died. Burdace finds that his cousin Laura is living there as well -- a girl with nowhere else to go, who helped to care for Emma, and now is entirely dependent on Anson. Anson Nohr has plans for her: it soon becomes clear that he wants her married to his repulsive neighbour Kester Bliss, so that their farms can eventually be merged. But nothing is as it seems. Emma Nohr seems to have died under somewhat suspicious circumstances, and Anson seems 'haunted' by whatever it is that lies in their past. He talks out loud to her in the dead of night: What was it held his uncle there on the stairs? 'Emma,' the older man said in a low voice, 'Emma, God damn you, answer me!' Burdace watched, at once drawn and repelled by this scene below him: the older man taut on the stairs, all his being emanating a fear so strong that Burdace felt it almost tangibly. (9) The next morning Burdace is out working on the farm, when he meets Dr Grendon on his rounds. Grendon makes it clear that Anson Nohr is not at all well-regarded in Sac Prairie. The fact that Laura is living alone at the farm with him, and that Emma died suddenly after much stomach trouble, is enough to set people talking. Burdace says he feels that ‘there’s something going on’ at the farm. Dr Grendon sums up his feelings on the situation: ‘...There's a biblical passage I'm reminded of -- "where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched". Something bums in Anson Nohr.’ (10) The
next day, Burdace meets Kester Bliss, when he comes to the farm
to court Laura. While Bliss seems to think that his possession
of Laura is a foregone conclusion, Laura’s body- language makes
it clear that she really wants nothing to do with him or the
plans Anson has for them both Inevitably, slowly, against the setting of the winter landscape, Burdace falls in love with Laura, and finds his love returned. They begin to contemplate escaping from the farm, and from Anson's plans. Meanwhile, at night, consumed by his own hell, Anson still speaks to his dead wife; and on one occasion, Burdace sees him trying to open Laura's bedroom door: 'Laura, last night,' he began immediately, 'I saw Anson at your door, I could tell...' But she shook her head, a frown on her forehead, her mouth turned down in an expression of distaste. There was something fragile about her standing there, some helplessness inherent in her. ‘That,’ she said. ‘I know that. It wouldn't be the first time. I keep my door locked and a chair against it. I always have.' ‘But some day he’ll go in!’ he protested. 'Laura, come away with me, come away now -- before something happens.’ She looked past him thoughtfully. 'He'll never come in,' she said. He’s been there so often before. Something always keeps him from coming in. It's his conscience.' (11) In the midst of Anson's nocturnal rages and despair, and among hints of dark designs against Kester Bliss and Laura, as winter gives way to spring, Burdace encounters Dr Grendon on his rounds again. They fall into conversation, and Dr Grendon reveals that he has heard rumours that Burdace is becoming sullen and melancholy. Burdace protests that he has never felt more healthy, and the two men come to the conclusion that Anson is spreading rumours about Burdace's state of mind. But the doctor is not deceived: 'Look here, Burdace, keep an eye on your uncle. Just watch him. Don't let him get anything on you.' 'I don't follow you, Doctor.' 'A man who stands on the stairs at night to listen to a voice he ought to know comes from a conscience he's half throttled can be expected to listen to other voices.’ (12) As the heady May air blows all around him, Burdace thinks about what Dr Grendon has said to him: He remembered again Dr Grendon's quotation from the Bible: Where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched, and he thought that fire burned unquenchably in all of them in the house. He was aware again of a faint fluttering of fear, a hint of impending disaster. (13) Matters slowly build up towards their climax. Anson discovers that Burdace and Laura intend to thwart all his plans. Things come to a head when Anson suddenly sends Burdace to the hayloft, to shift some hay. This is unnecessary work, and so Burdace is suspicious. His caution pays off, and he avoids walking straight into a trap set by Anson to fake Burdace's suicide. He is able to escape, and looks back to see how his uncle is reacting: But Anson was not following. He had got around the opening in the floor and now stood there motionless, staring into the darkness beyond Burdace, his eyes wide, his mouth open, his face a grotesque caricature of horrible fear. For an eternal moment, it seemed, he stood so, without motion, without sound. Then his voice came hoarsely. 'Emma! Emma!' At the same instant he threw up his arms as if to ward off a blow, quailed and fell backward, crashing through the loft floor to the stanchions below, where he gave back only a long sobbing groan and was still. (14) Burdace and Laura make good their escape. The entire story is recalled years later by Dr Grendon, who fulfills his calling: not, this time, by dispensing medical aid, but by defining the possibilities of what is happening in the story, and the lives of those involved, whether living or dead. Grendon articulates the thought already in Burdace's mind, that Anson is living in a private hell of his own making at the farm -- living in unquenchable 'fire' in an outwardly beautiful, fertile, and living setting. The countryside, for Burdace, is a place where he comes to regain his health, and where he also finds love. For Anson, the beauty and the life of the rural setting has become the place against which his obsession with gaining more land is played out. This comes to dominate his entire being, and all his activities and plans. His conscience, where the death of his wife is concerned, is in torment, and he is failing into madness just as Burdace is growing more healthy, and expanding his mental horizons with the possibility of marriage. At the last, the past, with its decayed marriage of Anson and Emma, reasserts itself the last time. As Anson's attempted murder of Burdace goes wrong, and he dies himself, we ask: was it supernatural intervention restoring the balance, or had Anson's personal hell finally come to overwhelm and consume him? ***** Although "One Against the Dead" is also set in the idyllic world of Sac Prairie, the story takes place in the more limited confines of a single house. It is narrated, years after the event, to Steve Grendon by his doctor grandfather. As ever, a small event prompts the old man’s memory: Grandfather Grendon bent forward. 