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ОглавлениеThe Short Stories
The motifs, themes and modes of writing to be found in McGrath’s later fiction have their genesis in the early short stories. The precarious and sometimes gleeful balancing of comedy and horror in many of them implies a consciousness of the hybridity of Gothic, used to advantage in a distinctive way. In an interview with Gilles Menegaldo in 1997, McGrath acknowledged his parodic relationship with Gothic conventions in the early work:
the Gothic genre is a mature genre; it’s a mannered genre, and to work in it with any real freshness or originality is difficult. My first impulse was to play with its very well established conventions; that inevitably became a form of pastiche as I exaggerated motifs, images that had already been well exaggerated by two centuries of development.1
McGrath’s earliest fiction takes the form of the short story. Most of the early work appears in the collection Blood and Water and Other Tales, published in 1988. Two later stories were published in 1991, one in an anthology entitled I Shudder at Your Touch, edited by Michelle Slung, and the other in Morrow and McGrath’s anthology, The New Gothic. The latter story, ‘The Smell’, is distinctive for the absence of specific setting, taking place entirely within an unidentified house and involving nameless characters. In contrast, most of the short fiction is clearly sited in time and place. McGrath’s own transatlantic identity is represented in his choices of setting and the different inflection of the English and American contexts. His later fiction draws on the same dual identity: the first four novels are set in mid twentieth-century England; the 2000 novel, Martha Peake, makes the representation of the relationship between England and the United States thematic, and the subsequent fiction is largely set in America. In the short stories and the novels, the two countries both appear as freighted with a textual history. McGrath’s use of parody in the early fiction, his exaggeration of ‘motifs, images that had already been well exaggerated by two centuries of development’, signals, it may be argued, an engagement with the wider implications of Gothic in its different contexts. Individual tales of transgression and decay may point to larger stories of cultural abjection and crisis. Thus, the Gothic themes of these short stories – vampirism; unstable bodies; fears of degeneration; violation of taboo – resonate beyond the boundaries of the fiction. Often they are inflected through McGrath’s own distinctive preoccupations: the problematic nature of medical practice (specifically psychiatry), madness and what it means to be an artist.
The influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whom McGrath sees as a key figure in the development of Gothic fiction, is clearly at work in many of the short stories. Asked to guest-edit an issue on the new Gothic in 1990 for the recently founded literary magazine Conjunctions, McGrath wrote in his afterword:
It is with Poe that we first see the Gothic shifting away from an emphasis on props and sets – dark forests and lugubrious caverns, skeletons and thunderstorms – and towards a particular sensibility characterized by transgressive tendencies and extreme distortions of perception and affect. Poe’s genius lies in his recognition of the sorts of structural analogies possible between the trappings and the sensibility, than in the deftness with which he splices them together.2
The introduction to The New Gothic pays tribute to Poe for turning the Gothic inward ‘to explore extreme states of psychological disturbance’ (p. xi). McGrath’s contribution to this 1991 collection, ‘The Smell’, lacks the comic dimension of many of his early stories and is now described by him in retrospect as ‘a very nasty, very dirty piece of work, almost fecal’.3 ‘The abject’, as defined by Kristeva, is often to be found in his fiction as a mode of representing madness.4 This Poe-esque tale is told by one of McGrath’s characteristic first-person narrators. In it, a petty domestic tyrant with a passion for order and a penchant for abuse becomes increasingly paranoid as he detects a smell that is evident only to him. The other members of his household are oblivious to this smell, but not unconnected with it. Running ‘a stern regime’ and predisposed to punish any infraction (in a manner he does not specify), he begins to sense it after crossing a threshold in oppressive behaviour.5 He wakes his sleeping children to punish them in some dreadful way that is left to the reader’s imagination, ‘watching the horror from somewhere outside one’s own body’ (246). He is then compelled to pursue the smell (‘I was drawn to the smell like a moth to a flame, it was pulling me in’ (246)) to the chimney, where he has already detected ‘a sweet and viscous liquid dripping into the fireplace’ (244). Trying to reach it by climbing up the chimney, he becomes irretrievably wedged, in a version of the live burial that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her study of Gothic conventions has identified as one of the preoccupations of Gothic narratives – a trope used by Poe, for example, in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’.6
Images of secrets buried or holed up in some way recur in the early stories, and the chimney was to be used later by McGrath in Spider, when his narrator hides his notebooks in the chimney in his attic bedroom. The physical details of putrefaction in ‘The Smell’ recall the oleaginous quality of what Kelly Hurley, after William Hope Hodgson, calls the ‘abhuman’ in late Victorian Gothic fiction, the entropic body.7 What is new here is the self-destructive nature of the experience and the way in which an obsessive desire for order leads to the ultimate entropy of death. The family romance is translated into the death wish in horrifying fashion, with the abuse inflicted on the disempowered of the household turned back on the abuser. The ‘milky feeling’ he describes in relation to punishing the children becomes transmuted into the final simile of the story in this narrative from beyond the grave (or, in his case, chimney), as he suffocates, ‘stuffed up my chimney like a dirty cork in a bottle of rancid milk’ (247). The image of milk points to childhood and suggests some shameful secret which is never divulged.
