Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories—and some on his friends, too.
Today we’re looking at E. F. Benson’s “Negotium Perambulans,” first published in the November 1922 issue of Hutchinson’s Magazine. You can read it here.
Spoilers ahead.
“Well do I remember his exposition of the doctrine of guardian angels. A child, he said, might think himself secure in such angelic care, but let him beware of committing any of those numerous offences which would cause his guardian to turn his face from him, for as sure as there were angels to protect us, there were also evil and awful presences which were ready to pounce; and on them he dwelt with peculiar gusto.”
Summary: Unnamed narrator introduces us to Polearn, an isolated fishing village in West Cornwall. As a boy, he lived there for three years with his aunt and uncle, strengthening his frail lungs with fresh sea air and rambles on the gorse-clad cliffs. Over time he sensed that the people of Polearn were linked by a mysterious (and tacit) comprehension of forces visible and invisible, evil and good.
On Sundays his otherwise amiable uncle preached fire-and-brimstone sermons. Guardian angels, he claimed, might protect us, but if we erred, “evil and awful presences were ready to pounce.” One such presence appeared on a carved panel in the village church—a gigantic slug opposed by a cross-wielding priest. This was “negotium perambulans in tenebris,” the Thing (Creature/Pestilence/Business) that walked in darkness; it was indeed a trafficker with the outer Darkness and also a minister of God’s wrath. From other boys, narrator learned about the ancient church from which the panel originally came. The owner of the quarry beneath which it stood took it for his own dwelling, and played dice on the desecrated altar. Gradually melancholy overwhelmed him, and he burned lights all night. But one night a gale extinguished his lamps. Servants answered his screams, to find a corpse drained of blood, a husk of skin and bones, from which a huge black shadow retreated. And this quarry house abutted our narrator’s family’s garden!
Grown to manhood, the narrator becomes a successful barrister in London, but he always longs to return to Polearn. As soon as he’s made his fortune, he does so. To his surprise, Polearn hasn’t diminished, nor has his aunt aged much. Her gossip confirms his impression of the immutability of the place, and he falls again under its spell.
One thing’s different, though. Mr. Dooliss, the quarry house tenant when narrator was young, succumbed to a phobia of the darkness and its Thing. In fact, he destroyed the panel bearing its likeness. Narrator’s uncle saw the carving in splinters, went to confront the reclusive drunkard, then returned to find the panel restored. An act of God? If so, who or what acted shortly after, leaving Dooliss dead and drained on the night shore, a husk of skin and bone?
Narrator’s incredulous of his aunt’s tale. Steeped in the weird wisdom of Polearn, she only smiles and says he’s been in London a long time.
An artist, John Evans, lives now in the quarry house. Narrator remembers him as a kind man and is shocked to see his deterioration into a shambling drunkard. Evans invites him to see paintings done in his new style—ordinary scenes infused with subtle malignity. Evans says he paints the “essence” of things, showing that “everything came from the slime of the pit, and it’s all going back there.”
Narrator sees Evans occasionally over the summer. His repulsion and interest grow in tandem, for the artist seems on a “path of secret knowledge towards some evil shrine where complete initiation awaited him.”
One October evening, the two walk on the cliffs near sunset. Black clouds suddenly move in, bringing premature night. Evans rushes for home, to light the lamps he burns all through the dark hours. Narrator follows. Arriving, he sees Evans still fumbling with matches, while a great phosphorescent slug glides toward him. It latches on to the shrieking artist. Narrator tries, and fails, to wrestle the thing off—his hands pass right through it.
In a few seconds, Evans is drained, a husk of skin and bone. The Thing glides off. Having now seen the evil side of Polearn’s magic, narrator leaves the village, never to return.
What’s Cyclopean: There’s a good deal of “shambling,” and an exiguous estimate of Polearn tourism.
The Degenerate Dutch: Benson’s treatment of an isolated rural population is pretty sympathetic, in stark contrast to stories like “Dunwich Horror” and “Lurking Fear.” See, it’s not so hard to be polite after all.
Mythos Making: It’s unclear if the negotium is really an avenging agent of god, or a more mythosian critter working for its own inscrutable ends. If the former, god really needs to go back to using multi-headed cherubim, because this thing is gross.
