HALLOWEEN READING
This essay was originally published in the now-defunct magazine Vocabula Review, in 2008.
Ghost stories and other types of horror fiction abound in English-language literature, but there seem to be relatively few classic tales or poems that deal specifically with Halloween, our annual celebration of all things terrifying. Christmas, of course, has inspired countless songs, stories, and poems. And even Thanksgiving has its own traditional song. Although the words are sometimes altered to make it a Christmas carol, the song we know as “Over the River and Through the Woods” is officially titled “A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day,” and was written by Lydia Marie Child, in 1844. Alas, the most famous song associated with Halloween is the moronic 1962 novelty hit “Monster Mash,” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt Kickers. Moreover, Thanksgiving has inspired at least a couple of classic short stories, “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen,” by O. Henry, and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” by Truman Capote. The classic story most often read in schoolrooms on Halloween is probably Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The story is spooky and prominently features a pumpkin, but it makes no actual mention of Halloween or any of its contemporary rituals. Robert Burns’ 1786 poem “Halloween” is bawdy and amusing but the Halloween customs described therein bear little resemblance to the ones practiced today. Judging by Burns’ poem, a Scottish Halloween in the 18th century was all about divining one’s romantic future. The characters in the poem spend all evening engaging in curious rituals purported to foretell whether one will marry a maid, a hag, a widow, the man of one’s dreams, or no one at all. One ritual requires courting lovers to place a pair of nuts (presumably chestnuts) side by side in a fire. If the two nuts roast quietly together, the courtship will result in marriage. If the fire causes one or both nuts to pop and leap away from its mate, the courtship will end badly. Burns’ characters also believe that if one holds a candle to a mirror on Halloween night while eating an apple and combing one’s hair, one will see the image of one’s future lover (sadly, Burns doesn’t explain how it is possible to perform all these tasks at once). In America, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” is the probably the poem most often associated with Halloween. It is creepy and entertaining but it has nothing to do with Halloween. If Poe and Irving don’t mention Halloween in their works, it may be because, according to Wikipedia, “American almanacs of the late 18th and early 19th centuries do not include Halloween in their lists of holidays.” The Puritans forbade the observance of the holiday. And not until the potato famine of 1845-49 brought millions of immigrants to America from Ireland (where Halloween was – and still is – a popular holiday) did Americans begin to observe All Hallows Eve in large numbers. Most of the rituals we associate with Halloween – dressing in scary costumes, visiting haunted houses, trick-or-treating – are of 20th century origin. Although autumn harvest festivals have been around since ancient times, their transmutation into a celebration of fear is a relatively recent phenomenon, especially in England and America, which may be why there is very little English-language literature that is Halloween-specific.
A Wikipedia entry entitled “List of Fiction Works About Halloween” contains a grand total of two novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree, both written by Ray Bradbury. Neither book has entered the cultural bloodstream in the way that, say, Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story has in all its various incarnations (story collection, movie, spin-off products, etc.).
Among the best-known contemporary American fictions about Halloween are the episodes in the late Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon strip dealing with the Great Pumpkin. In those episodes, the character called Linus annually demonstrates his belief in an omnipotent being known as the Great Pumpkin by sitting in a pumpkin patch and waiting for the arrival of this mythical entity. According to Linus, every year on Halloween the Great Pumpkin appears in the pumpkin patch he deems most “sincere,” after which he flies around the world, like Santa Claus, delivering presents to good little girls and boys (although, unlike Santa, the Great Pumpkin doesn’t take requests; he doles out gifts of his own choosing). But for forty years, from the creation of the Great Pumpkin storyline in 1959 until Schulz’s death in 1999, Linus’ Halloween vigils were all for naught. The Great Pumpkin never materialized in Linus’ local pumpkin patch and he never distributed any presents. According to Schulz’s biographer David Michaelis, the story of the Great Pumpkin illustrates “that people would rather live drunk on false belief than sober on nothing at all, at whatever cost in ridicule. Schulz is saying: be careful what you believe.” Although he usually manages to entice at least one other character to observe the annual pumpkin patch routine with him (often it is Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally, who has a crush on him), Linus is the only true believer in the Great Pumpkin, and even his faith wavers at times (in one strip he tells Snoopy, “I was the victim of false doctrine.”). In effect, Schulz’s Great Pumpkin story emphasizes the status of Halloween as a second-class holiday (unlike Christmas, New Years Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and even the day after Thanksgiving, Halloween is not a day on which large numbers of Americans get a vacation from work). Thus, America’s best-known Halloween fiction is really a sort of anti-Halloween fiction, which suggests that the holiday is, by and large, a disappointment, at least in comparison with Christmas, if not an outright fraud.