Jerrold E. Hogle offers a reading of this story informed by his argument that the Gothic reflects the fragmentation of signs and artefacts theorized by Baudrillard as characteristic of postmodernity:
Here is strong evidence joining with Baudrillard’s that a culture of pure simulation, especially when it is imported into the heart of the home as a system of management, is indeed a culture of death in its very efforts to transcend the death of the body and of the self.8
In Hogle’s psychoanalytic reading, the pull towards the chimney in ‘The Smell’ is representative of ‘an unconscious longing for the body and the mother (even in a death wish)’, and the story challenges the reader ‘to consider which is more Gothically monstrous: the reinsistence of the body with its primordial and final liquidity or the distancing and denial of that Real in systematic simulations that once made the Gothic possible as a form of fiction and drama?’9 What Hogle’s highly theorized reading does not consider is another aspect of the uncanny at work in the story: it may be read as one of retributive justice, in which the disciplining and punishing rituals are themselves transgressive and in their turn are punished through supernatural intervention.
The uncanny is ever-present in varying forms in McGrath’s fictions. His English settings present a recognizable England, usually in the middle decades of the twentieth century, but one that is always sinister and imbued with the uncanny. In the short stories, the narrative voices play competing discourses against each other. The homeliness of this England is disturbed by the strange or exotic in various forms; in Freudian terms, the unheimlich irrupts into the heimlich. Scientific discourse, and often specifically medical discourse, is juxtaposed with the bizarre or superstitious, often to darkly comic effect. These stories lay the groundwork for the territory of McGrath’s first four novels, all of which are set in this period, a time in many ways remote from the world of today but within living memory. These settings are not, however, those of the realist novel; they are more akin to a past that is accessed through its fiction. The stories invoke a chronotope, to use Bakhtin’s term,10 that is already highly textualized, but do so with critical difference; there is, in other words, a postmodern parodic quality to them, ‘repetition with critical difference’, in Linda Hutcheon’s formulation.
In Blood and Water, the golden age of British crime fiction is recognized in ‘The Arnold Crombeck Story’, which tells a tale of transgression through criminal ingenuity. Although set in 1954, a decade or two later than the heyday of the genre, it is reminiscent of the work of writers like Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, and provides both a twist at the end and a conservative recuperation of legality, when Crombeck does not succeed in his final fiendish attempt at murder and meets his due punishment. Its villain, however, is also an example of the mentally disturbed murderer who will appear again in Spider and Asylum. Known as the ‘death gardener’, he describes his ideal garden in lyric terms.11 Gardening assumes an important role in the novels Spider and Asylum; within the asylum, in both of them, gardens are associated with equilibrium. But they are an ambiguous symbol in McGrath’s fiction. They can also be associated with derangement and death. Crombeck may describe with bright eyes his ‘God-given’ garden, an English country garden, and yet have murder in his heart and in his hands (77).
‘God’ often signifies delusion in McGrath’s fiction. In ‘Ambrose Syme’ he draws upon his own unhappy experience of Stoneyhurst, the austere Catholic school where he had spent some time as a boy. He is also acknowledging a number of literary precursors. Colin Green has noted the influence of Mervyn Peake on this story, in which the school is called ‘Ravengloom’ and the Catholic Church is an ever-threatening and sinister presence.12 The raven in the name reminds us that Poe, too, is never far away in this early fiction. The setting maps on to Stoneyhurst’s location in the north-west of England, but the description of the topography also evokes the Dickensian world of Hard Times, with the Preston-inspired Coketown renamed ‘Gryme’. The Gothic edifice of Ravengloom reminds us of the historical origins of Gothic fiction, what Victor Sage has called ‘Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition’.13 Its transgressive priest, Syme, is – as his Christian name suggests – a latter-day Ambrosio, his crimes as shocking as those of Lewis’s monk. Yet he is treated more sympathetically than his eighteenth-century precursor, by a narrator who recognizes the foundations of repression that have made him a paedophile and murderer; he is shown to be himself a victim. Twenty years and more since the publication of this story, so many accounts of abuse in its institutions have emerged that the Catholic Church finds itself in crisis. The history in this instance seems to be as Gothic as the fiction. This story’s powerful representation of the link between repression and transgression reveals a cultural haunting at work; other stories explore further dimensions of the cultural haunting of England.
In the figure of Father Mungo, elderly rector of Ravengloom, McGrath’s preoccupation with the colonial aspect of British history is apparent. The name of this benevolent figure (‘who was still remembered with awe and affection by the natives of the Zambesi Basin’ (68)) is derived from that of the great explorer Mungo Park. McGrath has suggested that the African motif in his early fiction was ‘probably an outgrowth of [his] interest in pastiching nineteenth-century fictions’, and that in his writing ‘Africa became a symbol of the unconscious, the unpredictable, the chaotic’.14 The influence of Conrad is clear and, indeed, McGrath has identified Heart of Darkness as one of the books that has given him greatest pleasure.15 The figure of the explorer appears again in ‘The Lost Explorer’. The cultural history of colonial exploration here finds expression in the heart of the bourgeois family, where it represents an exotic ‘otherness’ in the imagination of a girl on the threshold of puberty. Like many Gothic tales, this story works within a liminal space. Evelyn Piker-Smith’s encounter with the exotic operates in the territory where realism gives way to fantasy, and the boundary between the two is unstable.16 This is signalled in the opening sentence, as ‘one fresh and gusty day in the damp autumn of her twelfth year Evelyn found a lost explorer in the garden of her parents’ London home’ (17). In another inflection of the garden trope, the explorer’s tent is pitched in the wild area at the bottom of the garden, an area that is described in terms of a Gothic desolation reminiscent of the sexually charged dream of Manderley in the opening of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca: ‘The rest of the garden beyond the pond was a tangled and overgrown mass of rhododendron bushes, into whose labyrinthine depths, since the death of the old gardener, only Evelyn now ventured’ (20). The trivialities of life carry on in their humdrum way in the Piker-Smiths’ bourgeois home, providing a contrast with the suffering of the explorer in his tropical delirium.