Libronomicon: No books, but some excellent gothic art (hopefully not destroyed by the negotium), and foreshadowy bas reliefs.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Living in the desecrated church appears to result in alcoholism. Either that, or sober people have more sense than to live on cursed property.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Proto-Lovecraftiana this week—proto weird fiction, really, written while Lovecraft was still mostly getting published in amateur zines. Benson’s “negotium” may have inspired the more thoroughly thought out shadow-walking business in “The Dunwich Horror”; it certainly had an influence on Lovecraft’s work in general.
It’s surprising how many of the central features of Lovecraft’s work are present here. There’s the combination of “revulson and interest” that the narrator feels for the artist John Evans (who seems like he ought to exhibit in a gallery with Pickman). There’s the build up from rumor to witness of horror. But the village of Polearn, in particular, seems a place that likely sent immigrants to Lovecraft County. Certainly, whoever carved prophetic bas reliefs in their church was hard at work, later or earlier, ensuring the availability of convenient expository sculpture in abandoned cities around the world. But it’s the narrator’s love for the place that lifts the story above its relatively pedestrian plot. It makes Polearn more than just a random setting for horror: Benson lays out his descriptions perfectly, so that it’s easy to see both why this one person happily abandons a successful career to live there, and why most people would never bother so much as passing through.
The powerful emotional relationship with place permeates Lovecraft’s own work. His most memorable stories build horror around love letters—or hate letters—to cities real and imaginary. Arkham, Kingsport, and Innsmouth, New York, Providence… all as vivid for how he feels about them as for physical description. And all leave their mark on the monsters they produce or attract.
Unlike Benson, though, Lovecraft tends to assume these attitudes are universal. Where our Polearn lover basically says, “Yeah, I can see why most people wouldn’t bother, but this is home for me,” Lovecraft assumes that Providence is so much the pinnacle of urban perfection that even the gods want nothing more than to dwell in an ideal version of it. I’ve got to go with Benson on this one: you need only listen in on a conversation between a staid New Englander and a Californian to know how firmly personal such judgments can be.
Where Benson doesn’t come out nearly so well, though, is the dismount. The plot, as I mentioned above, is pretty basic: narrator goes to a place he loves, narrator hears rumors of a terrible monster; narrator leaves and returns; narrator sees the terrible monster with his own eyes; narrator leaves forever. Since we’re reading a horror story, the fact that the monster exists is no surprise—in spite of a few extra details in the final description, the dread revelation isn’t much of a revelation.
What’s interesting, or should be, is the transformation of a loved place into a reviled one. The monster never attacks anyone who doesn’t live in the one desecrated church—so why not continue to live in the beloved old town? Why does the second-hand report of horror add pleasant piquancy to the place, but direct viewing make it unbearable? One can easily imagine any number of answers, ranging from simple trauma to cosmic inferences about the price of Polearn’s “spell.” This transformation seems worth exploring, and Benson doesn’t even a little. Lovecraft, at his best, would have focused on the psychological transition, and added a post-script paragraph or two to keep our attention on what was really important.
Anne’s Commentary
In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft mentions “Negotium Perambulans” as one of “the versatile” Benson’s most notable tales. And E. F. Benson was indeed versatile, writing not only superlative ghost stories but high comedy of character (the Lucia and Mapp novels), nonfiction, autobiography and plays. His “Room in the Tower” and “The Face” are masterpieces of sustained dread, while my favorite Benson, “How Fear Departed the Long Gallery,” combines his signature wry wit with soul-deep terror, and redemption.
Rereading “Negotium” so soon after “The Dunwich Horror,” I hear echoes bouncing forward and back. The openings are very similar—isolated towns are described as travelers might view them in accidental passing. Typically, Benson’s tourist can shrug off Polearn as merely unremarkable, while Lovecraft’s motorist shivers all the way through Dunwich territory. Like Dunwich, Polearn appears to be an invention strongly influenced by actual and well-known places. Like Dunwich, it’s isolated and likes it that way, with the very postbox set well above the village so that the postman doesn’t have to make the long trip down the combe. Geographic isolation, Benson’s narrator muses, produces isolation in the individual resident, while at the same time linking him to all the other residents. Sounds applicable to Dunwich, except that Benson sees independence and self-reliance in the isolated, while Lovecraft sees decadence and degeneration. However, the “mysterious comprehension” of Polearn isn’t entirely different from the communal superstition of Dunwich, for the invisible forces in Polearm are evil as well as good, malignant as well as benign.
