James Hynes

Mary Hynes was not one person. My mother contained multitudes.
    In the beginning, she was Manda Byelich, the daughter of immigrants, her father a coal miner and factory worker and her mother the full-time mother of eight, of whom Manda was the last, the one in family photographs who squinted at the camera in her big sisters’ hand-me-downs. She was a sister, one of the close-knit trio of the three youngest daughters, whose friends used to stand outside and call for them to come out, chanting their new, Americanized names in sing-song, “Annie! Millie! Mary!”
    My mother was a poor kid during the Depression, who only saw her first movie because the slightly better-off parents of a friend of hers took her with them to see King Kong, and what she remembered from the movie was how shocked she was that Faye Wray, giant ape or no giant ape, allowed her slip to be ruined, because a slip, especially a new one, was hard to come by, in my mother’s experience. 

Then she was a teenager during one of the first generations to celebrate teenagers, on the one hand a bright young woman who was the sports editor of her high school newspaper, and on the other, a hormonal bobbysoxer who hitchhiked with her friend Donna to Detroit and screamed herself hoarse over Frank Sinatra at the Fox Theatre.
    My mother was a college student, briefly, but mainly she was a working girl, starting at Sears in Lansing and working her way up to be personnel manager, where in 1949 she interviewed a veteran named Glendon Hynes. She didn’t hire him, but he called her up and asked her out, and because she was intrigued but sensible, and because she could, she pulled his application and checked his references. For their first date, he took her to the Ionia Free Fair, where she thought they spent not nearly enough time on the rides and way too much time looking at the livestock. Somehow she married him anyway.

    For a long time after that, my mother was a wife and then a mother, three times over. Having grown up poor, she insisted on a certain standard of gracious living—no milk cartons or ketchup bottles on the dinner table—but she was also high-spirited and even goofy, a mother who wrote clues for Easter egg hunts in rhymed couplets, who dyed her sons’ underwear green on St. Patrick’s Day, and who put books of stamps in her grown sons’ Christmas stockings every year as a not-so-subtle reminder that it wouldn’t kill you to write your mother once in a while.

    Along the way, my mother was a friend, an aunt, a parishioner of this church, a member of the city planning board, a bookstore employee, a volunteer, a taxpayer, and an indifferent cook, if you want to know the truth. She was a lifelong fan of the Detroit Tigers who could quote you “Casey at the Bat” from memory. She was a singer, whose repertoire encompassed hymns and show tunes, which she sang when she was ironing or doing the dishes. Later in life, she became a fan of Bruce Springsteen, changing her allegiance from one singer from New Jersey for another, from the Chairman of the Board to the Boss.
    My mother was, in her own quiet way, a feminist and an intellectual, who helped lead the effort to erect a monument in Big Rapids to Anna Howard Shaw. She was a joker, who once returned a particularly racy John Updike novel to a friend who’d loaned it to her only after wrapping it up in a plain brown wrapper, who commemorated the sinking of one of my brother Tom’s model boats by presenting him with a birthday cake with a toy boat upended in the frosting, who could laugh herself breathless over one of her own stories, usually told at her own expense. My mother was a writer, who went back to college in her late 50s to earn her journalism degree, and she was a newspaper columnist who was equal parts Erma Bombeck and James Boswell, chronicling with wit and affection the events of the town where she lived and her adventures with the man she immortalized as the Old Professor.

    Later in life, probably later than she preferred, she was a mother-in-law and, at last, a proud and loving grandmother. And then, much too quickly, she was a caretaker, who eased the passing, as best she could, of her husband of more than half a century. Then she was a widow, who used her wit and her talent to capture his essence in three words, the perfect epitaph. And in the last year when she could still look after herself, she became, by the grace of my brother Michael, a European traveler, who saw Rome and Venice and who returned to the village where her parents had been born.
    In the end, my mother was a mystery, as age and disease led her down a path where no one could follow. One by one, all the people she had been before—grandmother, mother, wife, writer—they all fell away, and she became younger as she became older, returning to earlier memories and earlier selves before, in turn, she shed those, too. Her wit survived longer than some of her other attributes: early in her dementia, when we foolishly tried to argue with her about what was real and what wasn’t, we would sometimes try to convince her that our father and her husband was really, truly dead, even to the point of showing her his death certificate, and she would say, with Serbian stubbornness, “Well, he came back.” And when we said, nobody ever comes back from that, she would say, “Well, you know your father. He never lets anybody tell him what to do.”