The two realities exist side by side for Evelyn, however, and both are narrated as such; only in the liminal area is there an acknowledgement of Evelyn’s imagination, as she thinks of the three white sheets billowing in the wind on the washing-line as sails on ‘a great ship shouldering on to the tropics’ (21). The narrative juxtaposes this with the next sentence, as she picks up ‘a jar containing a pickled thumb that Daddy had given her’ (21). Given the sexual connotations of hands in these early stories (in ‘Hand of a Wanker’, for example), it is difficult to read this other than in terms of a rather crude phallic symbol. It is, of course, not surprising in this house (Evelyn’s father is one of McGrath’s many medical men), where the topics of conversation at the dinner table include ‘a rather interesting colostomy [her father had] performed’, after which ‘Uncle Frank made some quips which might, in a non medical household, have been taken in rather bad taste’ (24). The body in this context is a masculinized domain.
In spite of his supernatural status, the explorer has for Evelyn a fully realized materiality in the text; there is nothing overtly spectral about him. From his ‘creased map of the upper reaches of the Congo’ to his torn mosquito net, he is accompanied by the trappings of his calling (17). In the liminal zone between childhood and adulthood, Evelyn shares with the explorer an alternative reality, aligning herself with neither female sexuality (as personified by Aunt Vera), domesticity (in the shape of her ‘plump, tweedy’ mother) nor the male doctors, who represent a banal rationality. Through her fantasy, the reader is offered an alternative perspective on an aspect of British history. Listening to Uncle Frank’s rambling account of Stanley’s adventures in the Congo, Evelyn glimpses over his shoulder the explorer, his ‘unshaven face deeply etched with gullies of suffering’ and his clothes looking ‘extraordinarily ragged and filthy against the beige flowered wallpaper of the hallway’ (25). When the explorer dies shortly afterwards, Evelyn stashes his body in the corner of a closet and tries to get rid of ‘the stink of a man too long in the jungle’. In one of the many comic turns in these early stories, her mother attributes the ‘funny smell’ the next morning to Evelyn’s ‘hockey things’, thus creating a bathetic closure to the explorer’s sojourn in the Piker-Smiths’ residence (28). After burying him with his possessions in the garden, Evelyn sees him occasionally as a spectral presence under a full moon, but by the time she has decided to become a doctor (at the age of fourteen and a half), ‘he disappeared from her life completely’ (31).
If this is a fantasy, it is (with its details of anthropophagous pygmies and a ‘creased and sweat-stained’ map (30–1)) a male adventure fantasy. Evelyn’s decision to become a doctor – entering into the male territory signified by the thumb – coincides with the disappearance of the explorer as she finds an adult role to pursue. The immediacy of her experience and her compassion towards the suffering man, as she tends to his needs, suggest, however, other possibilities for the medical profession than the smug indifference exemplified by the male doctors in the story. Hovering over both the fantasy and the quotidian reality, however, is a deeper fear, that of regression and entropy. In the wild zone of the garden, the wood-shed harbours ‘three substances, sacking, wood and the earth beneath the rotten wood, [which] had begun to coalesce, as if in attempting, in their nostalgia for some primeval state of slime, to abandon structure and identity, all that could distinguish or separate them’ (29). In the face of such forces the ephemeral nature of human lives is thrown into sharp relief, as are the ways in which they are recorded. The insubstantiality of textuality is represented by faded photographs in the shed, in which
barely a trace could now be detected of the humans who had stood, once, before the camera, vital, one presumes, and alive. It was as though they had died in the bad air, the malaria, of that neglected little corner of the garden, the thin dusty air of the old shed, within which everything must devolve to a fused state of formless unity … (30)
A less ambiguously comic treatment of the Englishwoman and Britain’s colonial past is to be found in ‘The Black Hand of the Raj’, which adopts an earlier setting, that of Victorian India. In this story the motif of the hand is central; its synecdochic quality places it in a tradition of hands with sinister import in Gothic texts.17 This hand acts autonomously and with lascivious intent, as does its American counterpart in ‘Hand of a Wanker’, but in this instance it is also murderous. Parodying the tradition of earlier stories of the Raj, from Kipling to Forster, and set in 1897, the story relates the experience of its young Victorian heroine, Lucy Hepplewhite. The narrator speaks from a mid twentieth-century perspective and the story opens with an academic Marxist discourse on the economic foundations of imperialism; this is soon explicitly set aside in favour of an exploration of the ‘soft face of imperialism’, which had enabled Europeans to discover passion in torrid climates. The narrator then sets the reader up for a tale in which ‘darker forces’ are at work and ‘the encounter of East and West, of the sensual and rational’ has a less satisfactory resolution (32). At this point the narrator displays the stylistic versatility of the parodist by adopting the language of romantic excess; Lucy becomes a ‘flower of Victorian maidenhood’, whose ‘dark eyes are misted and shining’ and whose ‘small pearly teeth gleam like stars’ from between ‘her soft lips’ (33).
