Literary fame and fortune is fickle. Hugh Walpole was a popular writer in the 20s and 30s who is mostly unread today. However, his ability to set a scene was excellent. He was well known for his historical novels, but also his supernatural fiction. The VanderMeers call “The Tarn” “a perceptive, clever, and all-too-true weird tale … our personal favourite” (241) and it can be seen why: it is a highly relatable tale of literary jealousy and sweet revenge.

Fenwick, the protagonist, is the author of a sombre novel, The Bitter Aloe, while his rival, Foster, wrote The Circus, a sentimentalist piece of garbage that is also a bestseller. The couple is a classic Ernie and Bert pair, with the addition that Fenwick is fantasizing constantly about brutally murdering happy-go-lucky Foster.

Fenwick blames the failure of his own book on Foster’s success. In the spirit of reconciliation, Foster invites himself over to Fenwick’s Lake District home, where he proceeds to pipe himself up with a false sense of modesty, saying that he has some talent “but not so much as people say,” before bragging that his success has allowed him to spend his time between the countryside, London, and “Italy or Greece or somewhere” (243). He’s also won a literary award: “Of course, a hundred pounds isn’t much. But it’s the honour,” he says (244).

Fenwick puts up with him quietly, giving every appearance of friendship and receptiveness, but secretly he wants to “push Foster’s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets” (243).

Fenwick invites Foster for a walk along his tarn, which is a small, but deep lake at the base of a hill. There Fenwick takes revenge–Edgar Allan Poe style. Fenwick and Foster could easily be standing in for Montresor and Fortunato from “The Cask of Amontillado.” Like Montresor, Fenwick seeks to redress insult after suffering injury, all the while never hinting that he bears his victim any ill will. (The tarn itself also reminded me of the one in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”)

Walpole suggests the unsettling nature of the tarn through descriptions and use of dialogue to set the mood. For example, while explaining to Foster what a tarn is, Fenwick says that “some of them are immensely deep–unfathomable–nobody touched the bottom–but quiet, like glass, with shadows only–” (244).

Later, he says, “Do you know why I love this place, Foster? It seems to belong especially to me, just as much as all your work and your glory and fame and success seem to belong to you. I have this and you have that. Perhaps in the end we are even after all” (245). This line communicates the depth of his loneliness and his bitter desire for revenge. He then leads Foster toward a jetty and drowns him in the shadows of the deep lake.

On the way home, Fenwick fancies that a man is following him back. He even believes that “it was the tern that was following him, the tarn slipping, sliding along the road, being with him so that he should not be lonely” (246). After all, Fenwick is a very lonely man, and he appreciates the tarn’s company whenever he spends time alone by the lake.

But Fenwick does not find peace that night. In the middle of the night, the tarn appears as an apparition in his own bedroom, filling up his room with water, until it grabs him by the ankle and drowns him. In the morning, all that is discovered is his body and “an overturned water jug” (247).

As a weird tale, “The Tarn” is well-achieved–it does what it does in a classic way, and it does it very well. The ghost is like the genius loci from Clarke Ashton Smith, a spirit of the tarn that gives Fenwick his just desserts. But the way in which the tarn moves, in its slithering, sliding way, into Fenwick’s second-floor bedroom, appears quite innovative. The apparition symbolizes Fenwick’s worst fears–and his unacknowledged regret at murdering his one and only friend.

Walpole was clearly an writer familiar with literary fame, moving in the same circles as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. He may have been familiar with Fenwick’s gripes and probably experienced jealousy just as much as the fame and success Foster enjoys. Most serious, published writers probably feel some degree of professional jealousy at a given point in their careers. It’s never healthy to act on such jealousy, certainly not to the extent Fenwick does, but at the same time, the feeling is very real, and Walpole captures that feeling brilliantly.

Next week, I will be examining Bruno Schulz’s “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” (1936), translated by Celina Wieniewska.