Clapperton

By John Herdman

The absurd, the grotesque, Thomas Clapperton, hypochondriac, egomaniac, Scotsman, misanthrope, misogynist, menagerie keeper ... has a date.His romantic rendezvous is with the girl across the road, Trudy Otter. Although Trudy only has an incestuous eye for her brother, Rex.The most dysfunctional of all beings rub against each other in the desperate search for human happiness in John Herdman's gothic miserene, Clapperton.Also in this volume, The Devil and Dr Tuberose. The equally unbalanced Dr Marcus Tuberose battles legless infantry of demons until he finally confronts the devil himself, embodied in the family dog of his blessed colleagues. A tale of transgressive madness from the master of the Scottish Gothic, John Herdman.Two tales of the mania, derangement and the psychopathy peculiar to the Caledonian Antisyzygy. Brace yourself for hilarity, ridicule and an exquisite dose of oddity.ALSO IN THIS EDITION: Complete Herdman Bibliography, spanning six decades of creative output."Perhaps in the very combination of opposites — what either of the two Thomases, of Norwich and Cromarty, might have been willing to call "the Caledonian antisyzygy" — we have a reflection of the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn... we need not be surprised to find that in their literature the Scots present two aspects which appear contradictory. Oxymoron was ever the bravest figure, and we must not forget that disorderly order is order after all." G. GREGORY SMITH, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence"I was struck by Herdman's wry, philosophical bent, his acute sense of place and perception and anguish at the plight of the human condition .... But despite the pitch darkness and seriousness of his themes, Herdman is an appealing writer, with a clipped, laconic and lugubrious wit, capable of swiftly etching a scene .... goodness knows why John Herdman is not much better known than he is." Alan Taylor, The Sunday Herald"Herdman's writing is a feat of great wit and invention." Scotland on Sunday"It is a tribute to Herdman's writing that he evokes so many writers without ever seeming to imitate them .. the quality of Herdman's fantastic imaginings commands respect." Christopher Whyte"John Herdman skilfully treads a vertiginous edge between satiric comedy and high seriousness." The Scotsman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gothic World Literature Editions
• Release date: Nov 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781914090059

Book preview

Clapperton

and

The Devil and Dr Tuberose

Contents

Title Page

Publication History

Clapperton

The Devil and Dr Tuberose

Clapperton’s Day

John Herdman Publications

Bertha M. Boyé

Gothic World Literature Editions

Copyright

Publication History

Clapperton

Scottish International, November1972

In Memoirs of my Aunt Minnie / Clapperton, Rainbow Books, Aberdeen, 1974

Extended and revised version:

In Three Novellas, Polygon Books, Edinburgh,1987

In The Devil and the Giro: Two Centuries of Scottish Stories, ed. Carl MacDougall, Canongate, Edinburgh, 1991

In Four Tales, Zoilus Press, London, 2000

[A Practical Joke, published in Chapman 26, Spring 1980, was incorporated into the extended version]

The Devil and Dr Tuberose

Chapman 58, Autumn 1989

Beloit Fiction Journal (Wisconsin), Vol. 5, No. 1 (Scottish Writers), Fall 1989

In The Devil and Dr Tuberose: Scottish Short Stories 1991, HarperCollins, London, 1991

In Hungarian translation (Az ördög és Dr Tuberose), in Marilynne várva: Mai skót novellák, Pannonia Könyvek, 1998

In The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows, ed. Marjorie Sandor, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2015

CLAPPERTON

Clapperton woke agreeably one December morning in a bed warmed down the middle by the heat of his extended body, and stretched out his feet towards the cool peripheries. Something was not quite right. His right foot felt somehow not entirely normal. The cold sensation of the sheet upon his skin was in some obscure and inexpressible way different from that in the left foot. This fact had registered itself as a shadow upon his consciousness, a slight draught playing upon the warmth of his well-being, even before he was properly awake.

From the beginning Clapperton had felt his body as a burden to him. His earliest reading matter being the Bible, he would, a child of seven, fearfully peruse the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Leviticus and examine his person for the marks of leprosy. ‘And if, when the priest seeth it,’ he read, ‘behold, it be in sight lower than the skin, and the hair thereof turned white; the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is a plague of leprosy broken out of the boil.’ The most miniscule pluke was thereafter an object of terror, and he was seldom without his magnifying glass, in those days. Suffering from headaches from the first, he imagined the interior of his skull sprouting, like that of Schumann, stalactites of knife-sharp bone. If he cut his finger or scratched his knee, every twinge in his back presaged for him (since he disbelieved in growing pains) the arching of his body in the rigid bow of tetanus. Nipped once in the elbow by a dog, for six months he felt compelled to swallow endless glasses of water to confirm that hydrophobia had not closed his throat, and to cast nervous glances at naked light bulbs to see if convulsions would follow. Often in the wee small hours he felt the buboes of plague rising in his groins and oxters.

As he grew older his terrors grew less dramatic, more muted, but no less hideous. Harmless moles thickened before his eyes into black cancer, mouth ulcers seemed the sloughing lesions of leukaemia, the buzzing of his ears heralded the imminent explosion of aneurysms in his brain. He became a furtive prowler in medical bookshops; if an assistant looked at him curiously, propped weak and sweating in a corner, he would casually flick over the pages to examine the price. During all these years he had been the victim of nothing more deadly than varicose veins. A policy of reassurance, said the doctor, and he was endlessly reassured; yet always, after a month or two of buoyancy, another symptom would appear. He understood his madness, appreciated his near-perfect health, yet each new fear seemed a tempting of fate: I am a hypochondriac, I know, he said, but it is not impossible, after all, for even a hypochondriac to be, for once, genuinely ill… His hypochondria was thus to Clapperton as his boulder to Sisyphus, a world of eternally repetitive misery.

So the strange sensation in his foot broke in upon his optimism and his peace of mind that morning like a stealthy enemy. His mood when he had gone to rest the previous night had been unusually benign, for he had been full of unexampled hopes for the morrow. The kernel of these hopes lay in his having secured for the coming evening, after long and taxing efforts, a date with Trudy Otter, the girl across the street. This was sufficient of a landmark in Clapperton’s existence to lighten more than a little the accustomed murk of his dealings with a hostile world, and to infect him with an uncharacteristic and general optimism. His waking, then, had been entirely pleasurable, for once he had felt eager to rise and capable of confronting with defiance the day’s realities. The feeling in his foot, a suppressed buzzing now it seemed to him, was like a mild chastening of such unwarranted presumption and confidence, a reminder that, Trudy Otter or no, he walked still upon the earth and was subject to the trials of the flesh. It was far from enough, however, to prevent him leaping energetically of a sudden from his bed, in two swift movements throwing back the covers and shutting the window, and moving precipitately towards the bathroom.

Clapperton was a man of indeterminate age, of whom Crazy Jane might have found it hard to say whether he was an old man young, or a young man old. Suffice it to observe that his youth, though surviving, was not in its first flush. The most striking feature of his physical appearance was its lack of self-consistency. His body seemed countlessly fractured, and its component parts—as if held together by no unitary principle but rather by an act of will upon which no absolute reliance might be placed—appeared anxious to hive off in independent directions. His movements consequently tended towards the erratic. He now lolloped shivering down the passage and gathered