The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Hogg prepared the way for the publication of his 1824 novel with a letter in the August 1823 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine entitled “A Scots Mummy”, about the supposed discovery of a suicide’s corpse, buried in a shallow grave for over a hundred years, yet somehow perfectly preserved. When the novel came out the following year, it quoted the letter in its concluding “Editor’s Narrative”, explaining how the main portion of the narrative, the “Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner”, was discovered as a damp but still legible manuscript unearthed on a subsequent visit to the grave. To perhaps make the whole thing a little bit more authentic, Hogg published the novel anonymously, and even included a passage in which the book’s “Editor” goes to see the writer of the letter — Hogg himself — hoping to be guided to the grave, only to be rebuffed, as Hogg (famously, a poet who found his literary calling whilst working as a shepherd) is too busy trying to sell some sheep. Hogg (the real one, not the one in the novel) then asked his literary friends to put about the rumour the book’s anonymous writer came from Glasgow, while he himself lived in the Edinburgh area.

This may have been playfulness on Hogg’s part, but could also have been him protecting himself from potential criticisms over the novel’s religious aspects. (When it was republished as part of his collected works in 1837 — two years after his death — these parts of the novel were extensively bowdlerised. It wasn’t until 1895 that Confessions was published again in its original form — though under the title The Suicide’s Grave — leaving it to become something of a 20th century rediscovery.)

Retitled 1895 edition

The story opens in 1687, with the instantly-disastrous marriage of George Colwin and Rabina Orde. George is a fun-loving Laird, who makes a point of dancing with all the women at his wedding; Rabina, on the other hand, is dedicated to the extreme Calvinistic teachings of one Mr Wringhim, and immediately removes herself from the celebrations. The couple’s first son, also named George, takes after the father in enjoying the company of friends, games of tennis and cricket, and the occasional trip to a bordello. Their second son, Robert, is very much in his mother’s mould, though. George Colwin even denies the boy is his. His wife had been spending all her time with the preacher Wringhim, and though Wringhim is indignant anyone would think he’d fathered a child, he takes Rabina in when she leaves the Colwin household, and becomes the young boy’s ward (who henceforth is known as Robert Colwin Wringhim). The brothers only meet for the first time as young men, when Robert decides to stand so close to George while he’s playing tennis that he obstructs his game, and the two get into a fight over his refusal to move. When George realises this is his brother he apologies, but Robert refuses the apology, and proceeds to follow George everywhere, making himself as much of a nuisance as he can, till George’s friends start to avoid him.

Robert becomes, to George, something like the monkey in Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”, always present wherever he goes, staring at him with a deep and spiteful bitterness, driving him to distraction. The two clash again and George is arrested for threatening to kill Robert (Mr Wringhim’s many worthy friends come to his ward’s defence), and although this comes to nothing, shortly afterwards George is killed in what appears to be an unrelated duel. The father dies of grief, and Robert inherits the lands, house, and wealth.

Illustration from the 1895 edition, by Robert Easton Stuart

The main portion of the novel, the “Confessions”, are Robert’s narrative, retelling the same events from this young man’s perspective. Robert has been brought up to believe in the extreme “predestinarian” teachings of Mr Wringhim, which claim that some people — the Elect — have already been chosen by God to be saved, while others are already consigned to Hell. Mr Wringhim, who “knew the elect as it were by instinct”, spends some time trying to decide if young Robert is one of them, and the moment he does, Robert meets a mysterious new friend. This man, who at first refuses to give his name (but later allows himself to be called Gil-Martin, a Gaelic nickname for a fox), has the supposedly “natural peculiarity” of being able to change his face just by thinking about it:

“My countenance changes with my studies and sensations… And what is more, by contemplating a face minutely, I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well.”

He drops a number of mysterious hints as to who or what he is, including the fact that he has “no parents save one, whom I do not acknowledge”, and “subjects and servants more than I can number”. Robert comes to the conclusion he is Peter the Great of Russia, rumoured to be travelling Europe incognito. The reader will already have other suspicions.

