[From my theme-based books column for ForbesLife India – a piece about some books featuring doubles or doppelgangers. As always I had a much wider list to begin with, but it was a 1000-word space, so... ]
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In an age where flash fiction has made way for tweet-sized narratives, an online group recently invited entries for two-sentence horror stories. Among the submissions was this little shiver-inducer: “I begin tucking him into bed and he says, ‘Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.’ I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, staring back at me quivering and whispering, ‘Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.’ ”
The staple interpretation would be that one of the two kids is a monster, but the possibility that both might be authentic is equally intriguing. It taps into our deepest subconscious fears built around the idea of the double or the doppelganger – a shadow-self that may be more “real” in some ways than we are, implying that our knowledge of ourselves and the world we take for granted is incomplete.
Readers familiar with Bill Watterson’s great comic strip Calvin and Hobbes may picture the brattish Calvin as the boy in the story. Drooling monsters under the bed are a feature of Calvin’s rich inner life, but so are alter egos and doubles, beginning with his stuffed tiger and companion in fantasy Hobbes. In fact, a website containing off-kilter, subtextual movie analyses has an essay suggesting that the protagonists of the film Fight Club – an unnamed man and his aggressive, hyper-masculine hidden self – are versions of the grown-up Calvin trying to deal with his isolation. I doubt that Chuck Palahniuk – the author of the novel on which the film was based – had any such thing in mind, but his book, like Watterson’s series, comments on the schizophrenia that accompanies the stresses and demands of modern life.
Doubles or nemeses in literature go back a very long way though. There are the classic formulations in works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a doctor isolates the darker side of his nature, then finds that the primal savage he has thus unleashed is the dominant self) and Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson (a debauched young man is shadowed by a lookalike, who seems intent on revealing the former’s misdemeanors). But there are also stories where the double theme is less immediately apparent. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer is told in the voice of a young, unnamed ship’s captain who allows a mysterious man named Leggatt aboard his vessel one night and keeps him hidden in his cabin; as we learn about the stowaway’s past, we see how it could be a cautionary tale, a pointer to things to come, for the narrator.
Interestingly, when the story first appeared in print more than a hundred years ago, it was called “The Secret-Sharer”, meaning simply that the captain and Leggatt shared a secret – but Conrad later decided to remove the hyphen, making the title more ambiguous. His most influential novel Heart of Darkness can be read in similar terms too, with its premise of Charles Marlow, a man from the “civilised” world, travelling into the Congo to meet an enigmatic slave-trader, Mr Kurtz. Thanks to his brief encounter with the deranged Kurtz, Marlow eventually returns with his own sanity intact and a clearer understanding of dark and dangerous places – not just in the physical world but also in the human soul. In one sense, he is like a Jekyll who gazed into the abyss and survived the test.
As should be evident, the main tenor of the doppelganger theme is gloomy and oppressive, but there are lighter narratives too: in Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper two young boys, who happen to be dead ringers, switch places so they may live each other’s lives, and in Anthony Hope’s adventure-thriller The Prisoner of Zenda an Englishman impersonates the king of a small country. Neither of these books is weighed down by psychological analysis, but they have interesting things to say about the tenuousness of 
identity and the nourishing aspects of role-play. Then there is Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, a follow-up to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice steps through a mirror and discovers a world that is not quite a straight “reflection” of the one she knows. Carroll’s books have inspired several tributes, such as Neil Gaiman’s novella Coraline – a modern horror-fantasy for children – about a girl discovering a locked door at the back of a house she and her parents have just moved into. Behind it lies a distorted-mirror version of her own house, complete with “another” mother and father who are pallid and automaton-like and have buttons for eyes. That sounds creepy, but haven’t most of us, at some time or other, viewed our own parents in similar terms? And can Coraline trust herself to make the right choice?
The double motif has had an extensive life in genre films too – it recurs through Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work, for instance. The Hitchcock film that most explicitly dealt with the split personality was Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s book about a lonely motel-keeper and his mysterious “mother”, but an equally notable occurrence is in Strangers on a Train, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s tightly crafted novel. Highsmith would later write a series of thrillers featuring Tom Ripley, a chameleon-like conman who slips into other people’s identities – but Strangers on a Train is 
her first, chilling take on the phenomenon known as the folie à deux (“a madness shared by two”), which has been a touchstone of much modern crime writing. Here, the upwardly mobile Guy Haines is persuaded by the sociopathic Bruno Anthony to “swap murders” – each of them does away with someone the other would like to get rid of, so that linking the two deaths would be impossible. Guy and Bruno are initially presented as very different personality types, but by the time the former is implicated in the plan, the line between them is disappearing.