Lucy is also represented as belonging to the tradition of intrepid colonial Englishwomen: she is ‘a girl of pretty stout kidney’ (34). Even for such a heroine, however, what follows is horrific. The erotic awakening implied by her expectations of her imminent marriage takes a most peculiar turn, when the reason for her fiancé Cecil’s reluctance to remove his pith helmet is revealed. Underneath it, a hand is growing out of his head. This is the result of the laying-on of hands by a mysterious little old man ‘with a bald head and a loincloth’, a figure that bizarrely evokes the image of Gandhi (36). Cecil has medication to keep the hand sedated; tragically, this seems ineffective on the night of Lucy’s arrival, so that she finds him dead in the morning, strangled by his uncanny appendage. She has dreamed about the hand, which had taken on an erotic agency: ‘it writhed and twisted and beckoned and pointed, it throbbed and undulated like a serpent, and performed gestures of an unspeakably lewd nature’ (38). What follows is an act that is comically abject: the hand consummates the relationship as Lucy ‘moan[s] in the shadows of the body of her lover’. When she recovers, she observes that ‘Cecil was beginning to go bad’ (40); the Victorians’ fear of female sexuality and their obsession with death are thus linked. The doctor’s diagnosis is ‘Black Hand of the Raj’, ‘some sort of wog curse’ that is always fatal (40).
At Cecil’s funeral the blackly comic effect is sustained by the observation, ‘she counted no fewer than seven Englishmen conspicuous for not having removed their headgear’. Lucy returns to England and becomes a nun, praying for her dead fiancé and ‘wondering, in her heart of hearts, what, exactly, was the nature of the sin she had committed’ (42). For the narrator, this is history, hence the quasi-objectivity of the story’s frame; Lucy had died twenty-five years earlier, having lived out the remaining half-century of her life within the convent, oblivious of the upheavals of history.18 Through its comic take on the violation of Victorian propriety and the Gothic autonomy of the wayward hand, ‘The Black Hand of the Raj’ constitutes a playful engagement with fears both of the exotic and of female sexu ality and serves to suggest the inherent instability of imperialism.
‘Blood Disease’ evokes the spectres of Empire through some of the other conventions of popular Gothic fiction, particularly that of the vampire, to create a story that confounds the reader’s expectations. The vampiric trope appears in various guises in McGrath’s later work. In contrast with developments in vampire fiction over the last thirty-five years that have made vampirism seem almost like an alternative lifestyle choice (by endowing the vampire with its own subjectivity and emphasizing its glamorous qualities),19 McGrath’s vampiric presences signify a negative and destructive otherness. In the later fiction, they tend to emanate from the minds of his characters or exist as traces written on human bodies, as in Port Mungo and Ghost Town (see chapter 3). ‘Blood Disease’ is both a vampire story and an anti-vampire story. Its narrative lays trails of false clues in a process of wrong-footing its reader, and refuting their expectations. It also demonstrates one of McGrath’s characteristic techniques, that of juxtaposing different discourses in order to highlight the shortcomings of each. Set in the mid 1930s, in the rural south of England, it reveals the practices of rustic English folk to be more bizarre and more violent than those of the pygmies of the equatorial rainforest, whom the returning anthropologist William Clack-Herman (otherwise known as ‘Congo Bill’) has left behind.
The dominant motif of blood in this story is represented through both scientific and Gothic discourses. While cautioning the reader with the opening line, ‘This is probably how it happened’, the opening paragraph accounts in scientific terms for the debilitated malarial state in which Congo Bill arrives at Southampton (84). What follows is a detailed account of what happens when someone is bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito. When a flea from the colobus monkey that Bill had brought back as a gift for his son Frank bites the boy, the reader is led to assume, therefore, that this is significant. Set against the scientific discourse is a set of markers that parody the vampire tale. The Clack-Hermans (Frank, Bill and his wife Virginia) stop for the night at an old inn called ‘The Blue Bat’. As its name suggests, this rustic hostelry, in spite of its reputation for ‘good beds, fine kitchen and … extensive cellar’ (86), is not to be regarded as a place of safety. Another guest arrives, a Ronald Dexter with whom Virginia has had an earlier relationship. His manservant, Clutch, is a grotesque figure who gives the impression of ‘a monstrous fetus’ (86) and who seems to fear the dangerous possibilities of the English countryside. Seeing him slip a crucifix into his master’s evening clothes, Ronald asks him if he imagines he will be set upon by vampires, to which his man servant replies, ‘One cannot be too careful … we are not in London, sir’ (87). Other false clues suggesting vampirism are given; at one point it seems possible that Ronald might be the victim of Virginia, who bears some of the markers of the vampire herself: ‘Her dress was of dead-white satin and cut extremely low. She was wearing a rope of pearls; her face was as white as her pearls, and her lips a vivid scarlet’ (90). Instead, as he leaves her bedroom, he is set upon by two men from the public bar, ‘flabby men with waxy skin and big, soft faces as round and pale as the rising moon’ (94). Virginia awakes to find herself, like Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, ‘surrounded by large pale women whose eyes glittered at her with an unnatural brilliance’ (101).
