LWiA 4.3: Gull, ascending

And that's Act IV. Omnibus forthcoming. Thanks for your support and patience as I worked my way through this absolute beast of a chapter. It may not be the longest of the project (it's currently fourth, behind the first V for Vendetta chapter, Swamp Thing, and, of course, Cuddled Little Vice), but it was by some margin the hardest, with so many desperately complex topics and major structural aspects that only made themselves clear when I got right up to them in the writing.

Onwards to some Grant Morrison miniseries.

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Any lingering sense that Moore’s interest in From Hell was flagging towards the end is dispelled decisively with its fourteenth and final chapter, “Gull ascending”—perhaps the most formally ambitious chapter in the comic. It features Gull, in 1896, dying on the floor of his cell in the asylum where the Masons secretly dumped him. This, at least, is relatively straightforward—the occasion for the morbidly funny detail of Gull’s nurse and an orderly having sex in the corner of his cell while he dies, a detail borrowed from Moore’s experience with his mother’s terminal cancer (she died in August 1995), although there the nurse at least had the decency to use the staff room next to his mother’s. The formal ambition comes when the comic moves into Gull’s subjective experience of his death, which is a full-on mystical vision.

Moore’s script invited Campbell to “feel free to use whatever media you feel are appropriate. You can afford to be strange and experimental here, and aren’t even necessarily bound by techniques that seem appropriate to the Victorian time period.” Campbell, however, declined the invitation, reasoning that it was inappropriate to introduce new techniques so late in the comic. As he put it, “the challenge of storytelling is to form new compounds out of the elements already in play. Alan’s From Hell sets out with a full tank, enough fuel for the long haul. That’s the raw narrative material, the parameters of which are drawn in the prologue and opening chapters. Then in its last mile it is fast and refreshed, as though it has distilled a new kind of fuel out of the stuff that was on board at the start.”[1] And so he treats the vast and shattering magical experience of William Gull with the same straightforward realism he used in the previous fourteen installments.

This is, of course, unquestionably the correct decision. Sure, Campbell could have thrown it away and gone full Bill Sienkiewicz on the final stretch, and the nature of Gull’s experience could even have justified it. But not only is Campbell correct that this would have been disloyal to the formal grammar of From Hell, unadorned realism is also fundamentally faithful to mystical experiences as Alan Moore understood them. Consider the adage that inspired Moore to magical practice—a declaration that gods and demons were real only as mental phenomena. Moore remained an ardent materialist throughout his magical career, insisting that, as he put it in The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, “all the extraordinary claims made on behalf of magic are entirely credible providing that one understands the magic to be taking place nowhere save in the mind.” Moore is, in this regard, following from Blake, who insisted from his earliest works that the capacity for visionary experiences extended from the human imagination. First you make it up, then it comes true anyway. And so Campbell’s decision to treat Gull’s mystical experiences no differently than he treated the most impoverished districts of London or the brutal murders of sex workers emphasizes that those experiences are in a fundamental sense still just ordinary human experiences.

Much of Gull’s vision is an extension of his earlier mystical experiences during the murders—his periodic flashes forward to the twenty-first century, and an elucidation of his claim to have delivered the twenty-first century. But there is a clear structure to the vision as well—it makes and develops an argument, building to a clear endpoint that serves as a final statement on Gull and his Great Work. The vision begins with a restaging of the opening of “A state of darkness,” complete with that chapter’s incessant refrain: “What is the fourth dimension?” But this time, as the barge emerges from its tunnel, instead of a small flock of ducks as in the original there is an explosion of gulls as the comic cuts to them flying over the sea. Gull’s narration—a necessary conceit to deal with the abstract and often cryptic nature of the issue’s imagery—explains that “A knowledge comes to me that I am high above the glittery Aegean and it is no longer 1896. It is instead the year of my achievement. It is 1888.” He realizes he lacks physical form, and attempts to focus himself, resulting in an explosion of blood that rains down upon a Greek fishing boat below. The underlying incident is real, or at least real enough to have made the pages of The Fortean Times, but is used here as a sort of moment of transformation—the point where Gull transforms from a mere man into some higher form, Or, as Gull explains it, “I sign my year of panics with appalling miracle.”