The line between an author and his characters can be just as blurred. A notable example of a character who functions as a novelist’s alter-ego is the fictional Nathan Zuckerman, who has narrated many of Philip Roth’s books starting with the aptly titled The Ghost Writer in 1979: like Roth himself, Zuckerman is a Jewish writer of literary fiction, which gives some of these narratives the texture of a hall of mirrors. At age 73, Roth finally put his literary double to rest in Exit Ghost, in a story about a writer suffering from physical ailments and an unreliable memory but still hankering to be “back in the drama, back in the turmoil, wanting to be with people again and […] feel the pleasure of one’s power again”. Was saying goodnight to Nathan a way of slaying the monster under his bed and acknowledging his own mortality at the same time? After all, writers and their creations are secret sharers too.
I don’t spend much time in bookstores these days (it’s the old conundrum: most of my reading is for review purposes), but one of my favourite recent buys was the anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. Thirty-five stories in all, beginning with Tod Robbins’ 1923 “Spurs” (this quaint tale about a dwarf’s obsession with a beautiful bareback rider formed the basis for Tod Browning’s creepy film Freaks) and including such writers as Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke.
“The thrill of noir,” writes Ellroy in his Introduction, “is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption.”
And then: “The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.”
Making doom fun – that’s a good way of putting it. Noir, French for “black”, was thoroughly incorporated into American popular culture in the 1940s – through a series of pulp novels and “film noirs” – until it came to stand for the dark and unknowable places in the human heart, and the character types are familiar even to readers who don’t know the genre well: the femme fatale who spins a fatal web around her victim; the morally weak patsy who helps her get rid of her husband for the insurance money; the hard-boiled detective with demons of his own. Needless to say, there are few happy endings in this world.
It isn’t easy to do a comprehensive review of an anthology that contains 35 stories, most of which are very good, so here are some short notes:
– I used to think of noir as relevant mainly to literature and films produced between the 1930s and 1950s, and indeed this book includes some solid, representative work from that period: I particularly liked Steve Fisher’s “You’ll Always Remember Me” 
(1938), David Goodis’s “Professional Man” (1953) and James M Cain’s bucolic, darkly funny “Pastorale” (1928) about a murder followed by problematic attempts to dispose of a bodiless head. But to my own surprise, some of the most impressive stories are from the past few decades. Twenty-one of the 35 pieces included here were written from the 1970s onward, and some of them intriguingly challenge the reader’s expectations of the genre and its tropes.
For example, Thomas H Cook’s intense “What She Offered” begins with a very familiar scenario – a weary, self-consciously cynical male narrator being approached by a mysterious woman in a bar (“What she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman”). But from here, the story heads in a completely unexpected direction – it turns out that what this woman really has to offer the narrator is the emasculating knowledge that “her darkness is real; mine is just a pose”. I thought there was also a sly little observation about self-important writers and their knowing readers, and the story's beginning reminded me a little of Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".
– Some of the recent stories are more sexually explicit and daring than stories written in the 1930s could be. Take Andrew Klavan’s “Her Lord and Master”, a disturbing take on the power equation in gender relationships, with a female protagonist who preys on men by stoking their appetite for violent sex games. The classic theme of the femme fatale using her wiles on a gullible sucker is given a very different spin here, and I doubt that the old masters like Mickey Spillane, Mackinlay Kantor and Cornell Woolrich (all of whom also feature in this collection) could have published something like this, even though much of their work was often controversial and politically incorrect in its own time.
– A special word for the longest story in this collection: Harlan Ellison’s powerful and literate “Mefisto in Onyx” is about a black man with a very special – and, to him, a very troubling – ability to “jaunt” into the minds of other people and scan their mental “landscapes”. To Rudy’s dismay, an old friend – a woman with whom he had a sexual liaison once – asks him to scan the mind of a convicted serial killer, whom she believes to be innocent. (The premise is slightly similar to that in Tarsem Singh’s excellent film The Cell.) I won’t give much away, except to say that the story climaxes with a fascinating game of one-upmanship and one twist following on the heels of another. It’s also one of the very few pieces in this collection that has anything resembling a “happy ending”, though given what has led up to it one can never be too sure. Incidentally, Lawrence Block’s gripping “Like a Bone in the Throat” is also about a series of mental games between two men: a rapist/killer and the brother of one of his victims.
