"Absolute Evil" (1918) by Julian Hawthorne

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (2009) Edited by Peter Straub

What made it our objective was the tale of its being haunted. Haunted houses were a fashionable subject of polite investigation at that period; and to test out a haunted island was an enterprise even more engaging….

Readers unfamiliar with "Absolute Evil" (1918) by Julian Hawthorne may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

First, read Julian Hawthorne's superb story "Absolute Evil" here.

"Absolute Evil" has excited my enthusiasm like few other stories. Setting, plot, and narrative voice come together powerfully.

Hawthorne only wrote three stories from a woman character's point of view. All were about Martha Klemm, stalwart hero of "Absolute Evil." This character clearly energized Hawthorne, beyond mere commercial considerations of titillating the reader. Though Klemm must have titillated: financially and socially liberated, unmarried, and fiercely independent, she seems like a citizen of Sarah Orne Jewett's country of the pointed firs, not Beacon Street, Boston.

"Absolute Evil" begins with Martha Klemm joining a houseboat party.

[….] Thirteen- Mile Beach….

  What made it our objective was the tale of its being haunted. Haunted houses were a fashionable subject of polite investigation at that period; and to test out a haunted island was an enterprise even more engaging….

  Our route lay along that chain of sounds or inland seas which extend from Chesapeake to below Hatteras. The island was one of those long, narrow sand-bars that form outlying buttresses against Atlantic storms. That, apart from legend, was all that any of us knew about it at starting. And even legend did not inform us by whom it was haunted, or why....

Among other guests, she meets Rev. Nathaniel Tyler.

  I was interested in original sin, and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. So, on these grounds at least, I was ready to meet Nat Tyler half-way.

  He was magnetic, fine-looking, and anything but a fool. He was tall, spare, dark-browed, with deep-set, gray eyes rather near together. His long hands were very sensitive and expressive. His lips were thin, but sharply curved, implying eloquence and secret voluptuousness. There was a conspicuous black mole on his left cheek, close to the furrow that went from the arched nostril to the corner of the mouth. His voice was a deep barytone, agreeably modulated, with reserves of power. I had heard him preach, and he could send forth notes like an organ.

  Every once in a while something peeped forth from the shadows of those eyes of his that made me jump—interiorly, of course; I was woman of the world enough to betray nothing. It was as if somebody I knew very well had suddenly peeped out at me from a window in a strange place, where that face was the last I should have expected to see.

  It seemed to have nothing to do with the personality of Nat Tyler himself; he was a clergyman, and this was suggestive of anything but divinity. It conveyed a profound, fascinating wickedness. It was as old as the pyramids, yet riotous with vitality. Perhaps I ought not to speak in this way of a thing which belonged to imagination; this reverend young gentleman’s life had always been open as daylight, and more than blameless— apostolic. His family was as old-established as my own, and I had known of him long, though our first personal meeting was recent....

[….] women are often attracted by what ought to repel them— some women! I confess I was on the lookout for that satanic drama in Tyler’s eyes, and enjoyed the little fillip it gave me. By no word or gesture did Tyler himself betray consciousness of his peculiarity.

  We discovered that we both had queer books— antique lore about witchcraft and the like. This gave us common ground, and, what was more to the point, uncommon, too.

  Imagine us side by side in our reclining chairs on a moonlight evening, with the calm, watery expanse far and near, and a dark line of low shore on the horizon. 

  Tyler, in his agreeable murmur, is speculating in my ear on the origin of evil.

  “Thomas Aquinas says that angels, white and black, can change men into beasts permanently; enchanters could do it, too, but not for long. Seventeenth century witchcraft affirmed that certain natural objects and rites could produce strange effects without aid of God or devil. But the operator must renounce God and Christ, be re-baptised, trample on the cross, and be marked in a certain way— a symbolic transaction….

  “Do you believe people can be changed into beasts?” 

  “Spiritually, I know they can be, and we often notice the resemblance of some one to an animal. Well, if, as the poet Spencer says, ‘Soul is form and doth the body make,’ why mightn’t the body of a man with the soul of a hog assume, under favorable conditions, hoggish lineaments?” 

  “I wonder. But what are the favorable conditions?"

This theological intercourse ends on a poignant note.

  “I wish we could have met sooner,” he remarked. “I have longed for stimulus and companionship in my researches; such things are perilous when one goes alone. The absolute evil!— is there such a thing? Until we know, how can we under stand and combat it?”

  "For my part, I don’t feel sure that we ought to combat it—that is, if we felt any assurance of extirpating it. Evil is as necessary an ingredient of life as red pepper is on an epicure’s menu—it stimulates one to enjoy the banquet of life.”

  “You are incomparable!” murmured the parson.

[….] we went inside like two Christians.

This is only the first scene in "Absolute Evil." It is flirty, theoretical, and quickly concluded. The story then jumps ahead two years. Martha Klemm returns to Thirteen Mile Beach. She is unaccompanied, and rents a room in the beach cottage of retired teacher Jane Duckworth.

At this point, theories of absolute evil are done. Hawthorne puts Martha Klemm on a direct path of confrontation with the physical reality of absolute evil. It's a heady shift in narrative intensity, and culminates in a spectacular climax.

Jay