Christmas possesses a strong narrative. In fact, it possesses two major narratives and dozens of lesser, but very popular, ones. For those who prefer to keep the Christ in Christmas, the holiday’s major narrative is the Biblical nativity story. For those more interested in the material aspects of life, there is the Santa Claus story, with its factories and elves and assembly lines and presents and distribution chain and so forth. And of course, there are the many lesser narratives: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, the Little Drummer Boy, It’s A Wonderful Life, the Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Night Before Christmas, and on and on and on. Perhaps if we could all agree to embrace a few strong Halloween-specific narratives, we might be able to elevate the holiday to a status equal with Christmas’. We should attempt this if for no other reason than to add another day of paid vacation to the calendar. With that in mind, I should like to put forth a few nominees.
For the title of Official Novel of Halloween, I would like to nominate a little-known young-adult fantasy entitled Knock Three Times!, written by Marion St. John Webb. I haven’t been able to verify the date of its publication. Even on the internet there is scant information about this book and its author. My copy is a fairly recent paperback edition published by Wordsworth Editions. The copyright page lists the publication date of only this particular edition (1994). It provides no biographical information about the author at all. Wikipedia has only a scant entry for Marion St. John Webb and claims that the book was first published in 1917. But, as you can see above, I found a photo on the internet of an edition of the novel which carries a date of 1905. The oldest used copy of the book I could find at the American Book Exchange (abe.com) was published in 1934. The book has garnered only two reader reviews at Amazon.com (one claims it is the best book the reviewer has ever read; the other that it is merely the best children’s book the reviewer has ever read). [Since this essay of mine was first published, thirteen years ago, the book has garnered more attention and now has 34 reader reviews at Amazon, almost all of them highly favorable. Alas, I doubt my essay had much to do with that. At Goodreads.com, the book has 44, mostly favorable, reviews, including one which states: “This is the creepiest and most exciting fantasy novel ever. Oz doesn’t even come close.”] The book is in the public domain, however, so all sorts of editions have been published through the years, and it is impossible to know which was the first without tracking down a copy of every edition, something I have no intention of doing.
I discovered K3T! recently while reading (or, in some cases, re-reading) various books described as “classic works of children’s literature.” K3T! was the only one of these books that I had never heard of before I bought it. If it hadn’t carried the Wordsworth Classics seal of approval on its cover, I might well have passed it by. Generally, I am not enamored of fantasy tales. I can stomach books and movies that employ such fantasy staples as time travel, invisibility, telekinesis, ESP, ghosts, and even body-switching. But I have little tolerance for dragons, sorcerers, magic rings, elves (sorry, Santa), trolls, unicorns, evil curses, or fairy godmothers. Despite the fact that K3T! falls squarely into this second type of fantasy genre, I enjoyed it immensely. What’s more, I found it genuinely creepy. At times I feared that at least one of the book’s likeable young protagonists might not survive the story (early in the novel a beautiful young princess dies tragically; and just about anything is possible in a fairy tale that allows a beautiful young princess to die and not be revived later on by some magic spell or prince’s kiss). Although the book never mentions Halloween by name, it is steeped in Halloweenery. The story takes place near harvest time and its pages are bountiful with pumpkins, goblins, haunted houses, witches (both good and bad), and a door-to-door quest by young children.