– And some personal favourites that I haven’t mentioned above: David Morrell’s “The Dripping”, Brendan Dubois’s melancholy “A Ticket Out”, Chris Adrian’s “Stab”, and especially William Gay’s very dark and poetic “The Paperhanger”, about the strange disappearance of a little girl while her mother was just a few feet away. Also, Ellroy's own "Since I don't Have You", set in the 1940s and prominently featuring real-life figures Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen.
The Best American Noir of the Century is a reminder that though the themes and narrative arcs of noir might appear to be limited in scope, their treatment isn’t. Reading these stories you never get a sense of repetition: in nearly every case, the characters’ actions and choices lead to the inevitable cul de sac, but it turns out that there are different ways to get there - as well as many forking, unexplored paths that might just have led them to a sunnier place.
P.S. The Windmill Books edition I have is missing four of the stories that were in the original publication, including one by Joyce Carol Oates. Pity.
I’ve been reading Eleven, a collection of some of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories (two of which I’d read before in other horror anthologies). Highsmith is an author I’ve long admired, but often from a distance. Even for people with a cynical view of human nature, her work can be discomfiting, or downright unpleasant, and this is perhaps truer of her short stories, which by their very nature are more intense than her novels (such as The Talented Mr Ripley and its sequels). Unsettling as the full-length books are, they have breathers that allow the reader to sit back and reflect on the plot convolutions or simply soak in a place description. But the shorter pieces, being more concentrated, offer fewer escape routes.
Other masters of the macabre (an obvious example being Roald Dahl, a contemporary of Highsmith) have a – dare one say it – feel-good style that makes their stories easy to savour, or at least chuckle at, even if you aren’t in a particularly wicked mood. Some of Dahl’s best work is marked by the twist in the tale, which means the reader can first anticipate a delicious ending and later feel the satisfaction of having experienced a neatly rounded-off story. Highsmith usually doesn’t provide such comforts. In contrast, the horror in much of her work comes from the fact that there isn’t a twist in the tale or a definite ending; that things simply continue to be as they are – bleak, unresolved. I’m thinking in particular of “The Cries of Love”, about two elderly women living together in what we assume is an old person’s home (or possibly a house for the mentally ill) – their mutual co-dependence, their inability to sleep in separate rooms, and the little acts of petulance and cruelty they direct at each other (destroying a precious cardigan, chopping off a braid of hair), which are natural offshoots of this lonely, parasitic existence. In such a story, the reader might expect a twist at the end – perhaps an act of supreme, unforeseen viciousness – but the story simply closes on an almost mundane note, with one of the women looking forward to Christmas (so she can damage the gifts that her roommate receives). It’s very depressing, because one sees then that the horror lies not in the specifics of the women’s actions but in the continuing banality of their lives: this endless cycle of vindictiveness, childlike sulking, recrimination and making up is all they have.
This isn’t to say that Highsmith doesn’t trade in more conventional thriller endings, but when she does it’s usually subtle and drawn-out – the effect isn’t so much of something suddenly springing out at the reader as he turns a corner but more that we are dragged along, reluctantly, towards the corner and to what lies beyond it.
There’s a definite mollusc fetish on view in Eleven, with two very creepy stories featuring people who become obsessed, in different ways, with snails: “The Snail-Watcher”, in which a seemingly innocuous hobby leads, in just a few short pages, to horrific consequences (the stunning matter-of-factness of the resolution has to be read to be believed); and “The Quest for Blank Claveringi”, about a professor visiting an island in the hope of sighting giant snails with shell-diameters of 20 feet. (While on shelled creatures, there’s also “The Terrapin”, about a little boy, his bad-tempered mother and the doomed terrapin that has been brought home for dinner.)
Highsmith’s writing can be savage and malicious at times. If you want to test your morbidity-endurance, try out the collection Little Tales of Misogyny, the opening story of which begins with the sentence “A young man asked a father for his daughter's hand, and received it in a box – her left hand.” Don’t feel sorry for the young lady, she’s rotten to the core, as many of the women (and most of the men) in this book are. Highlights include “Oona, the Jolly Cave Woman” (who was constantly pregnant and had never experienced the onset of puberty, “her father having had at her since she was five, and after him, her brothers. Even in late pregnancy she was interfered with and men waited impatiently the half-hour or so it took her to give birth before they fell on her again”); “The Prude” (who wants her daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters to “Be Pure in Every Way”); “The Breeder”, about a woman who has 17 children after nine years of marriage; and “The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife”. The stories are subversively funny, as their titles suggest, but their critique of social conventions is so sharp-edged, bitter, even gratuitous at times, that the reader feels uncomfortable about participating in it. Highsmith seems to actively dislike many of her characters and relish their misfortunes, which is not the sort of thing one is accustomed to in satire. My response to this is ambivalent: like I said, I admire her work but I can’t read too much of it at one go.
