THE DEEP ONES: "Negotium Perambulans" by E.F. Benson

"Negotium Perambulans" by E.F. Benson

Discussion begins January 27.

First published in the November 1922 issue of Hutchinson's Magazine.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.lesvampires.org/negotium.html
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/benson/ef/negotium-perambulans/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?76289

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

H. P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror
The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson
Who Knocks?: Twenty Masterpieces of the Spectral for the Connoisseur
The World's Greatest Horror Stories

MISCELLANY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlmdtKNGBZk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Benson
http://www.efbenson.co.uk/
http://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/2010/02/07/the-transformation-of-e-f-benso...
http://tinyurl.com/gltw289

Sorry for the delay in posting this week's tale. The Blizzard of 2016 and 30+ inches of snow were a bit distracting!

The World's Greatest Horror Stories (again) for me, I think.

>2 semdetenebre:

Quite all right, my friend!

The Third Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (selected by Robert Aickman) for me.

I'll be reading this out of the E. F. Benson Megapack from Wildside Press.

I downloaded the Adelaide eBook and will see about that version.

I was surprised to see Negotium perambulans in tenebris translated as "the pestilence that walketh in darkness", because "pestilence" isn't among the usual range of meanings of negotium, viz. "business, work, disturbance, trouble"; literally "non-leisure". But checking a number of modern translations, it seems it's the Vulgate that's being weird here and the Hebrew original must mean something like "pestilence".

The Septuagint has pragma, basically "deed, act", a word with a wide range of extended meanings, including both "medical condition" and "business, trouble", which perhaps explains how negotium ended up in the Vulgate.

"Negotium Perambulans in Tenebris" is the title of a card in the Call of Cthulhu card game:



The art doesn't seem to reflect anything in Benson's story, though.

I thought the ending of this one was impressively abrupt. I mean, you could see it coming, and coming, and here it is--goodbye!

I agree, and it contrasts with the opening which was almost too leisurely. The abruptness emphasises the vulnerability of the characters, visiting that feeling upon the reader.

Overall, Benson's story displays a nice management of pacing and a careful doling out of hints about the horror. In effect, the entirety of the story is some evil "critter" (loved that term used by one of the boys) stalking its victim, and finally going for the kill. The victims don't do much to deserve the attention, their primary fault is a moral one (drinking, unbelief, sacrilege against the church panels, all of which amounts to hubris) rather than anything directly threatening.

Benson's careful arrangement of atmosphere, the landscape and environment around the fishing village, the complicit outlook of villagers, the Biblical referent ... all of these efforts help glean the biggest impact from the core scene of the story, at the end.

>7 AndreasJ:

Great sleuthing on the translation, I took the story's translation at face value and didn't bother even an online search. That's a fascinating context for the use of the term by Benson. He did use the term "Business" once, I was struck by that usage but now see he knew of what he wrote.

The wormpire was kind of a letdown after a pretty decent buildup. Conan would no doubt have simply hacked it in two. On the plus side, Benson superbly conveys the rugged isolation or remote Polearn. That might be the real high point of the tale. The "hellish" images of artist John Evans predate Mr. Pickman by a few years. The quarry-house seems to induce alcoholism in its residents.

>10 elenchus: The victims don't do much to deserve the attention

In fact, the moral decline of John Evans seems to suggest that the victims aren't actually culpable, but that the place somehow corrupts them. It's as if the quarry house is a spot of evil in the field of goodness that is Polearn (as understood by the narrator).

>12 semdetenebre: wormpire

LOL.

>10 elenchus:, >13 paradoxosalpha:

I thought that Polearn itself was being set up as a place of supernatural malignity with the focal point being the quarry-house and the ruins it was built atop of. While I wasn't overly impressed by the physical form of the wormpire (1959's ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES kept coming to mind), the idea that it was a kind of supernatural double-agent was a pretty novel one:

There were dark secrets as well as these clear, kindly powers, and to these no doubt belonged the negotium perambulans in tenebris which, though of deadly malignity, might be regarded not only as evil, but as the avenger of sacrilegious and impious deeds . . . All this was part of the spell of Polearn, of which the seeds had long lain dormant in me. But now they were sprouting, and who knew what strange flower would unfold on their stems?

>12 semdetenebre: The "hellish" images of artist John Evans predate Mr. Pickman by a few years. The quarry-house seems to induce alcoholism in its residents.
>13 paradoxosalpha: the victims aren't actually culpable, but that the place somehow corrupts them.

I can see that especially in Evans, who seemed gentle and did not (I presume from the lack of mention) paint "hellish" images earlier on.

The earlier victims seemed less corrupted than depraved, though. Knocking down a church and using the altar to play dice is a moral affront, as was the second victim's defacing of the church panels. While that latter instance could be interpreted as an attempt to strike back at something, as was suggested in the tale itself, the first victim seemed unprovoked in the decision to take over the land and church.

I suspect it's simpler than all this, though. Benson is juxtaposing cultural norms and our offense at those who flaunt them, with an inhuman / unearthly horror. As paradoxosalpha put it, there's a spot of evil and there's neither explanation nor justification for it.

