Alexander Wilson on the Whippoorwill

“In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn’s that he thought his time had almost come.

‘They whistle jest in tune with my breathin’ naow,’ he said, ‘an’ I guess they’re gittin’ ready to ketch my soul. They know it’s a-goin’ aout, an’ dun’t calc’late to miss it. Yew’ll know, boys, arter I’m gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin’ an’ laffin’ till break o’ day. Ef they dun’t they'll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an’ the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.’

On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn’s in the village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural - too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call…”

I’m in the process of cataloguing a small but eminently desirable collection of antique books for a client and my eye was caught by a nice, three-volume set of Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, later amended by Prince Charles Lucien Bonaparte, and with the Notes and “Life of Wilson” by Sir William Jardine. This is the undated 1877 London edition, which can nevertheless be accurately dated by the publishing company’s name, which was changed in 1878. The catalogue description of the book is as follows:

Alexander Wilson & Charles Lucien Bonaparte, American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, with The Illustrative Notes and Life of Wilson by William Jardine, in Three Volumes, Cassell Petter & Galpin, London, nd. (c.1877).

Three volumes, octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in black morocco and red cloth boards with gilt spine titles and decorations and black endpapers; 1,451pp. [408pp. + 495pp. + 540pp.] (+8pp. of adverts), mostly unopened, top edges gilt, with an engraved portrait frontispiece, 104 chromolithographic plates and some other monochrome engraved illustrations. Mild wear, somewhat rolled; boards a bit rubbed and shelfworn with some minor insect damage to the cloth; spines mildly sunned, extremities a little worn and the head of Volume III pulled slightly; text block edges lightly toned; lower hinge of Volume I cracked (but still strong); light offset to the preliminaries and light scattered foxing throughout; some minor offset to some of the plates. No dustwrappers. Very good.

While I was poring through this – counting plates; noting wear and tear – I thought to myself, I wonder what he has to say about Whippoorwills? Here in Australia, we have our own crepuscular avians to mimic these famous American avians, however ours don’t carry anywhere near the whiff of superstition and folklore that the American versions do. Those well-versed in HPL’s works know whippoorwills famously from “The Dunwich Horror”:

“…But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

‘They didn't git him,’ he muttered in his heavy bass voice…”

The prevailing superstitious notion is that these birds act as psychopomps, that is, entities which accompany the spirits of the dead and which guide them to their deserved afterlife. In some schools of thought, the whippoorwills seek to attack and consume the spirit in some fashion, forming a kind of gauntlet run to the hereafter. This is certainly the aspect which HPL highlights in his tale.

“…Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the library. An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man…”

“…As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with any speech of earth, but towards the last there came some disjointed fragments evidently taken from The Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like ‘N'gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah: Yog-Sothoth, Yog- Sothoth...’ They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendos of unholy anticipation.”

As we see in the story, old Wizard Whateley manages to elude the birds as he passes over. Wilbur Whateley, his monstrous grandson, is also sized up for predation:

“Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey…”

Obviously, in this instance they attempt to bite off more than they could comfortably choke down.

Alexander Wilson was a precursor of the better-known John James Audubon when it comes to American birdlife; however, Wilson was the original and best. His book is considered to be the first illustrated work of science published in the United States. It was later amended by Charles Bonaparte to include several new species that Wilson hadn’t spotted, and this edition contains useful emendations, along with Wilson’s biography, by Jardine. Here is the section pertinent to the Whippoorwill:

Wilson, along with other writers on avian subjects and pushing a sense of scientific credibility, is quick to distance his observations from any superstitious ideas doing the rounds. It would have been interesting to know exactly what “silly notions” had been retailed to him, but I guess that information has now been largely lost.

And that’s it. There’s a lot of detail here – probably more than any “Call of Cthulhu” game or Mythos story writer would ever need (or use), but it’s of interest, nonetheless. It’s intriguing to note that the folkloric qualities of the creature probably only survive in literary confections like “The Dunwich Horror”, in oral traditions among the various indigenous and regional tribes, and probably a few anthropological dissertations.

In the final analysis, the mention of crepuscular avians in HPL’s tale does little more that add a hint of flittering menace to the tale, but it also grounds the story in a folkloric tradition, lending a veracity to the narrative that it might otherwise lack. Literary packrat that he was, Lovecraft was very good at incorporating various scraps of local lore, general knowledge and scientific rigour to his fantastical notions, and this is what gives them all a solid foundation and a sense of distinct possibility. We get a sense that there is a wider reality beyond the writing, and it is implicit in everything he tells us, even if it is only glancingly referenced. This is high-quality storytelling at its best!

(NB: If anyone is at all interested in obtaining this copy of Wilson's "American Ornithology" drop me a line and I'll see what I can do...)

