Here’s yet another post stemming from my reading for my biography-in-progress of Dorothy L. Sayers.
Harriet Vane is not a version of Sayers, though they do have some things in common. Both of them are writers of detective fiction with an interest in certain Victorian novelists who blended what now might be called genre fiction – tales of detection, ghost stories, other supernatural stories – with at least some of the concerns of the social novel. You see this in Dickens, of course, especially in Bleak House, where there are mysteries of identity, shocking revelations, one of the first fictional detectives, and death by spontaneous combustion; but when people talk about this kind of story, often called the sensation novel, the name most closely associated with it is Wilkie Collins, while another is Sheridan Le Fanu. Sayers wrote several chapters of a biography of Wilkie Collins — eventually abandoning it largely because Collins didn’t lead a very interesting life — while Harriet Vane, when she visits Oxford in Gaudy Night, officially does so in order to work on a book about Le Fanu.
I know Collins’s major novels, but I hadn’t until recently read much Le Fanu, and right now I’m immersed in his ghost stories or “weird tales.” (Le Fanu is often associated with the rise of “weird” fiction, as later dominated by H. P. Lovecraft, largely because two collections of his stories published after his death were titled The Watcher and Other Weird Stories [1895], and A Stable for Nightmares; or, Weird Tales [1896].)
A collection of Le Fanu’s stories called In a Glass Darkly links them to one another by presenting them as items from the collected papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a German physician who is interested in the convergence of certain forms of physical illness and encounters with the supernatural. He calls his speciality “metaphysical medicine.”
I may remark, that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope some day to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body — a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.”
I’m not sure what he means by “resurrection ‘in power’” (though I think I know what the apostle Paul means when he uses the phrase), but the key point I want to emphasize now is this: When people experience terrifying supernatural visitations, Dr. Hesselius often traces those visitations to what the sufferers eat and drink — for instance, the story “Green Tea” concerns a man whose nightmarish experiences began when he drank too much green tea. But Dr. Hesselius thinks that these experiences, while triggered by the consumption of certain substances, are actual encounters with the supernatural. He does not explain every occult experience thus — some happen because spirits of the dead are seeking vengeance upon those who injured or killed them — but he seems always to look first to see if there is a material catalyst for the person’s affliction. Should this be the case, then he pursues a course of treatment that, by eliminating the catalyst and therapeutically addressing its effects, gradually shrinks and eventually closes the window into the demonic realm. But Dr. Hesselius never doubts that the demonic realm is real.
So you get a story introduced by our unnamed editor thus:
The curious case which I am about to place before you, is referred to, very pointedly, and more than once, in the extraordinary essay upon the drugs of the Dark and the Middle Ages, from the pen of Doctor Hesselius.
This essay he entitles “Mortis Imago,” and he, therein, discusses the Vinum letiferum, the Beatifica, the Somnus Angelorum, the Hypnus Sagarum, the Aqua Thessalliæ, and about twenty other infusions and distillations, well known to the sages of eight hundred years ago, and two of which are still, he alleges, known to the fraternity of thieves, and, among them, as police-office inquiries sometimes disclose to this day, in practical use.
When I read all this I found myself remembering Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and its appendix, Heaven and Hell. Huxley records at great length his glorious experiences under the influence of LSD and mescaline, during which he feels that he has a direct encounter with Ultimate Reality, with the Ground of Being. This encounter poses some problems for him — for instance, ethical problems:
Now I knew contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation — but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action.
But despite such reservations he never questions that what he experiences is (a) real, (b) ultimate, and (c) wonderful.
That said, he cannot help knowing that some people have bad trips — nightmarish trips, trips in which they feel that they have been exposed to something demonic, just like those characters in Le Fanu’s stories. In such matters I’m of Dr. Hesselius’s mind: as I wrote some years ago, “the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic.” But Huxley is deeply reluctant to take that path, and so … well, basically he blames the victims:
Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear — in other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.
Huxley’s advice to those who would encounter the Ground of Being resembles Aragorn’s advice to those who would enter Lothlorien: that land is “perilous indeed, fair and perilous; but only evil need fear it, or those who bring some evil with them.” If you experience terror when contemplating the Ultimate Reality, that can only be the manifestation on a cosmic canvas of your own internal demons.
Still, having said that, Huxley continues to worry about bad trips, and returns to the subject in Heaven and Hell, in the last paragraph of which he writes,
There is a posthumous state of the kind described in Sir Oliver Lodge’s book Raymond; but there is also a heaven of blissful visionary experience; there is also a hell of the same kind of appalling visionary experience as is suffered here by schizophrenics and some of those who take mescalin; and there is also an experience, beyond time, of union with the divine Ground.
The book he refers to is an account by Lodge of how he and his wife visited a medium and made contact, they believed, with their son, who had been killed in the Great War. Having read the book, I see that it describes several different kinds of “posthumous state,” so I have no idea what Huxley is talking about. Perhaps — this is only a guess — he’s referring to the matter-of-fact ordinariness of Raymond’s reports from the Other Side. Huxley’s point seems to be that it takes all kinds to make an afterlife.
But I noticed in Raymond something that intrigues me, something that reminds me very much of Huxley’s own views on what Lewis’s Screwtape calls the Miserific Vision. Late in the book Lodge summarizes what several spiritualist writers have said about the world to which the dead go, and one of them, whom he quotes at length, says this:
“Cease to be anxious about the minute questions which are of minor moment. Dwell much on the great, the overwhelming necessity for a clearer revealing of the Supreme; on the blank and cheerless ignorance of God and of us which has crept over the world: on the noble creed we teach, on the bright future we reveal. Cease to be perplexed by thoughts of an imagined Devil. For the honest, pure, and truthful soul there is no Devil nor Prince of Evil such as theology has feigned…. The clouds of sorrow and anguish of soul may gather round [such a man] and his spirit may be saddened with the burden of sin — weighed down with consciousness of surrounding misery and guilt, but no fabled Devil can gain dominion over him, or prevail to drag down his soul to hell. All the sadness of spirit, the acquaintance with grief, the intermingling with guilt, is part of the experience, in virtue of which his soul shall rise hereafter. The guardians are training and fitting it by those means to progress, and jealously protect it from the dominion of the foe.”
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
P.S. Adam Roberts writes to remind me that in A Christmas Carol Scrooge first attributes his vision to food he has eaten:
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
But this of course is the reverse of Dr. Hesselius’s view, which is that food and drink can open what Blake (and then Huxley) called “the doors of perception” to a dimension of spiritual reality that is always really there but usually hidden from us.
There’s a good deal in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy about how food and drink can cause melancholy, while dreams and visions are symptoms of melancholy. Much more to explore here.