The scene shifts, and Gull finds that he has become Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment. In this form Gull is in key ways unstuck from time—he sees apparitions of people passing by the monument, but they are a mishmash from all times. His vision pulls upward from here, and he is given to see the pentagram he plotted out for Netley, now a glowing pattern of light marked out against the city. This re-emphasizes the notion that Gull is no longer human—indeed, shortly thereafter he explains that these lines “are London’s veins that pulse and glisten with significance. That course with energy and meaning. And I am that meaning. And I am that energy,” before launching into a smattering of apparitions, past and present, along the lines of his awful design.

Between these two moments, however, is an altogether more curious scene that sees Gull manifest at the top of a flight of stairs, where he encounters William Blake (though he fails to recognize him), who, to his astonishment, can perceive him, and recoils in horror. As he does, Gull realizes that his hands have grown grotesque and are now covered with scales. This encounter is puzzling for several reasons. First, it is a plain interruption in the early progress of Gull’s vision. In some ways more remarkable than Gull’s hands being transformed is the fact that he has hands at all—the only moment in the early parts of this vision where he has anything like a human form, and an initially counterintuitive beat to include in a section that is otherwise about Gull’s ascension to something more, or perhaps less than human. But it serves to introduce what will ultimately be the key to understanding Gull’s larger vision: the fact that, as he explains it, he is “now but a thing of mind, and coloured by the minds that view me.”

Perhaps the biggest point of significance, however, is the scaly hands. The staircase in question—in Blake’s house at Hercules Buildings in Lambeth—were the site of two visions. One of these contains comparatively sparse documentation—a single anecdote in Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake in which Blake is asked by a friend if he’s ever seen a ghost. Gilchrist notes that Blake was in most cases dismissive of ghosts, suggesting that they are seen only by unimaginative men, but that he concedes that he’d seen one once, at the top of the stairs—“scaly, speckled, very awful,” and that he fled in terror (an unusual reaction for Blake). The other, meanwhile, was the vision that he would eventually capture in The Ancient of Days, the iconic depiction of Urizen that forms the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy. By most standards it is this that would seem the obvious vision for Gull to inhabit. His bloody binding of female power into the cold stone of London is, after all, a pretty straightforward match for Urizen’s tyranny. And yet Moore decides instead to cast Gull as a mere ghost—perhaps more rawly terrifying than Urizen, but, crucially, nowhere near as majestic in his terror.

Gull’s inhabiting of his pentagram ends with another restaging of a scene from “A state of darkness,” this time Gull and Hinton’s conversation about the nature of time, specifically Hinton’s speech about “an invisible curve rising through the centuries.” This time, however, his chosen dates—1788, a century later, fifty years after that, twenty-five after that, and finally twelve and a half after that—are all unpacked as specific references, beginning with the London Monster in 1788—an attacker (or several attackers) who slashed at women’s buttocks throughout London, though did not kill them. A century later, of course, come Gull’s own murders, and then fifty after that the incident of the Halifax Slasher—a series of attacks in West Yorkshire that were ultimately determined to have been a bizarre mass hysteria in which people were slashing themselves. The final two incidents, meanwhile, are established as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderers, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.