When the secret of ‘The Blue Bat’ is revealed to the reader, a secret that causes Ronald, Virginia and Frank to be dispatched and exsanguin ated in the cellar (events described in gruesome detail), scientific discourse then comes into the ascendancy again. The Gothic figure of Clutch has already realized that the strange appearance of the people in the public bar can be explained by the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia and has ‘hiked off toward Reading, where somebody at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, he felt sure, would take his story seriously’ (102). The appropriately named Dr Gland (‘who’d once read a paper on iatrophobia and sanguinivorous dementia [bloodlust] in pernicious anaemia’ (102)) confirms what the reader has already been told, that events at the inn are subject to rational explanation. As with malaria, there is a disintegration of the red blood-cells; unlike malaria, the condition produces a group identity, hence the ‘cell of untreated anaemics’ (98) at ‘The Blue Bat’ preying on unsuspecting travellers and their corollary, the unsuspecting reader.
Such rationalization, however, is also treacherous because elements of the uncanny remain in the story. In characteristic Gothic mode, the boundary between life and death is rendered unstable. The narrative is interspersed with Congo Bill’s malarial delusions, in which he is back in the paradise of the Congo forest. The narrative also describes how, in effect, he had been brought back from the dead by the pygmies, who have three categories of death: as well as ‘dead’, there is ‘dead forever’ and ‘absolutely dead’ (101). A similar resurrection takes place with the monkey, who appears to die in the course of the story. Frank has been befriended by the landlord’s daughter, Meg, who had initially terrified him with her approach, although the ‘slow, heavy clump-clump-clump’ is revealed to be created by an orthopaedic boot (93). It is Meg who dresses the monkey in a ‘tiny gown of white lace’ and helps him place it in a shoebox for burial – in the cellar where the murders are taking place. The monkey’s revival down in the cellar (it was ‘clearly not dead forever’ (103)) leads to Frank’s discovery and his murder alongside his mother. The story ends with Congo Bill coming out of his delirium and spotting Meg making for the woods with the monkey on her shoulder. The figure of the monkey plays an uncanny role. Not the hallucinatory spectre of LeFanu’s ‘Green Tea’, its status in this story is nonetheless liminal. It signifies the permeability of the boundary between life and death, as well as the frailty of human identity, in spite of the rational scientific discourse that has explained the bizarre events at the inn. In the 1930s England of this story, infection and degeneracy are endemic in the English countryside; the threat is not the exotic but the domestic. This is contained by medical science at the end of the story, but the uncanny figure of the monkey is unsettling, reminding the reader of the limitations in understanding of its rational practices.
While the murderous degeneracy of the ‘cell of untreated anaemics’ provides the horror of ‘Blood Disease’, madness in the English upper class is the satiric target of the parody of the later story ‘Not Cricket’, which also plays with the idea of the vampire.20 The setting is a country house (Wallop Hall, ‘a fine example of rustic Gothic’ (119)21), where the butler is suggestively called Stoker. McGrath’s propensity for selecting evocative names thus sets the frame for the fantasies of the story’s narrator, Lady Hock, mistress of the Hall. She has taken herself off her medication, the nature of which is never specified but may be inferred from the hallucinations that then begin to beset her. This leads to her conviction that, in the person of Cleave, a cricketing visitor, she is entertaining not merely a demon bowler (who emasculates and sends off to hospital an inoffensive opponent with a fast ball to the testicles), but a vampire. In Lady Hock’s eyes, Cleave possesses all the physical attributes of the Stokerian vampire: ‘deep sunken eyes’ in a ‘disproportionately long face dominated by a huge, cadaverous jaw’ are combined with ‘a shock of jet-black hair, thickly oiled, that was brushed straight back from a sharp peak dead in the centre of a low cliff of overhanging forehead’ (121–2). Moreover, she discerns ‘a sort of red glow … deep in each of his eye sockets’ (122) and his ‘teeth shining with a nasty yellowish lustre’ (124). Determined to protect her daughter, though also carried away by what Millie Williamson has identified as ‘the lure of the vampire’,22 she determines to offer herself up to Cleave that night, but finds him sleeping. Admitting herself tempted, she instead hits him ‘extremely hard with a piece of metal piping that the plumbers had left behind’ and then hammers a meat skewer through his heart with that quintessential emblem of English country house recreation, a croquet mallet (130). It is only at the end of the story that she divulges that she is telling her story from the asylum where she is quite happy, playing bridge with her friend’s daughter, who has been incarcerated for ‘murdering the parish priest with a blunt axe in a moment of delusional psychosis’ (120). The reader is left to speculate whether this has indeed been a vampire story or an everyday tale of an unfortunate outsider with a good bowling arm who happened, like Stoker’s Dracula, to bear the markers of a different ethnicity.
In McGrath’s fiction, the English upper classes tend to be both mad and murderous; the asylum, it would appear, is their natural home. It is the final destination of Sir Norman Percy in ‘Blood and Water’, the title story of the collection, whose crime has been to decapitate a visiting Harley Street doctor. In this story, some of the persistent concerns of McGrath’s fiction may be discerned: the degeneracy of the upper classes; the limitations of the scientific perspective, specifically that of the medical profession; and a Gothic fascination with the instability of bodily forms. Sir Norman’s ancestral home, ‘Phlange’, is, like ‘Crook’ in McGrath’s first novel, The Grotesque, a place of grotesque perversity. Like many of the stories in the collection that bears its title, ‘Blood and Water’ demonstrates McGrath’s skill in using the comic potential of the Gothic.23 Domestic plumbing is used as an analogue for anatomy, as Sir Norman struggles with both an unreliable boiler and hermaphroditic developments in his wife’s genitalia, a struggle that culminates in her suicide and his incarceration.24 The punning link between plumbing and anatomy is sustained throughout (the estate handyman is called Tinkler), as the dispassionate narrative voice reconstructs the crime that lies at the centre of the story and invites the reader to view a series of scenes in phrases like ‘now turn your eyes’ and ‘our first clear glimpse’ (172, 173). The historical siting of the story is very precise: August 1936, ‘a cloudless Friday afternoon’ when ‘England is at peace’ (172), a point in history when ‘the landed gentry is hardly prospering’ (174).
