Modern Fantasy Writers (Writers of English) 0791022234, 079102248X, 9780791022238

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WRITERS OF ENGLISH: LIVES AND WORKS

Edited and with an Introduction by

HAROLD BLOOM

m

WRITERS OF ENGLISH:

AND WORKS

LIVES

MODERN FANTASY WRITERS Fantasy

midcentury flowered into

at

a bewil-

dering variety of modes testifying to the protean

nature of the genre

itself.

M.

P.

Shiel

produced

works combining the genres of

striking

mystery, horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

The

Inklings, a closely knit

Oxford

that included

S.

group of writers

at

Lewis, J.R. R.Tolkien,

and Charles Williams, fashioned

new myths for

both children and adults that emphasized Christian themes. Other English writers such as

David Lindsay,

E. R.

Eddison, and Mervyn

Peake created multivolume works

distin-

guished for their idiosyncratic vision and rich prose

style.

America, Robert

In

E.

Howard

founded the subgenre of sword-and-sorcery with his tales of Conan of Cimmeria; Fritz Leiber broadened the form by including

humor in his many accounts of

philosophy and

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Clark Ashton

Smith

s

exotic prose poems, A. Merritt’s novels

of lost races, John Collier’s sardonic tales of

imps and

devils,

and Ray Bradbury’s sensitive

portrayals of the strange worlds accessible to

the adolescent imagination proved that fantasy

had become

a

genre of extraordinary richness

and scope. This volume provides information on the fifteen

most

significant fantasy writers of the mid-

twentieth century, featuring detailed biographies, a

wide selection of

critical extracts,

and comprehensive bibliographies.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH: LIVES AND WORKS

is

an ongoing series covering the entire range of literature

in

English from

present. Each

Beowulf

to the

volume contains biographies,

biographical and critical extracts, and bibliographies of the authors covered, and features a series introduction Life of the

by Harold Bloom, “The

Author,” as well as a special intro-

duction to each

title.

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS New

York • Philadelphia

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2017 with funding from

Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780791022238

Modern Fantasy Writers

Writers of English: Lives and

Works

Modern Fantasy

WRITERS Edited and with an Introduction by

Harold Bloom

Chelsea House Publishers

New

York

Philadelphia

—

Jacket illustration:

NY;

Max

Ernst (1891-1976), Gypsy Rose Lee (Private Collection;

©

ARS,

courtesy of Art Resource, NY).

Chelsea House Publishers Richard Rennert Executive Managing Editor Karyn Gullen Browne Picture Editor Adrian G. Allen Copy Chief Robin James Art Director Robert Mitchell Manufacturing Director Gerald Levine Editorial Director

Assistant Art Director Joan Ferrigno

Writers of English: Lives and

Senior Editor

S.

Series Design

Rae Grant

Works

T. Joshi

MODERN FANTASY WRITERS

Staff for

Mary Sisson Research Peter Cannon, Stefan Dziemianowicz Assistant Editor

Picture Researcher

©

Pat

Bums

1995 by Chelsea House Publishers, a division of Main Line Book Co.

Introduction

©

1995 by Harold Bloom

All rights reserved.

No

part of this publication

may be reproduced

or transmitted in any

form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. First Printing

135798642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Modern

fantasy writers

p.

cm.

/

edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom,

— (Writers of English)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-7910-2223-4.— ISBN 0-7910-2248-X 1.

Fantastic fiction,

History and criticism.

— History and Fantastic — Bio

American 3.

Bloom, Harold. PS374.F27M63 1994 81370876609 dc20

bibliography.

I.

—

[B]

criticism. 2. Fantastic literature, English

literature

II.

(pbk.)

-bibliography. 4- Fantastic fiction

— Bio-

Series.

94-5890

CIP

§ Contents

Users Guide

The

Life of the

vi

Author

vii

Introduction

xi

Ray Bradbury

1

John Collier Sprague de

L.

E. R.

C.

S.

Camp and

29

Fletcher Pratt

Eddison

Robert Fritz

16

E.

43

Howard

57

Leiber

71

Lewis

85

David Lindsay

98

A. Merritt

110

Mervyn Peake

1

M.

137

P. Shiel

Clark Ashton Smith

J.

R. R. Tolkien

Charles Williams

23

151

165

180

—

1

User’s Guide

this

volume provides

biographical, critical,

the fifteen most significant parts: a

modem

and bibliographical information on

fantasy writers.

Each chapter

biography of the author; a selection of brief

consists of three

critical extracts

about the

author; and a bibliography of the author’s published books.

The biography life,

including his or her major writings.

array of books in

supplies a detailed outline of the important events in the author’s

and

periodicals,

The

critical extracts are

from the author’s lifetime to the present, and range

content from biographical to

critical to historical.

The

extracts are arranged in

chronological order by date of writing or publication, and a citation

is

taken from a wide

full

bibliographical

provided at the end of each extract. Editorial additions or deletions are

indicated within carets.

The author bibliographies

list

every separate publication

and works edited or translated by the author

phlets, broadsides, collaborations, for

works published in the author’s

— including books, pam-

lifetime; selected

tions are also listed. Titles are those of the

first

important posthumous publica-

edition; variant titles are supplied

within carets. In selected instances dates of revised editions are given where these are significant.

Pseudonymous works

are listed, but not the

pseudonyms under which

these works were published. Periodicals edited by the author are listed only

the author has written most or

all

of the contents. Titles enclosed in square brackets

are of doubtful authenticity. All works by the author,

other languages, have been

when

listed;

are not listed unless the author has

whether

in English or in

English translations of foreign- language works

done the

VI

translation.

The

Life of the

Author

Harold Bloom

NIETZSCHE, WITH exultant anguish, famously proclaimed that

Whatever the consequences of certainly

this for the ethical life,

its

God was

dead.

ultimate literary effect

would have surprised the author Nietzsche. His French

disciples,

Foucault

most prominent among them, developed the Nietzschean proclamation into the

dogma is

that

all

authors,

no more than

lengths,

is

God

included, were dead.

of

metaphor

a Parisian trope, another

of the author, which

for fashion’s setting of skirt-

now accepted as literal truth by most of our current apostles of what should

be called French Nietzsche, to distinguish also

The death

from the merely original Nietzsche.

it

have French Freud or Lacan, which has

Sigmund Freud, and even French

which

Joyce,

major work ot Jacques Derrida. But

little

to

do with the actual thought

interprets Finnegans

all this is as

We

Wake

as the

nothing compared to the

final

triumph of the doctrine of the death of the author: French Shakespeare. That delicious absurdity

is

given us by the

California fruit juice to give us the

New

Word

Historicism,

which blends Foucault and

that Renaissance “social energies,’’

not William Shakespeare, composed Hamlet and King Lear.

moment

to

murmur

Sometimes

it

“enough’’ and to return to a study of the

troubles

me

It

life

and

seems a proper of the author.

that there are so few masterpieces in the vast ocean

of literary biography that stretches between James Boswell’s great Life of Dr. Samuel

Johnson and the is

late

a crucial genre,

Richard Ellmann’s wonderful Oscar Wilde. Literary biography

and

clearly a difficult

one

of the lives of the poets seems to have biographies. Everything

happened

in

little

to Lord

which

to excel.

The

upon the

effect

Byron and nothing

actual nature

quality of their

at all to

Wallace

Stevens, and yet their biographers seem equally daunted by them. But even inade-

quate biographies of strong writers, or of weak ones, are of immense use.

never read a

literary

biography from which

I

have not

profited, a statement

make about any other genre whatsoever. And when

it

comes

to figures

I

I

have

cannot

who

are

— Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Goethe, Whitman, TolFreud, Joyce, Kafka among them — we reach out eagerly every scrap that

central to us stoi,

for

the biographers have gleaned. Concerning Dante and Shakespeare

we know much

when we come to Goethe and Freud, where we seem to know more than everything, we still want to know more. The death of the author, despite our too

little,

yet

vii

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

Vlll

momentary

current resentniks, clearly was only a

Something

fad.

vital in every

authentic lover of literature responds to Emerson’s battle-cry sentence: “There

no

history, only biography.”

at

and requiring a

Beyond that there

is

a deeper truth, difficult to

which

lifetime to understand,

that there

is

no

is

come

literature,

only autobiography, however mediated, however veiled, however transformed. events of Shakespeare’s writing was

The

included the composition of Hamlet, and that act of

life

though we do not yet know altogether

act of living,

itself a crucial

is

how to read so doubled an act. When an author takes up a more overtly autobiographical stance, as so many do in their youth, again we still do not know precisely how to

accommodate the vexed

upon James Joyce, made

We

want

relation

life

and work. T.

a classic statement as to such

know who

to

between

accommodation: and what were

are the originals of his characters,

the origins of his episodes, so that

and invention and discover how

we may unravel

far

and

in

meditating

S. Eliot,

the

web

of

memory

what ways the crude material

has been transformed.

When

a writer

is

not even covertly autobiographical, the web of

memory and

we may never unravel it. And yet we want deeply never to stop trying, and not merely because we are curious, but because each of us is caught in her own network of memory and invention. We do not always recall our inventions, and long before we age we cease to be certain of the extent to which we have invented our memories. Perhaps one motive for invention

reading lives,

there, but so subtly

is still

our need to unravel our

is

what we

or lived in relation to

Freudian terms,

is

we

own

webs.

likely, implicitly, to

are asking:

necessarily included,

suggestive.

I

What

ask:

What have we made

is

go on being asked that

it

we have

What

is

it

sad, or confused,

as long as

repressed?

that

we

we

read. In

What have we

flee? Art, literature

doubt the Freudian wisdom here, but indubitably read,

it is

profoundly

something in us keeps asking the equivalent of the

Freudian questions: From what or life is

our masters could make, from their

regression in the service of the ego, according to a famous

is

When we

stages in her

If

what we have read? The answers may be

forgotten, unconsciously but purposively:

Freudian formula.

that

then we can be moved by them to

read,

but the question

woven

whom

is

the author in flight, and to what earlier

she returning, and why?

Reading, whether as an art or a pastime, has been damaged by the visual media, television in particular,

and might be

in

some danger of extinction

the computer, except that the psychic need for

because

it

it

in the age of

continues to endure, presumably

alone can assuage a central loneliness in

elitist

society. Despite all

sophisticated or resentful denials, the reading of imaginative literature remains a

quest to overcome the isolation of the individual consciousness.

We

can read

information, or entertainment, or for love of the language, but in the end in the author, the person

whom we

have not found, whether

we

for

seek,

in ourselves or in

IX

once aggressive and defensive,

others. In that quest, there always are elements at

so that reading,

even

in childhood,

rarely free of

is

And

hidden anxieties.

remains one of the few activities not contaminated by an entropy of

we

read in hope, because

lack companionship,

yet

it

We

spirit.

and the author can become the

object of the most idealistic elements in our search for the wit and inventiveness

we

so desperately require.

We

read biography, not as a supplement to reading the

author, but as a second, fresh attempt to understand

what always seems

to evade

us in the work, our drive towards a kind of identity with the author.

much

This wilbtO'identity, though recently

deprecated,

experience of sublimity in reading. Hamlet retains

canon not because most readers and playgoers

who

clearly

is

its

is

a prime basis for the

unique position in the Western

identify themselves with the prince,

beyond them, but rather because they find themselves again

power of the language that represents him with such immediacy and

know

that neither language nor social energy created Hamlet.

Shakespeare

is

and never

endless,

will

Our

be appeased. That curiosity

in the

Yet we

force.

curiosity about itself

is

a value,

and cannot be separated from the value of Hamlet the tragedy, or Hamlet the literary character. It at

provokes us that Shakespeare the

once everyone and no one

as

man

Borges shrewdly observes. Critics keep telling us

otherwise, yet something valid in us keeps believing that better

Shakespeare’s

if

were

life

seems so unknowable,

as fully

known

we would know Hamlet

as the lives of

Goethe and Freud,

Byron and Oscar Wilde, or best of all, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Shakespeare never

will

How much

one

have

his Boswell,

would give

memoir

and Dante never

for a detailed

will

and candid

have

Life of

his

Richard Ellmann.

Dante by Petrarch, or an outspoken

Ben Jonson! Or, in the age just past, how superb would one another by Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald! But the list is

of Shakespeare by

be rival studies of

endless: think of Oscar Wilde by

Lord Alfred Douglas, or a joint biography of Shelley

by Mary Godwin, Emilia Viviani, and Jane Williams. More than our insatiable desire for scandal

would be

satisfied.

writers possessed perspectives

we dwell

in

some poverty

we

The

will

literary rivals

and the

lovers of the great

never enjoy, and without those perspectives

in regard to the writers

with

whom we

ourselves never

can be done.

There reader

is

is

a sense in

likely to

which imaginative

literature

is

perspectivism, so that the

be overwhelmed by the work’s difficulty unless

perspectives are mastered. Literary biography matters most because

it is

its

multiple

a storehouse

of perspectives, frequently far surpassing any that are grasped by the particular

biographer. There are relations between authors’ lives and their works of kinds

we

have yet to discover, because our analytical instruments are not yet advanced

enough

much

to perform the necessary labor. Perhaps a novel,

a regression in the service of the ego, as

mechanisms of defense,

all

working together

it is

poem, or play

an amalgam of

all

is

not so

the Freudian

for the apotheosis of the ego.

Freud

valued art highly, but thought that the aesthetic enterprise was no rival for psycho^

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

X

and philosophy. Clearly Freud was mistaken;

analysis, unlike religion

own

his

anxieties about his indebtedness to Shakespeare helped produce the weirdness of

Oxford

his joining in the lunacy that argued for the Earl of

Shakespeare’s plays.

Freud arrived at his depth psychology, and

poets,’’

We see what Freud would not see,

out ahead of psychoanalysis. is

it is

Shakespeare prosified and systematized. Freud

is

that psychoanalysis

part of literature, not of “science,”

and the biography of Freud has the same relations to psychoanalysis of Shakespeare has to Hamlet and King Lear,

author of

who was there before Shakespeare who is there still, well

was Shakespeare, and not “the

It

as the

if

only we

as the

knew more

biography

of the

life

of

Shakespeare.

Western

literature, particularly since

tion of internalized change in self

is

in itself a large

its

Shakespeare,

is

marked by the representa-

A literature of the ever-growing inner

characters.

form of biography, even though

this

is

the biography of

imaginary beings, from Ffamlet to the sometimes nameless protagonists of Kafka

and Beckett. Skeptics might want to argue that

literary

all

biography concerns

imaginary beings, since authors make themselves up, and every biographer gives us

same author

a creation curiously different from the Life.

Boswell’s Johnson

not quite anyone

is

difficult for us to disentangle the great

follower.

The

life

of the author

Death of the Author,” but

Those elements

it.

seen by the writer of a rival

Johnson, though

Doctor from

is

now

very

and

his gifted Scottish friend

not merely a metaphor or a

is

it

fiction, as

is

“the

always does contain metaphorical or fictive elements.

are a part of the value of literary biography, but not the largest or

the crucial part, which

hid behind

it

else’s

as

is

the separation of the

mask from the man or woman who

James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, master and sometime

disciple,

both of them enigmatic personalities, and their biographers have not,

were

as yet, fully

expounded the mystery of these contrasting natures. Beckett seems very nearly have been a secular as

humane

saint: personally disinterested, heroic in the

a person ever to

have composed major

obsessed even as Beckett was pretematurally

fictions

to

French Resistance,

and dramas. Joyce,

self-

was the Milton of the twentieth

selfless,

century. Beckett was perhaps the least egoistic post-Joycean, post-Proustian, post-

Kafkan of does

it

writers.

Does that illuminate the problematical nature of

his work, or

simply constitute another problem? Whatever the cause, the question matters.

The only death fate only of

of the author that

weak

what the canon

writers.

truly

is

The

about.

is

strong,

To

other than

literal,

who become

be read forever

and that matters,

is

the

canonical, never die, which is

the Life of the Author.

is

H

Introduction

david LINDSAY’S narratives.

A Voyage to Arcturus

prefer

I

it

to

is,

me, the most eminent of modem fantasy

even to Mervyn Peake’s marvelous Gormenghast

who

alone to the Neo-Christian moralizings of the Oxford group “the Inklings”: Lindsay’s

first

called themselves

R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams.

J.

and much

his best book. His later efforts

trilogy, let

A returns

was

tended to be formless, and

Areturns,

frequently are shrouded in a

dank obscurantism. In

one authentic book he had

him, an uneven but frequently sublime vision of the

in

Lindsay wrote the

ultimate quest-romance, in which a Promethean protagonist attempts to steal divine fire

on

a distant planet, a realm pervaded by alarming beings,

and by

as varied

and peculiar a fauna and

— including my Ursula K. Le Guin and John Crowley — but

Arcturus has

its

About

attracts.

enthusiasts

half of those to

whom

I

readable, while the other half reread

the governing factor; its

limits,

where

Lindsay

is

it

Areturns

is

flora as imaginative literature affords.

favorite it

contemporary fantasy

seems to repel

have recommended incessantly, as

it

demonic or semidivine,

I

it

do.

as

many

writers,

readers as

have found

it

it

scarcely

Temperament seems

an extreme work, pushing fantasy or romance to

threatens to turn into Gnostic scripture.

overtly influenced by Novalis

and by Carlyle, but

his deepest

mytho-

poeic affinities are with Blake, though Blake would not have approved of the

theology of pain in

Areturns.

Psychic cartography

Maskull, the Promethean quester,

Blake

named Luvah, while Krag

is

The most

difficult aspect of Blake’s

parallels Blake’s Los, the

god-man,

relative

Blake’s.

hammering prophet of

like Blake’s Urizen, a

is

deceptive demiurge

mysterious of Arcturus’ s questers, Nightspore, has

mythology, which

together again, would constitute one

full

it is

its

with Blake’s Tharmas, the fallen sense of taste and of touch. The most

affinities

own

Lindsay’s mode, as

akin to Ore, the fallen form of the titan that

the imagination. Lindsay’s Crystalman of the fallen world.

is

is

is

that his four primal titans, put

Human Form

Divine, a Hermetic pre-Adamic

hinted at throughout Lindsay’s book, though perhaps without Lindsay’s

awareness.

One

of the curious aesthetic strengths of Arcturus

freedom from self-consciousness.

knowing where

his

book

intuitive drive toward the

is

He

is

Lindsay’s

gives the impression of never quite

going: Maskull marches always north, in a hidden,

Muspel

light,

while Krag vanishes and reappears with a xi

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

Xll

sublime willfulness.

The

effect

of Schiller’s “naive” rather than “sentimental”

is

romance; episodes proliferate and throw off long shadows of significances, which

sometimes consolidate into a profound visionary meaning, and sometimes as

mythic exuberances

find frequently that

I

my

in excess of the story’s

is,

comes back

demands.

me

to

by involuntary

dreams and nightmares. The book works upon one

reveries or in

that

Areturns

like the action of the

Muspel

which

light,

away

fall

is

recall,

like a

even

in

trauma,

both destructive and benign.

Nightspore, in the extraordinary conclusion of Arcturus, returns with the death of Maskull, in order to face the ordeal of rebirth, which in Lindsay’s cosmos

and psychic

horrible than death. Enduring the physical

distress of

the final tower, Nightspore finally pulls his body up and stands roof,

expecting to gaze upon Muspel, the divine

nothing, until

he

As soon

its

more

clambering up

on the stone^floored

the

first

He

time.

darkness around him, on every side,

realizes that the

him, grinning in

light, for

is

is

sees

mocking

apparent triumph:

as that

happened, he understood that he was wholly surrounded

by Crystalman’s worlds, and that Muspel consisted of himself and the stone tower

This seems to

on which he was

me one

still

.

.

.

of the pure visions of a

Promethean quester replaced by gnosis

sitting

modem

Sublime, with the

a consciousness that leams the negativity of the

possible in a ruined universe: there

is

only oneself, the empty roof of

the tower, and a demiurgical darkness obscenely rejoicing against one. After that confrontation, the stoical Nightspore bleakly returns to the struggle, descending

from the tower to push

off

on

Krag’s raft into the dark waters of

Gnostics called the kenoma, the sensible emptiness of our

what the ancient

lives.

H.

B.

Ray Bradbury 1920

b.

RAYMOND DOUGLAS BRADBURY was born on August Illinois,

the

first

whose family witch

trials,

22, 1920, in

Waukegan,

child of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, an electrical lineman

tree included

an ancestor hanged

witch during the Salem

as a

and Esther Moberg Bradbury. Bradbury lived

a

happy childhood

soaking up the sights and atmosphere of his rural midwestern town. His love of fantasy began with a viewing of The Hunchback of Notre

Dame with

Lon Chaney in 1923 and was reinforced by his discovery of the science fiction magazine

A mazing Stories

in 1929. His interest in writing

members reading the works of

family

to him,

and

later

L.

moved with

Baum and Edgar Allan Poe the work of Thomas Wolfe.

Frank

by his acquaintance with

In 1934 Bradbury

was stimulated by

his family to

introduced to science fiction fandom through

Los Angeles, where he was

new

friends Leigh Brackett

and Henry Kuttner. Upon graduating from high school he supported himself selling

newspapers and wrote prodigiously. His

a collaboration with

Henry Hasse

entitled

first

professional fiction sale,

“Pendulum,” appeared in Super

Science Stories in 1941. Shortly thereafter Bradbury

became

a regular contrib-

utor to Weird Tales, where his evocative tales of the dark side of small-

town

life

were hailed

as a turning point in

by excesses of the Gothic

style.

The

weird fiction, hitherto dominated

best of these stories were collected in

Dark Carnival (1947), the contents of which were modified and reprinted as The October Country (1955). In 1947 he married Marguerite

his first book,

McClure, with

whom

he would have four children.

In the late 1940s Bradbury began sending Planet Stories, Thrilling Stories,

and other pulp science

more concerned with human

Wonder

fiction magazines interplanetary adventures

conflict than the scientific extrapolation by

which the genre was defined. In 1950 he assembled many of these into

stories

The Martian Chronicles, an episodic first novel about mankind’s coloniza-

tion of

Mars that helped

literary

mainstream. Although Bradbury’s collections The

to bring science fiction to the attention of the

(1951) and The Golden Apples of

the 1

Sun (1953) and

Illustrated

Man

his dystopic novel

,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

2

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) were reviewed enthusiastically in the leading periodic cals of the day, they

were often scorned by science fiction

purists.