Gil-Martin agrees with every word of Mr Wringhim’s teachings, and pushes them to a further extreme: one of the Elect can, he says, commit any crime — anything that might otherwise be deemed a sin — with impunity, because God has already declared them bound for heaven. This means they’re free, for instance, to rid the earth of sinners — and it would in fact be a good deed to do so, for though these sinners would go straight to Hell (where they were bound anyway), they’d at least do so that little bit less burdened by the sins they would otherwise have committed. Gil-Martin persuades Robert to begin by murdering old Mr Blanchard, whose main sin is to warn the young man against religious extremism. He then directs Robert’s attention to his brother George.

1978 Folio Society edition

Justified Sinner brings in some traditional, folklorish elements, such as the deal with the Devil, along with others that, though no doubt old as Faerie lore, came to the fore around this time in literature, in the theme of the doppelgänger or double, as in Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839) and Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846). In the first section of the novel, happy-go-lucky George is haunted by what seems his double or shadow, the surly, combative and religiously over-serious Robert; in the second section, it’s Robert who’s haunted, by Gil-Martin — not his opposite, in this case, but an intensification of all that’s extreme about his own beliefs. And Gil-Martin himself claims to have a dual nature, in a passage that makes it pretty clear — to all but the self-blinded Robert — that he’s the fallen angel Lucifer:

“We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person. I myself have suffered grievously in that way. The spirit that now directs my energies is not that with which I was endowed at my creation. It is changed within me, and so is my whole nature. My former days were those of grandeur and felicity. But would you believe? I was not then a Christian. Now I am.”

(I take his claim to not have then been a Christian then, to be because his fall from Heaven occurred before Christ’s incarnation — typical Devil’s equivocation.)

But, to me, the thing that makes Justified Sinner a piece of weird fiction, when deals-with-the-devil don’t usually fall into that category, is that Gil-Martin never feels entirely like the caricature Satan you’d find in, say, Doctor Faustus or The Monk. Gil-Martin isn’t the “Lord of this World” type of Devil, but one who needs human beings to do his work for him. He seems, in fact, rooted in Robert:

“I am wedded to you so closely, that I feel as if I were the same person. Our essences are one, our bodies and spirits being united, so, that I am drawn towards you as by magnetism, and wherever you are, there must my presence be with you.”

Although Gil-Martin claims he’s entirely willing to carry out the murders he’s urging Robert to commit, when it comes to it he can’t land a blow, but needs Robert to do the deed. There’s never any doubt that Gil-Martin exists as a separate person, because other characters in the novel see him, but his power over Robert is entirely psychological, and in the latter stages of the story, he seems to be actually inhabiting Robert’s very body and mind, and committing further crimes an increasingly fevered Robert has no memory of. He may be Satan, but he might just as well be some Faerie creature.

James Hogg, painted in 1830 by Sir John Watson Gordon (original at the National Portrait Gallery)

Robert Louis Stevenson called Hogg’s novel “without doubt a real work of imagination”, saying it “haunted and puzzled me”, and some commentators have found echoes of Justified Sinner’s structure in Jekyll and Hyde as well as its evident thematic links. I first heard about it thanks to Kim Newman and Stephen Jones’s Horror: 100 Best Books, and it has gained slow but sure literary ground throughout the last decades of the 20th century, particularly as a work of the Scottish fantastic. (Which makes me wonder if David Lindsay ever read it — both Krag and Gangnet from A Voyage to Arcturus have something of the air of Gil-Martin, as god-like beings who appear to be normal people, and who work entirely by persuasion; and Nightspore, meanwhile, feels like he has a similar nature, too, in being an external embodiment of a refined or distilled aspect of Maskull.)

What perhaps makes the book just as live a narrative today is the point it makes about how the Devil achieves his ends — not merely by being a tempter of the flesh, but as one who can work upon the pride of the most self-righteous, turning any view, the moment it strays towards the extreme, into a pathway to damnation and evil deeds. Hogg’s own attitude, meanwhile, is expressed by the critic J B Pick, who says in his study of Scottish mystical writers, The Great Shadow House:

“[Hogg] did not accept that any single mind or any single system of thought can encompass all the complexities of life, and was content to carry a variety of incompatible parcels in his luggage, and to accept the burden cheerfully… Hogg’s counterweight to the diabolical sublime is what I can best describe as the good nature and good sense of the common man.”

