James-A-Day: Martin's Close

By -
I'm not sure I really get all of "Martin's Close."  I am a bit puzzled.  Maybe you all can help me.

The story centers around a historical murder case and haunting from 1684, and most of it is a transcription of the court case.   George Martin, the local young squire, is accused of murdering the girl Ann Clark and throwing her body into a pond.  Martin had made a habit of asking Ann to go out walking with him, which was kind of a strange thing for a handsome and wealthy young squire to do, because the court case describes Ann as a "natural" or an "innocent."  These are the old-fashioned terms; we would say that she had a mental disability.   Ann was not pretty or charming or young, but she was thrilled to go out walking with Mr. Martin and thought that he was her sweetheart.

Young Martin, however, got engaged to a girl who was the same age and rank as he.  The girl seems to have objected to the way locals teased Martin about Ann, and the engagement was broken (does this make sense to you?  I can't quite see it as a real reason, can you?).  Soon afterwards, Ann disappeared and was later found in the pond, apparently killed with Martin's own knife.  But between disappearing and being found, Ann evidently came back to haunt the town, possibly especially Mr. Martin.

But it's all kind of hard for me to figure out.  Did Martin kill Ann?  He certainly seems to have done so, but the whole thing is very strange.  Why did he pay attention to Ann in the first place?  I don't know if I missed something, or what.  Tell me what you think!




Job, maybe?
In the back of my collection of stories, there are a couple of short essay-type things that MRJ wrote.  I just read one that he is thought to have written pretty early on, perhaps as an undergraduate or in the early 1890's.  It's called "A Night in King's College Chapel," and it's not spooky--it's funny.  James says that he fell asleep in the chapel and woke up after it was all closed up for the night--and he saw the stained glass figures come alive, and start doing things.  They quarrel or go see their friends and so on. 

I don't know if you've ever seen what King's College Chapel looks like, but it is this enormous Gothic church with a tremendous amount of painted stained glass along the walls.  MRJ must have known the images very well indeed.  I tried to find the figures MRJ mentions in the story--they're nearly all Old Testament characters, although four St. Lukes try to treat a poor put-upon Enoch--but there is so much stained glass and it's pretty hard to identify any of them, so I failed.

You can read the whole thing here if you like.

King's College Chapel from the outside--note all those windows


Comments

  1. Nancy LeekOctober 15, 2012 at 10:17 AM

    I think MRJ just liked reading the trial reports of the notorious hanging judge, Lord Jeffreys, and thought he would try his hand at writing one of his ghost stories in that format. I like the way he captures the language and style of an 17th century courtroom under a severe and irascible judge.

    I think he done it. I wondered a bit about the way Martin asks for the transcript of another trial, and complains about how his name is misspelled, but I think this is just MRJ throwing in some verisimilitude.

    Why did the other girl break off the engagement? Either she thinks Martin's treatment of Ann shows a lack of moral character (which it does) or else the talk about his behavior has gotten back to her and she feels he is touched with scandal. Or maybe both. After all, he is leading this poor simple-minded young woman on, and that's not very nice. Then when he realizes that his little joke is having social and financial consequences to himself, he gets rid of her. And he probably thinks no one will notice or care. But in an MRJ story, there are always consequences.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more