>7 AndreasJ: >8 paradoxosalpha: It seems a short work titled Negotium Perambulans in Tenebris was published on the same year as this short story, about recurring greco-roman representations of a figure of a holy/lordly horseman who fought or had overcome demonic figures (usually a she-devil or snake thought to be responsible for the death/disappearance of infants or the weakness or sickness of persons or animals).
https://archive.org/details/negotiumperambul00perd

There was also a 1988 video game of the text adventure genre with illustrations called "Polearn, a Cornish tale of mystery and the supernatural" that isn't derived from the story but may have borrowed the idea for the setting.
http://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=Polearn

>17 Jarandel:

An absolutely fascinating document. I wish there were a translation available, both for the text in French and the long sections in Greek (?).

The figures and blocks of text scattered throughout suggest cryptography may be involved!

ETA "text" not "story" -- it would appear to be an essay, not fiction.

I haven't yet researched whether Lovecraft read this story prior to composing his "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

There are some obvious similarities: the seaside town, strange ecclesiastical decorations, a monster.

But, as has mentioned, the evil here is not worshipped by a cult. It seems known and accepted by the locals, just accepted as the way things are here. It's part of the spirit of the place. And the evil aspect of that spirit, as evidenced by Evans' paintings, may be more corrupting than the locals appreciate and not just relegated to the quarry-house.

I thought this was a story with a lot of subtleties (except the monster).

It was pleasing to go this far back in weird fiction history and not get early examples of now familiar plot turns. No evil cult. Evans is a fondly-remembered childhood acquaintance of the narrator and not a sinister and unknown local. The narrator makes a clean escape from Polearn (and not called back like Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth").

>12 semdetenebre: The quarry-house seems to induce alcoholism in its residents.

The way Evans spoke about his drinking struck me as highly odd.

By the way, the narrator is yet another wealthy bachelor. I wonder if anyone's ever done a study about why they're so common in weird and horror fiction.

>20 AndreasJ: yet another wealthy bachelor

Fewer inducements to keep out of trouble?

Or a variation on the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew: easy to explain how they get around to so many far-flung locales. Plenty but free time and ready access to any necessary equipment or transportation.

I wonder if there's also a subtextual commentary on their decadence, though, whether class-based or sexual in nature.

Robert Aickman has a few words about this story (and its author) in his introduction to The Third Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories: "a writer for whom, as a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, ghosts were in the family" and "what community in Cornwall lacks for at least one such tale as this, complete with horrid witness in blood or runes, for those who dare to look?"

Is there any truth in this image of Cornwall? The Lore of the Land is a book I own but I've only dipped into it. It's perhaps not meant to be read cover to cover. It's a kind of gazetteer of English folklore arranged by county. Each county has a map with a key denoting the site of various types of legend. Cornwall includes: churches and holy place; devils and demons; ghosts, apparitions and screaming skulls; giants; legendary beasts; witches and wizards - crowded thickly on the tip of the peninsula.

None of which is to suggest that Benson was being unoriginal in crafting his story, if anything it points up the artistic success of the combination of story and setting.

On the character Evans' drinking and indeed his general decay. I'm not sure about this but it did strike me as maybe a rather stereotypical picture of a chap who'd "gone to the bad". Maybe it's something Benson carried with him from his schooldays (good grief, he was born at Wellington College, when his father (the future Archbishop) was Headmaster).

I didn't sense any satire, mockery or even gentle teasing of genre stereotypes in this story. As a very well connected Establishment figure, and almost certainly a homosexual, Benson must have had that ironic Insider's/Outsider's perspective that would have been conducive to producing such work - and of course he's best known today as a novelist of comedies of manners (the Mapp and Lucia books). I just don't see it here, though.

It would be interesting - if anyone had the stamina for it - to see a the result of an investigation into how the Edwardian gentleman adventurer was portrayed. I guess it would have to take in the biographical details of the writer (19th Century American writing for a British-dominated market? Writing from within the culture like Benson? From without like (working-class) William Hope Hodgson? A woman?) the market being written for (upmarket literary journal or "Penny Dreadful"?, for example). The time of writing would also be important, I expect, both because tropes can get tired and become clichés (and vulnerable to spoofing or subverting in other ways) over time, and because literature is not immune from history and the wider culture.

Finally finished this one this afternoon. I though it was just okay - atmospheric enough, but rather predictable. I see why HPL liked it, though, and how it influenced him - agreed with >12 semdetenebre: and >19 RandyStafford: that it seems to carry the seeds of both "Pickman's Model" and The Shadow over Innsmouth in it, and it seems to have anticipated TSoI's "Town with a Dark Secret" trope (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TownWithADarkSecret) that I had always previously assumed originated with Lovecraft. Since this sort of thing has been done to death since, it was probably much more effective and less banal-seeming when it was originally published than it is/does now.

>23 housefulofpaper:

Lore of the Land sounds like a fascinating volume to poke through. I've added it to my interlibrary loan list!