K3T! tells the story of British twins Molly and Jack. On their ninth birthday, they each receive a present from their oddball aunt Phoebe. Jack gets the paint set that he has been desiring, but Molly, to her great disappointment (she was hoping for a bangle), receives only a pincushion. She sets the pincushion on her nightstand and climbs into bed feeling blue. A few moments later, however, when the moonlight slanting through the window envelops it in light, the pincushion begins to undergo a weird transformation. As Molly watches, it morphs into a large grey pumpkin and rolls off the nightstand. Molly rushes to Jack’s room and drags him out into the hallway. As the children follow, the pincushion/pumpkin rolls out the door of the house and moves “steadily on in a quiet, deliberate way that made it the more uncanny.” The pumpkin is not meandering. It is moving towards some unknown goal, and “As it gained the woodland path the sound of little twigs and dried leaves crackling as it rolled over them came to the children’s ears.” The pumpkin comes to a stop at the foot of a huge gnarled tree. With a back-and-forth rolling motion it knocks three times on the tree (the first of several symbolic representations of the practice of trick-or-treating). To the amazement of Molly and Jack, a door opens up in the side of the tree and the pumpkin passes through it. Molly and Jack follow and, a short while later, they emerge from a door on the other side of the tree into a fantasy land known by its inhabitants as the Possible World. They learn from a good witch named Old Nancy that an evil dwarf who years ago wreaked terror upon the Possible World is locked inside the pumpkin, held there by a magic spell. With the dwarf inside it, the pumpkin was transformed into a pincushion and banished to the Impossible World, which is what the residents of the Possible World call our own world. Every night, Old Nancy prevents the pumpkin from returning to the Possible World by chanting an incantation at sunset. But on this evening, evil minions of the Grey Pumpkin drugged Nancy, preventing her from reciting the magic spell. Now the Grey Pumpkin, and the dwarf inside it, have returned to the Possible World seeking vengeance.
Molly doesn’t think this sounds so terrifying. “If he never comes out of the Pumpkin – the little dwarf – what does he do if he catches anyone?” she asks Old Nancy.
The witch replies: “Just rolls up to them and touches them – bumps against them softly – and then something queer happens to them. Perhaps they are changed into some strange animal, or maybe they shrink until they are only a few inches high, or suddenly they find they have lost their nose or their eyesight – or worse things than these may happen. The misery caused by the pumpkin is unthinkable; and more often than not – incurable.”
The worst part of it, according to Old Nancy, “is that no one knows how much evil power he has, nor what he can do to them if he likes. He evidently has his limits, for there seem to be some things that he cannot do: for instance, he cannot roll along quickly – he always moves at the same slow pace; and he cannot climb up walls or trees, though he can roll up hills.”
The uncertain extent of the Pumpkin’s powers, and the fact that he does harm merely by softly bumping up against his victims, gives him an especially chilling aspect. The scariest scenes in Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws aren’t those in which the shark actually bites into a victim, but those in which it softly grazes a surfer’s foot, or bumps into the side of a boat. Like Spielberg, Marion St. John Webb understood that a whisper is generally more frightening than a scream, a touch more terrifying than a blow.
Old Nancy explains to Molly and Jack that there is only one way to prevent the Grey Pumpkin from terrorizing the Possible World. Every year, a single black leaf sprouts on a pumpkin vine somewhere in the Possible World and remains visible for thirteen days. After that – poof! – it disappears until the following year. Anyone who picks the Black Leaf will gain full control over the Grey Pumpkin and can compel it to return to the Impossible World, where it can do no harm. But the Black Leaf never sprouts in the same place twice. To find it, legions of searchers must fan out across the Possible World and comb through every house, garden, wood, and meadow. If they can’t find the Black Leaf during its thirteen days of visibility, the Grey Pumpkin and his minions will make life wretched for the residents of the Possible World.
After hearing Old Nancy’s story, Molly and Jack volunteer to join the search for the Black Leaf. This search, which occupies most of the novel, sends Molly, Jack, and many others out into the city streets and country roads, where they knock on many doors in a manner that resembles Halloween’s ritual of trick-or-treat. Along the way they encounter an enclave of goblins, several spooky houses, and numerous oddball characters (Mr. Popingay is particularly memorable, and seems to have stepped right out of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland). They also have several frightening run-ins with the Grey Pumpkin and his minions, one of which ends tragically for Jack.
Though marred here and there by a cliché or a redundancy (for instance, she almost always refers to the evil dwarf as “the little dwarf”), Webb’s writing is, for the most part, noteworthy for its simple elegance and lack of pretension. In an introduction to Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (one of the books I read during my “children’s classics” spree), young-adult novelist David Almond says of Green’s prose, “With Green, the language is properly heightened, beguiling, but is never self-regarding or portentous. He never allows the beauty of the prose to impede the progress of the story.” If by “portentous” Almond means “pompous” (which the American Heritage Dictionary lists as a secondary sense of the word) rather than “foreboding” or “exciting wonder and awe” (the primary senses of the word), then his description of Green’s prose is also an apt description of Webb’s. Though her story is filled with forebodings, wonder, and awe, her language is never pompous or overblown. It is written so that an intelligent child can understand it, though even many writers for adults might benefit from emulating its precision and polish.