    But mainly I will remember my mother as a storyteller, as the one person, more than any other, who taught me how to tell stories. And so I will end with a story. The last time I saw her alive, last August, I sat with her and my brother Tom for three nights in a row in her room, watching television. She could no longer speak, and she was very frail, just a shell, and for the first two nights of my visit, I wasn’t even sure there was a person in there anymore. But on the third and final night, we watched a live TV production of South Pacific, one of her favorites, and I could tell from the way she lifted her head a little higher, and from the faint but discernible brightness in her eyes, that she recognized a least a little of what she was hearing. She looked rapt during the serious songs, like “Bali H’ai” and “Some Enchanted Evening,” but more significantly, I saw her smile during the funny ones, like “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.” She may not have known any longer why they were funny, but even now, after her memory had all but exhausted itself, and after all the other people she had ever been had disappeared, there was still a little spark, a little inextinguishable essence of Mary Hynes that still knew they were funny, and so at least I can say, that the last time I saw her, my mother was laughing.

I really wasn't going to do another Halloween list this year. It all started when Maud Newton asked me for a list of Halloween reading a few years ago, and then I did a couple more lists on my own, in 2008 and 2009. Lately, of course, as the handful of you who still come here know, I've been pretty much AWOL, blogwise. But then a friend of mine hinted that maybe I should do another one, and since I'm easily suggestible, and I had a little time on my hands, here it is.

I'm also, however, lazy. I don't keep up with contemporary horror fiction as a rule—well, not at all, to be honest—and if you look at the stuff I've written about in the past, hardly any of it dates from any later than 1970 or so. Which means that, up until now, I've basically been trawling the depths of my adolescent reading, so that this year it was either a) read some new stuff, or b) start digging around in my dusty old paperbacks for stories I didn't  remember the last two times around. But since, as I say, I'm lazy, and since a middle-aged midlist novelist wants nothing more than to prove how au courant he is, I decided instead to go straight to YouTube (au courant, that is, circa 2005).

Each of these entries (except the Disney and Tim Burton ones) has a direct literary antecedent, so that, by the skin of my teeth, I'm clinging to conceit that this is a literary list, and that Cultwriter is still a literary blog. But lest you think I'm doing a half-assed job here—to be fair to myself, I think it's at least a three-quarter-assed job—bear in mind that everything here (with the exception of the Tim Burton clip) is something I remember from my dank, gloomy, melancholy, Halloweenish adolescence, and is submitted here—as Rod Serling, another ancient influence, might say—for your approval. Happy Halloween! 

1. "The Golden Arm," by Mark Twain. This story, which is not original to Twain, appears as an example in his essay "How to Tell a Story." It is (fair warning) a "negro" dialect story, but in the hands of the right storyteller, it's lots of fun, and genuinely spooky. Ideally, you need to hear it live and in person, and probably from Mark Twain himself, who used to include it in his lecture tours. But since that's not possible (so far as I know—it is Halloween, after all), the next best thing is to hear it told by the great Hal Holbrook, during the course of his epic one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight. It's a testament to Holbrook's performance that I still remember this story vividly, having seen it only once before, when Mark Twain Tonight was televised in 1967, when I was 12 years old. I've only just watched it again today for the first time  in (ulp!) 43 years, and it's even better than I remembered it. Somehow, copyright be damned, the entire TV production of Mark Twain Tonight has ended up on YouTube, and "The Golden Arm" starts at 5:04 in part 8, continuing into part 9.