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of those 19th century landmarks on the way to modern horror, not widely-enough known to be lumped with the core classics such as Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde and Frankenstein, but like the latter belonging to that post-Romantic Gothic entangling of the supernatural with the psychological. To me it feels like it most naturally belongs with the demonic weirdness of Wuthering Heights, and the stories of Sheridan Le Fanu. Perhaps the only thing keeping it from being more widely appreciated is its being rooted in what might now seem to be the abstruse theological teachings of Calvinism, but the idea of elites who feel themselves to be free from morality, and its warning against the perils of extreme beliefs, are, surely, timeless.

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The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

I’ve been meaning to read John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps for some years, having seen both the 1935 Hitchcock film (Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed together and on the run) and the 1978 film (Robert Powell hanging off the minute-hand of Big Ben) multiple times. (And I recently caught the second half of the 2008 BBC adaptation. Lydia Leonard rubs mustard into Rupert Penry-Jones’s muscly back. Not a scene from the novel.) Even more so when I read somewhere that the meaning of “the thirty-nine steps” is different in the novel than either film. It turns out to be a quite short book, and an interesting glimpse into the origins of the sort of spy-thriller that would come to be one of the defining genres of 20th century fiction.

Supposedly, Buchan decided to write The Thirty-Nine Steps when, finding himself ill in bed and having run out of the sort of “shocker” that provided the best convalescent reading — a “romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible”, as he puts it in his dedication — he went ahead and wrote one himself. (Buchan was a writing powerhouse, producing a stream of novels, short stories, journalism and non-fiction books throughout a life already busy with a legal and political career that eventually saw him installed as Governor General of Canada. He paid for his own further education at Oxford by supplementing a scholarship with income from an already established writing career, but only ever regarded writing as a sideline.) The result was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine between August and September 1915, then published in hardback in October the same year.

The set-up is basically the same in novel and films. Richard Hannay, having made a fortune as a mining engineer in Africa (though I think he’s Canadian in the Hitchcock film), comes back to England to live a life of leisure, but quickly becomes bored. Just when he’s thinking of returning to Africa, excitement comes knocking in the form of Scudder, an American who has for some time been working to crack the details of a covert plot that will lead Europe, and perhaps the whole of the world, into war — a war deliberately planned by a vague and undefined group of foreign agents. (In the Hitchcock film, the Scudder role is provided by a mysterious woman played by Lucie Mannheim. In the 1978 film, Scudder is a retired British intelligence officer played by John Mills.) Scudder has almost got all the details, and knows that the plan hinges on the visit of Karolides, the Greek Premier, to Britain, where he will be assassinated. Scudder needs to live until then so he can warn the authorities, but of course he’s murdered almost straightaway, leaving Hannay not only the one person who knows what’s going on, but also the only suspect in Scudder’s murder, meaning he can’t just turn to the police. He decides the best thing to do is go on the run till nearer the date of Karolides’ visit, then come back and — when he’s understood the contents of Scudder’s coded notebook — prevent the assassination and foil the villains’ plan. He fixes on Scotland as the place to hide, and sets out on a train for the Highlands.

For most of what follows, there’s really no plot, just a series of episodes, in which Hannay has to flee or hide the pursuit of both the police and the “Black Stone” (as the villainous organisation is known). Running across the wilds of Scotland and trying to survive sees him bumping into a variety of characters, from a would-be-novelist innkeeper, a local road-mender, a Free Trade politician, an automobile tourist who is implied to be homosexual (which Hannay, and Buchan through him, take as clear licence to be abusive), and an assortment of Highland locals. For me, this section felt a bit episodic without building up to anything, but it was clear Buchan was enjoying himself. I started wondering if there wasn’t a sort of metaphor for being a writer in Hannay’s situation, as though Buchan were writing about the adventure of writing itself. Given a clue in the form of a coded notebook — like being handed a moment of creative inspiration — Hannay finds himself impersonating a number of different people, like an author proving he can get inside the lives of a variety of characters. Hannay gets into situations he has to figure his way out of, and I couldn’t help feeling Buchan put him into those situations just so Buchan, too, could work his way out of them, as a sort of writing self-challenge.

