At my high school, we read a Shakespeare play each year in English classes. For juniors, that play was, by inviolable custom, MACBETH. It was not taught with historical context; that is to say, nobody took time to explain that, far from being the murderous bastard whose ambition killed a beloved king, drove a wife and accomplice to madness and death, and all but destroyed Scotland in the process that Shakespeare made of him, Macbeth was one of the truly great Scots kings. (That Shakespeare was pandering to the man on the throne of a united-in-all-but-name England and Scotland of his day, James I, descended from the bloodline of the man who killed Macbeth in battle, would have been, frankly, a bit hard for my peers to grasp. Iambic pentameter was hard enough without adding the history of a declining Celtic kingdom, and the attempt of a playwright to stay in good standing with the royals, to the mix.)



In her 2008 novel LADY MACBETH, Susan Fraser King does a good deal toward telling Macbeth's story, and that of his wife, straight. She tells the story of a quarter-century long marriage and a seventeen-year reign by a beloved couple who were brought down, ultimately, by their very failure to be the ruthless killers of Shakespeare's fancy.

King's accomplishment is to take the meager information we have about Lady Macbeth and her husband and construct, frankly, a far more plausible history than Shakespeare's. Lady Macbeth, far from being the diabolical harpy of the play, is a princess of both Scots and Irish descent whose bloodline was so royal that she was in fact a full partner to her husband, Queen of Scots to his kingship rather than queen consort, left to reign in his stead during his 1050 pligrimage to Rome.

The witches of Shakespeare's imagination (probably another ploy to tempt his royal fan, whose obsession with witches is legendary) are transformed in King's narrative into what they truly were: Celtic wisewomen gifted in herbal lore and with the Second Sight, walking between the two worlds of old Celtic customs of protective chants and rituals and the insistence that none but the Catholic faith (itself, in those centuries, still divided between Roman and Celtic practices) could save.

The king Duncan whom Macbeth kills to ascend the throne is portrayed as what he truly was: an incompetent hothead in his twenties, put on the throne by a grandfather who wanted to establish a dynasty in keeping with the customs of the neighboring Saxons of England, who all but decimated Scotland in a bloody and fruitless war to try to bring the Vikings of the Orkney Isles under his dominion, and was killed not by treachery but in a fair fight with Macbeth, his older and infinitely more gifted cousin.

The downfall of the Macbeths would come, seventeen years into his reign, because they had mercifully let the young sons of Duncan live. The older one would be the killer of Macbeth and would go down in history as Malcolm Canmore, taught that his father had been usurped by an evil man and out for revenge; he succeeded both by killing Macbeth and by trying to destroy his reputation so thoroughly that both Shakespeare and his source, Raphael Hollinshed, could completely without irony portray Macbeth as a monster.

Nor, according to King, is there any reason to suppose that Lady Macbeth predeceased her husband. Barely forty at the time of his death, she most likely survived him, but totally disappears from the historical record thereafter.

Moreover, King points out, Malcolm Canmore did not succeed to the throne immediately upon Macbeth's death; Macbeth's successor was his stepson Lulach, Lady Macbeth's son by a first marriage, which suggests a far more convincing account of Macbeth's death: that, gravely wounded, he nevertheless lived long enough to make a fast journey to Scone, where Scots kings were always crowned sitting on the Lia-Fail (Stone of Scone, itself eventually usurped for the crownings of English kings), and saw Lulach crowned before he died of his wounds.

I will give Shakespeare this, though: nothing in King's otherwise excellent telling of the story of a beloved and great king can match the majesty of Macbeth's final soliloquy, given when news of his wife's death is brought to him:

She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. . .

Some last observations: Macbeth's death traditionally is said to have fallen on August 17th in the year 1057, so it's ironic that I should have come across this book in the local library just now.

Number two, for all Malcolm Canmore's scheming and hatred, Macbeth and his successor Lulach both lie buried, as they should, with the rightful kings of Scotland in the ancient royal burial ground on the island of Iona.