Bradbury continued to branch out in his writing, adapting his stories for

comic books, editing the contemporary fantasy anthologies Timeless for

Stories

Today and Tomorrow (1952) and The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improba -

On

(1956), producing a children’s book, Switch

ble Stories

and writing the screenplay

for

the

Night (1955),

John Huston’s film of Moby Dick (1956). In

1957 he turned a number of his nonfantastic

stories into the

novel Dandelion

Wine, a nostalgic paean to childish innocence and imagination. Something

Wicked This

Way Comes

(1962), about a sinister traveling carnival that

almost steals the souls of two young boys on the brink of manhood, further explored

many

novels Death

Is

of the themes addressed in Dandelion Wine.

a Lonely Business (1985),

A

With

the later

Graveyard for Lunatics (1990),

and Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), these books constitute a fictional autobiography in which Bradbury traces the persistence of youthful imagination into adulthood.

Since the 1960s, Bradbury has concentrated increasingly on poetry and

drama. His as

many

adaptations of his stories to the stage have been collected

Ray Bradbury on

Stage:

A Chrestomathy of His Plays

(1991) and his poetry

has been published in several volumes, beginning with in the

When

Elephants Last

Dooryard Bloomed (1973) and culminating in Complete Poems (1982).

His screenplays include

nominated

It

Came from Outer

Space (1963) and the Oscar-

Icarus Montgolfier Wright (1962); screen adaptations of Bradbury’s

work by others includemn Francois several episodes of

Rod

sion miniseries based

Serling’s

Truffaut’s 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451

“The Twilight

on The Martian

Zone,’’

and the 1980

Chronicles. Bradbury

is

televi-

a recipient ot

numerous awards, including the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula

Grand Master Award and the World Fantasy Award ment. His

William

literary influence

F.

for lifetime achieve-

can be found in the writing of Richard Matheson,

Nolan, Charles Beaumont, Dennis Etchison, and many other

leading fantasists of the day.

B

Critical Extracts

RAY BRADBURY upstairs at night

Some

of

my

first

memories concern going

and finding an unpleasant beast waiting

at the

next to the

Ray Bradbury

Screaming,

last step.

climb the it.

imagine

know

run back

down

was

I

to mother.

Then, together, we’d

would be gone. Mother never saw

her lack of imagination.

irritated at

should be thankful for

I

fear

I’d

Invariably, the monster

stairs.

Sometimes I

to

3

and apprehension

my

fear of the dark, though.

some form before you can

in

You have

write about

it

God knows my first ten years were full of the usual paraphernalia of ghosts and skeletons and dead men tumbling down the twisting must have been to have interior of my mind. What a morbid little brat thoroughly, and

I

around.

My

(.

.

.)

urge for the unusual was stimulated

first

by the Oz books, then by

Tarzan, then Buck Rogers, and finally the weird and fantasy publications.

Every action of

my

thereafter

life

seemed

to point inevitably to

my

writing

the more outre kinds of fiction. I’d like to

continue along the line where

I’ve

begun

my

story series.

I

don’t particularly care about ghosts, vampires or werewolves; they’ve been killed

by repetition. Lovecraft, Poe and C. A. Smith are the rare ones

who

did a splendid job by them. There are plenty of good stories in neurotic

psychology ready to be used. There are good stories in everyday things. Trains, crowds, motor-cars, submarines, dogs

— the wind around the house.

them more. And

stuff buried in the

I’d like to

leafs

use

there’s

much good

of childhood and the heaped dead leafs of old age.

that, too.

I

want

to write about

I

want

green

to get at

humans; and add an unusual, unexpected

twist.

Ray Bradbury, “The

WILL CUPPY

Eyrie,”

Weird Tales 37, No. 2 (November 1943): 109-10

Are you

a scoffer at the weird, as they call

it?

Have

you ever become fatigued when reading childishly bad imitations of the

most regrettable

side of

Edgar Allan Poe? Well, here’s a big helping of the

may hold you in spite of your mean disposition, by a fairly new of same who has obviously been tapped by leaders of the cult for the

stuff that

writer

mantle of the

late

H.

P. Lovecraft.

Ray Bradbury,

a

youth of twenty-seven,

who has

already achieved publications in several magazines outside the pulp

field, is

something

special,

perhaps the

first

suitable for general consumption. You’ll see

“The Homecoming,” the

first

of the high-pressure weirdists

what we mean

if

you peruse

of the twenty-seven tales in the volume.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

4

If

“The Homecoming”

strikes

your funny bone, indeed sounds like libretto

Addams, think no harm. There is more than Mr. Bradbury’s fantastic exhibits and don’t tell us it

to the drawings of Charles

the hint of a smile in is

unintentional. Exclusive prediction about this author: Mr. Bradbury will

gradually

move away from

the weirder weird, having already dropped

much

of the piffle pertaining thereunto, in accordance with the fine art of omission

and

which

a robust sense of fun

blobs and annihilate them.

and he

to the cause

direction of the

will

The weird fans will then hate him as a traitor move serenely onward and up in the general

John Collier bracket. But

have to make

thing, he’ll

one day turn on those protoplasmic

will

his critters,

human

it

will take practice. For

one

or diabolical, stop staring like

rubber stamps (they can stare, too) in the lower depths of whodunitism.

Mr. Bradbury!

Please,

Will Cuppy, [Review of Dark Carnival], 1947,

p.

New

York Herald Tribune Books, 25

May

30

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

The best of this new generation of scienceTiction writers are highly sensitive and intelligent. They are under no illusions about the prospective blessings of a machine --age utopia. They do not gape

with adoring wonder. Their approach to the inhabit'

at gadgets

ants of others worlds

anthropological and nonviolent.

is

Aldous Huxley than to public is

is

turning to

Jules

them and

Verne or H. G. Wells.

They owe more

to

Insofar as the reading

forsaking the cops and the cowboys, the public

growing up. This

is

not to suggest, however, that Ray Bradbury can be classified simply

as a scienceTiction writer,

his earlier

even

a superlatively

book of stories, showed that

within comparatively

his talents

realistic settings. If

he might be called a writer of fantasy, and

and the arabesque”

in the sense in

name comes up almost

is

can function equally well

one must attach

labels,

I

suppose

his stories “tales of the grotesque

which those words

inevitably, in

not because Mr. Bradbury

good one. Dark Carnival,

are used by Poe. Poe’s

any discussion of Mr. Bradbury’s work;

an imitator (though he

is

certainly a disciple)

but because he already deserves to be measured against the greater master of his particular genre. It

may even be argued

ing, science fiction at all.

that The Martian Chronicles are not, strictly speak'

The most

firmly established convention of science

)

Ray Bradbury

fiction

is

5

that

its

writers shall use all their art to convince us that their

happen. The extraordinary must grow from roots in the ordinary.

stories could

The

scientific “explanations”

as a

matter of

fact,

must have an authoritative

some scienceTiction

writers

whose work

abstruse technicalities that only connoisseurs can read

(There

air.

is

Such

it.)

are,

so full of is

not Mr.

Bradbury’s practice. His brilliant, shameless fantasy makes, and needs,

excuses for in

its

wild jumps from the possible to the impossible. His interest

machines seems to be limited to their symbolic and aesthetic

doubt

he could

if

no

much

pilot a rocketship,

less

aspects.

I

design one.

Christopher Isherwood, [Review of The Martian Chronicles ], Tomorrow 10, No. 2

(October 1950): 56-57

AVRAM DAVIDSON (Something Wicked This

This most recent of Bradbury’s novels

Way Comes combines two

of Bradbury’s favorite

themes: his deep and undoubtedly sincere love for the Midwestern small

town of bygone

and

years,

his fascination

than the circus or carnival per

inhuman

scene.

motif, that of

I

might

really say

“A

Boyhood.

warm and

theme with

a

swept away.

I

Both groups

will probably

whom Ray

charge and trample the that he

love

style, that

is

this

devour

it

is

I

could.

I

Ray Bradbury’s

writings

I

I

true of Bradbury-prone reader-types.

whole

at

one ensorceled

become the

would gladly be once again

much

that

is

rich

Those

sitting.

of course,

the effect

prisoner of his

acknowledge some measure of truth

the second. But there remains so

on any

enchanted and

name is like bandilleras to a bull will, book down with shouts of triumph to

find myself.

Bradbury

not easily broken,” observes

he comes perilously close to self-parody. But there

alignment, in which if

in a third favorite

uncritical love, will certainly be

repeating himself, that he has

is

category,

weaves

it

who

would hazard that Bradbury’s

an antic mirror of the human and

three-fold cord

Proverbs, and those multitudes

to

se) as

with the sideshow (rather, perhaps,

and

is

own

a third

in the first

in the shouts of

much

strange, so

that awakens echoes of the uncritical, magical, Bradburian past, in this

book

—

this

book about thirteen-year-old comrades Jim Nightshade and Will

Halloway, and of the devilish and timeless travelling show

much of an improvement Bradbury novel) that this:

I

in construction over Dandelion

justify

my

pleasure and allay

— and

of the short story, but there

my is

is

so

Wine (the previous discomfort with

Bradbury has not yet mastered the technique of the novel,

more than mastered that

it

as

he has

hope and evidence

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

6

here that he

would be more than a shame

will. It

if

we were

to be disap'

pointed.

Avram

Davidson, [Review of Something Wicked This

and Science

Fiction 25,

No.

RUSSELL KIRK

105-6

it

was in the beginning: the enlightening moral

imagination, transcending simple rationality.

and they

world

is

will

be swallowed up by the unknowable future.

is

not the

The

real

the world of the permanent things, which often are discerned more

clearly in the fictional

and Dark than

And

The everyday world

merely a film upon the deep well of the

real world, for today’s events are past,

Comes], Magazine of Fantasy

In Bradbury’s fables of Mars and of the carnival,

become what

fantasy has

(July 1963):

1

Way

—what

is

a

dead

in our

cities

own

of Mars or the fictional carousel of Cooger

little

wondrous thing

private slice of evanescent experience.

in itself

—the new generations of Americans

are not blind to the truth of the fabulists, for Bradbury

is

their favorite

author.

The

trappings of science fiction

Bradbury, but he has led

mythopoeic stories are

enduring

literature,

them on

to

young people

attracted

something

much

to

older and better:

normative truth acquired through wonder. Bradbury’s

not an escape from

reality.

may have

As C.

reality;

they are windows looking upon

Lewis remarks, those

S.

who

attack the fantasy

of moral imagination as trifling or baneful “escape literature” have shut

themselves up in Bentham’s Panopticon.

denounces “escape”;

for

he

is

The

the prisoner of his

ideologue, in particular,

own

and misery loves company. Lewis writes that he never

political obsessions,

denunciation of “escape,” this hatred of mythopoeic friend Professor Tolkien asked

men would you

me

understood

this

literature, “till

my

fully

‘What

the very simple question,

class of

expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile

the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers

perhaps this truth behind

it:

that those

.

.

.

to,

But there

who brood much on

is

the remote

past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to

be ardent or orthodox partisans.” Bradbury, with Lewis and Tolkien and Collier and some few others,

nobody’s prisoner and nobody’s a breach in

Giant Despair’s

Russell Kirk,

Rochelle,

jailer.

For our

modem

fabulists

is

have made

castle.

“The World of Ray Bradbury,” Enemies

NY: Arlington House,

1969), pp. 123-24

of Permanent Things

(New

Ray Bradbury

7

BRIAN ATTEBERY

The

horror

depends

story

on

things

remaining one sided, but fantasy demands both black magic and white.

What

Bradbury did, in Something Wicked, was use the conventions of gothic

horror as a doorway to fantasy. All that needed to be done was to turn the fallible

protagonist of horror fiction into a true fairy tale hero,

readers can root for and

someone capable of striking back

someone the

against dark gods,

of stealing away a few of their prerogatives like the working of wonders.

One

has the sense that the invasion of the dark carnival has results not

intended by

its

owners.

established fabric of

life.

Its

arrival

When

throws things off balance, disturbs the

the Tarot witch works her

spells,

when

carousel plays with time, they create a negative electric charge, as like the

house

charge the lightning-rod

man senses building up

in

it

the

were,

Jim Nightshade’s

Because nature abhors imbalance, a corre-

at the book’s beginning.

sponding charge begins to build in answer to the negative. The witch wakes inanimate objects to their potential power to do her bidding, but the waking proves contagious, spreading to objects not in her control. Evil gestures and incantations serve to bring out the magic in kindly acts and words. Dandelion

Wine pointed out

among

friends:

a great

many

of the rituals that develop in families and

some of the same kinds of

rituals

reappear in Something

Wicked with an added aura of the supernatural. Will’s father discovers that the carnival draws

sorrow, leaving

it

weapons of good,

on

a

wax

its

strength from fear and

vulnerable to smiles and laughter. Those

lent potency by the very evils they combat.

bullet kills the witch.

The

become the

A smile carved

laughter of Will and his father brings

Jim back from the edge, or beyond the edge, of death.

The

book’s happy ending, though not arrived at by the route followed

in fairy tales,

is

appropriate to the characters involved, to the plot and to

the meanings carried

man,

on the

plot.

The

says Bradbury through his fantasy,

and death

is

most

terrible

when we

grow from humble memories,

if

try

greatest threat to the confidenceis

the confidence to resist his lures,

hardest to deny

one has the

trick of

it.

it.

High themes can

Bradbury’s memories,

with help from Lovecraft, Burroughs, Melville, and especially Baum, shape themselves into stories with the authority of archetypes. Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition

(Bloomington: Indiana University

in

American

Press, 1980), pp.

Literature

139-40

from Irving

to

Le Guin

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

8

STEPHEN KING

More

here, Something

Wicked This

the Apollonian

life

town

inside the

than any other book discussed

clearly

Way Comes

reflects the differences

and the Dionysian. Bradbury’s carnival, which creeps and

limits

sets

up shop

meadow

in a

the morning (Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul,

everything that

wondered

if

the appeal of the vampire

myth

.

.

.

at three o’clock in like),

symbol of

a

is

Dionysian. I’ve always

for children doesn’t lie partly

vampires get to sleep

in the simple fact that

you

if

abnormal, mutated, monstrous

is

between

all

day and stay up

night

all

(vampires never have to miss Creature Features at midnight because of school the next day). Similarly,

and Will

attraction for Jim

strongly as Jim feels

deadly siren song)

no

regulations,

it;

Will

(sure,

feels its pull too,

even Will’s father

is

it

although not

immune

not entirely

that there will be

broccoli, think of people starving in China,”

chaos,

that part of this carnival’s

no set bedtimes, no and boring small town day after day, no

is

dull

we now know

no

school.

The

to

as its

and

rules

“eat your

carnival

is

taboo land made magically portable, traveling from place to

is

place and even from time to time with

its

freight of freaks

and

its

glamorous

attractions.

The boys

Jim too) represent

(sure,

not monstrous. They

Jim impatiently.

willingly,

The

live their lives

Which

is

just the opposite.

exactly is its

why

the carnival wants them.

need to compromise and corrupt

that delicate passage from innocence to experience that rigid

moral world of Bradbury’s

the carnival have taken

Cooger,

who

are normal,

by the rules of the sunlit world, Will

essence of evil, Bradbury suggests,

make. In the

They

all

fiction, the freaks

on the outward shapes of

children must

who populate

their inward vices.

has lived for thousands of years, pays for his

life

Mr.

of dark

degeneracy by becoming a Thing even more ancient, ancient almost beyond our ability to comprehend, kept alive by a steady flow of electricity.

Fluman Skeleton

is

paying for miserliness of feeling; the

The

fat lady for physical

or emotional gluttony; the dust witch for her gossipy meddling in the lives

of others.

The

carnival has

done

to

them what the undertaker

in that old

Bradbury story (“The Handler”) did to his victims after they had died.

On facts

its

Apollonian

side,

the book asks us to recall and reexamine the

and myths of our own childhoods, most

American childhoods. Written

specifically our

in a semipoetic style that

smalbtown

seems to

suit

such

concerns perfectly, Bradbury examines these childhood concerns and comes to the conclusion that only children are equipped to deal with childhood’s

myths and

terrors

and exhalations.

Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Everest House, 1981), pp. 310-11

Ray Bradbury

9

DAVID MOGEN

The Halloween Tree

quest story overtly

a

is

designed to dramatize mythological history and to advance a theory asserting the fundamental importance of Halloween, horror stories, and fantasy in

The

general. festival,

een

“Up

boys themselves, caught up in the pageantry of the Mexican

draw part of the moral. Though Green

much

of

its

meaning and

spirit

in Illinois, we’ve forgotten

have been

what

it’s all

our town, tonight, heck, they’re forgotten. really sad.

But here

—why, shucks.

Town still celebrates Hallowlost,

and the

about. .

.

.

mean

I

is

profound:

the dead, up in

Boy, that’s lonely. That’s

both happy and

It’s

loss

sad.

It’s all

fireworks

and skeleton toys down here.”

Through

meanings of the symbols and

visceral experience of the

rituals

from which their costumes originated, through direct exposure to the cultural contexts that created them, the boys

now know

that symbols of death

and

horror stories actually help humanize our relationship with the unknown.

More is

appalling than any of the grisly and haunting images they encounter

the spiritual poverty of simply denying Death’s presence.

death death,

itself

Not

actually

but a symbol to represent strategies for emotionally coping with

Moundshroud

power of mythology

inspires

both awe and affection. Representing the

penetrate the overwhelming mysteries of that

whose bourne no

he helps them face and

in the figure of a teacher,

real traveler returns, but

“unknown country” from

from which harrowed mythic

travelers return in mythologies throughout history.

(.

.

.)

Bradbury proposes two major arguments to support his defense of our symbols of

both dramatized in The Halloween Tree.

evil,

aesthetic: these symbols are intrinsically powerful; they

One argument

move our souls to awe

and wonder. But the other derives from “practical hair-ball psychology” knowledge of death

is

ourselves of the

rest.

The

and

is

to

do we

our throats, and only

digest

what we can and purge

and survive emotionally

intact.

“To

remain sane,” he maintains, contrasting the wondrous horror

release provided by stories of Dracula

unrelieved horror of such see toilet paper pile

no imaginative imagination,

for

mythical, fantastical tradition of horror inoculates

us to endure contact with the reality fantasize

it

—

all

a loathsome hair-ball in

through imaginative encounters with

is

up around the

release

we

modern

and the Wolf

realist films as

feet of the

Our Man

Man Flint,

with the

where we

dying victim, where there

is

from the tyranny of gruesome reportage. “Instead of

are treated to fact, to pure

raw data, which cannot be

an undoctrinal defense

digested.” Ultimately, Bradbury’s defense of fantasy

is

of the role of mythologies and religions in general:

“Our

religions, our tribal

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

10

personal myths, tried to find symbols then for the vacuum, the

as well as

void.

.

.

.

We

had

know.

to

We

had

names, even while we knew we

ward

to

lied.

lie, .

.

.

and accept the

Thus we gave

of labels and

lie

names

to

plot (of “Pillar of Fire”)

is

of

gifts

off the night.”

David Mogen, Ray Bradbury (Boston: Twayne, 1986), pp. 60-62

WILLIAM

TOUPONCE

F.

fantastic in construction, ral

and

made

The

a scientific explanation of the

William Lantry

is

is

Is

last

government

he an extraordinary case of suspended animation?

of

all

as a

make

writers

Lantry

is

is

set in

Salem

graveyard had been preserved as a tourist attraction by the

reminder of a barbaric custom.

Now

its

this graveyard

The government

scheduled by the government for destruction as well. thereby to

supernatm

Lantry really one of

Appropriately, the answer to this question (the former)

where the

a

uncanny events that happen when

reborn in the year of 2349 A.D.

the walking dead, or

between

so that readers hesitate

is

seeks

control over the world of darkness, death, decay (and

whose imaginations

reborn into

is,

are attracted to

therefore,

evident from the symbolism

it

it)

absolute.

an extreme Apollonian

employs.

It

The

society

culture, as

is

worships the sun of rationality,

emblazoned everywhere on public buildings. The dead of

this society are

burned in “Incinerators,” which are warm cozy temples where soothing music plays and the fear of death fire.

As Lantry watches,

is

abolished through ceremonies that deify

slowly the golden coffins of the dead roll in covered

with sun symbols, and after a brief ceremony, they are cast into a the altar are written the words

“We

flue.

On

that are born of the sun return to the

sun,” a fantastic reversal of the words normally spoken at Christian burials. It is

these gigantic Incinerators as myths of an Apollonian culture that

Lantry wants to explode, and does, killing hundreds of people in the sun

He hopes

rounding towns. to his cause

thereby to effect a revolution, to win converts

by creating more walking dead. But in

this rational

world the

dead remain dead. Because they never believed in vampires while

living,

they cannot be resurrected by Lan try’s magical procedures later (he draws

symbols of longMead sorcerers on the floor of the makeshift morgue and chants his

own

authorities

and

formulas, to is

no

avail). Eventually,

interrogated by a

he

is

picked up by the

man named McClure who is this century’s

representative of psychoanalysis and something of a detective as well.

Ray Bradbury

McClure

11

tries to

analyze Lantry’s mortified behavior, his paleness and lack

of breath, as a self-induced psychosis but

he finds that Lantry

is

mind such

McClure’s. Lantry

as

to a second death by the State, a death

which

were a Christian fantasy in the mode of the evident compassion of

McClure

and on

feel the

pp.

F.

for his victim

would have resulted it.

in

But no,

shock of seeing the imagination die

this level of response, the story

Touponce, Ray Bradbury (Mercer

is

quite effective.

more

Island,

terrible

WA:

The second

than

real death.