2. "Tailypo." This is another classic American oral story (essentially the same story as "The Golden Arm," in fact), in a version by some film students from the University of Georgia. I first heard it, live, during a one-man show performed by a touring actor whose name I no longer remember, who did a Holbrookish one-man show of American folk tales at the college where my father taught, Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan, sometime in the late 60s. Whoever he was (and I'm truly sorry I don't remember his name), he put on a great show, and despite my only ever having heard it once, I remember the story in every detail more than 40 years later. In fact, I used to tell it myself (and pretty well, if I do say so myself), when I was a young man, and when I could get my friends to sit still and be quiet for it. Again, like the Twain story, it doesn't work quite as well on screen as it does on person, so I suggest doing what I did, namely, learning it and trying it out yourself on a willing audience, and see what kind of reaction you get.

3. "The Raven," by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Raven," read by Christopher Walken. Nuff said.

4. "Night on Bald Mountain," from Walt Disney's Fantasia. This is still one of the spookiest things I've ever seen, the last great effort from the golden age of Disney animation, before the company entered that long, anodyne period in the 50s and 60s when it was afraid to frighten or disturb anybody. Unlike "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence in the same film, there's nothing jokey or cute about this: it's pure nightmare stuff, with a demon of (literally) mountainous proportions summoning ghosts from their graves, calling out demons and harpies, and casting damned souls into the fires of Hell (which is kinda like actually working for Disney, or so I'm told). Not only is there genuine terror and some rather European grotesquerie in this piece, there's also a perverse eroticism that appears nowhere else in the Disney canon (unless you count Britney Spears on The New Mickey Mouse Club, or certain Haley Mills movies). Naked women are summoned out of flame, and nude harpies with deathly pale skin and shocking pink nipples rush right at the camera. The demon himself has a raw erotic power as well, and I'm about 90 percent certain that he scared the crap out of a young Peter Jackson, who grew up to recast him as the Balrog in Lord of the Rings. And all of it set, of course, to the witches' sabbath music of Modest Mussorgsky, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

5. "Vincent," by Tim Burton. This is the ur-text of the entire Tim Burton canon, his first short film, made when he still working (unhappily, see above) for Disney. In seven and a half minutes you can see, in embryo, nearly every obsession, trope, and idiosyncracy that Burton would display in later films—with more time and bigger budgets, but not always as effectively as here. Already it expresses, fully formed, the jokey-macabre sensibility that would inform not only Burton's work, but the work of a generation of filmmakers since. Still, after all these years, Burton's one of the few who can get the balance between jokes and creepiness just right, and it's pitch perfect here, aided immeasurably by the voice of the late, great Vincent Price himself.

6. "Whistle and I'll Come to You," by Jonathan Miller. This is the only film version I know of "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad," the second greatest story by M. R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in the English language. The film was made in 1968 by the polymath writer, actor, director, and physician Jonathan Miller, best known as a member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy troupe. It's a fairly faithful adaptation, with one serious quibble: Miller insists on making the ending more psychological, in the manner of a Henry James ghost story, instead sticking to the unambiguous, uninflected ghostliness of M. R. James's original, which works better. That said, this little film is extremely well made and well worth watching, for two things in particular: the wonderfully spooky black-and-white cinematography by Dick Bush, and the perfectly twitchy central performance by the great English actor Michael Hordern. And PS,  Shameless Plug Division: I stole the climax of James's original story for a moment in the final novella in my book Publish and Perish, "Casting the Runes," which is a retelling of M. R. James's short story of the same name (which, if you're keeping score, is his best story).

There you go, this year's Halloween list, a multimedia, interactive lollapalooza. I see by looking back at last year's list that I was already beginning to whine about writing these things, that I had no intention even then of doing one every year. And I still don't. Really. So don't expect one next year. I mean it.

So, once again, until next year--d'oh!—Happy Halloween!