But having mentioned the seeming heartlessness of some of her work, I’d like to recommend a very affecting, empathetic story that also features in Eleven. “When the Fleet Was in at Mobile” is a little masterpiece about a timid woman named Geraldine escaping her louse of a husband and trying to reclaim her freedom. We learn about her past in bits and pieces, and through allusions, as the story proceeds. There is an unforced gentleness in Highsmith’s writing as she makes us care for this damaged, perhaps mentally unstable woman, and it all leads up to a devastating conclusion.
Incidentally Graham Greene wrote the Foreword to Eleven, and he astutely captures the moral disorder in Highsmith’s fiction:
She is a writer who has created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger, with the head half turned over the shoulder, even with a certain reluctance, for these are cruel pleasures we are going to experience…it is not the world as we once believed we knew it, but it is frighteningly more real to us than the house next door. Her characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realise how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are as they lead their lives from A to Z, like commuters always taking the same train…from Miss Highsmith’s side of the frontier, we realise that our world was not really as rational as all that. Suddenly with a sense of fear we think “Perhaps I really belong here”…she is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably.
And a nice piece about Highsmith here, by John Gray:
In making Tom Ripley attractive – sensitive to beauty, considerate to others in his everyday dealings, courageous and resourceful and endowed with an acute awareness of mood and place – Highsmith was not romanticising villainy; she was presenting a fact of life that moralists prefer to forget. The qualities that enable people to live an interesting and fulfilling life – and that make them valuable to others – are not all of one piece, and what are usually seen as the distinctively moral virtues are not always among them. Moral virtue is only a part of what makes life worth living, and not always the most important part.
P.S. At least three wonderful films – Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil and the John Malkovich-starrer Ripley’s Game – are based on Highsmith novels. Maybe David Cronenberg should adapt one of the snail stories!
Despite having written so many posts on films, I’ve hardly ever blogged about Hitchcock, and there’s a very good reason why: I’m afraid of getting started - scared of losing control and eventually suffocating on a glut of words and thoughts that run off in every which direction even as a single blog post swells to 5,000, then, 20,000, then 50,000 words and beyond, eventually perhaps using up all the space available on the Internet. There’s too much to say. The man’s work was my entry point into a much wider kind of cinema than I had been watching up to age 13, and he’s still among the 3-4 artists (pretentious term, but what the heck) who have most strongly impacted my life and my approach to reading/watching films. So I don’t want to talk about him at great length. You understand.
There’s another, more practical reason. Hitchcock has already been so over-analysed in print (and on the Net), his films so extensively examined from every conceivable angle, that I’m reluctant to add to the clutter (and also, perhaps, risk unconscious plagiarism – because I’ve devoured so many books on him, where so many of my own feelings about his films have been articulated by much better writers. I’m particularly indebted to Robin Wood, whose careful, passionate, personal studies of the themes that run through Hitchcock’s work are masterpieces of the type of film criticism that has no pretensions of being - what's that sad little word? - “objective”).
But I will allow myself the luxury of recommending a Hitchcock film that’s among my personal favourites – the 1951 Strangers on a Train, the DVD of which I watched again today. It’s based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel on the idea of the cross-murder: two strangers, each with someone they’d like disposed of, meet by chance and “swap” murders so that neither killer can be linked with his victim, and each person has an alibi for the murder he did have a motive for. Inevitably, Hollywood studio dictates of the time constrained Hitchcock to make alterations and permit a happy ending for the “hero” and his girlfriend. One of his great achievements was to work around this and keep the viewer mindful of the many ambiguities in the story.
Strangers on a Train begins with a lovely cross-cutting sequence. Two men arrive at a railway station in different cars, we see only their feet to begin with, and their shoes and walking styles telling us something about them even before we get to know them better. The dandyish Bruno Anthony is the wastrel who doesn’t see why he should be expected to work his way through life despite having a rich father; he hates his overbearing dad and wants him out of his way. Guy Haines is a tennis player slowly working his way up the social ladder. He’s in love with Ann Morton, a senator’s daughter, and hopes for an eventual political career himself. But there’s a problem: his unfaithful wife, now pregnant by another man, won’t give him the divorce he needs to begin a new life.