'That reminds me,' he said, 'your mother coming down the stairs now from the dark into the light -- that reminds me of the night Eleanor died, my sister Eleanor, your great-aunt, Boy, coming down that night, her mind already partly gone. That was a night. Yes, I remember that now... Down she came, like a ghost from the attic of that old red brick house she lived in...' (15) Years before, Eleanor and Dr Grendon had administered a lethal dose of morphine their sister-in-law, Haidee, who was terminally ill with cancer, and in great pain. Despite the fact that they had carried out an act of euthanasia, asked for by the patient, Eleanor, years later and now very ill herself, becomes convinced that she murdered Haidee, who is coming back to take her revenge: 'Eleanor waited until she had gone, and then she turned to me and said, "I talked to her last night. During the night I saw her and spoke to her." Then she stopped and looked at me slyly, daring me to say it wasn't so, and said, "You think I'm crazy."... 'She got angry then, but let her anger cool. "Why don't you pray?" she asked. "You ought to pray. Tonight the woman we murdered comes back, the woman whose blood we've had on our hands these ten years."' (16) Throughout the windy night, in the old house where Haidee had died, Eleanor slowly loses her mind, and waits for Haidee to return. Grendon sits up with Eleanor, who keeps replaying in her mind the events of the night that Haidee died. At midnight Grendon wakes to find that Eleanor is no longer in bed. Finally convinced that her death is near, Eleanor has got up, and is walking around the gallery of family portraits, talking to each one, saying goodbye to them. Eventually she reaches the last portrait -- Haidee's. She stands on a chair to talk to her: "I'm ready now, Haidee," she said. "Ready. And Jasper's upstairs. We're here, both of us, ready. Take these hands and take the blood from them, take the stain away." (17) Grendon sees Eleanor's chair tip over, throwing her down the stairs and killing her: 'But what happened?' I asked. 'Did she break her neck?' 'No, no bone was broken,' he said. 'It might have been the hardening of the brain arteries -- they're taken that way. It might have been something else. A doctor can't always tell -- sometimes never.'(18) Again, Derleth presents a portrait of a mind apparently sliding into madness, with the accumulated tensions and consequences of past events making themselves present again. Past and present are connected, and the past is never really dead. Relationships -- both those in the present and those that have been put to rest -- are penetrated by something intangible: a mind being consumed by an inner fire, and aroused conscience -- or a ghost, an unquiet revenant. In the best tradition, Derleth does not give an explicit explanation either way. Events in Derleth's Sauk County, that dark heart of the Midwest, and crucible of actions and desires both past and present, simply unfold and overtake its inhabitants. The small town and rural idyll is not the whole story. There is more to expose and bring to light. Past actions have present consequences. Derleth's universe is nothing if not a moral one. (19) ***** August
Derleth has been criticised, in his work utilising the Lovecraft
tradition, for not being cosmic enough, and thus producing material
that does not work as Lovecraftian horror fiction. But Lovecraft was also right in his estimation of Derleth as a writer when he was operating on his own ground. Derleth did not limit himself, but produced fiction that utilised his own natural world-view, rooted over generations in Wisconsin earth, to create the sort of horror that was ideal for that world, ideal for a trip to hell and back. A hell on Sauk County earth.
NOTES 1. Derleth published about one hundred stories in Weird Tales between 1926 and 1954. See Jaffery and Cook, The Collector's Index to Weird Tales, Popular Press, 1995. 2. H P Lovecraft, letter to J Vernon Shea, Selected Letters III, pp. 396-7. 3. See, for example, such published volumes of journal as Village Year (1941); the 'Sac Prairie People' poems in Collected Poems (1967); Walden West (1961); and the novella The House of Moonlight (1951). 4. Restless is the River (Scribners, 1939); Shadow of Night (Scribners, 1943), The Shadow in the Glass (Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1963). 5. Front jacket copy for Derleth's reprinting in the omnibus Wisconsin Earth (Stanton & Lee, 1948). 6. In 1938, Derleth was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was praised by such writers as Sinclair Lewis (a Nobel Prize winner) and Edgar Lee Masters. 7. Sac Prairie People (Stanton & Lee, 1948). "Where the Worm Dieth Not" was first published as "The Sinister Shadow" in Life Story, May 1944. "One Against the Dead" appeared for the first time in Sac Prairie People. 8. Sac Prairie People, pp. 115-16. 9. Ibid, p. 124. 10. Ibid, p. 132. See Mark 9:48. 11. Sac Prairie People, p. 147. 12. Ibid, pp. 153-4. 13. Ibid, p. 156. 14. Ibid, p. 163. 15. Sac Prairie People, p. 288. 16. Ibid, pp. 296-7. 17. Sac Prairie People, p. 303. 18. Ibid, p. 304. 19. This, correctly, forms the basic theme of Evelyn M. Schroth's treatment of Derleth's Sac Prairie Saga, The Derleth Saga (Quintain Press, 1979). 20. H P Lovecraft, letter to Frank Belknap Long, Selected Letters III, p. 295.
A slightly different version of this article first appeared in All Hallows 18, published by the Ghost Story Society Copyright (c) 2001 John Howard |