“There were powers and presences about me,” Benson’s narrator declares in his renewed connection with Polearn. “The white poplars that stood by the stream that babbled down the valley knew of them, and showed a glimpse of their knowledge sometimes, like the gleam of their white underleaves; the very cobbles that paved the street were soaked in it.” The powers “seethed along the hill-side at noon, and sparkled at night on the sea.” They are “grafted into the eternal life in the world.” Nature spirits then, or the very spirit of nature? And are the dark powers, the Things that Perambulate, part of that spirit, or are they super-natural? John Evans hints that the dark is not separate. All things are connected, the cat with the beast, the sunning boy with the monster crawled from the sea, the garden with the jungle. Everything has come from the slime of the pit, and will go back to it.
I’m thinking Azathoth now, the primal chaos and mindless spawner of all, including those invisible powers that pervade Dunwich even more pervasively than other human “strongholds,” for there were they called forth from the stone-crowned hills when the cycles of time were right. I guess we could call Lovecraft’s forces natural, if we consider nature as all that is. But they sure aren’t ever benign. Not unless you’re a mad wizard, and even then, what do they really give you but the far-sight that leads to deeper madness? And when THEY return to remake the earth to THEIR liking, will there really be a place for men in the new world, however crazy and wizardly those men may be?
The Judeo-Christian God has no place in Lovecraft’s Mythos, but does He in Benson’s fictive universe, as seen in “Negotium”? The Thing, narrator’s clergyman uncle proclaims, is an instrument of divine justice, counterpart to the rather fickle guardian angels of his imagination. The carved panel shows a priest confronting the Thing with a crucifix.
What we don’t know is whether the crucifix ultimately repels the Thing—Benson pictures the confrontation of priest and monster but gives no hint of the outcome. Could be the Thing slimes off. Could be it sucks the priest dry. What about the church from which the panel came? It’s said to be ancient, far older than the present Polearn church. I wonder if it was like Exham Priory, home to more than one faith in its time.
It seems that the Thing only attacks sinners, blasphemers and drunkards in particular. Oh, and people living in the quarry house/former ancient church. People who, living in the quarry house, fall into melancholy and phobias and addictions. An influence of the site? An influence of a Thing that lurks nearby, waiting until its prey has reached exactly the mental state which renders it vulnerable to attachment by a semi-material entity?
Maybe. At least it’s an explanation that appeals to me more than the idea that Capital-G God simply whistles up a Thing of Outer Darkness when sinners need radical bloodletting. It’s also hard for me to reconcile Capital-G with Benson’s pan(Pan)theistic natural elementalism or whatever it is that seethes along the hill-side at noon. Seethes! That’s a great verb for Benson to use in the middle of narrator’s rapture. It’s scary. It keeps things from getting too precious.
What does the Thing look like, when semi-material? An enormous slug, though even more featureless. It has no eye-stalks or antennae, only a rudimentary mouth. It smells of corruption and decay. About the only thing that comes closer to the slime of the pit than that is—a shoggoth! Yes, sluggy entities are Benson’s shoggoths. There’s Negotium here, and the very similar slug of “And No Bird Sings,” and the kinda sluggy-kinda wormy-certainly squirmy horde of “Caterpillars.”
Ergh, I’m seized by a psychosexual interpretation of Benson’s slugs that I will resist, because too facile. That, or it deserves deeper thought and more space than I have available at the moment.
Last thought goes to poor John Evans, who under the influence of the quarry-house has turned into the Pickman of Cornwall. I absolutely want to add his touched-by-the-malign paintings to my personal night gallery, especially the ones of the cat and the sea-changed boy.
Remember that homesick king in the Dreamlands, trying to turn his city of wonders into rural Britain? We’ll meet him, in his younger days, next week in “Celephais.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s non-Hugo-nominated neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Her work has also appeared at Strange Horizons and Analog. She can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal. She lives in a large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com, and her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen. The second in the Redemption’s Heir series, Fathomless, will be published in October 2015. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
Benson was new to me. I may have tried to find some of his work way back when, motivated by Lovecraft’s essay, but I don’t think I found any. I can certainly see the similarities. This felt, in a way, like a blend of HPL and Algernon Blackwood.
I thought he started out trying to build a Lovecraftian sense of menace about Polearn (which I consistently read as Polearm — I may have played too much D&D in my youth), but he then wiped it all away with his fond childhood memories. I do have to wonder about living in an open shed in the middle of a Cornish winter on the coast, though.