Starmont House, 1989),

87-88

STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ for

If this

R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis,

J.

death, the death of the imagination, becomes William

a

the death of

is

his conversion to the imagination at the end, thereby saving

Bradbury really wants us to

is

therefore,

is,

every fantastic writer in history, since only Lantry remembers them.

forever,

when

the real thing, one of the walking dead. Lantry

logical impossibility to a

condemned

himself slowly unnerved

is

In the two dozen stories he wrote

Weird Tales between 1942 and 1948, Bradbury shifted the focus of horror

from monster-driven

tales of the supernatural to

dark fables that turned the

everyday into the stuff of myth: in “The Scythe”, he imagined a farmer harvesting his crops as the grim reaper incarnate; in “Emissary”, a faithful

dog becomes an agent us that

we

all

for resurrecting the dead; in “Skeleton”,

carry a prop of

Gothic horror inside

us.

The

Bradbury wrought these transformations, his fictionalized

Death

Is

a Lonely Business,

in ordinary things that

Bradbury achieved

by infusing his

stories

is

he reminded

process by self

reminds us in

simple recognition of the fantastic possibilities

most people take

for granted

(.

.

.)

this interpenetration of the fantastic

and the familiar

with an almost childish sense of wonder that blurs

the boundaries between the natural and supernatural. Death Business (originally published in 1985)

and

Way Comes

tively, in his fictional

Both novels

a Lonely (origi-

Wine (1957) and Something

(1962), the third and fourth installments, respec-

autobiography (the

fifth installment,

White Whale, was published in 1992), which

how he has managed

Is

A Graveyard for Lunatics

nally published in 1990) are, after Dandelion

Wicked This

which

is

Green Shadows,

concerned in large part with

to preserve that childish imagination over the decades.

are mysteries with supernatural overtones. In the former, a

writer of pulp horror stories

nicknamed “The Crazy” must

figure out

why

.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

12

all

his friends

—

a Dickensian cast of eccentrics that includes a

380-pound

opera buff and an ageing actor with the face of a codger and the body of a

young Adonis

—

are dying

under mysterious circumstances. The

latter,

about a movie studio where characters manipulate Hollywood make-believe

The Phantom of the something of a riff on Bradbury’s

on an

to carry

intrigue that seems to be equal parts

Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is short story “The Night Sets”, in which a

man who

abandoned movie backlot actually turns into

much

takes refuge in an

a prop. Neither novel has

of a plot, but then one doesn’t turn to Bradbury for plot; one turns

for passages like this:

The rattle,

long chattering clack and grind, the ascending slow clang,

and

roar, like

some robot centipede of immense

size scaling

the side of a nightmare, pausing at the top for the merest breath,

then cascading in a serpentine squeal, rush, and thunderous

human

in scream, in

attack,

more

shriek

down

swiftly this time,

scale rising yet higher

That, in case you didn’t know,

is

the abysmal span, there to

another

and higher

roar,

hill,

another ascending

to fall off into hysteria.

a rendering of the

Venice Beach

roller

coaster. Descriptions like this, or of telephone booths seen by night as “unlit caskets, waiting to be taken away”,

enough

style

two novels, but

to sustain the

magic into the

abound

in

both books. They’re not

in quantity they infuse sufficient

stories to divert reader attention

from their self-indulgent

and puerile moralizing. Stefan Dziemianowicz, “Back to the Future,” Necrofile No. 9

Bibliography Dark Carnival. 1947. The Martian Chronicles. 1950. The

really

Illustrated

Man. 1951.

Timeless Stories for Today and

No Man

Is

an

Island. 1952.

The Golden Apples of Fahrenheit 45 1

Switch

On

Tomorrow

the

Sun. 1953.

1953.

the Night.

1955.

(editor). 1952.

(Summer

1993): 24

Ray Bradbury

13

The October Country. 1955.

The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable

Stories (editor). 1956.

Sun and Shadow. 1957. Dandelion Wine. 1957.

A

Medicine for Melancholy. 1959.

The Essence of Creative Writing. 1962. Something Wicked This

R

Is

Way Comes.

1962.

for Rocket. 1962.

The Anthem

Sprinters

and Other Antics. 1963.

The Machineries of Joy. 1964.

The

Pedestrian. 1964.

The Vintage Bradbury: Ray Bradbury’s

Own

Twice Twenty -two (The Golden Apples of

Selection of His Best Stories. 1965.

the

Sun,

A

Medicine for Melancholy ).

1966.

The Day

It

Rained Forever. 1966.

The Pedestrian (drama). 1966. S

Is

for Space. 1966.

Teacher’s Guide: Science Fiction (with I

Lewy Olfson). 1968.

Sing the Body Electric! 1969.

Bloch and Bradbury (with Robert Bloch). Ed. Kurt Singer. 1969.

Old Ahab’s

Friend,

and Friend

The Wonderful Ice-Cream

Suit

to

Noah, Speaks His Peace:

and Other

A Celebration.

1971.

Plays. 1972.

The Halloween Tree. 1972. Zen and

When

the

Art of Writing and The Joy of Writing:

Two

Essays. 1973.

Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed: Celebrations for Almost

Any Day

1973.

in the Year.

That Son of Richard

III:

A

Birth

Announcement. 1974.

Ray Bradbury. Ed. Anthony Adams. 1975. Kaleidoscope. 1975. Pillar

of Fire and Other Plays for Today,

Tomorrow, and Beyond Tomorrow.

1975.

1984 Will Not Arrive:

A

Prediction for the Greening of Scripps. 1975.

Long After Midnight. 1976. That Ghost, That Bride of Time: Excerpts from a Play -in- Progress Based on

Moby Dick Mythology and

Dedicated

to

Herman

Way Comes: Second Draft and Robot Men Run Round in

Melville. 1976.

Something Wicked This

Screenplay. 1976.

Where Robot Mice

Robot Towns:

Both Light and Dark. 1977.

the

New

Poems,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

14

Man Dead Then God The God

A

Is Slain!

?

Celebration. 1977.

1977.

in Science Fiction, c.

The Bike Repairman. 1978.

Twin

Swim

Hieroglyphs That

the River

Dust. 1978.

The Mummies of Guanajuato. 1978. The Poet Considers His Resources. 1979. Beyond 1984:

To

A

Remembrance of Things Future. 1979.

Sing Strange Songs. 1979.

About Norman Corwin. 1979. This Attic where the

A

The Aqueduct: The

Stories of

Meadow

Greens. 1979.

Martian Chronicle. 1979.

Ray Bradbury. 1980.

The Last Circus and The

Electrocution. 1980.

Imagine. 1981.

The Haunted Computer and

the

Android Pope. 1981.

The Ghosts of Forever. 1981. The Flying Machine. 1981. Complete Poems. 1982.

The Love

Affair:

A

Short Story; and

Two

Poems. 1982.

Dinosaur Tales. 1983. October. 1983.

Forever and the Earth. 1984.

A

Memory

of Murder. 1984.

The Last Good

Kiss. 1984.

Novels (Fahrenheit 451

,

Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This

1984.

Death

A

Is

a Lonely Business. 1985.

Device out of Time. 1986.

Death Has Lost

Its

Chaim

for

Me. 1987.

Fever Dream. 1987.

The Other The

Foot. 1987.

Veldt. 1987.

The April Witch. 1988. The Toynbee Convector. 1988. The Fog Horn. 1988. The Dragon. 1988. The Fog Horn and Other

Stories.

Classic Stories. 1990. 2 vols.

1989.

Way

Comes).

Ray Bradbury

A

15

Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of

Zen

in the

Stage:

A

1990.

Chrestomathy of His Plays. 1991.

Smile. 1991.

Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers

to

Impossible Futures. 1991.

Green Shadows, White Whale. 1992.

The

Cities.

Art of Writing. 1990.

Ray Bradbury on The

Two

Stars. 1993.

John Collier 1901-1980

JOHN HENRY NOYES collier was born in London on May 3, 1901, the son of John George and Emily Mary Noyes Collier. Although Collier’s father had connections with

royalty,

he was very poor and was forced to work

a clerk. Collier’s formal education was sporadic

and he was

as

largely tutored

by his uncle, the minor novelist Vincent Collier. Because of his love of books, however, he gained a considerable self-education in English literature, especially of the eighteenth century.

Collier initially wished to be a poet, and in 1922 he was the recipient

of a poetry prize by This Quarter magazine. a reviewer

and journalist

for

Time and

By

this

time he had also become

Tide, the Daily Telegraph,

and other

magazines and newspapers. By the end of the decade, however, Collier had

moved

wearied of London and he

Wife (1930), his a chimpanzee.

first

to the country.

Here he wrote His Monkey

novel, a curious light fantasy about a

Although well received

man who

marries

in English literary circles, the novel

garnered mixed reviews in America. Collier’s in 1931, the

one volume of poetry, Gemini, was published by

and

Just the Other

War, written

Day:

An

a small press

Informal History of Great Britain Since

in collaboration with Iain Lang, appeared in 1932. Collier’s

second novel, Tom's a-Cold (1933; published in the U.S.

as Full Circle),

describing an England following a devastating war, was a critical success, as

was

in

an eighteenth-century

At

his

next novel, Defy

the

Foul Fiend (1934), a picaresque novel written

style.

this point in his career Collier

turned his attention to two literary

forms that would bring him the greatest renown: short stories and screenplays.

He had begun

writing short stories as early as 1926, and a few of

published separately as chapbooks in the early 1930s. Collier’s of tales

is

The Devil and All (1934). In 1935 Collier

came

left

first

them were collection

England and,

after

to

Hollywood. For the next seven years he lived

alternately in England, France,

New York, and California until finally settling

a brief stay in France,

down

in California in 1942.

He remained 16

there for the next eleven years,

John Collier

17

writing the screenplays for Sylvia Scarlett (1936), Elephant Boy (1937), Deception

(1946), and other films. Collier wrote the original script for The African it

was not used and the

final version bears little

Meanwhile

Collier’s short stories

had been appearing

Queen, but

resemblance

to his.

New

Yorker, Playboy,

regularly in the

and other prestigious and well-paying magazines. The

collection Presenting Moonshine (1941) introduced to an

and fantasy

a writer of tales of mystery, horror,

misanthropy, and an enviable collections include The

command

full

American audience

of dry wit, pungent

of short story technique. Other

Touch of Nutmeg (1943), Fancies and Goodnights

(1951), and Pictures in the Fire (1958). In 1953 Collier, wishing to avoid the anti-Communist witch-hunts of

the

McCarthy

left

Hollywood

era

and

for

tiring of the lack of respect

Mexico, where he married Harriet Hess in 1954; they

had one son. The next year he purchased an he lived

for the

accorded his screenplays,

estate in Grasse, France,

where

next twenty-four years. The John Collier Reader (1972), a

large collection of his short stories, fleetingly revived interest in his work;

and the next year he published the eccentric Milton’s Paradise Screenplay for to

work on

April

6,

stories

Cinema

of the Mind. In 1979 Collier

a stage version of this work, but

1980.

Much

of Collier’s

work has

and His Monkey Wife retain

moved back

he died

Lost:

A

to California

in Pacific Palisades

on

fallen out of print, but his short

a following

among

readers of fantasy

and horror.

1

Critical Extracts

UNSIGNED

Although

this

modern

satirical

rendition of the story

Monkey Wife) has been hailed as vastly amusing by English doubtful whether many Americans will split their sides over it.

of Cinderella (His critics, it

is

It is

a curious mixture of the burlesque

age,

when men

are

what they

are,

and the extravaganza,

and when so few

were.” Like most humorists, the author

when he

casts his eyes

women and

fair

on England’s

men,” he finds them

is

are

what they

measurably misanthropic, and

“first-class all

women

satirizing “this

Nordic chivalry, on brave

very vulgar.

(.

.

.)

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

18

The subject of his mockery, His Monkey Wife takes a crack of English literature, which

is

in this case,

literary rather

is

than

social.

empty school

in passing at that broad but

based on the sentimental love 'in' the -jungle

theme, the shopgirl school of virtue-triumphant-down-the-ages, and the precocious chatter of Mayfair and Chelsea.

The mood

and the greater part of the book

sustained,

is

is,

however, nowhere

simply amusingly

silly. It is

a

light-hearted reductio ad absurdum of the whole “struggle-of-the-sexes” idea

which underlies

far

too

much

of Western fiction. Mr. Collier takes one of

the elements of the eternal triangle, turns her into a chimpanzee, and tries

out the result in Unsigned,

all

“War

the stock literary equations. of the Sexes,”

JOHN COLLIER

New

York Times Book Review, 19 April 1931,

p. 7

my position is a difficult one. I cannot see much good in the world, nor much likelihood of good. There seems to me to be a definite bias in human nature towards ill, towards the As

a writer,

immediate convenience, the vulgar, the cheap: a

or in

my

fellow

I

fall

end of every rocket-like ascent from pleasant,

into darkness must be the

grunting savagery.

whose

sort of stick

cannot therefore believe very enthusiastically in myself

men,

for

we

are past the starry stage.

I

would rather probe

the beating heart of humanity with a bodkin than with a pen. And, as the love borne to it is

Mary by her lamb

said to

that, looking

no longer

on

be perfectly frank,

I

rub

feel in earnest

my

I

who

bears

have become so

them no

ill-natured,

their Press, their pylons, their picture-palaces, their politics,

remonstrative mood, like a

good shepherd, nor inclined to the brisk but

have been of the responsive kind,

hardly to be expected that the sheep will love one

sort of good-will. In fact, to

I

is

self-constituted

little

satirical bark, like

the frisking dog;

hands, and say, “Hurry up, you foulers of a good world, and

destroy yourselves faster. Flock to be clerks and counter-jumpers and factory

hands. Eat your tinned food. Build yourselves more of the houses, reach-

me-downs,

faces, lives,

newspapers: they will

would

tell

tell

the rats so,

good thing that stands can be made and the more.

You

which express your

if

you you are

single soul so well.

all right,

Read your

that you should breed.

They

they grew up to be certified readers. Spoil every

in the

way of

sold, for, for the

evil sheep,

whom

trade,

and

time being,

it

praise every

gives

ill

thing that

you license to spawn

Shakespeare would have

led,

and Swift

barked back from destruction, you choose your nasty progress into comfort,

19

John Collier

a swinish choice,

and you have become swine,

on the Gadarene

cliff

swimming

suicidal swine,

Rush down

of self-deception.

own

pigs are said to do, cut your

it,

thank God!

into the sea, and, as

(or each other’s) throats

and

be forgotten.” (.

.

.)

There

are

two

sorts of prose: the impressionistic, in

human

yourself up to the subject, the

heart or the light

which you give

on the

tree,

and

the other sort, Burton’s sort, Fielding’s sort, in which you hold your puppetsubject at arm’s length, give across the table,

a jerk or two, then, laying

it

and with smile or

leer address

it

down, you lean

your ideal auditor direct, as

one good fellow to another. Impressionistic prose has been most worked on lately:

too

much worked

on.

of development, and anyway

hard

for ten years,

(. I

.

.)

The

like

other sort best.

it

capable of quite a lot

wonder

if,

supposing

shall find myself at forty in a position to write

I

That would be worth doing. Meanwhile

my

I

is

I’ll

I

work

it

well.

put some plots and things into

experiments, and by that means get some money. John Collier, “Please Excuse Me, Comrade,” cited raries:

in

John Gawsworth, Ten Contempo-

Notes toward Their Definitive Bibliography: Second Series (London: Joiner

Steele, 1933), pp.

109-11

DAVID GARNETT by John Collier,

I

who

drawn England

When

I

had read a few pages of Tom’s a-Cold,

thought that the author of that highly original book His

Monkey Wife had given the alarmists,

us another After London. For Mr. Collier has taken

predict the collapse of civilisation, at their

in the

nineteen nineties when,

famines have done their worst, what

is

left

is

word and has

after wars, plagues,

swamps, the

The towns

forests

are in ruins, the rivers

have extended

first

well,

is

and

a talk of wolves,

man

part of

have been choked up in

to twenty times their size; the cats

reverted to the grey brindled wild cat; dogs, horses and cattle are

There

and

almost exactly like what

(Richard) Jefferies described in the Relapse into Barbarism, the After London.

&

all

have wild.

which shows that Whipsnade has been working

himself has become a savage beast. But where Jefferies pre-

sented us with a sentimentalised feudalism, Mr. Collier shows us verminous

and lonely groups of outlaws, who are able to ings,

on

rabbits,

and when undisturbed

grow a few potatoes. The more sordid and hopeless the surround-

the more necessary

Here we

subsist

it

seems to give the reader a

are given a magnificent

really heroic hero.

young aspirant to the chiefdom who

is

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

20

coached by the oldest member of the clan

—who,

it is

odd

must

to reflect,

be living amongst us somewhere and just beginning to study Greek.

Mr. Collier says in an Introduction:

To

and events totally incompatible with present-day life here it was absolutely necessary to choose some other scene: the question was When or where? describe emotions

—

He

looked about

—

their drawbacks, so

to Neolithic times

and to savage

he chose the setting of

this tale.

islands, but these

had

Thus the book

not

is

written out of a deep emotion of hatred as Jefferies wrote, nor out of a deep

conviction such as H. G. Wells would have brought to clan has a tradition of the finer things of

and the knowledge of the

comes

is

fatal.

represented by the memories

come

life

The

to

when

mean no more than

it

the

murder a sick man under the pretence of healing him, and primitive

contraptions for staging a

have looked well

The

here.

This

of the old man. Unfortunately

classics,

to a test, the finer things of

ability to

life,

it.

terrific

massacre of the Swindon folk which would

book by Rider Haggard, but which

in a

entire absence of nobility nullifies the

The descendants

to feel for the father.

have been worth

them kneeling on the

rabbit-bitten turf.

out of place

sympathy we are expected

of a curate and a girl-guide would

ignoble clan and

all this

is

It

we might have wept on

seeing

was a mistake to leave out religion

and morality; they were necessary, and the conditions would have produced them.

It

was also a mistake to

Intelligentsia

hikers

and begin

the second generation revert to the

let

each other’s motives

to discuss

as

though they were

who had been reading Shaw. Tom’s a-Cold is therefore

book from the author of that

beautiful

and

Green Shade. The description of the Swindon the tower,

is

very good indeed. But

if

brilliantly girl,

a disappointing

comic

story, In

Rose, and the attack

Mr. Collier was a cat

this

is

a

on

not what

he would have drawn. David Garnett, “Books

in General,”

STRUTHERS BURT for horror.

The

much so, that Not on lonely that.

But the

(.

.

New

.)

best contemporary

Statesman and Nation, 8 April 1933,

John Collier has an one there

is

—

far

p.

448

infallible instinct

out in the lead. So

think frequently, and abruptly, he must frighten himself.

I

roads or in haunted houses. Nothing as

far

commonplace

worse feeling of horror that creeps over you

like a

as

sudden

21

John Collier

paralyzing chill with a lot of people around; at cocktail parties, or something

when

like that,

for a

moment you

are objective,

eyes, or metaphorically speaking, into your

John Collier takes

horror.

why,

seems to me, his murder

it

fantasies, mostly diabolic, usually

bamboo rod with

more

his horror

and look into someone’s

own. That’s dry-as-dust, desert

seriously than his wit,

stories are practically perfect,

break

too big a fish on

it.

down (.

.

end

right at the

what he

pleases,

Moving

while his

.)

completely

is

he can do exactly

in a never-never land,

and therefore most exactly cannot do what he

Released from any necessity of the rational, or the

realistic, or

he must use his freedom with discrimination and,

anything,

human. Faust had

that’s

like a delicate

Like the devil, or the jinn, or the badTairy, the author also

powerful in a fantasy.

and

to turn against the world

if

and undergo

pleases.

human,

the

become more

a long period of

degeneration before the devil got him, and Dr. Jekyll did the same. You can’t take any old scrubby like

some undergraduate

human

“The Right latter

is

Side’’

is

murder

such a

a magnificent fantasy

most certainly

And when John

joke.

fantasies are as pefect as his

being and turn him over.

story,

—

gets his proper

Collier

If

you do,

remembers

it’s

this, his

stories.

and so

is

“Thus

also a horror story

—

I

in

come-uppance. Stories

Refute Beelzy.”

The

which he who should, “Ah, the Univer-

like

“Possession of Angela Bradshaw,” and “Night! Youth! Paris! and the

sity!,’’

Moon!,”

fall

into a different category and, since there’s nothing to trip

the wit, are marvelously funny and absurd. In short,

for one,

I,

up

wish John

Collier would forget his preoccupation with the Devil, who’s really a dull

and unpleasant

fellow,

and too much around

of his lesser demons, and concentrate

and

lots of

at present,

on murder long or

anyway, with a

short. Long,

I

lot

hope,

it.

Struthers Burt, “Lineal Descendant of Saki,” Saturday Review, 5 February 1944,

P

.

BASIL

15

DAVENPORT

Collier’s stories)

tional gorillas, stories

is.

It

(.

.

cannot be the

.) it is

eerie,

and Beelzebub himself

(and the eeriest of all, perhaps,

in the big

department

stores).

Some

hard to say what th(e) quality (of although jinns, fiends, conversa-

figure

is

prominently in many of the

about the people

who

live all

night

of the best of them, tales of murder

revealed by an accident that was in the nature of things, or murders in the

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

22

future, pointed out equally

by the inexorable logic of the nature of things,

have nothing haunted about them. Collier can certainly get

young man

a helpless I

told

is

It is

more fun than any

living

disemboweled before

you John Collier was a hard

macabre

not quite the macabre, though Mr.

man

his

man out of a scene where own eyes (it is funny, and

to convey); for there

in the straightforward spiritual brutality of the

Saturday.”

Once

(.

.

the most unrealistic stories. There

is

stores.

Basil

but scholars

the dark

hardly ever quite free of humor, nor

who

write about Edith

even

may be

—

who

at their

it

Wharton and

E.

M.

further: histories of

Forster

16

who

Collier,

may

also

Anglo-American

most comprehensive, find room

said of other imaginative writers

Saki, for instance,

p.

read Irving Wallace and

and the other Irvings may not be expected to read

fiction rarely,

treat

is

People

be expected to neglect him. Take

who

who haunt

Davenport, “Unlike Other Tales,” Saturday Review, 22 December 1951,

Irving Stone

qualities

in

of horror.