Review: "River"

 

Abi Morgan (Creator), “River”, Kudos/Shine International/BBC One/Netflix, 2015.

Convincing an audience that something fantastic is going on in your fictive work is a bit of a high-wire act. If your target demographic isn’t convinced of what you’re trying to sell, then the whole enterprise quickly falls apart. The easy solution would seem of course - in the case of a visual medium effort – to obtain the best actors, directors, cinematographers – what have you - that money can buy; in this instance, I think the creators have knocked it out of the park.

There is a spooky premise to this show – a supernatural rationale – but I don’t want to let any cats out of their bags. Going in on these six episodes, I had no idea what to expect: I was looking for a gritty British police procedural to while away an evening’s ennui and I suddenly had just that, along with something completely unexpected and – dare I say? – delightful. Of course, the presence of Stellan Skarsgård and Nicola Walker meant that – had this been simply a stultifying home renovation program – I would still have watched the hell out of it; the supernatural aspects of this show were merely the excellent icing atop this wonderful cake.

The BBC is the spiritual home of the police drama. No-one else takes the sordid realities of the Street and boils them down to soul-crushing narratives in quite the same way. Take for example, the new show “The Responder” which is doing the rounds at the moment. I started watching this and had to stop. The grubby particulars of this show were almost too much to bear. I mean, there’s dark, and then there’s this: it’s like an exercise in pushing the envelope; there’s a gleefully iconoclastic edge to everything going on that actually starts to break the audience’s engagement due to its intensity. All that aside however, my main issue with it is that Martin Freeman – who I normally find eminently watchable - is completely miscast. There’s something about his performance and physical presence that is at odds with the material – maybe he was trying to prove that he too, could swan about like “Cracker” in a downbeat thug-fest, but I’m here to tell you that he can’t. No amount of withholding the razor and a good night’s sleep can knock the optimistic shine off Bilbo Baggins. There’s something quintessentially Home Counties about him that a bad haircut can’t disguise.

Now, if you had put Stellan Skarsgård in his shoes, then, you’d have something…

In “River”, my one issue is that the world – despite everything that comes out in the conclusion of this show – is a little too vanilla for the actors at hand. This is a plus and a minus: most of the drama here is internal with John River balancing his workload with his mental trauma, psychological scars which absolutely could not have been portrayed this well by any other thespian. Having witnessed his partner, and the person whom he had just begun to realise was the love of his life, gunned down brutally before him in the street, River starts tiptoeing around both his work colleagues and the enforced psychological review that he’s made to engage with, while simultaneously trying to solve the mystery of who his partner’s assailant was. That he hears – and responds to – voices unheard by those around him makes the knife-edge levels of his sanity more than apparent to everyone, including himself.

It's a testament to the writing that we don’t spot these voices until at least two-thirds of the way through the first episode. The writing allows the spookiness to slide right under the radar until the story deems it necessary to reveal the supernatural goings-on to the audience and it hits like a chill bucket of water to the face. I had been riding along with this show, enjoying the banter and the easy relationship of the two leads when suddenly I knew that I had something a bit extra to be getting on with. Right, I thought, this has taken a turn: I’d better strap in. Seriously though, with these two actors – plus the addition of a 70s disco soundtrack – if nothing at all had changed, I would have kept watching.

These supernatural elements are exquisitely handled. Everything occurs against the backdrop of John River’s mental disintegration and the plot becomes highly equivocal depending upon where you stand. The information that River receives from his spiritual sources is slippery and, at every stage, John, his co-workers, the suspects of his investigation, never know whether the information he’s working with is real or not, or whether it can be used in the chain of evidence. It’s a bravura performance from the writers and the actors and, because it’s all based upon a solid set of rules governing the spectral that the creators have set out clearly from the start, it works a treat. The scenes wherein John and his work-appointed psychologist play cat-and-mouse around the possibility of supernatural forces at play, are crafted to perfection and wonderful to observe.

The only real grizzle I have with the show is everything is a little too neat. The action takes place in a very enclosed world – every character leads to the next significant character and the narrative has a consequent hermetic feel to it. Essentially, the world of “River” is a very small one into which nothing of a wider reality intrudes. A key element of the investigation involves a shonky car-hire accompany and chauffeuring service, the name of which becomes a common refrain as things progress, flagging to the viewer the final destination of the mystery. In essence, all roads lead to Rome, and everyone has connexions to everyone else. It’s a little incestuous but, given one of the big reveals at the end, maybe that’s deliberate.

My biggest delight with this show is that, while it has everything that you’d want in a gritty police procedural, it’s also very human and incredibly sad, while at the same time being quite uplifting and inspiring, in the best tradition of such fare. As I said in the beginning, lesser thespians would not have made this work, but they run with it and elevate everything around them to build a fantastic – in all senses – piece of television drama.

Four Tentacled Horrors.