Psalm 91 and this particular phrase seem to be very popular. It gets used a lot in several Jewish holidays and is very popular with the armed forces. The Thing in the dark gets mentioned a lot in stuff from A Canticle for Leibowitz to a Jerry Garcia song. From some cursory scanning of commentary, the original intent may have referred to a Canaanite plague deity.
As for the psychosexual aspects of his slugs, Benson does appear to have been homosexual and not terribly repressed about it. Make of that what you will.
“Negotium Parambulans” is a fine evocation of another lonely and curious country, even if the supernatural framework is comparatively mundane.
Lovecraft on Benson in full: From “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, section IX:
“The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose “The Man Who Went Too Far” breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan’s hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson’s volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power; notably “Negotium Perambulans”, whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and “The Horror-Horn”, through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks. “The Face”, in another collection, is lethally potent in its relentless aura of doom.”
Translation time: pestilence or business?
Post title is supposed to be “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Something-or-Other,” rather than “An Angry Something-or-Other.” Clever references to historic Calvinist sermons, damn it, not Mythosian vaguebooking. (And I totally forgot to link our rereads of the other stories referenced, so it’s probably my own fault. I plead the busiest month of my life since I was ABD, plus an unsleeping spawn.)
I’ve heard the psalm used occasionally, but never encountered that phrase at services. Maybe it’s an orthodox thing?
I didn’t realize when I came out, lo these many years ago, that being openly bi would mean psychosexual interpretations of all my eldritch monsters. Oh well, too late now. Matt Damon really should have warned me about that.
@3: On Bible Hub the Latin Psalm 91 line 6 of the New Vulgate is given as
“a sagitta volante per diem a peste in tenebris ambulante a morsu insanientis meridie“
I believe that Benson was using the older Clementine Vulgate, where the equivalent Psalm, 90 in this Greek-numbered version, has this line 6:
“a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris, ab incursu, et daemonio meridiano”
For exhaustive detective work on the translation error in Benson’s edition, see the link @2.
@3: I was going by the Wikipedia entry for Psalm 91. Digging a little, I would guess that most of the day-to-day uses are probably more Orthodox, but funerals and Sukkot should be fairly common. OTOH, I don’t recall the rabbi reading the psalm at my father’s funeral last year (unless that was something the cantor sang? I dunno, I walked away from all that when I was eight) and who the heck pays any attention to Sukkot in the US?
@@.-@: Benson probably used whatever was standard for the CoE in the late 19th century. His father was a priest who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury. A fact, now that I think of it, may have some bearing on this story. (Ooh, Benson pere told Henry James the story that became the genesis of Turn of the Screw.) The whole family seems to have had a religious and creative bent. EF’s older brother wrote the words to “Land of Hope and Glory”, his baby brother became a Catholic priest and apologist and novelist, and his sister was an Egyptologist. Interesting bunch.
(Incidentally, this is Jaime Chris – I finally got around to registering on the site and couldn’t use “Jaime Chris” as a username so I picked something similar. I’ll be posting as JaimeW from now on.)
I’d actually never heard of this story before, which is surprising to me as I’m an aficionado of vampire fiction and mythology (not in a “Twilight” way but in an “I’ve taught this in my classes and written articles about it,” way, thankyouverymuch.) ;) I’ve bookmarked the story because I definitely think I may teach it in future and may even include it in my critical writing.
Like others, I found the religious/moralistic content especially notable, especially in comparison to Lovecraft’s work (although, didn’t Christian symbols prove effective against Keziah Mason in “Dreams in the Witch-House?”). I too was hit by the sledgehammer of symbolism with the phallic monster at the end (a side-effect of growing up with a Freudian psychologist for a mom is that I can find phallic symbols ANYWHERE.) ;) Although the information about Benson’s sexual identity posted by DemetriosX IS very interesting. The literary vampire, amongst many other things, seems to be a focus for expressions of non-heteronormative sexuality…
I was in Cawsand, Cornwall for an afternoon this past August – I took a ferry from Plymouth. While it’s not West Cornwall, I DID find a very old church! I have to report, however, that I was not attacked by any ghastly vampiric “Things.” (In fact, the caretaker let my partner and me look inside the church, and below the pews there were pillows on which to presumably kneel while praying; many of them were embroidered with the names and professions of residents of the community!) While I’m not conventionally religious, I always try to visit churches when I travel, not just for the often-incredible architecture, but the sense of history they contain.