ANTHONY BURGESS

the same

and most vividly

But in general Mr. Collier remains the master of an irony

so perfectly balanced that his horror

humor

“Wet

in

a really idyllic feeling about the love

of the night-watchman and the youngest of the people

his

murder

.)

or twice tenderness nearly or quite breaks in,

department

nothing

is

share

for

him, but

some of

his

and Mervyn Peake, and the royal physician

wrote the anonymous comic masterpiece Augustus Carp Esq. (what a is

coming

to

Americans when some publisher decides

to reprint

it).

To write tales about hell under the floorboards, the devil as a film producer, men kept in bottles, a man who marries a chimpanzee is a sure way to miss the attentions of the “serious” chronicler of fiction. The puritanism of the scholarly tradition leads Oxford dons to produce detective stories pseudony-

mously but to refuse to write “seriously” about the form (T. promised to produce a considered thesis on the genre but ,

or It

decorum or lack of time or something

S. Eliot

—because of shame

—the promise was not

also exhibits pudeur in the presence of fantasy, especially

evident didactic purpose. Gulliver’s Travels

is

always

all right,

when

fulfilled). it

has no

but the works of

Carroll and Lear are for the depth psychologist rather than the literary historian.

23

John Collier

John Collier

essentially a fantasist, but not of the

is

romantic order that

He makes

purveys Gothick, both paleo- and neo-, and science fiction.

literature out of the intrusion of fantasy, or quiet horror, into a real

world

closely observed, not out of the creation of a parallel world (windy, bosky,

and machicolated; (.

.

There

.)

different (.

.

.),

from

is

and computerized; hobbitish).

steely

what

is

which does not

conclusion, though

it

.

.)

sometimes called wickedness in Collier

There

salacity.

(.

is

—

a quality

also the logic of the metaphysical conceit

balk, as the cartoon fantasy does, at the inescapable

leaves everything to the imagination.

The

Collierian

melodic line deliberately seduces us into accepting reality through the agency of a “double take.”

happens, for instance, at the end of the story called

It

“Bottle Party,” where the hero

some

In the end,

it

glassed

and corked and put on

sale:

happened to drift into the shop, and, contained the most beautiful girl in the world,

sailors

hearing this bottle they bought

is

up by general subscription of the

fo’c’sle.

When

him at sea, and found it was only poor Frank, disappointment knew no bounds, and they used him with

they unstoppered their

the utmost barbarity.

That

final

word covers

a great deal, but Collier the scriptman, the visual

conceptor, undoubtedly has a

number

of specific images in mind.

Or

just

one.

Anthony

Burgess, “Introduction,” The John Collier Reader

(New

York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1972), pp. xii-xiv

TOM MILNE ‘I

(In 1933) Collier wrote a sort of declaration of faith:

cannot see much good in the world or much likelihood of good. There seems

to

me

a definite bias in

human

nature towards

convenience, the ugly, the cheap ...

you foulers of

a

I

rub

ill,

towards the immediate

my hands and

good world, and destroy yourselves

say “Hurry up,

faster.”

’

The

cynical

disenchantment expressed here informs most of Collier’s writing, but governs only the more conventional short

stories,

including the two selected by

Hitchcock: diabolical murder plots conceived by resentful husbands and spiteful

who and who

wives

strategy,

observe the utmost social aplomb in the niceties of their are suavely brought to

book by neat O. Henry

twists,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

24

whether internal (both husband and wife execute the same successful plan simultaneously in ‘Over Insurance’) or external (the dead and buried wife

had previously arranged

in ‘Back for Christmas’

Mildred Natwick, blithely chirruping ‘What seems

surprise for her husband).

upon Edmund Gwenn dragging

to be the trouble, Captain?’ as she stumbles

a corpse about by the heels in a Collier character that to say

Hollywood

repairs to the cellar as a

it is

The Trouble with Harry,

is

so quintessential^

surprising as well as sad that

—never made more use of Collier

Hitchcock

— not

as scriptwriter or source.

much subtler and more disorientating. The magnificent ‘Are You Too Late or Was Too Early?’, conceived entirely as a subjective narrative, is the haunting love story of a man for the mysterious ghostly woman who appears, tantalisingly, in his flat as a Crusoe footprint, But Collier, of course, could be

I

dimming the

a breath

an overheard

mirror, a scented breeze in passing, until

telephone conversation takes us through another looking-glass: a full

heard, in

opening of the sense, the delicate intake of her breath, the very sound

of the parting of her as clear as a bell.

lips.

She

She was about

said,

“Oh,

it’s

to speak again.

perfect.

Guess how we were lucky enough to get

it!

dead in his chair, and they actually say

it’s

The nightmares away

‘I

syllable

was

so quiet for Harry’s work.

It’s

The

Each

previous tenant was found ’

haunted.”

of the imagination discovered by Poe are never very far

where a sculptor seeking success

in Collier’s stories,

as a ventriloquist

dummy so lifelike that it assumes his life (‘Spring Fever’); a lovelorn young man conceives the notion of having himself stuffed and placed in creates a

an eternal reproach

his beloved’s presence as

(‘Squirrels

a stuffy father ordering his small son to banish

Mr. Beelzy

is

Have

Bright Eyes’);

an imaginary playmate called

himself mysteriously consumed (‘Thus

I

Refute Beelzy’). In

these stories, however, Collier invariably sets out from reality: from the

psychological inadequacies and emotional disturbances that lead to strange fancies.

The

Devil, for instance, might be said to

end of ‘Thus

I

have taken

a

on the

last

of his pedestrian

self. (.

.

father determined to

mould him

into a replica

.)

Despite the profusion of devils in his work, Hell, for Collier,

is

at the

Refute Beelzy’; more particularly, however, the child has

simply turned at

of our

hand

own making. Yet even

as

he excoriates the world

clearly increasingly preoccupied

by

—and

for

is

essentially

its follies,

sympathetic to

— the

Collier

human

predicament expressed by his collection of lonely castaways yearning little

romance, a

little

tenderness and a

again not inappropriately, the

little

for a

understanding. Oddly, but

man who hungered

for the

world to destroy

25

John Collier

itself

more

rapidly,

and spent

covertly expresses his

animals

who

witnesses to

new concern by way

as

mute

more often

destructiveness, but

birds,

of the amazing collection of

sometimes

proliferate in his stories,

human

and

his days killing harmless beasts

(or not so

mute)

as surrogates for the

unrealised aspirations.

Tom

Milne, “The Elusive John Collier,” Sight and Sound 45, No. 2 (Spring 1976):

107-8

BEN

P.

INDICK

when

Generally,

attendant murder and horror, he leavens

its

expense of some unfortunate undeserving ones

as well).

Such

us that the fate was, after

on the workings of laboriously

chopped

all,

Fate.

a

his

unusual

mock

tells

comment Christmas” who has

lesson and a wry

doctor in “Back for

home

had arranged

“Green Thoughts”

which

in the narrative style

is

annoying wife into pieces and buried her in neat

parcels in the cellar leaves

that his late wife

at the

denouement may include dismay, agony

welbearned, a

The

with ironic humor

it

deserving wretch (and sometimes some

if

and even dismemberment; the humor

In

Collier employs Guignol, with

to

for a

presumed vacation, only

have

a

a horticulturist

is

to learn

new

cellar built in his absence.

literally

absorbed, physically, by his

new orchid. When his avaricious nephew sees his uncle’s face within

the flower, and then discovers that the uncle’s intention had been to cut

him from

his will,

he snatches up a

scissors

...(...)

His Guignol, however, on occasion, retains the verve and shock without

“The Touch of Nutmeg Makes murder, the work of an apparent

the relieving laughter, most classically in It.”

A

story of a particularly repellent

madman,

it is all

the more peculiar that a sensitive, mild-mannered

has been accused of so heinous a crime. accept

him

trivial

incident demonstrates

as a murderer,

and he

is

It

is

logical that

no

man

jury could

acquitted; however, a subsequent

more about the man than any amount of

circumstantial evidence might. In “Special Delivery” a

with a department store mannequin; there

is

no humor

his stealing the doll to his eventual death at the

man

falls in

as the story follows

hands of hooligans. Yet

there

is

a disquieting fascination in his hopeless love, with

he

is

kicked to death and thrown with the mannequin into a chalk

as

“His head lay limp on her neck; her

stiff

love

its

terrible fate

arm was arched over him.

pit.

In the

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

26

autumn, when the overhang crumbled down on them,

it

him

pressed

close

to her forever.”

Ben

P. Indick,

ed. Darrell

II,

“Sardonic Fantasists: John Collier” (1982), Discovering Modern Horror Schweitzer (Mercer Island,

BETTY RICHARDSON

Like E.

he was born into

a

Starmont House, 1988), pp. 123-24

M.

He was sympathetic toward

believe in belief. paradise, for

WA:

Forster,

the

John Collier did not

human desire for an

world of Victorian values and studied the

works of the Victorian visionaries, but he realized that the desire

Eden

is

no more than

a poignant dream.

He was

to restrict

true, just as

human

for a lost

profoundly skeptical of

the twentieth-century dogmas and ideologies that promise to

dream come

earthly

make

this

he was skeptical of traditional theology that sought

human

behavior and cripple

aspiration for the sake of a

paradise to come. Collier’s world

concept of the world

as process, flux,

permanent order can be imposed on deception.

At

who

view was that of a modern

worst,

it is

camouflage for those

an excuse

who want

accepts the Bergsonian

and change. To believe that some an act of

self-

for authoritarian control of others

and

this universe

is,

at best,

to manipulate others.

Whether those who

seek power for these reasons are Christian proselytizers or merely individual physicians or industrialists, Collier abhorred their ambition and attacked

them. But, because he was a

hunger

for experience,

and

man

possessed of a great love for

human

he attacked them with Rabelaisian laughter.

even though he of thinking

is

a great

a great capacity for enjoying all the riches of

the earth, including the rich variety of

Collier’s vision

life,

(.

and

illusions .

personalities,

.)

might well be one of despair and pessimism, but

it is

not,

profoundly aware of man’s mortality, of the desperation

men and

of the stultifying

boredom and

frustration of small

men caught up in capitalistic machinery in which they are used as objects. What Collier stresses through his writing is the realization of the transience of all things, and he insists on stripping down the trappings of the world to bare essentials essentials,

—

time, sex, death, creativity.

then a good

existentialism

and

life is

possible, a life reminiscent

of those values that Collier inherited

education and Edwardian boyhood affection, and,

Granted awareness of these

above

all, pity.

—

both of a kind of

from his Victorian

tolerance, loyalty, respect, dignity,

John Collier

But

an

27

good

this

individualist,

in his writing.

life is

an outsider,

He

is

roles that Collier accepted

man and

belonged to no

his personal integrity

man who

possible only to the

and the

to

no

party,

willing to remain

both in

his life

and

and he maintained

integrity of his craftsmanship despite the

temptations to which he occasionally and admittedly succumbed. Betty Richardson, John Collier (Boston: Twayne, 1983), pp. 106, 108

JOHN

J.

KESSEL

Demons, witches,

and magic appear

genies,

quently in Collier’s short fiction. Stories like “Fallen “Pictures in the Fire,”

“The Devil George and

Star,’’

fre-

“Bottle Party,’’

Rosie,” and “Halfway to

Hell” are frankly presented as divertissements, but some of the snap of His

Monkey Wife effect. “Thus Simon, by

One

I

serious

Refute Beelzy” presents the persecution of a boy, Small

his father, Big

Simon,

day the father returns

Simon

more

surfaces in others that use these materials to

in the

home

name

early

of “learning from experience.”

from his

office

and discovers Small

playing with his imaginary friend, Mr. Beelzy. Big

Simon

insists, in

proper psychoanalytical terms, that the boy give up this fantasy before he turns to a real

lie.

Collier, in a few pages, deftly sketches in the tyranny of

the father, the mother’s ineffectuality, their neighbor’s embarrassment, and the boy’s desperate defense, culminating in Big

Simon

taking his son upstairs

once there are no authorial intrusions:

to beat the fantasy out of him. For

the story consists almost entirely of dialogue and ends of Beelzy’s refutation of the father. “It was

they found the shoe, with the man’s foot of a

mouse which sometimes

falls

on the

horrific

on the second-floor landing

still

in

it,

much

like the last

note that

morsel

unnoticed from the side of the jaws of

the cat.”

The is

plot of this story, complete to the supernatural reversal at the end,

similar to those of Collier’s

more whimsical

that leads up to this conclusion raises story

is

it

Any

aware reader

is

is its

it

starts

clever.

This

from a situation

going to expect the departure into

fantasy in the end, where father gets his

pected

beyond the merely

more powerful than “Fallen Star” because

closer to reality.

but the domestic drama

tales,

comeuppance, but what

disproportionate savagery and the matter-of-fact

way

is

unex-

in

which

Collier leads us from the comic psychological brutality of dad (whose attacks are veiled, as are brutality of

most attacks

in the civilized family) to the grim supernatural

Small Simon’s protector (whose attack

is

graphically physical,

.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

28

unveiled to us in the gruesome final line of the story).

We

begin the story

comedy and conclude in grand guignol. No authorial comment necessary or offered, as the tale moves from the whimsical to the minatory.

reading light is

John

Kessel,

J.

“John Collier,” Supernatural

York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), Vol.

B

Fiction Writers, ed. E. F. Bleiler

2, p.

580

Bibliography His Monkey Wife;

No

or,

Married

to

a Chimp. 1930.

Traveller Returns. 1931.

The Scandal and

Credulities of

John Aubrey. 1931.

Gemini. 1931.

An

Epistle to

a Friend. 1932.

Green Thoughts. 1932. Just the Other

Day:

An

Informal History of Great Britain Since the

War

(with

Iain Lang). 1932.

Tom’s a-Cold. 1933, 1933 Defy

the

Foul Fiend;

The Devil and

or,

(as Full Circle).

The Misadventures of

the Heart.

1934.

All. 1934.

Variation on a Theme. 1935.

Witch’s Money. 1940. Presenting Moonshine

Wet

1941.

Saturday. 1941.

The Touch of Nutmeg. 1943. Fancies and Goodnights. 1951. Pictures in the Fire. 1958.

The John

Collier Reader. 1972,

Milton’s Paradise Lost:

A

1975

(as

The Best of John

Collier; abridged).

Screenplay for Cineima of the Mind. 1973.

(New

L.

Camp

Sprague de b.

1907

Fletcher Pratt 1897-1956

MURRAY FLETCHER pratt was born on April 25, 1897, in Buffalo, New York, the son of a farmer. As a youth, he held a variety of jobs including librarian and flyweight

prizefighter before attending

financial problems forced in

New

him

Hobart College.

to leave school,

When

he found work on newspapers

York and Pennsylvania. Burned out of

his

New

York apartment

the early 1920s, Pratt and his second wife Inga used the insurance to

move

to France,

family

where he studied languages

at the

Sorbonne.

in

money

Upon

his

return to the United States, he began writing and translating science fiction

pulp magazines and established a reputation as a writer of

stories for the

popular history and nonfiction books.

Lyon Sprague de Camp was born on November 27, 1907, in New York City, the oldest of three sons born to Lyon de Camp, a sawmill owner, and Beatrice Sprague. His early education was divided between Trinity School in

New

York and

a

North Carolina

military institute, the

Snyder School.

Eventually, he earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1930, and a master’s in engineering and

economics Jersey.

He

in

1933 from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken,

taught courses in patents for inventors until 1937,

when

New

his first

book, Inventions and Their Management, was published. That same year, he sold his

first

known

as

“Golden

story to Astounding Stories the ,

one of the most erudite and imaginative

writers of science fiction’s

Age.’’

Pratt was introduced to

collaborate

with

magazine where he would become

on

a story that

Pratt’s interest in

Trumpet,’’ the

first

De Camp

in 1939,

and he suggested that they

would combine de Camp’s wry sense of humor

language and mythology.

The result was “The Roaring

of the magical misadventures of Harold Shea, in which 29

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

30

Shea, a bumbling and egotistical experimental psychologist, accidentally transports himself to the world of the Norse Eddas,

magic, rather than science,

May 1940 issue was already known for in the

of

is

that world’s governing logic.

John

his

where he discovers that

W.

The story appeared

Campbell’s Unknown, where de

amusing alternate

histories,

and

it

Camp

became the

epitome of the magazine’s brand of literate adult fantasy. The second Harold

“The Mathematics of Magic” (1940), took Shea to the world of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, where Shea learns to master magic like science. It was combined with “The Roaring Trumpet” for book publication Shea

as

story,

The Incomplete Enchanter (1941). Shea’s adventures continued in the world of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in

The Castle of Iron (serialized 1941; book publication 1950), and almost ended in fellow Unknown writer L. Ron Hubbard’s “The Case of the Friendly Corpse” (1941), where his annihilation brought complaints from readers.

De Camp and

Pratt eventually resurrected

Shea

in

two more adventures,

“The Wall of Serpents” (1953) and “The Green Magician” (1954), which sent their antihero respectively to the worlds of the Finnish Kalevala and Irish

mythology. In the meantime, they collaborated on The Land of Unreason

(1942), a mingling of folk legend and political satire, and The Carnelian

Cube (1948),

romp through

a

“alternate heavens”

made

accessible by the

possession of a magic talisman. In 1953, they collected a filled tall tales told at a fictional

Tales from

Gavagans

Although history,

he

watering hole as their final collaboration,

Bar.

Pratt’s later years

were taken up mostly with writing popular

produced the heroic fantasy The Well of

also

number of pmv

the

Unicorn (1948),

the dream fantasy The Blue Star (1952), and several science fiction novels

and anthologies before dying of complications of 1956.

De Camp

The Undesired

Krishna

cancer on June 10,

published alternate world fantasies in Unknown, including

Princess (1942)

fantasy with science fiction in set in a future

liver

where

stories, set

Brazil has

on

and Solomons Stone (1942), and merged his futuristic Viagens Interplanetarias series,

become the dominant world power, and

planets where feudal governments hold sway.

his

With

Fin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg, he helped to organize and complete the saga of Robert E. Howard’s

the 1950s and 1960s.

Conan

the Barbarian in a series of books published in

Among his

recent works of fantasy are The Honourable

Barbarian (1989), a continuation of his heroic Novarian saga set in the

milieu he created in The Goblin Tower (1968), and The Incorporated Knight

(1989) and

its

sequel The Pixilated Peeress (1991), written in collaboration

— L.

Sprague de

&

Camp

31

Fletcher Pratt

whom

with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp,

De Camp

on ancient

has written prolifically

fiction writing,

and numerous other

Grand Master Award from the Science he resurrected Harold Shea one

Gnome

last

history, science, the craft of

and

topics,

he married in 1939.

is

a recipient of the

Nebula

Fiction Writers of America. In 1991

time in the novella

Sir

Harold and

the

King.

Critical Extracts

JOHN W. CAMPBELL results to

“The Mathematics of Magic’’ shows the

be attained by a sound scientist, working with a knowledge of

mathematics,

magic works. local yokels

logic, It

and the

scientific

tricks,

magic into a system of law and order

can

really stir

method

takes the scientific

have some good

method, stranded to

make

where

a real enchanter.

The

but a pair of scientists at work analyzing

—with

a highly elastic decimal point!

up something. Harold Shea, errant psychologist with an escape

mechanism, really gets results in the world of Spenser’s John W. Campbell, “Of Things Beyond,” Unknown 3, No. 5

L.

in a world

RON HUBBARD

(I

Faerie

Queene!

(July 1940): 6

man dressed in funny^looking clothes know who I was. told him and asked

saw) a

and when he saw me, he wanted

to

I

—

him who he was and he said his name was let’s see, what did he say his name was? Hair Harole She or Shay. Harold Shay, that was it. He said

—

he was a magician from another world.

Well

I

would be

make

was a

just

about to show the dean

good time to

try

it

this

out and see

if it

really

worked.

said this

I

I

said I’d

the snake and then he could rear up a monster and we’d see which

one won. Well, he seemed kind of upset when it

double wand so

I

threw down the wand and

began to grow and he yelled some kind of chant that sounded

mathematics and the snake

just

kept on growing.

I

like

expected to see his

monster any minute because he said he was a magician from another world

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

32

and

figured

I

he must be pretty good. But by

and then grabbed him and ate him up before L.

Ron Hubbard, “The Case

of the Friendly

snake just grew up

golly, the

could do anything about it. Corpse,” Unknown 5, No. 2 (August I

1941): 31

BASIL

DAVENPORT

tures (in

The Incomplete Enchanter) surprisingly manage to be genuinely

exciting

—

When

menace

more metaphysics or

Fu Manchu

as Dr.

idea of this most unusual book. either

Jotunheim (who walk

after all, the giants of

are just as credible a

one adds that some of the adven-

has

It

less;

its faults,

like

Bowery toughs)

— that should give some

of course. There should be

any reader worth entertaining should be

willing to grant a possible world almost as a postulate, with a

theory; but with so

much

explanation as there

ask the further questions of where the in,

mind

is

one

here,

of Spenser

is

minimum

of

inclined to

is

supposed to come

and why Shea should vanish into another world by concentrating on

propositions of logic

would be

a bold

which appear

man who would

to be true of this one.

And

though he

maintain that any given episode

be found in the proliferating forest of the Faery Queene, surely the

is

not to

Da Derga

has strayed in there from the Irish epic cycle, and ought to be explained. Also, the book

is

uneven; the fun sometimes

But the burlesque athlete,

is

at

its

best, as in the

at least a possible Britomart, as this

is

and

a book, with

its

own

p.

IRIS

like

as burlesque

sometimes forced.

can be, convincing;

a possible world.

is

it

in your

Davenport, “Worlds in Time,” Saturday Review of

It is

a world,

life.

Literature, 4

October 1941,

19

BARRY

Of course, The

Incomplete Enchanter

terous, but the authors imply that they

hope

is

wild logic, with some fighting and a lot of fun;

and you never met anything exactly Basil

and

treatment of Britomart, the lady

both genuinely amusing, and even

this

flags,

to be enjoyed. This,

of humanity and

humor

I

think,

may

is

utterly prepos-

do not expect to be believed, only fairly

be predicted. There

in the gods, trolls, enchanters

whom

is

a

heap

our heroes

encounter, while the puzzling circumstances they find themselves in are

recounted with straightforward energy and abandon. Oddly enough, one of

L.

