A Preference for “Green Tea”
by Jeffrey Greene
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
The thing is an illusion, yet it follows him home, even dogging his steps, and enters the house with him. While impalpable and enveloped in the same dull red glow as its eyes, it behaves in some ways like an ordinary monkey. At first it seems “jaded, sulky, dazed and languid,” but its glowing red eyes are never off him. “In all situations, at all hours it is awake and looking at me. That never changes.” This demon, for that is what it is, has a single character, he finds, “one of malignity, unfathomable malignity.”
Although the monkey unaccountably disappears for weeks and even as long as three months at a time, it always returns and, each time, it seems more enraged, more determined to destroy the hapless Mr. Jennings. It follows him to his parish in Kenlis and thwarts his attempts to preach sermons by planting itself on the very page he is reading from, forcing him to withdraw in shame from his congregation. Jennings has long since stopped drinking green tea and prays constantly for deliverance, but nothing avails. When the thing begins to speak to him, Jennings tells Hesselius that this new power of speech will be his undoing.
His listener, shocked by this detail, asks if it speaks as a man does, and he replies that it does, “but there is a peculiarity... It is not by my ears it reaches me; it comes like a singing through my head.” It distracts him with terrible blasphemies, orders him about, is always urging him to harm others or himself, and Hesselius perceives that Mr. Jennings is in the last stages of distress, “like a sinking patient who has given himself up.”
But instead of spending the night with Jennings in his dark, quiet, remote house surrounded by huge elm trees, the doctor departs in order to meditate on Jennings’ case. He leaves his lodgings and travels a short distance to a country inn to better facilitate thinking. This decision proves fatal to his patient, who has sent urgent letters to him in the night, obeying the doctor’s admonition to write to him immediately if the monkey, which has made one of its temporary withdrawals, returns.
When Jennings’ servant finally catches up with him the next day and conveys him to the minister’s house, Hesselius finds a somber-faced servant with blood on his hands, who breaks the awful news to him: Mr. Jennings has “made away with himself.”
The story’s narrator, Dr. Martin Hesselius, who practices something he calls “metaphysical medicine” and would today be called a quack, is, if not the progenitor of the psychic doctor (that is Balzac’s Dr. Desplain), certainly the prototype in English literature, a narrative strategy later emulated with more success by Algernon Blackwood in his John Silence stories, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, Ghost Finder series and Arthur Machen’s Dr. Reymond and Dr. Black.
Hesselius relates the tragic saga of Mr. Jennings, (though it is Jennings’ first person account of his haunting, as told to Hesselius, that is the tortured heart of the story, the rest mere framing devices), but he may also deserve the distinction of being one of the first unreliable narrators in English fiction.
The tale we are reading was purportedly a long letter to a friend and former patient found among the papers of the now long-dead Dr. Hesselius by his unnamed, devoted and very uncritical disciple, a much younger man who became his secretary and eventually his literary executor. This particular case, we are told, is one of those that the supposedly brilliant doctor intended for a lay audience, and not written in the more technical language of his scientific work, which would likely leave “unlearned readers” like ourselves baffled.
Hesselius, in relating the case of Mr. Jennings, is presenting us with what emerges as his single failure among his fifty-seven cases of treating what he variously calls “sublimated, precocious and interior visions” and “spectral illusions.” But although the doctor’s unforgivable error in judgment directly results in the death of his patient (he insists that Jennings hadn’t yet become his patient, so he doesn’t really count as a failure), he refuses to take responsibility for this egregious malpractice, instead blaming Mr. Jennings’ preventable death on “hereditary suicidal mania.” He rattles on about “The Cardinal Functions of the Brain,” and of something he calls the cerebral heart, which he believes circulates a fluid through the nerves, and that fluid is spiritual, “though not immaterial, any more than... light or electricity are so.”
Green tea and other stimulative agents, he tells us, can with excessive use disturb this spiritual fluid, forming spots on the brain on which disembodied spirits may operate. “Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.”
Whatever explanation we can expect for this inexplicable and fatal persecution of a good man comes to us from the mouth of the vain, overconfident Dr. Hesselius, assisted by a series of well-chosen quotations from the Arcana Coelestia of Emanuel Swedenborg. LeFanu artfully weaves the Swedish mystic’s extraordinarily detailed visions of Heaven and Hell into “Green Tea,” which partially depends for its effectiveness on the Swedenborgian conviction that the spirit world impinges closely on the material world and that humans and spiritual beings, whether divine in origin or from one of the many hells, are normally unable to perceive each others’ existence. Hesselius believes — no, is dogmatically certain — that Mr. Jennings’ mistake — it can’t be called a sin — was, through the immoderate consumption of green tea, inadvertently to weaken the brain’s natural barrier between the exterior and interior senses.
I suppose the haunting power of this story might cause a few readers who regularly consume large quantities of green tea to forgo that third cup, but most of us are more likely to snicker than swear off this harmless stimulant. It’s impossible to deny the silliness of the premise, and some might quibble over the notion of a demon taking the animal form of a monkey and not something more obviously terrifying, like say, a huge spider, or some monstrous teratoid, but LeFanu knew what he was about. For that little, black, infernally glowing monkey, in the hands of a writer at the apex of his skills, acquires, through the accumulation of unsettling details, a terrifying distinctness, and a personality that might be the most vivid of the story’s three central characters.