And maybe one day I’ll encounter a lurking horror in a decrepit cathedral… ;)
Um…does anyone know how to insert a photo into a post? I’m trying to insert the picture I took of the Cawsand Church but every time I try to do so I just get a broken picture image. I have it saved in my Dropbox account in jpg format. Thanks in advance! :)
The Latin word negotium means work, business, in contrast to otium, leisure. Otium was the normal state for free citizens, while negotium was for slaves (or those too poor to afford slaves).
@5: Psalm 91 is traditionally recited seven times by the funeral procession to ward off harmful influences on the way from the hearse to the gravesite.
R. H. Benson still makes the news every so often as his early dystopian novel Lord of the World is a favourite of Pope Francis.
@6 & 7: If you like lurking horrors in decrepit cathedrals, then you will enjoy “An Episode of Cathedral History” by M. R. James.
To insert an image:
Click the “Insert/edit image” icon (furthest right above the comment box). In source, insert the direct url of your image (so something like
doesn’t work while 
would) and click OK.
I quite like the translation error that gave us “negotium perambulans in tenebris”. The vagueness gives it more menace. “Plague” is very straightforward. But “business”, “affair”, even “deal” or “agreement”… creepy stuff.
And it does sound as though Polearn’s inhabitants made some kind of a deal. The one thing that fairy stories teach us about places too good to be true is that they are generally too good to be true. All that business about “careful not to irritate your guardian angel, or he’ll desert you and leave you for the Things…”
Cascadia has to be the world’s slug capital, and they are creepy enough without the need for any “psychosexual” interpretation. I used to have a collection of Benson’s stories–wish I still had it–and recall the writer of the intro going tiresomely on and on about Benson’s real or imagined sexual orientation as an influence on his stories, which to me is unprovable. I remember “And no birds sang”–the monster seemed more like a caterpillar or sea-cucumber than a slug; you really need those eyestalks, but anyway. How phosphorescence can be stale I am not sure, unless he means that it has grown dim.
I checked out a book on Lee Brown Coye and it seems he did a drawing based on this story, which I thought I had a copy of but can’t find now; as I recall the negotium was sort of a blob. A Google image search seemed to turn up only irrelevant material.
The “Long Gallery” story was memorable for a heroine who didn’t succumb to terror and turned the story around.
It has been said that dogs love people and cats love places; some people including myself are more like cats. But where do ghosts do when the places they haunt are destroyed? There was a theater in Seattle that was supposedly haunted; it was demolished, and if ghosts and so on aren’t total BS, which I suspect they are, that needs to be explained…
Hooooooly shite. I think Sunday, from The Man Who Was Thursday, could be read as a Shoggoth. Look at this.
Someone else describing Sunday:
“…But there must have been something in me that answered to the nerves in all these anarchic men. For when I first saw Sunday he expressed to me, not your airy vitality, but something both gross and sad in the Nature of Things. I found him smoking in a twilight room, a room with brown blind down, infinitely more depressing than the genial darkness in which our master lives. He sat there on a bench, a huge heap of a man, dark and out of shape. He listened to all my words without speaking or even stirring. I poured out my most passionate appeals, and asked my most eloquent questions. Then, after a long silence, the Thing began to shake, and I thought it was shaken by some secret malady. It shook like a loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of everything I had ever read about the base bodies that are the origin of life—the deep sea lumps and protoplasm. It seemed like the final form of matter, the most shapeless and the most shameful. I could only tell myself, from its shudderings, that it was something at least that such a monster could be miserable. And then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was shaking with a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me. Do you ask me to forgive him that? It is no small thing to be laughed at by something at once lower and stronger than oneself.”
Remember the parody-murals in At the Mountains of Madness?
Sunday Himself:
“And you,” said Syme, leaning forward, “what are you?”
“I? What am I?” roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. “You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”
Before one of them could move, the monstrous man had swung himself like some huge ourang-outang over the balustrade of the balcony. Yet before he dropped he pulled himself up again as on a horizontal bar, and thrusting his great chin over the edge of the balcony, said solemnly—
{spoiler}
With that he fell from the balcony, bouncing on the stones below like a great ball of india-rubber, and went bounding off towards the corner of the Alhambra, where he hailed a hansom-cab and sprang inside it.
The guardian angels are the worm thingies. Just– shaped into complete sets of pseudo organs.