The point of conflict in the story is Lady Percy’s body. She is not, however, represented as abject but as an ethereal figure from romance, ‘a pale woman in a white silk gown, utterly motionless and devoid of expression, gazing out over the copse of chestnuts on the brow of the distant hills, and into the deep sky beyond’ (172) from her chamber, with its ‘four-poster bed, spread with a fine-woven coverlet of medieval design’ (181). In contrast, it is the doctor who is rendered as monstrous: grossly fat and androgynous in his own way, marked as monstrously feminine with ‘wide, soft-nippled tyres of flesh’, but (in keeping with the joking but sinister use of the plumbing metaphor) a ‘little pink hose-end of a penis peeping out from below’ (173). It is the doctor’s proposal that Lady Percy’s case should be written up in the Lancet as ‘a scientific monograph’ (177) and Sir Norman’s fear that she will be subjected ‘to the knife’ (178) that precipitate the catastrophe. Suffering from the delusion that he is an Arthurian knight protecting his lady, the latter dispatches the foe with one plumber’s tool (‘a large spanner’) and saws off his head with another. Thus, in comic parodic mode, using a crude phallic symbol, Sir Norman asserts his masculinity and mastery of his domain. The story’s emphasis on the specular makes it particularly susceptible to a psychoanalytic reading. Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ identifies the fear of blinding as being symbolic of the fear of castration. Sir Norman, in presenting the doctor’s bloody severed head to his lady, says: ‘Show yourself to me’ (181) and her ‘deformity’ is revealed. ‘In deep psychotic territory’ (182), Sir Norman does not realize until it is too late that his wife has fled to the bathroom and committed suicide by cutting her wrist in the bath. He is instead ‘fascinated by the eyes of his enemy’ (182). He ‘seats himself before the bloody head set between the mirrors on the dresser and there gazes into its infinite deadness’ (182).
‘Blood and Water’ is a story of inversions; two kinds of masculinity are pitted against one another: the rationalizing of the scientific establishment that cannot recognize its own monstrosity and the aristocratic masculinity of Sir Norman, with its propensity for madness. Defending his family honour by the use of the phallic ‘tool’, the latter metaphorically castrates the doctor, who, in an inversion of Lady Percy, also represents androgyny through the markers of the monstrous feminine on his body. Sir Norman’s committal to Broadmoor does not prevent his resuming the role he had played so well all his life, that of the bucolic squire, and spending the rest of his life ‘in a state of happy and imperious insanity’ (183). McGrath pays tribute to one of the writers he most admires by using some lines of Melville’s for Sir Norman’s epitaph, which closes the story:
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life’s gate? (183)
The cloven ‘human integral’ may be a reference both to the division between the sexes and to the fragmentation of Sir Norman Percy’s psyche, where the flanges (to use the plumbing metaphor) no longer hold.
The unfortunate doctor in ‘Blood and Water’ is not the only medical man to meet a gruesome end in the short stories. In ‘The Skewer’, it is again gendered identity and the potential uncanniness of the body that is instrumental in bringing about the demise of an all-too confident doctor. McGrath’s interest in the gendered body reflects the fascination with gender instability in evidence in the popular culture of the 1980s. From Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie (1982) to the popularity of Boy George and Divine’s celebrated performance as a woman in Hairspray (1988), there was a growing awareness of the performativity of gender during this period. This awareness, that was to be so clearly articulated in theoretical work by scholars such as Judith Butler in the 1990s, became the stuff of a gleeful and often comic playfulness, in which parodic re-representations became of central importance. In a darker comic vein, Iain Banks’s novel The Wasp Factory (1984) plays the kind of narrative trick with gender that is to be found in McGrath’s story ‘The Skewer’, when its excessively masculinized narrator discovers himself to be biologically female.
In ‘The Skewer’, assumptions about gendered identity comically and literally cut down to size the founding fathers of psychoanalysis.25 The all-too confident doctor in this story is evocatively named Dr Max Nordau,26 and, it is implied, will have his eye put out with the eponymous skewer by the narrator. This will be in revenge for the torment he caused the narrator’s uncle, who is revealed at the end of the story to be her/his aunt (the reader never learns the sex of the narrator). Neville (Evelyn) Pilkington’s aesthetic and reclusive masculine identity, related to her disfigurement from an accident which killed her twin, has been a masquerade. The narrator states that her/his uncle’s mind had taken ‘a mystical, not to say Gothic, turn in the twilight of his life’ (108). Nordau, however, claims at Neville’s inquest that he had suffered self-inflicted torment: he had hanged himself in his London home, having already cut out his own eye in a Brussels hotel room. Neville’s journal forms a significant part of the framed narrative and he writes of his harassment by visions of miniature psychoanalysts: Freud, Otto Rank and Ernest Jones and eventually ‘the whole Weimar Congress’, infesting his room like vermin (121). Descriptions of these encounters as they appear in the journal are interleaved with Nordau’s report in the courtroom, giving an account of psychoanalysis as violence; it is the miniature Ernest Jones who uses a pen as a lance to put out Neville’s eye, an act interpreted by Nordau as symbolic castration, in accordance with classic psychoanalytic theory. The narrator recognizes this as a ‘phallocentric fallacy’, although the reader does not discover Neville’s biological identity until the twist at the end of the tale, which ends on a note of intended violent revenge: ‘an eye for an eye, I say’ (123). In the later novels, medical men continue to be represented as problematic characters, but the most suspect of all are the psychiatrists. In McGrath’s most recent novel, Trauma (2008), the psychiatrist narrator is finally revealed to be himself deeply traumatized and in need of therapy.