Moore pauses here to allow Gull to explain the metaphysical implications of this, having him note that there is “movement and yet there is no movement. There is not space. There is not time, and therefore nothing moves but only is.” This is largely a restatement of the younger Hinton’s theories of time, but by this point it was also a summary of Moore’s own magical revelations, and particularly his newfound belief that time was “a ‘solid’ in which past, present and future all happily co-exist,” describing a magical experience that “bore relevance to my previous work; especially to Watchmen (the Doctor Manhattan chapter) and a couple of the time-travel stories I wrote for 2000 AD. In the burning white heart of the experience, I thought I had a revelation that these stories were premonitions of the state that I exist in now—more accurately I can perceive them as memories of the state I exist in now. Time can be seen just as effectively one way as another.”[2]

The sequence also serves as a distinct transition within the larger vision—it’s followed by Gull ascending upwards towards the moon, “which is the world’s unconscious self. Which is all poetry and dream.” This sparks a sequence in which Gull is established as the inspiration for a variety of things—Robert Louis Stevenson’s conception of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance. He also includes a second Blake sequence. This one depicts an incident in 1819 in which Blake was paid a visit by his friend John Varley, and beheld a spirit, which he proceeded to draw for his friend, memorably pausing at one point to do a detailed study of the creature’s mouth because, as he explained, it had just opened its jaw and spoiled the pose of his initial sketch. (Moore explains this as Gull’s jaw dropping with astonishment at the realization that he’s seeing William Blake) This sketch was eventually worked into Blake’s famous painting The Ghost of a Flea. The historical record is not entirely clear on the claim that this vision was of the same creature he’d identified as a ghost back in Lambeth, although Blake is far from the first to make the suggestion. But it further confirms the quiet implication of the initial Blake scene. For all Gull’s horror, he is no grandiose tyrant in the mould of Urizen. He’s just a little flea feasting on the blood of humanity.

Fittingly, the next two moments of inspiration are altogether darker, with Moore appearing once again to both Ian Brady and Peter Sutcliffe. In the latter case he appears in the living room of Sutcliffe’s brother, where he astonishes and horrifies the people there by picking up and inspecting an ashtray, causing it to move around in the air. In the former, meanwhile, he appears to Brady as a disembodied head floating down the street—a vision Brady interpreted as being Death itself, who he subsequently felt compelled to appease by raping children and burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor. More than anything else in the issue, these sequences show why Campbell’s instinct to remain in a realist mode was so sound. His depiction of Sutcliffe’s “mean-spirited and ugly English room” is aggressively banal—a grotty living room where Gull sits on the edge of the sofa, distinct only because of his lack of clothes. (Writing in the From Hell Companion, Campbell wryly notes that “I’ve sat in too many English 1970s living rooms just like that one int he last panel. And I always felt ill at ease. Now I know it was because of the big fat naked bastard on the sofa.”)

Similarly, Campbell could have unleashed any number of fantastic techniques for Gull’s appearance to Brady, imbuing the scene with a deep sense of horror and unease. Instead, however, he just draws William Gull’s ordinary head, floating several feet above an equally ordinary Glasgow street. The result is absurd and more than faintly silly, and serves to undermine Gull’s Republic serial villain ranting a page earlier about how “I am not man so much as syndrome; as a voice that bellows in the human heart. I am a ran. I cannot be contained. Free of Life, how then shall I be shackled? Free of Time, how then shall history be made my cage? I am a wave, an influence. Who then shall be made safe from me?”

The vision makes a second transition here, with Gull turning from the lunar realm of Yesod to approach the sun. This is the lead-in to a very different moment of apparition, in which he appears, still in slightly ridiculous floating head form, to Netley in 1903, who panics, his horse rearing, and ends up thrown from his carriage to have his head dashed upon an obelisk—a grimly ironic resolution for one of the book’s most engaging minor characters. And from here Gull begins his final ascent, rising up into the sun where he is greeted by the gods, Osiris and Christ and others, and prepare to ascend fully. And yet the gods stop him, Osiris gesturing downwards once more, sending Gull to have one final revelation. Gull is faintly irritated—impatient at the delay, small as it is, but he obliges, descending to find himself looking at a small house in Ireland in the early years of the century he birthed.

