THE DEEP ONES: "Beyond the Wall" by Ambrose Bierce

"Beyond the Wall" by Ambrose Bierce

Discussion begins July 22.

First published the December 1907 issue of Cosmopolitan



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/btw.html
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Wall

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?665341

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce
Can Such Things Be?
100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories

MISCELLANY

http://alangullette.com/lit/bierce/master.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Bierce
https://marzaat.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/reading-bitter-bierce-the-weird-stories...
http://www.ambrosebierce.org/
http://tinyurl.com/pbsquav

The Dover paperback edition of Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce for me.

I've got it in 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories.

I'll be reading in the Amazon eBook version of Can Such Things Be? that I mentioned elsewhere* so I can make you all aware of any other hilarious typos I find. :)

* https://www.librarything.com/topic/192367#5216295

Ah, Cosmo! And at Christmas, at that.

Online for me.

Back to the Tartarus Press hardback of Bierce's supernatural fiction, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and Other Stories, for me.

I'm a big Bierce fan, and I like this story. It isn't one that most readers would point to first, as it lacks the action of "Owl Creek" or the dark humor of "The Bottomless Grave", but it's a quiet little story with a closed in feeling.

Another interesting article / commentary, found when searching for Parapelius Necromantius. The author quickly wades into the weeds:

http://lovecraftzine.com/2015/03/20/the-foundations-of-the-king-in-yellow-and-th...

>8 elenchus:

Thanks! I was going to post that very link for this rather obscure reference but you beat me to it.

By now it should be Wednesday for everyone but the inhabitants of a few places in the Pacific. Apologies to any American Samoans or whatever one calls the inhabitants of Midway among us.

Parapelius Necromantius is yet another fictitious authority of the occult. Did we ever 'stablish who was the first of the type? Googling his name brought me too to the Lovecraft eZine page. Deep minds think alike?

(I wonder incidentally if Lord Dunsany was really unaware of Carcassonne being a real place. I don't think the story licences us to assume he necessarily wasn't anymore than "A Tale of the Equator" allows to conclude he didn't know how the equator works.)

Dampier, speaking of recurring types, is yet another occultistically inclined aristocrat of dubiously sound mind. A handy type, clearly, for the weird story writer.

One wonders about the girl. What did he think of her neighbour and what did she think she was doing answering his knocks?

(If the tangent be excused, I'm also dubious about following the eZine in concluding the reference in HPL's "He" is necessarily to Dunsany's Carcassonne. It's mentioned as a half-fabulous city in a breath with El Dorado and Samarcand, where the former is quite mythical and the later quite real, however fabled.)

I think this was already a quite traditional sort of ghost story when Bierce wrote it, which surprises me a little, since I think of him as something of an innovator.

Dampier is dead in the final paragraph, as he anticipated earlier in the story. Are we to suppose that he suicided, or that he merely completed his catastrophic loss of vigor?

>12 paradoxosalpha:

I read it as the later, with an ambiguity as to whether the the ghostly visitation was merely a premonition or somehow causative in his decline.

>12 paradoxosalpha: Are we to suppose that he suicided, or that he merely completed his catastrophic loss of vigor?

I wondered if another possibility was that the girl "summoned" him, whether out of any retribution, or ironic spite, or even a romantic eternal bond. I'm left with the impression Bierce wasn't going for any one particular answer, rather he relished the idea there is an overabundance of pathways open to Dampier.

And what a name: Mohun Dampier.

I appreciated Bierce's dry wit throughout, including the unintentional humour in having the narrator confess, “Then I went my way, leaving my heart behind.” Anticipating by 46 years (song written 1953) Tony Bennett's “I left my heart in San Francisco”.

Dampier is in effect killed by guilt, but I don't think via suicide. He and the girl share a perverse relationship, as Dampier himself admits at one point. Interestingly, undying love doesn't seem to enter it as it might with Poe. It's just head games, as in "She had long and cruelly ignored me; now I would ignore her." Obsession seems to be the root cause of the haunting, but whose?

The big reveal is very weak, especially for Bierce, as paradoxosalpha mentions, although the story is augmented by fabulous lines here and there like:

Three or four trees, writhing and moaning in the torment of the tempest, appeared to be trying to escape from their dismal environment and take the chance of finding a better one out at sea.

MOHUN DAMPIER

= I DAMPEN HUMOR

= I POUND HAMMER

= ORPHAN MEDIUM

>15 gwendetenebre: The big reveal is very weak, especially for Bierce, as paradoxosalpha mentions

I don't usually do well in predicting outcomes, but I was quite close as I read this one: correctly anticipated the girl was sick and dying, and that Dampier would be shocked at discovering this. What I didn't anticipate was his spiteful refusal to respond to the girl's knock that last time, so I had a little thrill when I realised the gravity of his childishness. From that standpoint, his fate made a sort of cosmic justice. Not exactly terror, but supernatural karma is still pretty cool.

I'm with >7 mstrust: in liking the story, though I wouldn't call it a favourite.

ETA I have to admit "supernatural karma" is redundant, but I'll leave it.