If a riveting work of prose can help elevate Halloween to the same status as Christmas, then I nominate the adventures of Molly and Jack as chronicled by Marion St. John Webb in Knock Three Times!. It may never acquire the cultural significance of Luke 2:1-7, but I found it a hell of lot more entertaining. What’s more it might help reverse some stale old cultural stereotypes. Black, which is generally a color that symbolizes evil, in K3T! symbolizes good. The book also has strong feminist leanings. It isn’t macho Jack who saves the day in K3T! but thoughtful Molly. Almost all great Christmas narratives center around male characters (Rudolph, Frosty, George Bailey, Ebeneezer Scrooge, the Grinch, the Little Drummer Boy, Christ, and Santa Claus). With K3T! as our guide, perhaps we can transform Halloween not only into a first-class holiday, but into a celebration of diversity, as well.
But if we make K3T! the Halloween equivalent of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, that still leaves us in need of an official Halloween poem, an All Hallows Eve equivalent of “The Night Before Christmas,” something to be read in schoolrooms and at family firesides every October 31. To find one, I turned first to Poems Bewitched and Haunted, an anthology of scary verse edited by John Hollander and published, in 2005, by Everyman’s Library. The book is a bit of a bait-and-switch job. The cover is bedizened by numerous grinning jack-o-lanterns, and the jacket flap proclaims that the book’s purpose is to “add to the revelry of All Hallows Eve.” But in his introduction, Hollander makes it clear that he has little enthusiasm for Halloween, which he dismisses as “a secular holiday for children” and an “innocent modern occasion.” Accordingly his anthology includes only two or three poems that mention Halloween. Rather than celebrate Halloween, Hollander’s book, in his own words, “constitute[s] a more serious kind of grown-up play.” And this is evident in the adult nature of many of the poems. Consider for example the following stanzas from “Invective Against Denise, A Witch,” written by Pierre de Ronsard and translated by Anthony Hecht:
Luring about you, like a brood,
The vulgar, curious and lewd,
You shamelessly lay bare
Your haunches to the sight of men,
Your naked shoulder, abdomen
Emblazoned with blood-smear.
You know the worth and power of both
Rare herbals and concocted broth
Brought from the tropic zone;
You know the very month and hour
To pluck the lust-inducing flower
That makes a woman groan.
Often I’ve watched as you espy
From far away with baleful eye
Some shepherd on his heights;
Soon after, victim of your arts,
The man is dead, his fleshly parts
A nest of parasites.
The poem hardly seems suited to schoolrooms and family firesides. Nor does Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “The Witch Mother,” wherein a woman shows up at her ex-lover’s wedding and serves him the blood and flesh of their two illegitimate sons as a part of the reception meal. “The Young Witch” is another poem for mature audiences only (“Your breasts are soft pillows of lassitude/And in your nubile belly and firm flanks/The snake of lechery raises its head…your tongue knows well satanic kisses, and/It is a goatish love burns through your heart.”). In Robert Herrick’s “To Bring In The Witch,” the author describes a magic potion that calls for the spell-caster to “Commix with Meale a little Pisse.” Alas, none of the poems in Hollander’s anthology seems likely to inspire classic holiday TV fare along the lines of How the Grinch Stole Christmas or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. After finishing the book, I was about to abandon my search for a poetic companion to Knock Three Times!, when, as if by magic, the object I was looking for appeared unexpectedly in my email box. The author of the poem is Shawna Kastin, daughter of a longtime friend of mine. Shawna is in her early 20s and lives in Ashland, Oregon. She has been writing fiction and poetry since she was about five, and occasionally she passes on her work to me. On September 9th of this year, she sent me the following poem:
The unfortunate Lenore, deceased
In an old abandoned mansion
where the sun shines nevermore
lived a lonely little child,
the mysterious Lenore.
She was pale and quiet and bashful
and terribly well read
but she was not like other children
because she was, in fact, quite dead.
How did it happen? I hear you ask,
I’m sad to say it’s true,
she hit her head falling out of bed
and died before anyone knew.
Her parents wailed, went mad with grief
and locked themselves in their room
while Lenore continued as before
lamenting her sudden doom.
She had rather hoped to die of plague
or coughing up blood in her tower
or to be cooked in a stew, with some carrots, too,
for at least a solid hour.