In the American short stories, the doctor figure is notably absent. In contrast with this thematic figure, who, at this stage of McGrath’s career, seems to be connected with his British past, creative protagonists are more in evidence: a painter, a writer and a photographer inhabit the pages of three of the stories. McGrath had left England after university and, following a spell in Canada, had been living in New York since 1981. Whereas the England of the short stories is that of earlier decades, an apocalyptic future and a distinctly Gothic late twentieth-century New York provide settings for several of the American stories. In another, ‘Marmilion’, there is a clear homage to the Southern Gothic tradition of Poe. In all of them, the Gothic concerns of transgression and decay remain paramount.
In contrast with the specific location and history which frame ‘Marmilion’, a ghastly future is imagined in two of the stories, reflecting the apocalyptic fears that many harboured in the America of the 1980s. McGrath has commented that as he was living in the United States during the Reagan era, he and many others found them selves speculating what the world would be like after a nuclear holocaust, when there were no human beings left to tell their own tale.27 Neither of the first-person narrators of ‘The E(rot)ic Potato’ (his first published story) and ‘The Boot’s Tale’ is human (being a fly and a boot, respectively). With their implication that human beings’ ascendancy is inevitably doomed, both stories adopt a darkly comic treatment of the most abject subject-matter: corpses and cannibalism. In the case of ‘The Boot’, McGrath’s story sits within a long tradition of satire, where an ‘innocent’ voice (in this case that of an inanimate narrator) lays bare the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of others. This story raises some uncomfortable questions about the positioning of the reader. Just as its human characters are lacking in human sympathy (a mother is eaten by her family without any compunction), their unsympathetic portrayal invites a similar lack of affect in the reader. Such a misanthropic vision is not, however, characteristic of McGrath’s work. Some of his characters who commit abject acts, like Spider in the novel of the same name, tell their own stories; others, like Harry Peake in Martha Peake, are recuperated in the narrative. Always in the novels the human situation is rendered as complex, and this displacement of the human focus does not happen elsewhere in McGrath’s fiction.
These two stories offer a blackly comic look into a bleak future; in the others, the past tends not to be far away in the present day. ‘Marmilion’, the homage to Poe, is set in a derelict mansion in the Deep South. Unusually for McGrath, the first-person narrator is a woman. She undergoes an uncanny experience and pieces together a speculative and possibly quite erroneous history for the house, its owners (the Belvederes) and the events that had taken place in the aftermath of the Civil War. Entering the ruined mansion, she feels ‘something in the house react to [her] presence’ but nevertheless spends the night there, only to be woken and terrified by the sound of something ‘like a nail being scraped by a feeble hand against a brick’. ‘Was there some sort of creature in the chimney?’ she wonders; she has had ‘the bizarre experience that something was trying to communicate’ with her in the night (127). As a result of this experience she tries to find out about the history of the house and those who lived there. Her reflections on history anticipate the unreliability of historical narrative that is thematic in the 2000 novel Martha Peake; it is, she suggests:
all a matter of sympathetic imagination. For to construct a cohesive and plausible chain of events from partial sources like letters and journals requires that numerous small links must be forged – sometimes from the most slender of clues – and each one demands an act of intuition. (134)
Her own partiality in the interpretation of events is there to read between the lines – a demand that McGrath frequently makes upon the reader. She is herself a Southerner, a ‘monkey woman’–in other words, a photographer of monkeys. The story begins with an observation on spider monkeys that ‘the Cajuns have long considered the spider monkey a great delicacy’, adding, ‘I should know: my husband was a Cajun’ (126). Later in her narrative, she makes a strong statement about her alienation from the traditions of her own society, one ‘dedicated to the greatest good for the smallest number. Endorsing such a society, I consider the moral equivalent of eating monkeys’ (131). Her outright condemnation of the son of the family, William, is connected with her contempt for Creole society, which, she reminds the reader, has an aristocracy ‘descended from thieves, prostitutes, and lunatics – Parisian scum forcibly recruited to populate the colony in the reign of Louis XIV’ (139).
She has already speculated that no doubt the relationship between mother and son began to deteriorate at an early stage, and casually informs the reader, ‘I should know; I’ve had a son of my own’ (130). What emerges from her narrative is that her ‘sympathetic imagination’ may well be a projection of her own attitudes and familial failures. She feels close to the mother, Camille, ‘like the wives of so many planters in the Old South, a deeply unhappy woman’ (this, she adds, ‘perhaps … accounts for my intuitive attraction to her’) (129). When the historical sources can take her no further, she admits that the rest of the story is ‘the construction of a sympathetic imagination’ (140). She speculates that Caesar, Marmilion’s former slave (who has fathered a child with the daughter, who died as a result of the birth), wreaks a dreadful vengeance on William for causing the death of Camille when she intervenes in his attempt to kill Caesar. The latter, she asserts, ‘was a black nemesis, an agent of retributive justice’; he ‘bricked him up in that pillar by the fireplace, buried him alive, upright and conscious’ (141). In her desire to find out the truth of this speculation, she demolishes the pillar, to find instead ‘the tiny, perfect skeleton – of a spider monkey’ (143).