>14 elenchus:

I appreciated Bierce's dry wit throughout, including the unintentional humour in having the narrator confess, “Then I went my way, leaving my heart behind.” Anticipating by 46 years (song written 1953) Tony Bennett's “I left my heart in San Francisco”.

LOL, as they say!

I don't know how Bierce felt about Edgar Allan Poe, but to me this read as almost a straight-up Poe homage. The tapping of the ghost recalls the famous lines from "The Raven":

...suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”

Dampier's feelings of guilt are reminiscent of the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and of many other Poe tales. And the lines that Kenton mentions in >15 gwendetenebre: (as well as other aspects of this tale) recall "The Fall of the House of Usher", as one Thomas F. Maher, Jr. discusses here: http://manicman11.tripod.com/stories/horror.html

I don't know...my first impressions were of a surprisingly traditional ghost story, as well, but then I thought about it in light of "bitter Bierce's" reputation. Isn't he too tough-minded and ornery to serve up something like that without twisting or subverting it in some way?

The figure of Mohun Dampier is a familar figure from Romantic and Decadent literature, with Roderick Usher and Des Esseintes being the first two that came to my mind.

Although the narrator does not criticise him, as his story is told, the reader learns that Dampier is a snob and a moral coward; and this - and his final pettiness - made the girl's death an unnecessarily unhappy one (I'm not going to say he caused her death, that she pined away, I can't see Bierce having sympathy with that kind of swooning Romantic leibestod either).

Hidden away behind the facade of this rather stately, sad, even Borgesian tale (Borges of course wrote about great writers 'creating their own predecessors', it's therefore fitting that he should be such a writer himself) is, I would suspect, Bierce kicking out at swooning Romantics and 'poètes maudit' both.

I think Dampier's name is another irony, as it seems to combine two vigorous characters from British history, the explorer and pirate William Dampier, and (from Wikipedia) "Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun (c. 1675 – 15 November 1712) was an English politician best known for his frequent participation in duels and for his reputation as a rake."

On something of a tangent, I've noticed that San Francisco seems to be a kind of locus for weird tales of one kind or another, and while I know it's fairly old as US cities go, and is a port, and can get foggy, I'm not really sure that these factors alone explain it. Is it just one of those things or is there a particular reason why this is so?

>20 housefulofpaper: I think Dampier's name is another irony

I'd also found the Charles Mohun reference but not the pirate William Dampier, interesting!

>14 elenchus:
I wondered if another possibility was that the girl "summoned" him...
An angle I hadn't considered before, and an interesting one. Bierce did leave it as a kind of choose-your-poison ending.
I first read this story a couple of years ago and linked it for a short story group I was in for a few years. The general reaction was a shrug and "nothing much happened" comment, which I thought was unfair to the story. It's atmospheric rather than scary.

>20 housefulofpaper: Maybe it has to do with the city's sometimes sordid history of pirates, drugs and sex slavery. Or maybe it's just the fact that it can be so cold there, even in the summer. ; )

>22 mstrust:

I've just looked up average temperatures and humidity for San Francisco...I could be quite happy in that climate!

>20 housefulofpaper:

On something of a tangent, I've noticed that San Francisco seems to be a kind of locus for weird tales of one kind or another, and while I know it's fairly old as US cities go, and is a port, and can get foggy, I'm not really sure that these factors alone explain it. Is it just one of those things or is there a particular reason why this is so?

George Sterling, the central figure in a literary circle that rivals Lovecraft's in its influence on weird literature (it included Bierce, Jack London, and Clark Ashton Smith), was based in Carmel, California, which is only about 120 miles away from San Francisco*. That must factor in to some degree.

* http://tinyurl.com/pp9bnx4

>23 housefulofpaper: I couldn't agree more. This 110 degree stuff is for chumps!

>20 housefulofpaper:

On something of a tangent, I've noticed that San Francisco seems to be a kind of locus for weird tales of one kind or another...

My favorite horror/weird novel Our Lady of Darkness is set in mysterious San Francisco.

Many thanks for the info on San Francisco. Our Lady of Darkness is a novel I intent to reread before too long.

Well, on reading this one again (my first reactions are recorded at https://marzaat.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/reading-bitter-bierce-the-weird-stories... listed in the Miscellany), I noticed something else.

Whether the dead girl somehow summoned Dampier to his death or it was grief, there is a thematic relationship to other Bierce stories.

Those would be Bierce's autobiographical "What I Saw of Shiloh" and his story "Killed at Resaca". All are stories about men killed because they adhered to a particular code.

It's the aristocratic code in this story. It's a sort of patriotism in "What I Saw of Shiloh". In it, after a description of dead on the battlefield, Bierce says "I cannot catalogue the charms of those gallant gentleman who had got what they enlisted for."

In "Killed at Resaca", a man is goaded into fatal battlefield heroics when trying to live up to the admonitions of his female admirer who the narrator compares to a snake. She is also described as charming and beautiful like the woman in "Beyond the Wall".

Now that's interesting.

And I'd forgotten you were behind those Reading Bitter Bierce entries, @RandyStafford. Found several of them quite good, and had to exert some discipline at work to avoid reading them all. (Sadly enough, I did so avoid.)