Sprague de

Camp

&

33

Fletcher Pratt

the pleasantest scenes in the book finds the two contemporary

humans

ardently engaged in a cockroach race while they languish in the unpleasant

dungeon from which Snogg eventually mingling of that

known

makes the narrative

too, in learning

and

habits

how

them.

releases

It

perhaps this

and reactions with the remotest of backgrounds

lively.

And

there

the two psychologists

most un-Christian pleasure,

a

is

manage

to

plumb the thoughts

desires of their fabulous friends of the long-ago past.

own though

singularly like our

is

They prove

to be

dressed up in unfamiliar, impressive and

obsolete guise. Iris

Barry, [Review of

October 1941,

p.

The Incomplete Enchanter],

Archaeologist Arthur Cleveland Finch, digging

for Hittite artifacts in

which transports him Century

state of

—but

wardheelers is

York Herald Tribune Books, 12

8

FREDERIK FOHL

around the

New

Armenia, comes across

a cube of carnelian stone

seem

to three worlds of his dreams. All three

to center

Kentucky, and the time seems to be the Twentieth

in the first the

who hold

government

is

of, for

and by

gang of super-

a

the populace in subjection; in the second, the state

divided into feudal

—and

feuding

—

baronies, complete with lavender

armored limousines; and the third presents the picture of a

sort of permanent

fancy-dress ball, where everyone takes part in reconstruction of famous historical events. for keeps;

The

trouble, in the last case,

is

that the

games

and the Archaeologist Finch discovers himself

doomed to execution. The team of de Camp and fantasies ever to see print.

Pratt has produced

Frederik Pohl,

cast as a slave

some of the funniest

The Carnelian Cube, almost alone among fantasy

books, has never been published in magazine form the magazines missed

are played

—but one wonders how

it.

“The Science

Fictioneer,” Super Science Stories 5,

No.

1

(January 1949):

92

A.

LANGLEY

SE ARLES

authors’ previous collaborations

of Unreason

—

will

approach

Readers

who remember

these

two

— The Incomplete Enchanter and The Land

this third

one with

a

good deal of anticipation.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

34

They little

are sure to be entertained

and often amused by

There

its

predecessors. But then,

a

Cube does not duplicate the high

disappointed, too, for The Carnelian

standards of

and probably

it,

what fantasy novel does these days?

are three separate episodes in the book, every

one

in a different

dream-world, and archeologist Arthur Cleveland Finch gets himself into plenty of adventurous trouble in each.

Asia Minor

when he encounters

It all

on an expedition

begins

a carnelian cube engraved with cryptic

and

Etruscan characters. This cube, he discovers,

is

owner

be taken to heaven.

sleeps with

The

under his pillow he

“heaven” he lands in

first

people are

it

named according

will

a “dreamstone,”

to their occupations.

one jump ahead of the forces of law and

The second world than anything

tic

feuding furiously

all

the

Finch Arthur Poet finds

number two

order.

likewise has a feudal set-up, but

else,

if

an interesting feudal hierarchy where

is

himself in progressively hotter water, and escapes into heaven just

in

it

proves to be anarchis-

what with Kentucky colonels and

their retainers

over the Kentucky landscape. There are no end of

goofily unusual characters here, but

ardent pursuit of Finch causes

him

it

is

a familiar seductive siren

whose

to use the carnelian cube yet a third

time. I

suspect the final locale

is

intended

methods; but totally aside from that all

three,

as a semi-satire

it

is

Pratt

would put

scientific

probably the most intriguing of

ending the novel on a pleasant note.

Camp and

on modern

I,

for one,

their imaginations together

wish Messrs, de

more

often.

A. Langley Searles, [Review of The Carnelian Cube], Fantastic Novels

4,

No.

1

(May

1950): 116

SAM MERWIN

Continuing the adventures of hapless Harold Shea

and the devious Professor Reed Chambers

(sic)

form in The Incomplete Enchanter (Prime

Press, Philadelphia),

became

first

inaugurated recently in book

when Shea

involved in the world of the Norse gods and then in that of

the Faerie Queen,

when he brought back

the

fair

Belphebe to

wife.

In this even daffier sequel Professor Chambers, in an effort to prevent his

snow-maiden

light-of-love

from melting in the

first

hot

spell,

has con-

veyed not only his ice-born Lady Florimel and himself but Belphebe into the troubadoric magic land of the

Chanson

of Roland.

L.

Sprague de

Camp

&

35

Fletcher Pratt

Shea, in prosaic Ohio of this world, promptly finds himself about to be

when

charged with murder, kidnaping and sundry other capital offenses

Chambers,

in

need of help, whisks him, along with a screwball fellow

psychologist, a cop

heaven

—

a sort of

Shea and

more or

less

and Shea

at

and one other adjacent character, into

way

his screwball pal

manage

Chambers, who

is

operating

once learns that his beloved Belphebe has become inextricably

ratrace

is

de Camp-Pratt fans could wish.

and will content outselves with those

to join

happily in the enchanted castle of the Moorish wizard Atlantes,

name and personality. From then on in the

all

Mohammedan

station.

and schizophrenically involved with

by

a

who

a local

maiden of somewhat

merry and fantastic

as

We don’t intend to spoil

a

as the it

similar

most devout

in these

columns

most hearty recommend. Should be enjoyed

love cats, love dogs and detest toast buttered only in the

middle.

Sam Merwin,

[Review of The Castle of

Iron],

Thrilling

Wonder

Stories

37,

No.

2

(December 1950): 159-60

ANTHONY BOUCHER last

and

J.

FRANCIS McCOMAS

the superlative magazine series by L. Sprague de

Pratt,

all

is

in print in a completely revised

form. The Incomplete Enchanter (universes of Norse

Queene) has been time the

Furioso). series

and Fletcher

recounting Piarold Shea’s experiences with the mathematics of magic

in alternate universes,

first

Camp

At

The

reissued by Prime;

and

Gnome

and expanded

Gods and

of the Faerie

has brought out for the

The Castle of Iron (universe of Orlando plot much the weaker of the two; but the whole

fuller version of last

is

in

marks a high-point in the application of sternest intellectual logic to

screwball fantasy.

Anthony Boucher and

J.

Francis

Fantasy and Science Fiction

FLETCHER PRATT and of Amazing

Stories in

1,

No.

McComas, “Recommended Reading,” Magazine 5

(December 1950): 104

With 1926,

it

of

the

first issues

of Weird Tales in 1923

was discovered that a

class of reader

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

36

who was

existed

story as long as

That

is,

it

careless of the thematic material or the

dealt with other times, other spaces of the world of wonder.

these readers were

more

interested in the

a story took place than in the story

and fantasy

outcome of the

itself.

In the early days of science fiction

adopted form

as a consciously

background against which

this

produced some

frightfully

bad writing

— long passages of undigested

more than

catalogs of the strange monsters found in distant planets

description, stories that were

the marvelous inventions of the remote future.

It

was responsible

little

and

for the

many people still attach to imaginative could only make its beginning among the

“pseudoscience” tag that

fiction

and

highly

for the fact that

it

uncritical readership that follows the pulps.

that most science fiction and fantasy

and even

ization

is still

in emotional content.

author and furnished by the reader, it

shrinking world there are

horizons.

It is

still

worth re-emphasizing that

accounts for the other fact

comparatively weak in character-

The primary response sought by the when the story is a success, is an

intellectual pleasure. Usually

is

It

the pleasure of discovering that in a

this habit

on the

part of science fiction-

fantasy readers and the characters of the readers themselves, not only allows

the writers to deal with some fairly ponderous material, but

they do

in a readable way.

it

entire field of literature

is

demands

One

of the most curious characteristics of this

this

combination of careful thinking in the

background with a lightness of exposition that almost amounts to Fletcher Pratt, “Introduction: der, ed. Fletcher Pratt

(New

DAMON KNIGHT

that

The Nature

levity.

of Imaginative Literature,” Worlds of

Won-

York: Twayne, 1951), pp. 18-19

Tales from

Gavagans Bar by de ,

Camp and

Fletcher Pratt, contains the respectable total of twenty-three stories,

dealing with supernatural goings-on at Gavagan’s. This stretch a gag;

I

think a

little

too

far.

Some

a long

is

all

way

to

of the tales, like “Elephas

Frumenti,” “The Green Thumb” and “Caveat Emptor,” are purely wonderful; others like

“The Love Nest,” with

its

totally

stories that give the impression they didn’t

improbable exit

want

to

come

line, are

good

into Gavagan’s

in the first place.

Damon No.

3

Knight, [Review of Tales from Gavagan’s Bar], Science Fiction Adventures

(May 1954): 124

2,

L.

P.

Sprague de

Camp

&

37

Fletcher Pratt

SCHUYLER MILLER

Gavagan’s

The

—rhymes with “a pagan’s” —

closest thing to these tales

are the occasional

Lord Dunsany’s widely traveled friend Jorkens

(I

from

commentaries by

am unhappy

to say that

I

have never learned what happened on the occasions when Jorkens Had a Large Whiskey ). But those were the misadventures of one man, and these are things

which have happened

to people as different as

an automobile

salesman (“Corpus Delectable”), a drummer in toys (“Beats of Bourbon”),

an attorney (“The Black (“Fiere, Putzi!”). P.

My own

Ball”),

and a

favorite

woman

is still

married to a were-dachsel

the classic “Elephas Frumenti.”

Schuyler Miller, “The Reference Library,” Astounding Science Fiction 53, No. 6

(August 1954): 148

ALFRED BESTER zine, all

not the

field)

de

Camp and

& Science Fiction

(the maga-

has inherited the mantle of the fabulous Unknown,

have a warm spot

each re-print from

Although Fantasy

its

in our hearts for that great trail-breaker

pages. Latest

is

we

and welcome

The Incomplete Enchanter by

L.

Sprague

Fletcher Pratt.

The authors waste no time getting down to They hocus-pocus Harold Shea, a XXth century

their fantastick business.

psychologist, back to the

para worlds of Norse mythology and Spenser’s Faery Queen, and involve

him

in adventures that follow the pattern of

lean heavily

on anachronistic dialogue

The Connecticut Yankee. They

for laughs, but the

book holds up

amazingly well after twenty years. Alfred Bester, [Review of The Incomplete Enchanter], Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 19,

FLOYD

C.

No. 4 (October 1960): 94

GALE

team of fantasy

De Camp and

Pratt were far

and away the

collaborators. In their present misadventures,

Faerie wife, Belphebe,

become involved

finest

Shea and

in the Finnish land of Kalevala

his

and

the Ireland of the hero, Cuchulainn. If

de Camp’s and

and usually

Pratt’s

heroes and villains alike are usually ineffectual

likeable, their stories are always chuckle-filled delights.

Floyd C. Gale, [Review of Wall of Serpents], Galaxy 20, No. 2 (December 1961): 145

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

38

LIN CARTER

This combination of wacky logic and scientific analy^

“The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic”) delighted the readers to no end; they ate up both yams with relish and hungrily howled for more. Pratt and de Camp obliged six issues later with a novel called The Castle of Iron, which ran in the April 1941 Unknown. The story sis

(in

opened with yet another display of what with rational,

incomparable team could do

this

thinking as against the sloppy romanticism

realistic

to pulp writers. In the usual run of pulp adventure yarns, hero

common

and heroine

return from their magical adventures and that’s that. But Pratt and de

opened the novel with

a grueling scene in

poor Harold under the broiling

done away with with a

girl,

Not

his boss, disposing of the

and Chalmers were it,

lights.

which the cops

in the lab together

.

.

Camp

are interrogating

unnaturally, they think he has

body somewhere. After .

all,

he

and only Harold came out of

probably his accomplice in the murder.

Of course, Harold doesn’t have much luck persuading them that Chalmers has accepted a job as chief magician, settled down to married life with a lovely lady made out of snow, and has relocated to Fairyland! In fact, the only thing he can think to do Faerie

is

to try to get

back to the universe of the

Queene. But everything goes wrong: by accident he takes one of

the cops along, and they end up universes away in another literary cosmos, that of the all

Xanadu of Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan.” Another hop

brings

the characters together in a universe singularly close to that of Spenser’s

poem, to wit the universe of Ariosto’s Orlando borrowed rather heavily

The team continued

for his style

Furioso,

and many of

from which Spenser

his ideas.

to delight the readership of

Unknown with some

of

the most sprightly, entertaining, witty fantasies ever written, fantasies in

which romantic adventure took

a

back seat to rational plotting and

interest^

ing characterization. In novels like The Land of Unreason and The Carnelian

Cube,

as well as

two further Harold Shea stories

—

journeys into the realm of the Kalevala, and at

—

myth they were for Unknown.

far

L.

which the syllogismobile

last to

the world of Irish

and away the most admired and popular of the writers

Lin Carter, Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy pp.

in

(New York:

Ballantine Books, 1973),

79-80

SPRAGUE DE CAMP

assess the virtues

and

For obvious reasons,

faults of these novels.

I

I

cannot objectively

will only say that they

were

L.

Sprague de

Camp

&

39

Fletcher Pratt

certainly heroic fantasy, or swordplay^and-sorcery fiction, long before these

terms were invented. While Robert E.

American pioneer Shea

a

Conan

is

justly hailed as the

nor

in this genre, neither Pratt

had ever read

stories,

Howard

I,

story or heard

when we

started the

enough about Howard

name. By coincidence, our colleague Lester del Rey had

to recognize his

the idea of a parallel story laid in a parallel world of Scandinavian just

myth

about the time we did. Alas for Lester! we got our manuscript in

Our method of collaboration was to meet out the plot by discussion, of which utility

I

in Pratt’s

apartment and

When

I

stories,

we

draft,

which

I

I

wrote a rough

reversed the procedure, Pratt doing the

first

member,

taught

I

member

do the rough

to

as a result of experience,

is

likely to

then

Gavagan’s

draft

second. This did not work out so well. In such collaborations,

senior

hammer

draft. Pratt

edited. In a few cases in our later

generally better for the junior

first.

valuable ever since.

it

had taken home the notes,

wrote the final

at

took shorthand notes. Observing the

of Pratt’s knowledge of shorthand from his journalistic days,

myself Gregg and have found

Bar

main

and

I

the

think,

it is

draft, since

the

I

have more

skill at

polishing and condensation.

A fan

magazine once asserted

that, in the

Harold Shea

stories,

de

Camp

furnished the imaginative element and Pratt the controlling logic. Actually, it

was the other way round. Pratt had a

than

I,

much

but

I

of what

had a keener sense of I

think

I

know about

collaborations. Pratt’s influence

livelier

and more creative imagination

critical logic. In

any

case,

I

learned

the writer’s craft in the course of these

on me

in this matter

was second only

to

(John W.) Campbell’s. L.

Sprague de Camp, “Parallel Worlds: Fletcher Pratt,” Literary Swordsmen and Sorcer -

ers:

The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1976), pp. 182-83

BRIAN STABLEFORD worked was

first

to decide

on

The method by which de Camp and a plot; then de

Camp would

and Pratt a

final one. All of their early writing

quickly (de

Camp

a first draft

must have been done very

wrote one other novella and two novels for

the same period, plus numerous short pieces for it is

do

Pratt

Unknown

in

Unknown and Astounding );

not really surprising that the authors sometimes seem to be failing to

make the most

of their premises.

Only

in the first

two novellas, where the

whole business was so new and exciting, did they muster the verve and

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

40

make everything flow smoothly and

vitality to

became

steadily

The

more mechanical

three long stories that de

perfectly; the three novels

they materialized.

as

Camp

own for Unknown much the same kind

wrote on his

during the period of his collaborations with Pratt are

“The Wheels of If” (1940) is a lively story of alternate possibilities. The Undesired Princess (1942; in book form, 1951) takes yet another not of work.

very heroic hero in a fairy-tale world painted in primary colors where

statements are taken altogether too in

book form, 1957) seems

it is is

literally.

Though

have been written

to

in the

same

frenetic rush,

perhaps the best of the three. Prosper Nash, an accountant whose body

borrowed by a demon, finds himself on the

astral plane,

by the dream creations of

men

in the real world.

a dashing cavalier,

and

in that

self

Solomon’s Stone (1942;

is

talisman from an enchanter

he

if

is

He

form he must

to stand a

which

is

inhabited

finds that his fantasy steal the

eponymous

chance of recovering

his

own

body.

All these stories demonstrate that de

help

—was rather limited

into an

Camp

—with

in his plotting strategy. Either

or without Pratt’s

he

thrusts a hero

awkward situation where the story is kept rolling simply by recounting

the hero’s attempts to stay alive or, more often, he provides the hero with a motive for searching out

and securing an object of some kind. Because

of these limitations his longer stories— including the longer collaborations

with Pratt like

—

are nothing but a series of exotic encounters strung together

beads in a necklace.

seem

The

to be there only to

careless in

strand usually has

fill

the gaps. In general de

connecting up the episodes of his longer

arbitrarily switching

from one

briefly

Brian Stableford, “L. Sprague de Writers, ed. Everett F. Bleiler p.

stories

to be

and ended up

sketched situation to another.

Camp

(New

Camp seemed

and Fletcher

Pratt,” Supernatural Fiction

York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), Vol.

2,

927

DAVID DRAKE fairly

some gems but other beads

These

are fast-paced adventure novellas in

which

ordinary folk from the present-day transport themselves into myth-

worlds populated by monsters and villains, wizards and heroes

some characters who mix

And

that’s

— including

several of the categories.

important too, because the characters behave refreshingly like

people instead of fitting neatly into one or another stereotype. Heroes can

L.

Sprague de

Camp

&

Fletcher Pratt

41

be hot-tempered, stupid and arrogant.

be intelligent, success-oriented fellows, so similar to it

can be a

evil.

A modem

man

doesn’t

dropped into a heroic myth attributes of

The

modem

to pick sides in the struggle

little difficult

become

—but

turn out to

academics that

between good and

a mythic hero simply because he’s

he may be able to learn some of the

heroism that remain valid in his world

rigor of the stories appears in

may

Villainous wizards

as well.

two fashions: the authors display expert

knowledge of the myths which form the framework

for the novellas;

and

they display expert knowledge of the real conditions of the worlds on which the myths are based. David Drake, “Introduction,” The Complete Compleat Enchanter (New York: Baen Books, 1989),

p. 2

STEFAN D ZIEMI AN O WIC Z Unknown) stands of L. Sprague de

landmark

as a

Camp and

May

The

(1940)

(of

issue

for bringing together the formidable talents

Fletcher Pratt in The Roaring Trumpet, the

of the Fdarold Shea novels. Shea

is

a vain experimental psychologist

first

who,

along with several colleagues, discovers a perfectly logical and rational way

own

of stepping from his literature. In

world into the alternate worlds of myth and

The Roaring Trumpet, he accidentally plunks himself down

the Fimbulwinter of the Norse Eddas,

Darkness

would be

Fall, in

which de

possible,

Camp had shown

if difficult,

that science would have

on the eve of Ragnarok. Unlike

no

Rome,

novel proposed

this

where magic

is

the rule. Shea

discovers to his dismay that, in the imagined worlds, guns will not cigarette lighters will not light

and

who wove

who

the legends into narratives.

“the mathematics of magic” (the

he achieve some control over

title

his

fire,

stainless steel rusts because the principles

behind them were known neither to the races the writers

Lest

that 20th century technology

in sixth century

effect in lands

in

created the legends nor

Only when Shea masters

of the second Harold Shea novel) does

environment

—with predictably

hilarious

results.

The Harold Shea tional fantasy

stories are perfect

one could find

dealt with creatures

who

inverted the idea, having

in

examples of the type of unconven-

Unknown. Where

so

much

enter our world from outside, de

human

weird fiction

Camp

and Pratt

characters project themselves into worlds

of fantasy and magic. Just as Lest Darkness Fall

had been

a variation

on both

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

42

the gadget and time travel stories of science ficton, the Harold Shea stories

were fantasy equivalents of a familiar science fiction theme, the voyage to

an alien world

—

in this case, though, the space ship

syllogismobile,” science by “the mathematics of magic”

is

replaced by “the

and gadgets by magic

spells.

Stefan Dziemianowicz, The Annotated Guide

(Mercer Island,

WA:

to

Unknown

and

Unknown Worlds

Starmont House, 1991), pp. 29-30

Bibliography The Incomplete Enchanter. 1941.

Land of Unreason. 1942. The Camelian Cube. 1948. The Castle of

Iron. 1950.

Tales from Gavagan’s Bar. 1953, 1978.

Wall of Serpents. 1960.

The Complete Enchanter: The Magical Adventures of (as

The Compleat Complete Enchanter).

Elarold Shea. 1975,

1989

E. R.

Eddison

1882-1945

ERIC RUCKER EDDISON was born in Yorkshire, England,

on November

1882, and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford.

From an

24,

early

age he had an interest in Norse mythology, and he studied Icelandic in order to read the Norse sagas. in the classics after

At Oxford, he

acquired a solid background

and mastered Greek, Latin, and French. In 1906, the year

he graduated, he began work

as a civil servant

with the British Board

of Trade, a job he would hold until 1937. In 1909 he married Winifred

Grace Henderson, with

whom

he had one daughter, Jean.

Although Eddison had an aptitude arts, his literary

Letters,

for writing

and was

inclinations were not realized until his

a patron of the

first

book, Poems,

and Memories of Philip Sidney Nairn, was published in 1916. The

measure of his talents became known when his

The

Ouroboros, appeared in 1922.

first

novel, The

epic tale of an average

full

Worm

man who

is

transported magically to the planet Mercury inhabited by warring factions

comprised of nobles and sorcerers, that

mixed

a spirit of

allusions to classical

it is

told in a deliberately archaic style

mythology and Elizabethan drama to evoke

romance. Lauded by James Branch Cabell, James Stephens, and

other of Eddison’s contemporaries, the book found only a small readership until 1926,

when an American

edition coincided with the publication of

Styrbiorn the Strong, a historical novel of the Vikings.