This climax to the story leaves an ambiguous closure, as the reader is left to reflect on the meaning of the nexus of identification between the narrator, Camille (whose historical trace, her hand writing, is described as ‘spidery’ (132)), and the spider monkey. As William Patrick Day suggests:
The parody is above all the metamorphosis of one thing into another. It is, then, a literary device that perfectly embodies the mystery basic to the Gothic fantasy. Out of one thing comes two; the second subverts the first but is dependent upon it. While the parody subverts the original, it also affirms it, since it is a likeness of the original. The exact meaning of a parody, particularly in the Gothic, is always somewhat ambiguous.28
The motif of live burial, as suggested earlier, is recurrent in Gothic fiction; the discovery of the monkey suggests that the narrator’s dream of nemesis is just that and that there is a chain of victimhood, which means that she has been the Gothic heroine all along. This story is an example of what could be termed ‘simian Gothic’, for monkeys and apes make an appearance in nineteenth-century Gothic texts from Poe’s orangutan in ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’ onwards. Richard Davenport-Hines argues that there is a distinction between the simian fantasies of nineteenth-century writers like Sheridan LeFanu (whose malevolent spectral monkey in ‘Green Tea’ has resonances of not only subconscious urges but also the threat posed by the Irish poor) and of those in the twentieth century, like Karen Blixen. Blixen’s story ‘The Monkey’ (included in her Seven Gothic Tales) makes the monkey a redemptive figure. In McGrath’s tale, the monkey represents a perpetuated victimhood in which it is the narrator herself who is imprisoned by her history.
Whereas McGrath is able to draw on the long-established tradition of Southern Gothic in ‘Marmilion’, he adopts a distinctive approach to urban Gothic in his three New York tales. The concern with the Gothic aspects of embodiment in evidence in so many of the short stories appears here, too. As its title suggests, ‘Hand of a Wanker’ is a comic excursion into perverse sexuality; in it the Christian obsession with sexuality is rendered darkly comic through a jaunty and ironic narrative. Parodying the Book of Revelations, the ‘beast’ in this context is male sexual desire, represented by the severed hand, an image that echoes popular horror cinema.29 As the title suggests, through its use of British slang, this story offers a comic take on a practice that caused the Victorians a good deal of anxiety and was a taboo subject in all but the coarsest company.30 Characterized by the legendary hairy palm of the compulsive masturbator (in this instance the mark of the beast), the hand appears in a seedy night club in the East Village one late summer afternoon, where it proves itself to be as subversive and disruptive as its counterpart ‘the Black Hand of the Raj’. In the final sentence, an indulgence in the florid writing of popular horror in the manner of H. P. Lovecraft, a reference to the ‘putrid existential miasma that seethed within his guilt-ridden soul’, is stopped short in a bathetic conclusion, as ‘the stranger waved his stump over his head and limped off into the sharp Manhattan dawn’.31
Equally strange but less comic as a tale of Gothic embodiment and the decay of religion is ‘The Angel’. ‘I was very happy with that story,’ McGrath told a recent interviewer:
I was living on the Bowery at one stage and that’s very much how I was experiencing New York at the time, sweating through those hot summers, couldn’t afford to get out of the city, and there were all these curious creatures, men like The Angel – you saw Quentin Crisp every day on the streets.32
Identified by Andrew Hock-Soon Ng (who has written the only piece of sustained criticism on this story) as ‘a narrative of the fin de siècle that is related to the crisis of representing the body’,33 ‘The Angel’ is marked by features that are characteristic of late nineteenth-century decadence. The city is represented as a place of corruption and decay in which the narrator, Bernard Finnegan, walks along a ‘garbage-strewn and urine-pungent sidewalk’ (1). The city as a locus of Gothic possibility is suggested by a ‘rather grisly murder’ where ‘the body was mutilated and drained of all its blood’, which leads the New York Post to suggest that a vampire may be on the loose’ (5). The subject of Bernard’s story, the old man Harry Talboys,34 is one of the ‘curious creatures’ described by McGrath; he bears the markers of a late nineteenth-century dandy, the shabbiness of his clothes failing to disguise ‘the quality and elegance of the cut’ (1). His mouth is made up with lipstick and he habitually wears a ‘fresh white lily’ in his buttonhole, a flower associated with death. He is a subject waiting to be found by a dandified writer, Bernard, whose opening paragraph displays a self-conscious mannered excess:
It was high summer when I met him, high summer in Manhattan, when liquid heat settles on the body of the city like an incubus, and one’s whole activity devolves to a languid commerce of flesh and fluids, the ingestion and excretion of one by the other, and all sane organisms simply estivate. (1)
Bernard’s narrative creates the frame for Harry’s reminiscences as well as for a shorter intertext, in the form of a Gnostic tale that he discovers. In this, Satan, ‘a great god’, persuades a spirit called Arbal-Jesus to project himself into a human body, causing him great agony. Then, subjected to sexual abuse by Satan, his only consolation is the presence of another spirit in the body, that of Death. Along with this intertext, the fin de siècle markers in the contemporary New York setting point to the two dimensions of Gothic that provide the means through which Harry’s story can be understood: the abhuman and the doppelgänger.
