In a ‘dedicatory letter’ Walpole described the book as ‘a simple shocker which it has amused me like anything to write, and won’t bore you to read.’ Perhaps he had decided to prepare his readers for something ‘gruesome and unpleasant’ with what would now be called a trigger warning. Throughout most of the novel dreadful things, and more so the fear of them, would never be far away: touches of sudden sadistic violence, episodes in a pervasive gothic atmosphere of psychological intensity, come scattered throughout Walpole’s many novels.
Even to a reader who skipped the dedication the opening sentence should seem set to suggest an unusual novel: ‘The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away.’ It takes a moment more to see that Walpole has used a most traditional device: the protagonist on a leisurely train journey, followed by a walk to the final destination. Here, Harkness, who is soon revealed as a young American tourist, is going to visit the Cornish seaside town of Treliss.
When Harkness sees Treliss for the first time it is ‘absolutely the town of his vision’ yet gives him ‘a clutch of terror as though some one was whispering to him that he must turn tail and run’ (30). Once in his hotel Harkness accidentally overhears the distress of a young woman, Hesther, and resolves to himself to help her against her heartless husband and father-in-law. Wandering in the hotel garden before dinner, Harkness observes, fascinated, a man with red hair ‘standing straight on end as Loge’s used to do in the old pre-war Bayreuth “Ring”’ and whose eyes ‘were alive and beautiful, dark, tender, eloquent…’ (52). Introducing himself, the man, Crispin, invites Harkness to join him and his family for dinner. Harkness then realises who the girl was – and the identity of her husband’s dominating father. Crispin now comes to dominate the story, even when not directly appearing on the page.
Having involved himself with the Crispins, Harkness has no choice – and would not want one – except to follow through on the consequences of his promise. He agrees to go along with a plan already hatched by David Dunbar, Hesther’s previously rejected suitor, and Jabez Marriot, a local fisherman, to rescue Hester from Crispin’s house. Harkness has been invited there to view Crispin’s collection of prints and other precious objets d’art. During the visit Crispin tells him his own terrible story: an upbringing that taught him that it was necessary to suffer pain in order to understand the true heart of life – and to control. To inflict pain and then tend the victim is to be greater than God. ‘I myself am increasing my power every day. First one, then another. First through Pain. Then through Love. […] I should myself be superior to the suffering of others, because I know how good it is for them to suffer’ (135).
The rescue of Hesther goes to plan until a sudden and very thick fog prevents the party from escaping across the bay. In a hushed and haunted journey the fugitives attempt to walk to another village, but in the fog find themselves back at Crispin’s house. Wholly in a madman’s power, Harkness and Dunbar are told they can ‘Make your adieus then to the lady. Your eternal adieus’ (234). The two men are eventually led, stripped naked, to a large room at the very top of the house and each tied to a pillar as Jabez already is. Their prison is ‘a high white place with a round ceiling softly primrose. One high window went the length from floor to ceiling, and this window, which was without bars, blazed with sun and shone with the colours of the early morning blue.’ What should be an exalted place in the heights has been corrupted by Crispin’s sadistic madness; his intentions are obvious. But there the story reaches its climax perhaps rather too simply, too easily. The headlong pace sustained throughout comes to an abrupt end and peters out in the few pages remaining – leaving the reader to realise that the entire exhausting action has taken place over less than a single day.
In Portrait of a Man with Red Hair the reader is surrounded and carried forward by Walpole’s sense of place, his gift for describing landscape, weather, and the ever-changing light. The great and heavy fog that descends and occupies most of Part III serves to maintain the tension, if not to increase it, but when the fog has cleared and the novel finished, all seems somehow to have been curiously insubstantial, as if the glowing countryside and enveloping fog had never quite been experienced after all. Perhaps this is appropriate for a ‘simple thriller’ written to provide a few hours’ vivid entertainment – which it certainly does.
(John Howard)