Between 1926 and 1935 Eddison continued rising to the level of

deputy comptroller general of overseas trade and

assuming a membership on the Council literary effort

in his civil servant position,

for

Art and Industry. His only

during this period, a translation of Egils Saga, appeared in

1930. Then, in 1935, he published Mistress of Mistresses, a semisequel to

The his

Worm

Ouroboros and the

first

book

in

what would become known

masterwork of heroic fantasy, the Zimiamvian

as

trilogy. Mistress establishes

the topography of Zimiamvia, a feudal world of three kingdoms recently

them with dissolution Dinner in Memison (1941),

united by King Mezentius, whose death threatens

and war. The second Zimiamvian novel, 43

A

Fish

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

44

is

upon concepts introduced

a prequel to Mistress, but nonetheless builds

in the first novel,

most importantly the idea that male and female characters

on Zimiamvia and Earth

As

Aphrodite.

are imperfect avatars of the divinities Zeus

a foreword to the novel,

Eddison included a lengthy

and

letter

that outlined the philosophical foundations of his writing and emphasized

the straightforward, nonallegorical orientation of his romances.

The

vast

scope of these novels and the vivid realization of their imaginary realms

brought Eddison to the attention of fantasists C. S. Lewis,

and Charles Williams,

all

of

Eddison retired from the

whom

civil service in

1937 with the honored

of St. Michael and St. George and

of the Bath.

He was

on August

18, 1945. In

work on the

R. R. Tolkien,

he met in the early 1940s.

Companion

at

J.

Companion

third novel in the trilogy

titles

of

of the Order

when he

died

1958 Eddison’s widow published the novel’s finished

chapters and his synopses for the remainder of the book under the

title

The

M ezentian Gate.

1

Critical Extracts

EDWIN CLARK gaudiness and appetites

flair

This romance (The

of the Elizabethans.

and vigorous

It

Worm

Ouroboros ) has the

has the exuberance of great

living. It transcends all ordinary

the wonder and awe of excess.

Such Elizabethans

as

life. It

burns with

Marlowe, Webster

and Greene, had they collaborated upon a prose narrative,

as

they did in

playmaking, might have written a romance with such elemental havoc and physical force.

The scope

much abused word. Yet

it

of the book

will

is

truly epical

be recalled that

—

to distinguish that

Homer nods. So does Eddison.

His epical happenings lapse from time to time from his furies and surging energy to bombast. recounting. return.

The

The

interest

Troy have been known to weary

lengthy speeches between the captains on both sides

and check the advance of the narrative overmuch. Surely the

and compactness of form would have been considerably benefitted

by careful and prudent cutting. This new writer heroic

in

series of battles in the fore part of this narrative give a like

The windy and

lack interest

battles before

manner

that evokes beauty

and vigorous

without injury to his verbal charm or

loss

is

stylistic in

life,

yet

it

the grand and

seems to us that

of beauty in his passage of atrru>

Eddison

E. R.

45

sphere saturated with glamour of nature, he could have removed

would quicken the action of his narration to a more is

much

attractive pace. Eddison

a poet, his sensitiveness finely depicting contrasts of living forces.

The

Worm

Ouroboros

is

that

And

the product of a first-class imagination that has yet

to be fully mastered by art.

Edwin Clark, “Mythology p.

New

York Times Book Review, 6 June 1926,

20

KENNETH BURKE sis

Mode,”

a la

Most

novelists of this age place their

elsewhere, trying primarily to reveal aspects of

dealing with the

phenomena

Worm

Ouroboros)

rhetorical or literary virtues. Fantasy, or romance, interest. (I use the adjective in

sense, not as a

psychology, or

of social transvaluation, and so on, whereas

Mr. Eddison’s chief intention (in The

such a “pure”

human

empha-

moral attribute.) Fantasy

is

its

is

is

to exemplify

the natural outlet for

chemical and philosophical

the natural result

lacks utilitarian interests, or “gravitational pull.” For

when an author

the usual writer

if

occasionally produces beauty in the process of trying to convince his reader

of something else, the “pure” writer consistently produces fantasy in the process of trying to convince his reader of beauty. In other aspects of art

the subject the subject

the end, beauty

is is

is

the means

—

in fantasy beauty

is

the end,

the means. Thus, in turning to romance or fantasy Mr. Eddison

could be said at least to orientate himself by the use of a compass which points resolutely toward beauty

—and the constancy of

readily be identified with the attainment of his purpose.

to caution against this confusion, asking that

beauty and more about

its

Nor need

as

this

since of itself

be taken it

we

his I

concern could

should presume

say less about the book’s

constant outstretching of the arms toward beauty.

an adverse

criticism, but as

specifies the type rather

an observation, rather,

than attempts

at rating

within the

type.

Kenneth Burke, “Romance p.

in

Vacuo,”

New

York Herald Tribune Books, 4 July 1926,

3

UNSIGNED

This ( Styrbiorn

everybody. But those

who

the Strong)

is

not, of course, a

book

for

read books for their quality rather than their

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

46

theme, will see in

it

something fine and

Dumas

is

thrilling,

sense that

There

not.

it is

plenty of heroism and excitement; but poetry. Mr. Eddison has given

more

aimed to complicate or mystify. His the old North

however,

—blond

essential appeal

satisfying

and mighty

the story where

not touching

for the vitality

it

where

it

needed

needed to be

it

it,

the appeal of

it

tricks of writing

the very breath of

and the

horses,

for the

left

sea.

The

in all a thoroughly satisfying

side of the

man who

Worm

Unsigned, “The Old Norsemen,”

New

can be grateful

and

We

alone.

story,

its

for his

for his restraint

can be

style of the

most part to retain

air. It is all

wrote The

We

alteration,

and beauty he has given the

good sense which led him

grateful also

book, yet for the

simple, old-fashioned

achievement which

offers a

second

Ouroboros.

York Times Booh Review, 19 September 1926,

16

p.

BASIL

DAVENPORT

and Mr. Eddison’s world

Theophanies

and even brutal

are notoriously dangerous,

(in Mistress of Mistresses),

to hold all other elements in a self-contained

one

is

than any

story has about

style are altogether praiseworthy.

skill in altering

harsh,

plenty of bloodshed in

given something of modern compactness, and Mr. Eddison’s

is

method and in

giants,

its

is

thrilling book, in the

the spirit of the sagas, aware that their

it

strength and vigor are infinitely

A

different.

which

harmony,

for the occasionally misty

is is

huge enough too keen and

enchantments by which

figure melts into another.

Beyond from

its

that,

own.

we may

It is

object to the book from our point of view, but not

undeniably ornate; but then

positively prefers to call sighs

not clearly explain live in. If a

allowed to

run of

it.

It is

it

suspirations of forc’d breath.”

a planet that exists in

please himself,

its

own

right,

Age

which

does

he may be

and we may be glad to be allowed the

is

many

neither an age of poetry, nor like the eighteenth

of Prose rightly regarded as an achievement, but an age

who wish a who give more

merely of the makeshift prose of M. Jourdain. But for readers tale as

It

to be feared that Mistress of Mistresses will not appeal to

readers in this age,

century an

belongs to a taste which

and neither does the other world that we now

itself;

man can make make

“Windy

it

shadowy and

as vivid as old

romances, for readers

,

E. R.

Eddison

47

than lip-service to the romantic and the heroic, sake are interested in the romantic, here

who

for

its

own

a book.

is

Davenport, “The Heavenly Aphrodite,” Saturday Review of Literature 10 August

Basil

1935,

p.

6

JAMES STEPHENS most

as the

for readers

In some sense Mr. Eddison can be thought of

difficult writer

of our day,

for,

behind and beyond

all

which

that

—

we cannot avoid or refuse the switching as from a past to something that may be a future he is writing with a mind fixed upon ideas which we may

—

call ancient,

but which

in effect, eternal

are,

courage, and a “hell of a cheek”.

It

when

the proper question

his fellows? that

is

is

and

in

an idea of the

is

Infinite.

one answer which may be advanced. Here he does

is

and

man Even

differ,

a pretty lonely writer.

something, exceedingly rare in English fiction, although every'

where to be found attitude,

is,

asked, wherein does Mr. Eddison differ from

and that so greatly that he may seem

There

aristocracy, that

must seem lunatic to say of any

that always, as a guide of his inspiration, so,

—

in English poetry

and accent. The

whatever

brutality,

aristocrat

—

this

may be

can be brutal

called the aristocratic

as ever gangster was, but,

he preserves a bearing, a grace, a charm, which

our fiction, in general, does not care, or dare, to attempt.

Good

breeding and devastating brutality have never been strangers to

each other. You may get in the pages aristocratic fictionists

work

in all literature

of, say,

—more sheer

put together could dream

of.

and violence, and slaughterings that they are devilish with an accent

—

The

M ahabharata— the

brutality

than

all

most

our gangster

So, in these pages, there are villainies,

are, to

one

reader, simply devilish. But

as Milton’s devil

is;

for

it

instantly

is

observable in him, the most English personage of our record, and the finest of our “gentlemen”, that he was educated at Cambridge.

So the

colossal

gentlemen of Mr. Eddison have, perhaps, the Oxford accent. They are certainly not accented as of Balham, or

Hoboken.

All Mr. Eddison’s personages are of a “breeding” which, be heavenish, never again,

he

is

lets its fathers

a different writer,

down and never

and a

hellish or

underlings up. So,

difficult.

James Stephens, “Introduction” (1941), tine Books, 1968), pp. xi-xii

lets its

it

A Fish Dinner in Memison (New York: Ballan-

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

48

C. S.

LEWIS

You may

Worm

myself like that of The

of Mistresses) but there

like or dislike (Eddison’s)

invented worlds

(I

Ouroboros and strongly dislike that of Mistress

here no quarrel between the theme and the

is

articulation of the story. Every episode, every speech, helps to incarnate

what the author whole

You could

imagining.

is

none of them.

The

dialogue.

These proud,

secret here

whole atmosphere of C. S. Lewis, “On

is

largely the style,

reckless,

and especially the

Stories,” Essays Presented to Charles Williams p.

(London: Oxford

104

I

give

all

my

admiration to

Fiorinda’s beauty of person, exquisitely robed or in voluptuous

admire her

style of the

amorous people create themselves and the

ROSTREVOR HAMILTON I

takes the

their world chiefly by talking.

University Press, 1947),

dour.

It

up the strange blend of renaissance luxury and northern

story to build

hardness.

G.

spare

as a lofty,

naked splen-

dangerous and unscrupulous woman, or as a

goddess of like character, and, as such, she has her just pre-eminence in a

country the nobility of which would be nothing without brutal aspect. But

rebel

I

when

am

I

its

savage and even

asked to recognize her as “omnium

rerum causa immanens: the sufficient explanation of the world”; one, the service of is

whom

the only wisdom.

is

And

her boundless self-preoccupation

a travesty of that intellectual love with which, in the phrase of Spinoza,

God

loves His

Own

Self. Mistress of Mistresses

and the

Fish Dinner present

high matter for the imagination, and the moral or religious censor would deserve to be prosecuted, should he break in and trespass

But when,

as

on

here and there, the high moral or religious claim

this is

ground.

expressed

or clearly implied, the censor cannot refuse the invitation to protest.

The

truth

is

that Eddison

from Fiorinda to the nothing amiss.

He

is

least

fell

deeply in love with his imagined world,

blade of grass, and like a lover, he could see

completely serious and takes his stand on philosophy,

reducing Truth, Beauty and Goodness to one ultimate value, Beauty: a thing

you may only do,

if

in

Beauty you include not only sensuous beauty of form

and beauty of action but

also

— and not dependent on these —beauty of

character, according to the highest conception of the to recognize this

which

I

It is

his failure

regard as the chief defect in Eddison’s Utopia.

And

yet to bring

fault

has the same root as his virtue, so that one

it

Good.

into the

open

is

to risk a loss of perspective: for this

may almost

say

felix culpa.

E. R.

It

Eddison

was

49

because he saw with the eyes of a lover that he was able to

just

present his world with so amazing a vitality. G. Rostrevor Hamilton, “The Prose of E. R. Eddison,” English

J.

TOLKIEN

R. R*

appeared; and

I

I

once met him.

I

45-46

read the works of Eddison, long after they I

heard him in Mr. Lewis’s room in Magdalen

College read aloud some parts of his Mistresses, as far as

Studies 2 (1949):

remember.

He

did

with great enjoyment for their sheer

own works it

—from

extremely well.

literary merit.

My

almost the same as that expressed by Mr. Lewis on Presented to Charles Williams. Except that

I

the Mistress of read his works

I

opinion of them

p.

is

104 of the Essays

disliked his characters (always

excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire more intensely than Mr. Lewis at any rate saw

thought what gathered);

I

admire

‘soft’

(his

word: one of complete condemnation,

thought that, corrupted by an

I

to say of himself. Eddison

fit

evil

and indeed

he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and tally,

silly

‘philosophy’,

cruelty. Inciden-

thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of

I

of which,

I

still

all

think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of

‘invented worlds’ that J.

1

I

have

read.

But he was certainly not an

‘influence’.

R. R. Tolkien, Letter to Caroline Everett (24 June 1957), Letters ofj. R. R. Tolkien,

ed.

Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen

& Unwin,

1981), p. 258

E. R. is

EDDISON

by the very fact

amends the

The first

M ezentian Gate,

in order of ripeness.

earlier books, but does

Mistresses, leaving

I

last in

order of composition,

no

respect supersedes or

It

in

think illuminate them. Mistress of

unexplored the relations between that other world and

our present here and now, led to the writing of the Fish Dinner; which book in turn, at

its

climax, raised the question whether what took place at that

singular supper party

may not have had yet vaster and more cosmic

quite overshadowing those affecting the fate of this planet.

by then, fallen in love with Zimiamvia and

my

persons;

I

reactions,

was besides,

and love has a

searching curiosity which can never be wholly satisfied (and well that

cannot, or mankind might die of boredom). Also

I

wanted

to find out

it

how

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

50

it

came

that the great King, while

still

at the

height of his powers, met his

death in Sestola; and why, so leaving the Three Kingdoms, he

These

in a mess.

common

with

distraction, political, social

predecessors)

its

them

The Mezentian Gate.

riddles begot

Without current

left

is

as utterly

and economic,

unconcerned

as

this story (in it

is

with the

Stock Exchange procedure, the technicalities of aerodynamics, or the Theory of Vectors.

Nor

is

an

it

allegory. Allegory,

prostitution of their personalities, forcing

own.

If

they have not

argument essentials,

I

am

it is

them

for

To me,

is

a

an end other than their

And

the persons are the argument.

not fool enough to claim responsibility; a great eternal

life,

but a dressing up of argument in a puppetry

life, it is

of frigid make-believe.

persons have

if its

for,

commonplace, beside which,

I

for the

stripped to

its

am sometimes

apt to think, nothing else really matters. E. R. Eddison, “Letter of Introduction,”

The Mezentian Gate (1958;

rpt.

New

York:

Ballantine Books, 1969), pp. xiii-xiv

ORVILLE PRESCOTT

What

Worm

flawed masterpiece (The

are the reasons for considering this

Ouroboros ) (so noble in concept and so

mighty in scope and yet marred with a few irksome

failings)

attention of serious students of literature? First of

all,

narrative sweep of as is

it,

there

the pure essence of story-telling for

has become increasingly rare in our introspective the splendor of the prose, the

and the sheer gorgeousness

of

roll

worthy of the

its

modem

is

own

the lordly sake such

world.

Second

and swagger and reverberating rhythms

much

of

its

deliberate artifice.

And

third

is

the blessed sense of vicarious participation in a simpler, more primitive

world where wonders

still

abound and

glory

is still

a

word untarnished by

the cynical tongues of small-minded men. Orville Prescott, “Introduction” (1962), The

York: Ballantine Books, 1967),

FRITZ LEIBER

The

fantasy or science fiction. taste

and good judgment,

the ring of truth. Despite

its

Ouroboros by

E. R.

Eddison

(New

xiv

Worm

It is

his

p.

Worm

has no single, logical rationale, either

instead a composite. But since Eddison has

composite has

style,

inner consistency, and

leisurely telling, the story

maintains a varied

E. R.

Eddison

51

suspense and teems with inventions: sweating sorceries, moving mythic

themes, wondrous landscapes, strong clashes of character, a sand sea with tides, flying serpents, hippogriff rides,

who when he

dies

is

swashing swordTights, an evil king

always revived in another body, mantichores that put

many

the great apes of fiction to shame, dire comets, and

all

other “rare

and remarcable occurants and observacions.” It is

aristocratic

as warlike

melodrama, which

and ambitious princes who

numbers who

pits

not so

much good

against evil,

are honorable against their opposite

are dishonorable in varying degrees; but both sorts live for

action “that shall embroil and astonish the world”

—which makes me think

of Ferdinand’s dying lines in The Duchess (of Malfi ): “I shall vault credit

and

affect

high pleasures beyond death.”

Fritz Leiber,

[Review of The

Worm

Ouroboros ], Fantastic Science Fiction 18, No. 4

(April 1969): 142-43

URSULA

you have to do

distancer, but all.

LE GUIN

K.

The man who

did

it

The it

archaic

perfectly.

It’s

If

is

indeed a perfect

a high wire:

perfectly was, of course, Eddison.

write Elizabethan prose in the 1930s. His style

never faked.

manner

you love language

for

its

own

is

one

slip spoils

He

really did

totally artificial, but

sake he

is

irresistible.

it is

Many,

with reason, find him somewhat crabbed and most damnedly long; but he is

the real thing, and just to reaffirm that strange, remote reality

a longer quotation from

dead king

is

him

here. This

is

Worm

from The

being carried, in secrecy, at night,

down

I

am placing

Ouroboros.

to the beach.

Witchland took and the men at arms bare^thegoods, and the King went in the midst on his bier of speanshafts. So went they picking their way in the moonless night round the palace and down the winding path that led to the bed of the

The

lords of

combe, and so by the stream westward toward the

deemed

sea.

Here they

show them the way. Desolate and bleak showed the sides of the combe in the windblown flare; and the flare was thrown back from the royal jewels of the crown of Witchland, and from the armoured buskins on the King’s feet showing stark with toes pointing upward from below his beanskin mantle, and from the armour and the weapons of them that bare him and walked beside him, and from the black cold surface of the

it

little

safe to light a torch to

river hurrying forever over

its

bed of boulders to the

sea.

A

,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

52

The path was rugged and

and they fared slowly,

stony,

they

lest

should stumble and drop the King.

That

prose, in spite or because of

clear, powerful. Visually

it is

precise

archaisms,

its

and

good

is

vivid; musically

—

prose: exact,

that

is,

in the

sound of the words, the movement of the syntax, and the rhythm of the sentences it is all

was

—

it

is

seen, heard,

how

and very strong. Nothing

subtle

That

felt.

Eddison, an

artist,

style

was his true

in

faked or blurred;

it is

own

style, his

voice; that

spoke.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” (1973), The Language of Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction rev. ed. pp.

At

least in

one

the most skillful of Eddison’s works because

action.

HarperCollins, 1992),

85-86

HELMUT W. PESCH is

(New York:

It

has been said that while the

novels are Machiavellian, not so

is

M ezentian Gate

The

integrates philosophy

it

Worm

much

respect,

nant in the story

because the world of Zimiamvia

What has irritated G. Rostrevor Hamilton and de Camp is that the characters do not behave like

are capable of cruelty

and cunning and deem themselves superior

to other people. Philosophically, this

terms,

it is

so predomi-

is

itself.

infuriated (L. Sprague)

They

and

Homeric, the Zimiamvian

resembles renaissance Italy but because the element of intrigue

gods.

the

may even be

nevertheless highly suspect.

It

Viewed

justified.

in social

ought to be noted again, though,

that these characters are not just one-dimensional figures representing abstract values. Eddison’s aforementioned dislike of allegory

on the notion that

there are

the particular, and that

The

no

no general

is

principles except as

single manifestation

sufficient to

is

firmly based

embodied

in

denote them.

characters in his novels have their individual characteristics, reflecting,

no doubt,

to

But even

some extent the

if

there

is

no

author’s

own

strict allegory,

cultural prejudices.

there

is

a certain quasi-allegorical,

philosophical layer which appears superimposed In the

action

Worm, is

heroic action

is

an aim in

itself,

on the

political intrigue.

but in Mistress, the political

interspersed with philosophical discussions, mainly situated in

isolated places like the timeless gardens of the philosopher

magician Doctor

Vandermast, who, having aged beyond the desires of the the image of Death

itself.

In Fish Dinner the action

to the philosophical preoccupations.

Only

in

is

The

flesh,

is

almost

more or less subordinate

M ezentian Gate do both

Eddison

E. R.

intrigue

53

and philosophical

desire interact, leading to a

common aim

— the

death of King Mezentius.

Death

is

the central theme of Eddison’s final work.

a subject of discussion in the earlier novels, but only transition, as a gate to a fuller,

more conscious

life.

As

It

has already been

under the aspect of such,

by the first-person narrator of the “Overture” to Mistress, features in

common

it is

who

discussed

has some

with Doctor Vandermast. In Fish Dinner the author

has Lessingham say, “Perhaps

if

people knew, beyond quibble or doubt,

what was through the Door the world would be depopulated?” What through the Door

is

a Death, so easy, so familiar

But a curious problem remains unresolved: wait another

world?

ium” this

years before he

What purpose

—and

is

fifty

it

is

may

and dreadless,

Why

join his beloved once

there to cogitation that has

or “induction”

—the

to a believer.

does Lessingham have to

more

in another

no aim? In the “Praelud-

ought to be noted that Eddison chooses his

no “opening”

titles

with care:

central aspect of death

is

that of

negation. Here, in our world, the thought of “leaving one’s love alone”

indeed the ultimate

beginning

To

—holds no

edge enclosing episode.

is

at first

It is

this

all

—

either as a forgetting or a

new

only a temporary forgetting, a starting it

all-knowing knowing,” the time-transcending knowl-

existence

basically the

the end of The

death

he and Zeus have done again and again. But

a blank page, as

cannot “redeem

if

is

fear.