But she’d comfort herself
with her bats and her rats
and her black cat,
Melmoth the third.
While her mother went quietly mad in the attic,
scribing tale after tale of woe
and her father, even madder,
every day growing sadder,
became obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe.
Alone and forgotten Lenore carried on
exploring the neighborhood tombs
and reciting lost poems of romance and loss
that always brightened her gloom.
Aside from her parents not everyone knew
that Lenore was sadly deceased
and now that she lacked her parents’ attention
her presence at school increased.
Her teacher, Matilda, near-sighted and dim,
never noticed Lenore coming in.
She’d hand in her homework, just as before
and Matilda would say with a grin:
“Oh Margaret, yes, thank you.
How queerly you hover,
your feet not quite touching the floor.
And look at that face, all pasty and white.
You should play in the sun much more.”
But Lenore would just smile
happy at last that someone had noticed her there
for the rest of the children and teachers and parents
looked past her unaware.
Whether she sat on the swings
or moped in the hall,
watching giggling children play ball,
Whether she stood on her head
whispering tales of dread
to an empty bathroom stall,
No one came near her
or batted an eye
leaving Lenore to wonder “Why”?
Were the others afraid of her wavering form?
Were they scared she would make them like her?
Had death turned her boring or ugly or dull?
Was she not as exciting as before?
Why couldn’t she be like Charlotte and Johnny
and their tiny little sister Sue?
Who laughed in the sunlight, their curls bobbing gaily,
and always knew what to do.
They made life look easy
full of smiles and friendships
but Lenore knew that death was hard
so whenever she saw them
playing or sitting or skittering past her yard
she sighed and felt jealous,
and wished they could see her
just once without being alarmed.
Soon Spring turned to Summer
and Summer to Autumn
and trees wept leaves of gold.
Lenore sat outside
tending her tomb,
never once feeling the cold.
Gazing up at the moon
waning so soon she thought
tomorrow is All Hallow’s Eve!
How she used to adore
dressing in gore
counting the treats she received.
But this time was different
for she was alone
with no one to see her or care.
And to be on that day
without friend or foe
was something she just couldn’t bear.
She retired to her tower
and slept through the day
while her parents below her
wasted away.
Then, suddenly, there came a rapping
as from a long way off.
Could it be someone was tapping,
tapping at her own front door?
She grabbed her cat
and left her rats to chew apart her bed
then ran down several flights of stairs
by the ominous rapping led.
And when at last she flung open the door
she almost shrieked with joy
for there on her porch
shouting Trick-or-Treat
were two girls and a little boy:
A witch, a ghost and a mummy
skin pale and eyes open wide
shaking their curls
and smiling and laughing
they invited her to walk by their side!
Come with us, they giggled,
You shouldn’t stay here
all alone on a night such as this.
You should be out eating candy
and scaring the neighbors.
Think of the fun you’ll miss.
Lenore giggled also
no longer lonely, wondering what to do.
She followed their lead
through the perilous streets
accompanying Charlotte, Johnny and Sue.
For All Hallows Eve is a magical time
when the veil between worlds becomes thin,
when ghosties and ghoulies are seen by us all
and lost things are soon found again.
From that day on she was never alone
but played with her companions by day
and by night she read them tales of fright
that would have scared other children away.
When her parents realized their Lenore was not lost
but merely a little bit dead
they rejoiced in their hearts to be reunited at last
and chose sanity instead.
So ended the unfortunate demise
of the mysterious Lenore
and arm in arm and hand in hand
all lived happily evermore.
As fictional characters go, I think Lenore is at least as memorable as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or Cindy Lou Who. It’s too bad Edward Gorey is no longer around to animate her story for a television special. His ghostly shade seems to have been the spirit that presided over its composition.
All by themselves, Knock Three Times! and “The unfortunate Lenore, deceased” may not be enough to promote Halloween from second-class to first-class holiday, but they constitute a good start. I urge writers everywhere to start producing more such stories and poems. With a few more classic narratives to celebrate it, Halloween might someday attain national holiday status, which would result in one less day of work each year for most Americans. And isn’t that a cause worth fighting – and writing – for? And after that lofty goal has been achieved, who knows, maybe we can focus our attention on Valentine’s Day, and then Groundhog Day, and then April Fools’ day, and then St. Patrick’s Day, and then Cinco de Mayo, and then…