The element of impersonation seems to be a key aspect of the book. Hannay starts off impersonating a milkman to escape his flat (which is being watched by the agents of the Black Stone), but later ends up playing the role of a tramp, a road-mender, an Australian political expert, and a petty thief, all in an attempt to escape detection. In this he’s guided by advice he remembers from an old friend, “the best scout I ever knew”, who told him how to pass himself off as someone else:

He said, barring absolute certainties like fingerprints, mere physical traits were very little use for identification if the fugitive really knew his business. He laughed at things like dyed hair and false beards and such childish follies. The only thing that mattered was what Peter called ‘atmosphere’.

If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in which he had been first observed, and—this is the important part—really play up to these surroundings and behave as if he had never been out of them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives on earth…

Richard Hannay looking as much like James Bond as the illustrator can make him

It’s when Hannay eventually returns to England and gets in touch with the authorities that, for me, the tension properly kicks in. Suddenly, he has to understand the final clues in Scudder’s notebook — among them the meaning of that phrase, “the thirty-nine steps”, which will tell him how the villains are planning to escape the country — and catch them before they get out with vital information that will make war not only inevitable, but disastrous for Britain. It’s also at this point Hannay ceases having to impersonate people, and instead has to spot impersonators. The people he’s after are masters of disguise — one is able to walk into a closed meeting of the topmost military staff and pass himself off as the First Sea Lord, in front of people who must surely have met the First Sea Lord many times. Even when Hannay works out where the thirty-nine steps are, and finds the people he knows must be the villains, their bluff at being perfectly ordinary Englishmen is so perfect, he starts to doubt himself.

Quite how he sees through them, at the end, is a bit of a mystery, but it happens:

“…in a flash, the air seemed to clear. Some shadow lifted from my brain, and I was looking at the three men with full and absolute recognition… The three faces seemed to change before my eyes and reveal their secrets. The young one was the murderer. Now I saw cruelty and ruthlessness, where before I had only seen good-humour… The plump man’s features seemed to dislimn, and form again, as I looked at them. He hadn’t a face, only a hundred masks that he could assume when he pleased… But the old man was the pick of the lot. He was sheer brain, icy, cool, calculating, as ruthless as a steam hammer. Now that my eyes were opened I wondered where I had seen the benevolence. His jaw was like chilled steel, and his eyes had the inhuman luminosity of a bird’s.”

1915 HB cover

It reminds me of H G Wells’s early novels, whose protagonists come to see the world in two ways at once, as both superficially ordinary and, under the surface, full of potential danger. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, after his adventures, the protagonist can’t help seeing the potential beast in everyone around him, however superficially civilised. Here, it’s Hannay’s fellow citizens who seem perfectly, almost boringly, normal one moment, then villainous foreign agents, anarchists and spies the next. (And I can’t help comparing Buchan’s “He was sheer brain, icy, cool, calculating” with Wells’s “intellects vast cool and unsympathetic” from The War of the Worlds.)

Was there something in the late-19th/early-20th century psyche that started to look at the world in a new way, to see that behind the apparently ordered surface, there was the potential for nothing but chaos? Alien invasions and beastmen in the case of Wells, anarchists and war-mongers in the case of Buchan? Rooted, perhaps, in the likes of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, where that double-vision starts with the darker secrets of the human psyche, it quickly leads to distrust of one’s fellows, and then it’s only a short step to the ultimate cosmic horrors of Lovecraft or David Lindsay’s Gnostic fantasy A Voyage to Arcturus. There was definitely something in the collective imagination in those days, and the World Wars that followed did nothing to put anyone’s minds at rest as to the stable nature of things.

The other Buchan novel I’ve reviewed here at Mewsings, Witch Wood, has an element of this too, with its secret coven of Devil-worshippers in a Scottish village. Richard Hannay would become a continuing character in a number of other Buchan novels, which may be worth a read, and the ending, at least, of The Thirty-Nine Steps really worked as a thriller, for me.

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The Lifted Veil by George Eliot

In 1859, George Eliot — not yet known to the world at large as Mary Anne Evans — wrote her most uncharacteristic work, “The Lifted Veil”. She had recently had her first major success with Adam Bede, and took a break from her second novel, The Mill on the Floss, to write this supernaturally-tinged tale in March. It was a difficult time for Eliot, as she was torn between revealing her identity (which would mean having her two-year ménage with George Henry Lewes exposed to the Victorian public) and having other people take credit for her work (a man called Joseph Liggins had been suggested by some as the mysterious “George Eliot”, and Liggins was busy doing nothing to deny it). On top of these obvious reasons, there was, perhaps, a sensitive person’s natural need for privacy. In the light of this, “The Lifted Veil”, a story about a young man who, after an illness, finds himself burdened with a constant telepathic awareness of other people’s thoughts, as well as the occasional doom-laden prevision of his own future, feels like a nightmarish unloading of anxieties on Eliot’s part.