Mezentius, death

anew with

even

terror,

is

Worm

first

revealed to Mezentius in the Fish Dinner

same problem we have already encountered

at

Ouroboros: the question of awareness in reenaction,

which can now no longer be ignored. Helmut W. Pesch, “The Sign of the Worm:

Images of Death and Immortality in the

Fiction of E. R. Eddison,” Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Carl B.

1985), pp.

Yoke and Donald Hassler (Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press,

98-99

VERLYN FLEIGER

A

galloping horse, a portrait in

oils,

a click

of castanets; these are clues to the simultaneous occurrence of separate but intrinsically identical events linking the

via

— of A

Fish Dinner.

significant as they

two worlds

—Earth and Zimiam-

Seemingly unimportant events in one world become

echo or mirror events

in the other,

though

at times the

mirror appears to be held at a slant. Carl Jung calls this synchronicity,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

54

wherein causally unrelated but coincidental events give meaning to one another.

It is

even when,

a function of time in

A

as in

which two schemes

and

intersect

interact,

schemes themselves are of different

Fish Dinner, the

worlds.

Whatever the scheme, time because

it

is

both worlds

in

are together or apart. Second, because, as its

we

will see,

and

it

is

First,

as lovers

time

literally

feminine personification, time controlled by Her,

from Her perspective, experienced by Her men. erotic, strict

governed by love.

seeming to run swift or slow according

lovers’ time,

created for Love in

is

It is

time both austere and

yielding, reminiscent of the contradiction inherent in

those naive china figurines which used to grace drawing-room mantelpieces:

demure but

naked young

entirely

reminding observers that This saying,

trite as

it is

it

love that makes the world go round.

sounds,

is

under Eddison’s hands the triteness in

A

Fish Dinner begins with

and frames both with a

come

falls

to

know by

third.

away

it

seems), but

affair, parallels

that with a second,

All of them connect, and

all

the end of the book) are the same love.

who

are counterpoint to their

is

Zimiamvian

of

one another,

parts of

what Eddison describes

notes as “duality in unity (Zeus the Object of Love: Power

&

& Aphrodite:

all

the

than

life

giving

them back

to the Gods.

complex and various is

immense

it

Earth, (or

selves:

Barganax

six lovers are

in his unpublished

& Feminine:

&

Love

prose, confers sublimity

on

other authors take love as their

into his thesis. His contention

in the

a magic circle in

Where

is

simple in concept,

mutual but dissimilar needs of Lover and Beloved:

which Love cannot

kind of Worm Ouroboros. In that energy all

lovers

taking time and love away from the naked china lady and

theme, Eddison weaves

it

on

we

this unity in multiplicity set in Eddison’s

world, conveyed in his

trite saying,

first

(as

Beauty).”

This interweaving of personae, larger

Masc.

them

The

and Fiorinda and King Mezentius and Duchess Amalie. All aspects of

ambiguous

ramifications.

its

one love

to reveal a concept

Edward and Mary Lessingham, whose time of love

are

so

the idea behind the Fish Dinner, but

presentation and disturbing in

its

with clocks in their stomachs,

ladies

exist

all is

without that Love.

It is

a

engendered; from that dynamic

proceeds.

Not

until the

end of the book

Eddison’s design in

all its fullness

clear that surrounding

we permitted to see and and complexity. Not till this are

and containing

all

secondary partnerings

is

appreciate is

it

made

the formal

and formative relationship of Mezentius and Fiorinda, who never touch,

E. R.

but

55

Eddison

who

Creation

are the ultimate exists.

Lover and Beloved

Eddison’s particular genius

God and Goddess onto

He

for

whom

this to a thesis

is

know and

all

to project this interplay of

whom

delight in one another.

do violence to Eddison’s imagination.

to

has written a novel, not a dissertation. Thesis

and so clothed

and

their lesser selves, separated aspects through

the supreme Self and Co^Self can

But to reduce

is

whom

in

implied, never stated,

is

in the sensuous interaction of lovers that

argument dissolves

into poetry. Verlyn 15,

Fleiger,

“The Ouroboros

Principle:

Time and Love

in

Zimiamvia,”

No. 4 (Summer 1989): 43-44

WILLIAM M. SCHUYLER, JR.

Like virtually every Englishman

of his class and time, Eddison had a classical education.

more

on him than

lasting influence

it

It

was perhaps a

was on many of those who shared

problems of purpose and of injustice

his background. His solutions to the in a

M ythlore

world created by divinity are built on the framework erected by Descartes,

Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer. To this company (.

.)

.

we must add Spinoza.

Despite his admiration for the sagas and their heroes, he turned to Greece

when

it

came time

to shape his philosophy of

and Greek. However,

are peppered with Latin

modern philosophical

He

human

tradition

and the

nature: his later books

his interpretations of the

classical legacy are idiosyncratic.

takes as his foundation the proposition that only consciousness of

the present

moment can

known

be

to be real. (Descartes

where we must begin.) Reason can take us no to Descartes’ rationalism are sound.) Yet there

which cannot be known by

logic (as

further.

was right about

(Hume’s objections

must be something further

Kant maintains). This can be reached

only by the poet’s vision (else Schopenhauer’s truth would be unavoidable).

What itself

the poet seeks

and not

as a

is

ultimate value, that which

means

to

something

else.

One

is

desired as an

end

in

ultimate value seems to

be sufficient.

For Eddison, following in the steps of such thinkers as Shaftesbury, that value

is

Beauty:

all

others, including

and many, universal and every pair

is

Good, derive from

particular, abstract

it.

However, one

and concrete; each member of

dependent on the other. Moreover,

if

value

is

the ground of

existence, then “ought” implies “is”: whatever exists must be to exist (“Letter”).

what ought

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

56

There

is,

then, a multitude of beautiful things, and everything

which

somehow beautiful. This seems contrary to our experience and must somehow be placed in perspective so that it falls in line with theory. There is no need for the world to be as it is (or we could discover the necessity exists

is

by reason). Therefore this,

and the best motive that Eddison can think of

amusing, although

Who, is

must be that someone or something wanted

it

that

then,

it is

pairs, there

we who

certainly not

it is

for that

is

it

that

desirable. In accord

with Eddison’s principle of complementary

must be one that desires and one that reason for choosing Zeus

he

for a creator, the critical role

is

desired.

The complement

fills

is

that the father of gods

in Eddison’s fantasies.

some way amused by

The problem self-sufficient

this

world

who

facing anyone

as they,

not we, see

postulates a creator

is

is

It is

and

suitable

And who

than Aphrodite to personify Beauty and the object of desire? are in

is

amused? The foundation of any value, including Beauty,

is

The

it

are amused.

tary (not opposing) principles of his dualism are personified as Zeus

Aphrodite.

like

better

they

who

it.

why

a perfect,

being would have bothered to create the universe. Eddison’s

dualism provides a solution for this puzzle. All the worlds are created for love, as

homages

to Aphrodite.

William M. Schuyler, of Science Fiction 3,

fl

Jr.,

No.

“E. R. Eddison’s Metaphysics of the Hero,” 7

New York Review

(March 1991): 13-14

Bibliography Poems,

The

Letters,

Worm

Styrbiom

and Memories of

Ouroboros:

the Strong.

Egil’s Saga:

Done

Fish Dinner in

Naim

(editor). 1916.

Romance. 1922.

1926.

into English out of the Icelandic. 1930.

Mistress of Mistresses:

A

A

Philip Sidney

A

Vision of

Z imiamvia. 1935.

Memison. 1941.

The Mezendan Gate. 1958.

Z imiamvia

(Mistress of Mistresses,

Gate). 1992.

A

Fish Dinner in

Memison, The Mezendan

Robert

E.

Howard

1906-1936

ROBERT ERVIN HOWARD, the only child of Dr.

Isaac

Mordecai Howard and

Hester Jane Ervin Howard, was born on January 24, 1906, in Peaster, Texas.

He

spent most of his

in Cross Plains, a part of the post oaks region of

life

Texas, and grew up familiar with the region’s frontier legends and folklore.

Bookish and introverted school,

when he

Howard endured

as a child,

bullying until high

transformed himself into a formidable physical figure

through bodybuilding. Howard enrolled in Howard Payne College in 1924 but

left

shortly after selling “Spear

and Fang’’ and two other

stories to the

pulp magazine Weird Tales, thereby embarking on a career as a writer.

However, he was unable 1929, and he took

Howard

on

a variety of jobs to

hand

tried his

to support himself completely by writing until

at a

number of

sports, adventure, detective, love stories

magazines that he would carve out a issue of

make ends meet. different story types

—but

name

it

was

—western,

in the weird fiction

for himself.

The August 1928

Weird Tales carried his novella “Red Shadows,’’ which introduced

the series character

who proved

the

Solomon Kane,

first

a seventeenth-century Puritan vigilante

of a succession of swashbuckling heroes

who would

dominate Howard’s writing. The following year Weird Tales published “The

Shadow Kingdom,’’

the

first

of several tales of King Kull of the ancient

land of Valusia who, like Kane, was fashioned out of both the heroic frontier legends and Howard’s interest in ancient history. In 1932 a Kull story

he could not

sell as

“The Phoenix on the

Howard rewrote

Sword,’’ renaming

main character Conan the Cimmerian, a warrior of the prehistoric Hyborian Age whose barbaric comportment distinguished him from the noble savages that hitherto had dominated adventure fiction. A mouthpiece the

for

Howard’s

social philosophies

Conan became

concerning the

failures of civilization,

the hero of a score of stories written between 1930 and

1936, and one of the most popular characters to emerge from the pulp

magazines. Conan’s exploits inaugurated the fantasy subgenre of “swordand-sorcery,” a blend of heroic action adventure and supernatural fiction, 57

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

58

and earned Howard a reputation

one of the bloodiest

as

writers for the

pulps.

Howard began corresponding with fellow Weird Tales author Lovecraft, who affectionately dubbed him “Two-Gun Bob” in his

In 1930

H.

P.

Their mutual interests in history and social philosophy forged a

letters.

Howard

friendship that was integral to Howard’s intellectual development.

would ultimately contribute

fast

a handful of stories to the shared universe of

horror fiction created by Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth,

and

others,

known

Howard wrote magazines to

today as the Cthulhu Mythos. During the depression,

prodigious amounts of fiction and verse for a variety of

offset the shrinking of his literary

that would allow

him

to provide for his ailing mother.

an

his mother’s lapse into

June

11, 1936,

irreversible

growing

Deeply affected by

coma, Howard took his

own

life

his fiction collected in

literary reputation led to the

book form,

posthumous publication of nearly

every scrap of his writing. Starting with the efforts of L. Sprague de in the 1950s to edit

chronology for the

Camp

and systematize the Conan stories, and flesh out Howard’s series

with his completions of Howard’s

“Howardiana’’ became a cottage industry that created fantasy

on

with a gunshot wound to the head.

Although Howard never saw any of his

markets and earn a living

fandom and culminated

in de

Camp’s

official

Destiny (1983), and two film adaptations of the

literary fragments, its

own branch

of

biography, Dark Valley

Conan

saga in the 1980s.

Howard’s early autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs appeared ,

in 1990.

1

Critical Extracts

ROBERT E. HOWARD in decaying form, idyllic

is

For the world as a whole, civilization even

undoubtedly better

view of barbarism

—

as

near as

I

for

people as a whole.

can learn

it’s

I

have no

a grim, bloody, ferocious

and loveless condition. I have no patience with the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, god-like child of Nature,

wisdom and speaking of a barbarian

He was

is

in

endowed with

measured and sonorous phrases. Bah!

very different.

ferocious, brutal

He had

strange

My conception

neither stability nor undue dignity.

and frequently

squalid.

He was haunted

by dim

Robert

Howard

E.

and shadowy reasons.

As

shown by

59

he committed horrible crimes

fears;

monstrous

he hardly ever exhibited the steadfast courage often

a race

civilized

for strange

men. He was childish and

bloody

terrible in his wrath,

and treacherous. As an individual he lived under the shadow of the war-

whom

chief and the shaman, each of

might bring him to a bloody end

because of a whim, a dream, a leaf floating on the wind. His religion was generally one of

dooms and shadows,

They bade him

mutilate himself or slaughter his children, and he obeyed

his gods

were awful and abominable.

because of fears too primordial for any civilized

comprehend. His

to

was often a bondage of tabus, sharp sword-edges, between which he

life

walked shuddering. it,

man

and very

personal freedom, being

as civilized

bound

man

understands

to his clan, his tribe, his

Dreams and shadows haunted and maddened him. Simplicity of the

chief.

primitive?

way

little

He had no mental freedom,

as

To my mind

modern man’s

—

the barbarian’s problems were as complex in their possibly

more

so.

He moved through

life

motivated

by whims, his or another’s. In war he was unstable; the blowing of a leaf

might send him plunging in an hysteria of blood-lust against or cause

him

to flee in blind panic

when another

wherein he read of grass

all

his.

The day and

birds

him, and partook of his kinship.

full

joy of

the night were his book,

things that run or walk or crawl or

and moss-covered rocks and

won

stroke could have

the battle. But he was lithe and strong as a panther, and the

strenuous physical exertion was

odds,

terrific

fly.

Trees and

and beasts and clouds were

The wind blew

his hair

with naked eyes into the sun. Often he starved, but

alive to

and he looked

when he

feasted,

it

was

with a mighty gusto, and the juices of food and strong drink were stinging

wine to

his palate.

seen anyone

do

I

Oh,

I

know

I

can never make myself

who had any sympathy whatever

want any. I’m not ashamed of

such a

life

for such

now;

it

it.

I

existence, to be born into

such an existence as

I

it

I’ve just

relative merits of barbarism

do say that

and

my

never

point of view, nor

would not choose to plunge into

would be the sheerest of

an existence. But

with

clear; I’ve

raised in

if it,

hells to I

me, unfitted

as

I

am

had the choice of another

knowing no

other, I’d choose

sought to depict. There’s no question of the

and

civilization here involved.

It’s

just

my own

personal opinion and choice. Robert

E.

Howard, Letter

1931-1936,

Warwick,

ed.

RI:

to

H.

P.

Lovecraft (2

Glenn Lord, Rusty Burke,

Necronomicon

S.

Press, 1991), p.

November

1932), Selected Letters

T. Josbi, and Steve Behrends (West

35

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

60

ROBERT BLOCH

I

am

Conan the Cluck, new wizard, tackled

awfully tired of poor old

who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girl-friend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her a place of honor, either on the cover or on (

the inner illustration. Such has been Conan’s history, and from the realms of the Kushites to the lands of Aquilonia, from the shores of the Shemites to the palaces of Dyme-Novelle-Bolonia, his iron-thewed

sword thrusts

—may he be

cry:

I

‘Enough of

this brute

and

sent to Valhalla to cut out paper

dolls.’

Robert Bloch, “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales 24, No. 5 (November 1934): 651

H.

P.

LO VECRAFT

were wholly unique.

He

The

character and attainments of Mr.

Howard

was, above everything else, a lover of the simpler,

when courage and strength took and when a hardy, fearless race battled

older world of barbarian and pioneer days,

the place of subtlety and stratagem,

and

bled,

and asked no quarter from

this philosophy,

No

ies.

and

and derive from

it

hostile nature. All his stories reflect

a vitality

found in few of his contemporar-

one could write more convincingly of violence and gore than he,

his battle passages reveal

an instinctive aptitude

which would have brought him distinction

for military tactics

in times of war. His real gifts

were even higher than the readers of his published works would suspect, and, had he lived, would have helped literature It is

him

to

make

his

mark

in serious

with some folk epic of his beloved Southwest.

hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out

so sharply; but the real secret

that he himself

is

is

in every

one of them,

He was greater than any even when he outwardly made

whether they were ostensibly commercial or not. profit-making policy he could adopt concessions to internal force

Mammon-guided and

sincerity

—

for

editors

and commercial

which broke through the

critics,

surface

imprint of his personality on everything he wrote. Seldom, set

down

a lifeless stock character or situation

he concluded with

it,

it

and leave

it

if

he had an

and put the ever, did

he

as such. Before

always took on some tinge of vitality and reality

in spite of popular editorial policy

—always drew something from

experience and knowledge of

instead of from the sterile herbarium of

desiccated pulpish standbys.

life

Not only

did he excel in pictures of

his

strife

own and

— Robert

Howard

E.

slaughter, but

he was almost alone

truly excel unless

just that

even

in his ability to create real

No

and dread suspense.

spectral fear

can

61

author

—even

he takes his work very

in cases

in the

seriously;

emotions of

humblest

fields

and Mr. Howard did

where he consciously thought he did not. That such

a genuine artist should perish while hundreds of insincere hacks continue to

concoct spurious ghosts and vampires and spaceships and occult detectives indeed a sorry piece of cosmic irony! H. P. Lovecraft, “In Memoriam: Robert Ervin Howard,”

is

Fantasy Magazine No. 28

(September 1936): 30-31

FRITZ LEIBER each of Howard’s

The

earlier stories

of a boy’s daydream, a

no worry

a boy’s

at all

how

it

It

as simple, limited,

is

hewmout

while the story progresses. is

landscape, plan, diagram, or microcosm of

and complete

as that

stage setting that can be held in the

mind

has no more parts than a good diagram. There

intersects the real world.

It is

an inner world

solemn adventuring. In most fantasy there are only

for

traces of this

boyish stage in the development of the dream world (Eddison naming his

Worm Demons, Witches, Pixies, Goblins, Imps, and Ghouls) but in Howard (especially to my mind in the King Kull and Solomon rival nations in

The

Kane stories) it is dominant. Most of us, I imagine, create adventuring.

I

spent a

lot of

childhood starkly simple landscapes

in

time on a rope bridge over a dark chasm; often

there was a tiger at one end and a lion at the other. But

unique talent and intensity to make powerful genuine of these materials with almost

Broad

no

disguise at

Howard when

I

and there

fiction,

is

denominate

an undeniably boyish element

came of

something

like

much

like

friends will expect

they are deceived, for

1

who when

said.

I

his writing as boyish. I’m

much

as

anything

in all swordplay^and-sorcery

When the author

age, or into his great inheritance, his

“Now my

the same Beckford

me

to

behave

comment was

like a

man.

How

intend to remain a child always!” This was a great tower

estate collapsed, instantly reacted, (...)

—

even the most sophisticated or wickedly decadent.

of Vathek

took Howard’s

stories directly out

power

thinking of his freshness, sincerity, and exuberance as else,

it

all.

strokes, stark landscapes, neancliches of

I’m not belittling

for

“Ah,

if

only

he was having I’d

been there

built

to see

on it

his

fall!”

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

62

Nor am

saying that

I

Howard used

iron will, morbid curiosity seekers,

cliches

and

on the order of stony

rapier-like wit

—but rather the nearand

cliches of the horror story, such as words like strange, weird,

something strangeness

Howard heavily

strange, a

is

and

lies,

good writer ought

on such cousin-words “Robert

E.

(Newark, NJ: Wildside

as grim, black, dark,

Howard’s Style” (1961), Fafhrd Press, 1990), p.

ROBERT WEINBERG many

It

he can.)

if

ghostly.

& Me: A Collection of Essays

47

first

presented the closest look at

It

Kane

story

Kane and

all

was a fast-paced adventure story with a strong sense

of atmosphere and just the right touch of the weird.

It

and

“Red Shadows” was the

ways, the best.

that he represented.

for

effective

generally didn’t over-use those particular words, but he leaned

Fritz Leiber,

and, in

more

eerie. (If

wherein the

to be able to spot

surely his description will be

silence,

Argosy or Adventure but did not

sell

and

finally

It

was evidently written

made

which would haunt the

did suffer from several faults

to Weird Tales.

it

Most

entire series.

prominent was the dreadful use of coincidence to forward the

plot.

There

Nor are any of the characters other than Kane anything more than cardboard. The villains are typical

was no attempt

any complication in the

at

plot.

stereotypes and are a shade too evil.

Balancing out these

some

were Howard’s

and notable description.

fine writing

Throughout the relentless fighter,

faults

entire series

much

is

one who never seems to

one of the deadliest swordsmen

alive.

gift for storytelling, (.

.

made tire,

along with

.)

of Kane’s cold fury.

and while not

This picture of the

He

he did

say.

The grim menace

of his promise,

perfectly presents the deadly determination of

“Red Shadows” menacing

also

had Howard

lure of the jungle.

notable for

its

atmosphere.

A

man

is

skillfully

The

spirit

else.

more than from what

“Men

shall die for this,”

Solomon Kane.

at his descriptive best, telling of the

The African sequence

of the novelette was

menace hangs over place of mystery and dark

feeling of dark lurking

the entire section of the story, making the land a death.

say

a

a flashy fencer,

developed by Howard more through understatement than anything

Kane sounded deadly because of what he did not

is

of the jungle, the soul of Africa, the thrum, thrum, thrum

of jungle drums seems to echo in the print.

The Black God

of the natives

Robert

Howard

E.

63

made menacingly

is

real

and the picture of hidden menace

perfectly

is

maintained. Robert Weinberg, The Annotated Guide Island,

WA:

to

Starmont House, 1976), pp. 7-8

GEORGE KNIGHT writing typically group

and J. R. R. Tolkien

—

Most commentators on Robert

it

writers with

whom Howard has very little

the category of “fantasy writer,’’ yet to

Howard’s

me

class,

environment,

beliefs,

tales,

in

Howard

common.

is

put into

the most interesting aspect of

not the fantasy but the realism

is

Howard’s

E.

with the work of William Morris, Lord Dunsany,

Because his most popular creations are his fantasy

his fiction

& Sorcery (Mercer

Robert E. Howard’s Sword

—

a realism springing from

and the age

in

which he wrote.

Howard’s impulse toward realism that makes him unique in fantastic

and one of the most important American

ture

It is

litera-

writers to contribute to the

form.

Howard wrote

at a

time

when

civilization

was

in upheaval.

the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the

I,

Europe and gangsterism in the United States his vision of civilization

— these

rise

it

had been known

of fascism in

factors greatly affected

crumbling before the tides of barbarism. Civilization

— the of the Empire, of America’s Manifest Destiny —was changing as

World War

to

Western culture

era

far-flung British

and

rapidly,

as the forces of established order

worse.