And one final oddity, a tie to Shakespeare's play: Immediately after Macbeth kills Duncan, he is summoned by a knocking at the gate, celebrated by the essayist Thomas de Quincey in "On the Knocking at the Gate in MACBETH." I swear this is true; the night I began reading this book I was awakened, in black dark, by the sound of someone knocking at our front door, a sound repeated twice. There were no other sounds of walking or of anyone being around, and Mom, sleeping in a room much closer to the front door, heard nothing.

Being of Scots and Irish blood myself, I can't help but wonder what a summoning that might have been.

And if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

An excellent piece from WaPo staff writer Adrian Higgins about efforts to restore Steepletop, the Austerlitz, NY home of the Jazz Age poet Edna St. Vincent Millay--the house, her writing cabin, the pool where she, her husband and friends skinnydipped, and above all her vegetable and fruit gardens:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con....isrc=newsletter



Most of us know "Vincent" as intimates apparently called her from this bit:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But oh! my foes, and oh! my friends,
It gives a lovely light.

But she wrote a substantial body of verse, often inspired by current events, such as the Sacco and Vanzetti trial.

Indeed, my beloved Barbara Michaels was inspired by Millay poems to write two novels: INTO THE DARKNESS, a title taken from "Dirge Without Music"--

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

And BE BURIED IN THE RAIN, from "Justice Denied in Massachusetts":

. . .The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

In the last decade of her life (she died at age 58, in a drunken tumble down the stairs of Steepletop, in 1950) her poetry had fallen out of favor as "oldfashioned", but in its day was considered cutting edge. A lot of it is very much worth the reading still.

If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

Y'all know how scholars are: they like to keep facts and fantasies categorized according to type. They've even taken folklore and reduced it to a series of what they call motifs--a central idea that can have endless variations.

Well, one of my favorite motifs in folklore is the King of the Cats, which may have had its origins in the medieval period. The basic tale is usually told like this:

A man is walking home from his work one night when he comes up on the strangest sight he's ever seen. He tells his wife about it when he gets home. He had come up on what appeared to be a cat funeral. There was one large cat marching in front, walking on its hind legs, followed by twelve cats, six on each side, also walking on their hind legs, who are carrying a board on which lies the body of a dead cat. When they see him, the leader gives an imperious gesture which stops the other cats in their tracks. And then the leader SPEAKS to him, in screechy but recognizable human speech: "You!! Go tell Dildrum, Doldrum's dead!"

When the man reaches that part of his story, their old house cat, who has been lying drowsing by the fire, leaps up, shouts, "Then I'M the King of the Cats!" and vanishes up the chimney, never to be seen again.

Like all folklore motifs, this one has myriad variants. One such can be found in C.B. Colby's 1988 book WORLD'S BEST "TRUE" GHOST STORIES; the story is recounted under the title of "The Witch Cat of the Catskills" as it's supposed to have taken place in New York's Catskill Mountains. Instead of a royal funeral, there are two cats dragging the body of a third between them; they lay their burden down long enough for one of them to tell the human protagonist to go home and tell Molly Myers that she can come home now because Old Man Hawkins is dead. When he recounts this at home, the housecat, without a word, goes up the chimney and is never seen again, the implication being that she is Molly Myers.

My favorite variant though is a short story by the American writer Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943). Best known for his variant on the deal with the devil motif "The Devil and Daniel Webster", Benet wrote his story "The King of the Cats" in 1929 for HARPER'S BAZAAR. In his story, the mysterious M. Thibault (the French version of Tybalt, Prince of Cats), a disturbingly feline orchestra conductor who actually has a tail, has taken Manhattan by storm, even managing to woo away the girlfriend of a young Manhattanite. The young suitor goes to great lengths trying to find out how to break M. Thibault's spell over his girl, until finally he and a friend hatch a plot to tell the story of the king of the cats at a fancy dinner party, with predictable results.

Benet tells the story with great panache and wit. The young suitor's bumbling over the story is masterful, and it does bring about the desired effect; M. Thibault vanishes with a French-accented shout of "Then I'M the King of the Cats!" and the young lovers are eventually reunited.