If the traditional ghost can be defined as a kind of spiritual husk or apparition of a dead person, then the “spectral illusion” of Green Tea is not a ghost, but closer to a form of demonic possession or assault. Peter Penzoldt believes that the monkey haunting Mr. Jennings is a symbol of repressed sexual desire and that the minister himself suffers from schizophrenia. I’m not sure if one can have it both ways, but a diagnosis of repression in this unmarried, religious yet intellectual clergyman certainly rings truer than a malevolent split personality.
With the exception of the lesbian undertones of “Carmilla” and the whiff of necrophilia in “Schalken the Painter,” LeFanu tended to shy away from sexual themes in his fiction and, since Green Tea was written the year before he died at the age of fifty-eight, it is at least conceivable that his loneliness and deprivation following his wife’s death so many years before, found its way, consciously or unconsciously, into his supernatural fiction. The parallels between Mr. Jennings’ tea-fueled, nocturnal writing habits resemble those of his creator too closely to be ignored.
But the psychological underpinnings of any story are far less interesting to me than its effectiveness as fiction. And in spite of the weaknesses of plot — the psychoactive properties of green tea and the highly questionable medical ethics and perhaps intentionally preposterous theories of Dr. Hesselius — Green Tea has left generations of readers distressed and uneasy long after reading it. Why?
There are two main reasons for this. LeFanu has never, as far as I know, received credit for being, at least in this story, one of the precursors of Kafka. Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay, “Kafka and his Precursors,” cites Zeno’s Paradox, Lord Dunsany’s story, “Carcassone,” Robert Browning’s poem, “Fears and Scruples,” Kierkegaard in some of his parables and Léon Bloy as writers who have used themes in their work that Kafka later refined and made his own, but Borges either never read LeFanu or didn’t find the relation between Green Tea and The Trial as persuasive as I do.
If a central theme in Kafka is mysterious punishment for unnamed crimes — perhaps merely existing — then Mr. Jennings’ predicament certainly qualifies as Kafkian. The poor clergyman has wronged no one; he simply isolates himself for literary purposes and drinks too much green tea; and for these offenses he receives a punishment so cruel and outlandishly unjust that we both pity him for the lonely horror of his ordeal and count ourselves lucky not to have acquired a “companion” of our own.
It is the sheer arbitrariness of his haunted persecution that sets this ghost story apart from the many hundreds I’ve read. The pitiless hounding to suicide of a good man by an apparently infernal agency (or some animated fragment of his own troubled mind) is a truer depiction of a random, uncaring universe than all the other stories put together that impose a higher order of supernatural justice over the failings of human jurisprudence.
Then there is the haunting itself. There is something indefinably creepy about a visitation that resembles a small primate yet is clearly not of this world and that behaves, almost as a mocking provocation, like the form it has taken. The way it moves, sits, hangs from a lamp when the minister tries to pray and swings itself back and forth before his eyes is both monkey-like and perniciously distracting, while all the time, night and day, month after month, for almost four years (subtracting its brief absences, which seem like a refinement of torment, since it always returns), it watches him.
And there it is: the hatpin in the pineal gland, courage unscrewed from the sticking place, the masterstroke of a detail that never fails to upset me. “If you had ever yourself known this,” he tells Hesselius. “You would be acquainted with desperation.” Indeed we would. I’m not sure if the idea of a spectral monkey dedicated to your destruction and over which you have no control is more disturbing taken literally, a fiend that watches you with sleepless hatred even while you sleep, or as a metaphor — the ultimate trespass on the sanctity of human privacy, a symbolic threat which, in our hyper-connected digital inferno, becomes, in ways LeFanu could never have imagined, more timely and significant with each reading.
LeFanu’s sensitive, atmospheric prose has grown on me with the years, and while I’ve already noted the flaws of Green Tea — and what great work of fiction doesn’t have one or two? — I haven’t commented on the masterfully constructed plot, which unhurriedly peels itself like the layers of an onion, adding suspense and unease with each tantalizingly titled chapter, as it leads us down to its fearful, tragic core, revealing at last, as Jennings and Hesselius sit together in a darkening room at the minister’s melancholy residence at Richmond while the fading glow of sunset casts an uncertain light on their faces, the inescapable nightmare that this gentle, secretive, tormented man is even then experiencing.
Darkness is everywhere in “Green Tea,” the more serious darkness of a candle-lit age: in the corners of rooms, in unlighted carriages, under huge, spreading elms that surround and embrace the unfortunate clergyman’s home. And silence, too, holds sway: “the depressing silence of an invalid bachelor’s house.” Although private wealth insulates Mr. Jennings from the common evils of hunger and want, his once-fruitful solitude has become a lightless cell in a dungeon deep underground, where he struggles mightily, futilely, against a Fury of uncertain origin, which slowly prevails.
Let me conclude with Mr. Jennings’ own words: “But as food is taken in softly at the lips, and then brought under the teeth, as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has been once caught firmly by the end of the finest fibre of his nerve, is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am.”
Copyright © 2020 by Jeffrey Greene
