"A pariah even among demons"
Oct. 6th, 2022 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileIn my search for weird spooky season reads I figured it was time to finally pick up the rest of Montague Summers’ The Vampire (originally published as The Vampire: His Kith and Kin), the first two chapters of which I read sometime when I was still in school, and which I have been moving around from house to house with a bookmark in Chapter 3 for a good 15 years now.
Montague Summers is not an easy read. He was an incredibly strange person, initially studying to be an Anglican priest and then converting to Roman Catholicism and styling himself a Catholic priest despite there being no records of him having ever been ordained. He believed wholeheartedly in witches, vampires, werewolves, demons, and all sorts of things that the Catholic Church had since come to see as embarrassing superstitions. He was writing in the early 20th century and dressing like it was the late Middle Ages. He is the absolute wordiest man in the world, and his writing is full of long rambling digressions, vehemently earnest editorializing, untranslated passages in Latin and French, half-translated passages in Greek and German, and quotations from every conceivable source, no matter how dubious–from Ovid to newspaper articles to “an authority” to some guy he once met. His works are likely best read on a hefty dose of NyQuil.
That said, the book furnishes us with a fascinating array of legends, ghost stories, and murders, as well as whatever other anecdotes Summers feels like telling on any subject whatsoever. To the degree that they are tied together by anything, they are being sorted into Summers’ attempts to “prove” what beliefs about vampires are true and which ones are embellishments. He is entertainingly disdainful of people who do not believe in them at all, and extremely judgmental in his tours through the folklore of the world. I don’t remember very much about the first two chapters, since I read them umpteen years ago. The third chapter, “The Traits and Practices of Vampirism,” talks a lot about suicides and Greek drama, then relates many interesting folkloric beliefs about types of blood-eating ghosts and demons from various places and what causes someone to become one of these ghosts, then embarks upon a supremely awkward analysis of “love-bites” before relating to the reader the career of serial killer Fritz Haarmaan, who would have been reasonably recent news at the time of publication (Haarmaan was exposed in late 1924). The fourth chapter concerns vampire legends in “Assyria, the East, and some Ancient Countries,” which is very A Nineteenth-Century British Guy Writes About Asia at times, but is great fun if you can remember not to take any of it seriously (which is easy, given that Summers is largely relating these legends with an eye towards somehow proving that vampires are real, and therefore takes great pains to point out commonalities with European vampire legends and explain away differences).
The last chapter is undoubtedly the funniest and the most obviously dated. It is called “The Vampire in Literature” and it is like 75% about French theater. It references many interesting-sounding works that have apparently not stood the test of time at all as I have never heard of them, and I have heard of a lot of old vampire literature. He discusses Polidori’s The Vampyre at little length and then the bajillion stage adaptations thereof at much greater length. He professes that good scary stories have to be short, which is hilarious coming from the Reverend Augustus Montague Summers, Wordiest Motherfucker in the World, of all people. He opines that even Le Fanu’s Carmilla is possibly starting to get overextended in how long it is (it is a novella); he then immediately contradicts himself by gushing over what an impressively long-running artistic work the 800-page monstrosity Varney the Vampire is. (He also misattributes it to Thomas Peckett Prest, which is one of his more understandable errors–this was a popular belief at the time.) His gushing praise for Varney contrasts hilariously with his disdain for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the unprecedented popularity of which he attributes solely to the fact that it’s about vampires, as he thinks that it is too long, the characters are boring, only the first five chapters have any real narrative tension, and–predictably but hilariously–that Bram Stoker erred in including aspects of the vampire legend that are poorly sourced and that Summers has therefore concluded are unfounded, and he thinks that Stoker should have stuck only to true and proven vampire facts. It is extra funny reading this in the context of doing the Dracula Daily readalong on Tumblr, where everyone is discovering anew after decades of unfaithful movie adaptations that “the polycula,” as it has been affectionately nicknamed, consists of absolutely fantastic characters that movie makers have done dirty for years. Of course, the only Dracula movie adaptation that even existed at the time this book was published was the unauthorized German expressionist film Nosferatu, and anyway, Summers does not acknowledge that movies exist. He instead closes out the book by slamming the Dracula stage adaptations and misspelling Bela Lugosi’s name.