On the train, they accidentally meet. Bruno, who seems to know everything about Guy, suggests they exchange murders: “I kill your wife, you kill my father”. Guy shrugs him off – “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about” – but there’s an uncertain smile on his face, which suggests that he’s faintly intrigued by the other man. They part ways but Bruno, clearly a madman, coolly goes through with his end of “the deal” - he murders Guy’s wife and then threatens to implicate Guy unless he reciprocates in kind.
When I saw Strangers on a Train for the first time, I was most excited about the spectacular fairground showdown at the end – Bruno and Guy fighting each other on a roundabout that’s spun furiously out of control – a scene I had already seen before, on a “Hitchcock Special” videocassette; this is one of the director’s most famous setpieces. Viewing it today, I’m a little embarrassed by the gaudiness of the scene, but I think it needs to be appreciated regardless: it provides the film with the explosive climax it needs and it’s one of the surprisingly few times Hitch really let himself go in terms of supplying a no-holds-barred ending.
But it would be a pity if that showy climax were to overshadow the countless other memorable scenes that run through the film, for Strangers on a Train has more delightful little vignettes than most other films I can think of. Too many to mention here but I’ll list a few. First of all, Robert Walker’s superb performance as Bruno, one of the many charismatic “bad guys” in Hitchcock films who aided the director in his famous audience manipulation techniques – putting the viewer in a spot where we become complicit in a villain’s actions. (Norman Bates and the car that momentarily stops sinking into the swamp in Psycho is the most famous example, but there are instances in every one of Hitchcock’s major films.)
Then there’s the classic extended sequence where Bruno follows Guy’s coquettish wife (and her callow boyfriends) around a fairground: their exchanged glances, his demonstration of strength at a sound-the-bell contest; his shadow ominously overtaking hers in the Tunnel of Love as his boat trails hers; and finally the murder, reflected in her broken glasses (the old observation that Hitchcock shot scenes of murder as if they were scenes of lovemaking and vice-versa was never as true as in this shot).
The comedy is at its darkest too – notably in the scene between Bruno and his equally crazy mother. (This scene, incidentally, begins with a classic dissolve from the Pure Filmmaking canon when a shot of Bruno’s flexed hands – which are being manicured by his mother - is superimposed over Guy’s shouting “I could break her [his wife’s] neck!” over the phone.)
And then there’s the great scene where Bruno jokes with an elderly society lady at a party about the most efficient killing methods.
“I’d take him out in the car,” she squeals in delight, referring to her husband, “knock him over the head with a hammer, pour gasoline over him and the car, and light a match.”
“And have to walk all the way home?” asks Bruno disapprovingly.
It’s characteristic of Hitchcock’s unerring moral sense that this fun-and-nonsense scene (which we as viewers have been morbidly enjoying all the while) ends on a horrific note, with Bruno going into a trance and nearly killing the poor old lady for real while demonstrating a strangling method. It pulls the carpet right out from under the audience’s feet.
Time and again, Hitchcock accentuates that the “leading man”, Guy, has many weaknesses himself, and that the death of his wife is a welcome development for him though it inconveniences him to admit it. Naturally, his girlfriend’s family makes all the politically correct noises about how tragic the murder was, all except for the straight-talking younger sister who sniffs, “Some people are better off dead.”
This theme – maintaining a high moral ground and looking away as others do your dirty work – is masterfully encapsulated in a typical throwaway moment at the film’s climax. The roundabout is out of control and an old fairground worker offers to undertake the dangerous task of crawling under it to get to the controlling lever. “You’ll get yourself killed!” shouts a concerned detective, but he shuts up when his superior looks at him and says, “Well, do you want to do it yourself?”
Incidentally, the roles of Guy and his girlfriend Ann are played respectively by Farley Granger, an actor whose stock in trade was nervous, inwardly conflicted characters, and Ruth Roman, a Warner Bros starlet of very limited ability. I was a bit bemused by Hitchcock’s statement in an interview to Francois Truffaut that he would have preferred more robust, confident actors in these roles – the conventionally heroic William Holden for Guy, for example. I think that would have taken a lot away from the film, which is anything but a conventional morality tale. It’s to the movie’s advantage, for instance, that the romantic relationship between Guy and Ann seems strained and awkward at times, because throughout we are aware that Guy may be using the relationship to further his political ambitions. They aren’t meant to be a fairytale Hollywood couple and I think it’s important to retain the sense at the film’s end that given these characters’ weaknesses, history can easily repeat itself. That would certainly be appropriate for a film that brims over with circular motifs and imagery.
P.S. Robert Walker, whose performance as Bruno counts among the best in any Hitchcock film, died at a tragically young age the same year the film was released. Check this tribute website.