I love a story with a happy ending. And if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

In the past couple of days we've had two short sharp afternoon showers of rain, totaling more than we've had in weeks. This morning I woke to a leaden sky. Hmmm--that looked promising. Good day to settle down with a good book. Preferably an old favorite--familiar characters, familiar situation. And in my case--and yes, I'm not exactly like other people--maybe a ghost or two.

So I piled up with Barbara Michaels's 1971 novel THE CRYING CHILD. It begins with a sad, sad premise: a woman who has lost a child to miscarriage. However, on the tiny island in Maine's Casco Bay where the story is set, her loss stirs up the spirits of a mother and child who died in 1846.

Very conventional story: the hauntings, the Gothic trappings, the lovers in danger. There's a huge fancy mansion built by a seafaring man for his legitimate family, with a wing added on for a mistress and illegitimate child whom he smuggled in under the guise of an adoptee and his nurse; there's a spooky old family graveyard whose most conspicuous features are a truly hideous New England Gothic revival mausoleum and a tombstone outside the fence that bear only the name "Miss Smith" and a date; and there are the ghosts. The more insidious of the two is a mere sound--of a small child crying in the distance; the other is a full-fledged materialization of a woman in a cape.

And--this being a Michaels book--there are cats. Mostly Maine coons, those magnificent furballs that look like pintsize lions with great plumy tails, they are almost as major characters as the humans.

In 1996 THE CRYING CHILD was a made for TV movie, with Mariel Hemingway as the mother who miscarried her child and Finola Hughes in the role of her concerned sister. Billed as "based on the novel by Barbara Michaels", it was based on the novel in only the loosest sense; characters added, characters subtracted, and a contrived explosion and fire at the end.

The book's better.



If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

To a girl from the red clay knobs, the bayous of Louisiana seem a strange and wonderful place, as harshly beautiful in their watery way as the high desert. They are also the home of the Cajuns, the French immigrants driven out of what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia (then called Acadia; Cajun is a corruption of Acadian). The Cajuns made a world for themselves in the bayous: a way of speech that harks back to their French roots, a cuisine that makes use of what they can fish and hunt and raise from the land, and tales that still carry the savor of their original home in France. (A great introduction to those tales is HAUNTED BAYOU AND OTHER CAJUN GHOST STORIES by the storyteller J.J. Reneaux.)

One of the most fearsome creatures in French folklore is the loup-garou, the dreaded werewolf, who can change from human to wolf under certain conditions. In France, in a werewolf panic that began around 1520 and lasted over a century, some thirty thousand people were tried and burned as werewolves, accused (among other things) of killing humans and eating their flesh while in their wolf form.

The werewolf legend lies at the heart of Carolyn Haines's 2007 novel FEVER MOON, which I just finished reading this morning. Set in a nameless town in New Iberia parish (the setting also for James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels) in 1944, the story begins with a murder: the death of Henri Bastion, the richest, most politically powerful, and most corrupt man in the parish, found ripped to pieces with a small blood-covered woman named Adele Hebert standing over him. The people of the swamps, egged on by Adele's sister Bernadette, a troublemaking associate of Bastion's named Praytor Bless, and their knowledge of the legends of their fathers about the loup-garou, erupt in a frenzy, a frenzy only heightened when a child disappears in the night.

The one person who doesn't believe in the legend is a sheriff's deputy named Raymond Thibodeaux, a veteran still carrying the shrapnel that nearly killed him in the still-raging Second World War; he has seen the evil men can do and knows they need no help from a legend to commit the most depraved acts against each other. He is certain that Adele was not the murderer of Henri Bastion, and the bulk of the story is devoted to his efforts to prove her innocence.

It takes a lot for a book to give me the shivers. This one did: the mix of folklore, the descriptions of the dark and foreboding Bayou Teche, and the characters living out the fears of their ancestors, is one I'll not easily forget.

Stephen King once cheerfully admitted that his criteria were simple in his writing: if he could not terrify, he would horrify, and if he could not horrify, he's not too proud to go for the grossout. Haines doesn't have to go for the grossout; she simply stands your hair on end with a dense haunting prose that brings to life our atavistic fear of what might lurk in the dark--a fear common to all cultures.

If you can find this one, it's worth a read.

And if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.