In short, this book is almost unreadably terrible in an uncountable number of ways and yet I am tempted to be like “Absolutely perfect, 10/10, no notes,” because if it were in any way better it would be less funny. Highly recommended if you want to get real serious about insane pseudo-scholarly works on the occult by eccentric throwback Catholics who fancied themselves real-life vampire hunters.
Montague Summers is not an easy read. He was an incredibly strange person, initially studying to be an Anglican priest and then converting to Roman Catholicism and styling himself a Catholic priest despite there being no records of him having ever been ordained. He believed wholeheartedly in witches, vampires, werewolves, demons, and all sorts of things that the Catholic Church had since come to see as embarrassing superstitions. He was writing in the early 20th century and dressing like it was the late Middle Ages. He is the absolute wordiest man in the world, and his writing is full of long rambling digressions, vehemently earnest editorializing, untranslated passages in Latin and French, half-translated passages in Greek and German, and quotations from every conceivable source, no matter how dubious–from Ovid to newspaper articles to “an authority” to some guy he once met. His works are likely best read on a hefty dose of NyQuil.
That said, the book furnishes us with a fascinating array of legends, ghost stories, and murders, as well as whatever other anecdotes Summers feels like telling on any subject whatsoever. To the degree that they are tied together by anything, they are being sorted into Summers’ attempts to “prove” what beliefs about vampires are true and which ones are embellishments. He is entertainingly disdainful of people who do not believe in them at all, and extremely judgmental in his tours through the folklore of the world. I don’t remember very much about the first two chapters, since I read them umpteen years ago. The third chapter, “The Traits and Practices of Vampirism,” talks a lot about suicides and Greek drama, then relates many interesting folkloric beliefs about types of blood-eating ghosts and demons from various places and what causes someone to become one of these ghosts, then embarks upon a supremely awkward analysis of “love-bites” before relating to the reader the career of serial killer Fritz Haarmaan, who would have been reasonably recent news at the time of publication (Haarmaan was exposed in late 1924). The fourth chapter concerns vampire legends in “Assyria, the East, and some Ancient Countries,” which is very A Nineteenth-Century British Guy Writes About Asia at times, but is great fun if you can remember not to take any of it seriously (which is easy, given that Summers is largely relating these legends with an eye towards somehow proving that vampires are real, and therefore takes great pains to point out commonalities with European vampire legends and explain away differences).
The last chapter is undoubtedly the funniest and the most obviously dated. It is called “The Vampire in Literature” and it is like 75% about French theater. It references many interesting-sounding works that have apparently not stood the test of time at all as I have never heard of them, and I have heard of a lot of old vampire literature. He discusses Polidori’s The Vampyre at little length and then the bajillion stage adaptations thereof at much greater length. He professes that good scary stories have to be short, which is hilarious coming from the Reverend Augustus Montague Summers, Wordiest Motherfucker in the World, of all people. He opines that even Le Fanu’s Carmilla is possibly starting to get overextended in how long it is (it is a novella); he then immediately contradicts himself by gushing over what an impressively long-running artistic work the 800-page monstrosity Varney the Vampire is. (He also misattributes it to Thomas Peckett Prest, which is one of his more understandable errors–this was a popular belief at the time.) His gushing praise for Varney contrasts hilariously with his disdain for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the unprecedented popularity of which he attributes solely to the fact that it’s about vampires, as he thinks that it is too long, the characters are boring, only the first five chapters have any real narrative tension, and–predictably but hilariously–that Bram Stoker erred in including aspects of the vampire legend that are poorly sourced and that Summers has therefore concluded are unfounded, and he thinks that Stoker should have stuck only to true and proven vampire facts. It is extra funny reading this in the context of doing the Dracula Daily readalong on Tumblr, where everyone is discovering anew after decades of unfaithful movie adaptations that “the polycula,” as it has been affectionately nicknamed, consists of absolutely fantastic characters that movie makers have done dirty for years. Of course, the only Dracula movie adaptation that even existed at the time this book was published was the unauthorized German expressionist film Nosferatu, and anyway, Summers does not acknowledge that movies exist. He instead closes out the book by slamming the Dracula stage adaptations and misspelling Bela Lugosi’s name.
In short, this book is almost unreadably terrible in an uncountable number of ways and yet I am tempted to be like “Absolutely perfect, 10/10, no notes,” because if it were in any way better it would be less funny. Highly recommended if you want to get real serious about insane pseudo-scholarly works on the occult by eccentric throwback Catholics who fancied themselves real-life vampire hunters.