There he encounters a woman, calling her daughters in: Anne, and Katey, and Lizzie, and Polly. Gull is confused. “I don’t know these people,” he protests. “I have never seen this woman in my life.” Which, indeed not. And yet Gull finds himself afraid of the strange woman, and the “terrible ferocity” in her eyes—a fear that’s justified when she unexpectedly turns to face him, plainly able to see him just as Blake had been. “As for you, ye auld divil,” she says. “I know that ye’re there, and ye’re not havin’ these. Clear off now wit ye. Clear off back to Hell and leave us be!” And Gull, baffled and confused, ascends, which Campbell depicts with a page turn on the line “I become” that reveals a stark white page in which the word “God” appears, small and plain in the middle, “and then I…” hanging about a quarter of the page further down before a final page of the nurse and orderly finishing up and seeing that Gull has passed.

Moore is ostentatiously cryptic about this final scene in the annotations, declaring that it “must go without an explanation for the moment. Work it out for yourself,” although he rather spoils the bit two paragraphs later with a hint regarding Marie Kelly’s various nicknames. Indeed, the woman clearly resembles her, and her children’s names are those of Gull’s other four victims. Campbell—who would presumably know—insists that Moore remained undecided on this reveal until the last moment. Perhaps, but it’s also clear he was working himself up to it, going to considerable lengths to leave Kelly a plausible escape in “From Hell” and having Abberline encounter a pair of witnesses insisting they saw Kelly after her supposed murder in “The unfortunate Mr Druitt” (which did, in fact, happen). Speaking about it after the fact, he explained that “I just wanted to give this poor woman a happy ending. I wanted to somehow—without actually going against what was possible, I wanted to sort of give her a way out,” and noting that the page is “one of the most powerful scenes in the book to me.”[3]

Moore is, obviously, quite sentimental about this beat—it would seem difficult not to be after spending as long as he did obsessing over the fine points of her mutilation. But there’s a clear literary purpose to the revelation as well, especially following on details like Gull being the inspiration for The Ghost of a Flea or Campbell’s underplaying of his visitation of the young Ian Brady. For all that the issue offers Gull’s final ascension, the key message that the gods want him to take from his vision is that he failed. The twentieth century he delivered was not the one he intended—a fact emphasized by his disdain whenever he’s shown it.

It is perhaps easy to make too much of this. The issue’s primary focus is still plainly Gull’s transcendence, with the revelation of Kelly’s survival being one of a couple notes of pointed dissonance with that theme. And it was released alongside the epilogue, a return to “The old men on the shore” in which Abberline and Lees chat further about death and their sense that they’ve outlived their times and are in a century with no further place for them. The comic’s final note sees Lees describing a recurring dream he’s had. “I’m in London, by an old church in the Jewish quarter. It’s the eighteen-eighties. There’s this awful grunting, like an animal. It comes from everywhere. The church doors splinter open and there’s blood. Great gallons of it, washing everyone away.” This is a straightforward recap of the sequence at the start of chapter five about the conception of Hitler, and Lees’ conclusion from the dream—“I think there’s going to be another war,” form’s the comic’s final line (which Moore notes in his big interview with Dave Sim that he had in mind before he started). It’s a bleak closing note, and one that puts the emphasis firmly on the way in which Gull’s work did shape the twentieth century.

But then again, it would have been patently absurd to suggest that Marie Kelly’s escape might have prevented World War II, both because Marie Kelly was almost certainly actually murdered in her room on Miller’s Court in the early hours of November 9th, 1888 and, more to the point, because World War II happened along with, by the time From Hell #10 came out, some ninety-six percent of the twentieth century. Moore’s room to leave an escape route from the century’s horrors was definitionally narrow. Subtext was the only place such a thing could be placed. But inasmuch as From Hell is a grandiose and externally facing work of magic like Watchmen or “Station to Station” as opposed to an inward looking one whose consequences were mostly for its author, this final detail was it: the twentieth century could be escaped.

[1] Eddie Campbell, From Hell Companion

[2] D.M. Mitchell, “Moon and Serpent: The World of Alan Moore,” Rapid Eye #3, transcription provided privately

[3] Barry Kavanagh, “The Alan Moore Interview,” Blather, http://www.blather.net/projects/alan-moore-interview/