Seven Gothic Tales

by Isak Dinesen [Smith and Haas, $2.50]

Seven Gothic Tales . . . they are magic words, take them separately or together.

As for Gothic — if the reader will call up all his associations with the word, from Horace Walpole’s ‘gothic story’ to the pointed arches of bare ruined choirs, and bathe them in the cold light of a Northern sky, something of the book’s atmosphere will surround him and prepare him for the tingling plunge into its pages. No brief description can isolate the penetrating quality of the plunge, but a few excerpts will prepare the way, for reader and for book.

If you are content to give yourself wholly to a story which opens ‘with an evening of more than ordinarily heavenly calm, but of stifling air and a strange, luminous, sulphurous dimness’; if you are prepared to welcome a ghost and can savor a passage like this: ‘"Master Morten,”she said at last, and at the sound of her own thoughts of these last long days and nights she herself grew very pale, “is at Elsinore. He walks in the house’”—then you will scarcely wait to take the plunge. But there is far more to the experience of reading these 400 pages than the shiver of delightful apprehension. There is wisdom and there is style.

Perhaps seven stories of strange, heroic, legendary figures of the nineteenth century, of beautiful and desirable maidens who never marry, of young men who, like another young dandy of Elsinore before them, are the observed of all observers— perhaps these stories of highly civilized, highborn men and women and ghosts moving in Denmark or under the shadow of the North seem too fantastic a medium for the communication of wisdom. Yet the recurrent pattern of attitudes which are hard, fierce, disillusioned yet controlled (though sometimes a little mad), weaves a rich texture of meaning through the book; and certainly the observations scattered light-heartedly, lavishly throughout point to a shrewdness which is close to wisdom.

The truly philosophic passages are too long, and too closely woven, alas, to quote here. To lend in advance a faint perception of the style, then, one must return to the Gothic atmosphere with which we started, to the coast of Denmark itself. In ‘The Deluge at Norderney’ the dikes have given way, letting the sea in. ‘The farmers were awakened by the plaintive bellowing of their animals. Swinging their feet out of bed, in the dark, they put them down in a foot of cold, muddy water. It was salt. It was the same water which rolled, out of the west, a hundred fathoms deep, and washed the white feet of the cliffs of Dover. The North Sea had come to visit them.’

Again and again ‘the grave and noble likeness to a skull’ is the apt epithet for a hero of these tales. Something of that same grave and morbid nobility is the chief characteristic of the tales themselves.

MAKY LOUISE WHITE