For a story about telepathy, “The Lifted Veil” is remarkably unconcerned with exploring the possibilities of being able to read other peoples’ minds. In fact, to Latimer, already a sensitive and slightly “morbid” young man, this gift feels like a curse, revealing to him as it does nothing but the petty selfishness of other minds, even those closest to him. Here’s a sampling of how he describes the sort of thing his gift reveals:

“…vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions… the trivial experience of indifferent people… all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts… worldly ignorant trivialities… their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their half-wearied pity…”

And as he can’t shut it off, it becomes “like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect”, a constant background drone of dreary, wearying banality.

The one exception to this is Bertha Grant, his older brother’s fiancé. Latimer can’t hear her thoughts, and so is free to relate to (and idealise) her as any young man might a pretty woman. He falls in love with her, despite her evident cynicism:

“What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I’m going to marry? The most unpleasant thing in the world. I should quarrel with him; I should be jealous of him; our ménage would be conducted in a very ill-bred manner. A little quiet contempt contributes greatly to the elegance of life.”

Although the “veil” of the title brings to mind images of the gauzy barrier Victorian Spiritualists saw as standing between the worlds of the living and the dead, in this story it refers to the block Latimer has against reading Bertha’s thoughts. Despite knowing she’s engaged to his “florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent” brother, Latimer has a bittersweet vision of his own future, in which he is married to his beloved Bertha — bittersweet because, in this future, she evidently hates him.

And, when this vision comes true and they do marry, the veil lifts:

“The terrible moment of complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening forth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the narrow room of this woman’s soul…”

It’s a very dim vision of human relationships, though one that recurs in the only novel of Eliot’s I really know, Middlemarch, in its desolate mismatches of Dorothea Brooke with the emotionally dead scholar Casaubon, and of the ambitious Lydgate with the frivolous Rosamond Vincy. In both cases in that novel, marriage seems to clang down like a portcullis, preventing escape until all the illusions of pre-marital love have been stripped away.

To Latimer, the “sweet illusions” we live with are, in the end, essential to life, as is all mystery:

“So absolute is our soul’s need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between…”

There’s even a note of cosmic or religious horror, as Latimer, in the latter stages of his condition, experiences more generalised visions of the world at large:

“…of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes—the presence of something unknown and pitiless.”

That “presence” remains unexplained, though the next thing Latimer says, “For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me”, implies that the “something unknown and pitiless” is his feeling of what the God of this world must be like. (Eliot herself had long struggled against her own religious upbringing. At one stage, her father threatened to throw her out of the house because of her rejection of it.)

Read as horror fiction (and coming nearly thirty years before the boom in Victorian classics that saw the publication of Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Gray and The Turn of the Screw), “The Lifted Veil” is more about the horror of other people, and the weariness of the “incessant insight and foresight” of a sensitive soul. Nevertheless, it ramps up the Gothic at the end, for a post-deathbed confession scene, in which Bertha’s maid, freshly expired from peritonitis, is revived long enough by an experimental blood transfusion to issue a dreadful confession and accusation.

(Given that Latimer has visions and can read minds, this ending, with its Gothic appurtenances of blood, death, illness, fringe science, and a dramatic revelation, seems hardly needed, and, indeed, Eliot’s publisher Blackwood tried to persuade her to remove it.)

In the end, “The Lifted Veil” was printed anonymously in the July 1859 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (a periodical which had an established reputation for tales of Gothic horror, to the extent of having been satirised even by Poe, in his essay “How to Write a Blackwood Article”).

A muted horror tale, but one that fits very much into George Eliot’s work as a whole, full as it is of moments of extreme sensitivity to the subtleties of her characters’ emotional lives, “The Lifted Veil” is a significant piece of Victorian fantasy.

The text is freely available online, and I have a downloadable version on my free ebooks page.

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