(.

.

were concerned,

it

was changing

as far

for the

.)

In the cheap wood-pulp magazines popular fiction was changing, becoming

more

Black

violent,

more

Mask magazine

realistic, told in terse,

newspaper-like language. In

Hammett and

others took the immensely

Dashiell

popular classic murder mystery and Americanized (.

.

.)

Howard,

in the pulp pages of

for the fantasy story

—he broke

it

it,

Weird Tales did ,

away from the lush

Dunsany, and Eddison and wrote in direct language.

brought

much

it

up-to-date.

the same thing

stylists like

Hodgson,

He eschewed

the arty

toying about with elves, enchanted princesses, and magical dragons and cut loose with stories about thick-armed warriors, apes.

He was

or Morris any

harem

and flesh-eating

not catering to the reader of James Branch Cabell, Dunsany,

more than Hammett was catering

popular American mystery writer of the day, S. S.

showed

girls,

traditional tastes in his poetry,

and took

to the reader of the

most

Van Dine. Though Howard a slam at jazz in his privately

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

64

The Golden Caliph,

circulated newsletter fiction

is

Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic

E.

The Writings of Robert E. Howard

port,

CT: Greenwood

DON HERRON

—A

Press, 1984), pp.

Of

created barbarian figures.

roam Africa

Fantasist,”

Critical Anthology, ed.

a distinct

The Dark Barbara

Don Herron

(West-

117-18

course before Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tarzan and Rudyard Kipling in the

tion to

in his best

Howard and Hammett were each creating audience, the American pulp magazine reader.

George Knight, “Robert

in

accomplishment

very modern.

genre for their ian:

his

Mowgli, of The Jungle Books,

earlier

When Lord Greystoke shed the trappings of civiliza-

in loincloth

and knife

as

Tarzan of the Apes, a more

barbaric image would be difficult to create. Mowgli, raised by wolves, trained

by bear, panther, and snake,

is

equally stripped of the costumes and conven-

tions of civilization in Kipling’s tales.

These

figures certainly set a

precedent

Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian, but Howard carried the matter

for

into a distinct literary type.

Dumas and

a

The

further,

he usurped the swordplay of

fact that

good measure of supernatural horror from Lovecraft added to

the distinction.

Yet the overriding difference

Tarzan

is

naked

stories

is

in

mood and

a respectable pillar of civilization as

American sense of the

the twentieth-century ing

is

in time-lost cities

the jungle giving

and primeval

way

philosophy. Burroughs’

an English Lord, and preserves status

forests.

quo even

The

when adventur-

thrust of the

Mowgli

before civilization’s inroads, and the

child leaving the forest and his bestial comrades to live as

man, not

manas

an

animal. In Howard, the unquiet surge of barbarism ever threatens to sweep the works of civlization under, the status quo

is

at best

shaky

—even when

Howard’s barbarians use their swords to put themselves on the thrones of the ruling

class.

The Howardian mood and philosophy

is

not simply barbaric,

it is

a dark

barbarism, a pessimistic view that holds the accomplishments of society of little

account in the face of mankind’s darker nature. The famous lines

the end of the

Conan

story

“Beyond the Black

River’’

epigrammatize this

philosophy: Barbarism unnatural.

is

the natural state of mankind. Civilization

It is

a

whim

of circumstance.

always ultimately triumph.

And

at

is

barbarism must

Robert

Howard

E.

65

Beyond the Black River the barbarians wait fact that the river

is

“Black”

is

their

chance to rush

The

in.

aptly symbolic of Howard’s underlying

meaning. The words “black” and “dark” appear often in fantasy

titles,

perhaps more because they represent Howard’s content than for any lack of inventiveness on his part.

This dark and brooding attitude was

at the core of

Howard’s creative

impulse. His artistic leanings toward the poetic and the romantic, his compul-

sion for violence, his interests in history, into this

myth and adventure

all fell easily

shadow of barbarism.

Don

Herron, “The Dark Barbarian,” The Dark Barbarian: The Writings of Robert E.

Howard

—A

Critical Anthology, ed.

Don Herron

(Westport,

CT: Greenwood

Press,

1984), pp. 150-51

MARC

A,

CERASINI

and

CHARLES HOFFMAN

and most of Howard’s other heroes

are presented far

more

Conan than

realistically

the characters of Howard’s fellow pulp writers, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs

and Lester Dent.

One

of the ways in

vision of his fantasies with a his protagonists.

stiff

which Howard tempered the fabulous

dose of reality was to

stress

the humanity of

Howard’s heroes are always formidable, but never invincible.

They can and do get hurt as a result of their dangerous exploits. Solomon Kane gets the worst of his duel with Le Loup in “Red Shadows.” Kull is cut nearly to ribbons in both “The Shadow Kingdom” and “By This Axe Rule!” Conan is no exception; he suffers great wounds in many of his adventures, which in reality are the prices a hero usually pays for an actionI

filled life.

Another way

in

which Howard’s protagonists

of popular culture heroes

complex than the

is

simplistic

differ

from the general run

that they are motivated by impulses

more

good guy/bad guy morality that most “genre”

The Shadow and Solomon Kane both fight for good against evil. However, while The Shadow’s motivations are never made clear, Solomon Kane is driven by impulses that Howard renders recognizable

writers adhere to.

and plausible

to the reader.

Howard’s

ability to fully realize subtle aspects

of characterization was especially evident with Conan. Indeed, each of the characters

we have examined displays characterization far more sophisticated

than that usually found in popular preserving his race and culture, Kull’s philosophical

fiction.

Bran

Mak

Solomon Kane’s

brooding are

all

clearly

Morn’s obsession with

religious fanaticism,

and

and concisely presented by

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

66

Howard

body of each short work. Because he worked within the

in the

Howard was compelled to be spare. Nevertheless, his characterization is convincing, and Conan is another step forward in Howard’s crafting of believable characters. That Howard considered Conan to be his “most realistic’’ character was undoubtedly because Conan possesses limits of the short story,

a

more “normal” personality than

personality

is

men, Conan for wealth,

more

and a hunger

women and

of

is,

Conan’s

readily understandable to the average reader. Like

motivated by

is

his previous characters: that

self-gratification, a

for experience.

strong drink.”

Conan

Howard

melancholies and gigantic mirth.”

If

most

healthy sex drive, a desire is

spoken of

as

being “fond

mentions Conan’s “gigantic

also

the latter statement suggests a manic-

Conan nonetheless possesses a greater capacity for pleasure than Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, and Kull put together. Though Conan

depressive nature,

is

referred to as being frequently sullen

of in this is

no

is

is

usually only spoken

manner. The aspect of Conan we are most often shown, however,

one of vitality and humor. Conan

He

and moody, he

slave to obsession or

inhibitions,

Conan

Howard would

is

free of

is

an extrovert, not a

religious fanatic.

morbid introspection. Devoid of neuroses and

what Blake

mind

called “the

forg’d manacles.”

consider these “manacles” to be the trappings and conven-

tions of civilization.

At

the core of Conan’s personality

Dryden

called “the noble savage.”

modem times, who

The

is

the unmistakable purity of what

cult of the noble savage, at least in

originated with the Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau,

considered

man

in his natural state to

took a more sophisticated view. savages are possessed of

many

be free of vice.

Though not

fleeter

.

.)

Howard

necessarily noble, Howard’s

qualities lacking in civilized

attributes of actual barbarians are present in

(.

Conan. He

is

men. All the stronger and

than someone raised in a civilized environment. Having been bred

in the wilderness,

he

is

inured to discomfort and hardship, even pain. His

senses are keener than those of civilized hair-trigger. All of these qualities, says

men, and

his reflexes are set

Howard, give Conan an edge

on

in

a

any

situation or conflict.

Marc A. Cerasini and Charles Hoffman, Robert

E.

Howard (Mercer

Island,

WA:

Starmont House, 1987), pp. 61-62

RUSTY BURKE in his Irishness, steeped

By 1930, Howard had become confirmed enough

enough

in the history

and

lore of the subject, to

Robert

E.

Howard

67

The

begin writing fiction in this vein. persona

is

—

earliest creations,

a statue of

him

featured character

O’Brien. That

from the

Pictish chieftain

is

a Celt

—an

Irish

who was remote

him

as the

named Turlogh Dubh new character is evident

adventurer

enthusiastic about the

he hopes to

new

this

in this story a legend of the

plays a central role in the plot. Replacing

Howard was

fact that

is

emerge from

story to

“The Dark Man”: Bran Mak Morn, the

one of Howard’s past

first

sell a series

Only one

of stories about him.

other story of O’Brien sold, though: two months after the acceptance of

“The Dark Man,” Howard Tales) to

reports that Farnsworth

(editor of Weird-

bought “The Gods of BabSagoth.” Another story apparently

sell,

failed

and one unfinished fragment completes what we now have of the

Turlogh Dubh O’Brien

At about

series.

“The Dark Man,” Howard sold another Cormac of Connacht, leader of a band of

the same time he sold

story featuring a Celtic warrior. Irish

Wright

who

are settling the Scottish region of Dalriada,

character in “Kings of the Night,” but actually seen as

if

is

is

not the best-known

central to the story,

through his eyes. Most commentaries on

which

this tale focus

Mak

only on the meeting of two of Howard’s more popular heroes, Bran

Morn and Pictish

Kull.

But there are in

shaman Gonar

transpire

fact three

When

Kings of the Night.

now,” he could well have been referring to the kings: Kull of the

Bran of the present, and Cormac of the

with

Rome

in the story, but as

Howard

future.

Bran wins his battle

well knew, the future of Scotland

belonged to the Gaels. Robert Weinberg, in his commentary on says “Strangely is

the

says “All things that ever were, are, or ever will be,

past,

This

is

enough, the

not so strange

Only three

tale

when we

is

seen through the eyes of

see this story in

further purely Celtic stories are

its

this story,

Cormac

proper context.

documented

after

(.

.

.

.

.)

1930:

“Spears of Clontarf,” a story concerning the battle in which the High King

Brian Boru broke the power of the Vikings in Ireland, was rejected by the

Clayton Publications in mid- 1931; a revised version of this

God

Passes,”

which gave

Tales later in the year. as the

background

And “The

for

it

a

more supernatural

“The Grey

was rejected by Weird

“The Cairn on the Headland,” which used Clontarf a modern horror tale, was accepted in early 1932.

People of the Dark,” accepted at about the same time, featured

a black-haired

Gael of Eireann named Conan who encounters

underground dwellers either influenced by the sist

focus,

story,

Little

a race of

People of Welsh fanta-

Arthur Machen, or derived from the same sources. This story

really

ends Howard’s purely Celtic period, and presages the advent, only a few

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

68

weeks

later,

Conan

of the character generally considered Howard’s greatest creation,

of Cimmeria.

Rusty Burke, “The Active Voice: Robert

E.

Howard’s Personae,” Dark

Man No.

(April 1993): 24-25

Bibliography A

Gent from Bear Creek. 1937.

The Hyborian Age. 1938. SkulEFace and Others. [Ed. August Derleth.] 1946.

Conan

the

Conqueror. 1950.

The Sword of Conan. 1952. King Conan. 1953.

The Coming of Conan. 1953. The Challenge from Beyond (with C.

Moore, A. Merritt, H.

L.

P. Lovecraft,

and Frank Belknap Long). 1954.

Conan

1954.

the Barbarian.

Tales of Conan. 1955.

Always Comes Evening. 1957, 1977.

The Dark

Man

and Others. 1963.

Almuric. 1964.

The

Pride of Bear Creek. 1966.

Conan

the

Conan

the Warrior. Ed. L.

Conan

the

Adventurer (with L. Sprague de Camp). 1966.

Usurper (with

Sprague de Camp. 1967.

L.

Sprague de Camp). 1967.

King Kull (with Lin Carter). Ed. Glenn Lord. 1967.

Conan (with

L.

Wolfshead. Ed.

Sprague de

Glenn

Camp and

Lin Carter). 1968.

Lord. 1968.

Etchings in Ivory. 1968.

Red Shadows. 1968.

Conan

the

Conan

the Freebooter

Conan

the

Conan

of Cimmeria (with L. Sprague de

Avenger (with Bjorn Nyberg and

Sprague de Camp). 1968.

(with L. Sprague de Camp). 1968.

Wanderer (with

Mak Morn. 1969. The Moon of Skulls. 1969. Bran

L.

L.

Camp and Lin Carter). 1968. Camp and Lin Carter). 1969.

Sprague de

3

. .

Robert

Howard

E.

69

Singers in the Shadows. 1970.

The Hand of Kane. 1970. Solomon Kane. 1971.

The Red Blades of Black Cathay (with Tevis Clyde Smith). 1971. Black

Dawn. 1972.

The Road

Rome. 1972.

to

Echoes from an Iron Harp. 1972.

Marchers of

Valhalla

The Sowers of

A

Song of

the

1972.

Thunder. 1973.

Naked Lands. 1973.

the

The

Vultures. 1973.

The

Incredible Adventures of

Dennis Dorgan. 1974.

Tigers of the Sea. 1974.

Worms

of the Earth. 1974.

The Tower of

the Elephant.

1975.

The Vultures of Whapeton. 1975. Black

Vulmeas Vengeance and Other

Tales of Pirates. 1976.

The Book of Robert E. Howard. 1976. The Iron

Man

and Other Tales of

the Ring.

1976.

The Grim Land and Others. 1976. Rogues

House. 1976.

in the

The Second Book of Robert E. Howard. 1976. S words of S hahrazar

1976.

Night Images. 1976.

The Hour of Son of

the

the

Dragon. 1977.

White Wolf. 1977.

Three-Bladed Doom. 1977.

The Lost Valley of Iskander. 1977. Sword Woman. 1977.

Red

Nails. 1977.

The People of

the

Black Circle. 1977.

Black Canaan. 1978. Kull. 1978.

Queen of

the

Black Coast. 1978.

Marchers of Valhalla. 1978.

The Last

Ride. 1978.

Black Colossus. 1979.

Mayhem on

Bear Creek. 1979.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

70

The Road of Azrael. 1979.

The Howard

Collector. Ed.

Glenn

Lord. 1979.

The Gods of BaLSagoth. 1979.

Hawks

of Outremer. 1979.

Lord of

the

Dead. 1981.

The Ghost Ocean. 1982. Bran

Mak Morn: A

The She

Play

,

and Others. 1983.

Devil. 1983.

Robert E. Howard’s Kull. 1985.

The Adventures of Lai The Pool of

the

Cthulhu: The

Singh. Ed.

Robert M. Price. 1985.

Black One. 1986.

M ythos and Kindred Llorrors.

Robert E. Howard’s World of Heroes. Ed. Selected Letters. Ed.

1989-91. 2 Post

Glenn

Ed. David Drake. 1987.

Mike Ashley. 1989.

Lord, Rusty Burke, S. T. Joshi, and Steve Behrends.

vols.

Oaks and Sand Roughs. 1990.

Robert E. Howard’s Fight Magazine. Ed. Robert (projected).

M.

Price.

1990-

.

8 issues

Fritz

Leiber

1910-1992

FRITZ

REUTER

LEIBER, JR.,

was born in Chicago on December 24, 1910, the

son of distinguished Shakespearean actor and theatrical manager

Fritz

and Virginia Bronson Leiber. Exposure to members of his mother and

Leiber

father’s

acting troupe introduced the young Leiber to a variety of interests, including reading, chess,

and the

stage. Leiber spent

most of his childhood

in

Chicago,

eventually enrolling in the University of Chicago, from which he graduated

with a B.A. in 1932.

Upon

graduating, Leiber served as an Episcopal minister but a crisis of

conscience over his lack of religious faith sent him back to graduate school. After a brief but unsuccessful stint on the stage, Leiber returned once again to school,

where he met Jonquil Stephens. The two were married

and moved

to

Hollywood

to live with Leiber’s parents while Fritz

in

1936

embarked

on an abortive career in film. Their only son, Justin, was born in 1938. Over the next few decades, Leiber held a succession of jobs in publishing. While

at college, Leiber

writer H. P. Lovecraft,

influences

on

was introduced to the work of weird fiction

whom he would later cite as one of the most important

his writing.

He

corresponded with Lovecraft a short time

before the latter’s death in 1937 and sent his early efforts at fiction writing for Lovecraft’s criticism.

Fischer,

two

who

shared

many

Also while in college, Leiber met Harry Otto of Leiber’s interests. In their correspondence, the

playfully imagined themselves as heroic fantasy characters

(Leiber) stories

and the Gray Mouser

(Fischer),

who became

named

Fafhrd

the subjects of several

by Leiber.

Leiber submitted several stories for publication to Weird Tales in the late 1930s, eventually selling his horror story

(not published until 1940).

Unknown, he sent the

tales of

“The Automatic

To John W.

Pistol’’ in

Campbell’s fantasy magazine

Fafhrd and the Mouser that had been rejected

by Weird Tales. Campbell would publish five of these, starting with

Sought Adventure’’

in the

1938

August 1939

issue.

The Fafhrd and Mouser stories,

with their squabbling antihero characters and 71

“Two

sly

humor, were immediately

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

72

recognized as alternatives to the stereotypical blood-and-thunder type of heroic fantasy that hitherto had dominated the pulp fantasy magazines. Leiber also

made a mark with his horror fiction, updating the

horror for

modem

tropes of Gothic

urban settings inhabited by psychologically complex

“Smoke Ghost” and

characters in stories such as

his first novel, Conjure

Wife (serialized 1941; revised for book publication 1953; filmed

Woman

in

1948 and Burn

,

Witch, Burn in 1963).

The

as

Weird

latter, a rational

treatment of the persistence of witchcraft in the modern world, became one of the most influential horror novels of the twentieth century.

When Unknown fiction,

folded in 1943, Leiber concentrated

on writing science

producing the novels Gather, Darkness! and Destiny Times Three for

Astounding Science Fiction. His

first

book, the collection Night’s Black Agents

was published in 1947. “You’re All Alone”

(final revision as

Ones, 1986), a short fantasy novel about alienation in the as well as stories Leiber

The

modem

,

Sinful

world,

wrote for the burgeoning science fiction market of

the 1950s, blurred the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, and horror

through their imaginative expression of America’s postwar angst. Recovering

from the

first

of several bouts with alcoholism in the 1960s, Leiber began

extending the saga of Fafhrd and the Mouser in the pages of Fantastic and

paperback story collections, where the growth of the characters increasingly

came to reflect his own developing understanding of himself. Over the last twenty-five years of his life Leiber amassed numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugos, four Nebulas, and the World Fantasy Award for his novel Our Lady of Darkness (1977), a tale of urban paranoia set in his adopted town of San Francisco. He became the only writer to win lifetime achievement awards in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction fields. Although hobbled by health problems throughout the 1980s, Leiber continued to write, producing the lengthy and insightful autobiographical essay

“Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex”

for his collection

Ghost Light (1984) and a final collection of Fafhrd and Mouser Knight and Knave of Swords (1988).

of strokes

on September

5,

1992.

He

stories,

The The

died from complications of a series

— Fritz

Leiber

73

Critical Extracts

ROBERT BLOCH

Mr. Leiber (in Night's Black Agents) has given

us a clue as to his concept of blackness by arbitrarily dividing the tales in

two

his collection into

sections, with

one

tale of transition.

His story^

groupings are labeled Modern Horrors and Ancient Adventures. In the section

we

memorable “Smoke Ghost”

find the

“dirty sunsets”

and “blackish snow”

black footprints, and grime in as a

shadow

like a

in a world of

— an inky phantom leaving smudges,

wraithlike wake, a horror that materializes

suffusing flesh with a

omnipresent blight in the hovering

its

— dweller

first

modem

smoky hue. Darkness,

compound

world, a

to Leiber,

of industrial

is

an

smudge

monstrous pall over a mechanized civilization and giving

birth to horrors typical of the

new Dark Ages.

It is

obvious that to Leiber

our civilization presents a very dark picture indeed.

“The

Man Who Never Grew

Young,” an ingenious

tale of transition,

exemplifies his recoil from today’s reality. But distance lends enchantment.

And

in the

two

tales

which conclude

— “The Sunken Land” and “Adept’s Gambit” — one

book

his

the masterful, hitherto unpublished novel,

finds

worn by swashbuck-ling adventurers, a black hood veiling the features of warlocks and wizards black magicians. In modem times the nighDsky is an embodiment of evil; darkness assuming a classic glamour.

It is

a black cloak,

but in the blackness of prehistoric dawn, Leiber sees the “selTconsistent stars.”

Robert Bloch, “Through a Glass Darkly,”

Arkham

Sampler

1,

No.

1

(Winter 1948):

85

FRITZ LEIBER

We’ve grown fond of

So tender with our monsters! Because they

these old fears, haven’t we?

are almost the only hint of

what

imagination can attain beyond the stanhigh walls that ring this plain.

And

they’ve grown weak, you know.

Look here

—

’t

was not a

silver bullet killed

the werewolf.

But come now,

sit

and

rest

—may be your only chance between the recent

planeDmaiming war and some atomic doom friendly boulder. Eat flute

Find each a

and drink. Lick your old wounds. Set one to play the

—some dreamy, solemn

strain to

muttering voices of the plain.

bad when we have

that’s just ahead.

rested.

And

make our

ears forget the querulous,

deeply rest— things will not seem so

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

74

How

do

know? By what authority do

I

whom

nothing. Just someone

speak to you? By none. I’m

I

you’ve paid to dream for you.

A

kind of

twilight skald.

You

say,

small band

Dark Eyes and Weary Smile, we’re going nowhere? That our is

out of touch with

Our path only

life?

dreams?

flight to childish, superstitious

What

a circling retreat, a

then,

ask you, are those

I

peaks ahead, that black, forbidding rampart in the sky? Oh, an illusion, it?

The plainsmen say

them? Well, bones,

the mountains are not real and you, Dark Eyes, believe

just wait!

when your

When

— then

in that rusty cuirass,

Fantasy ? Well, at? Stiffen

let

them.

tell

what

me

reflects

till it

selves, set against those

They laugh

at us

and

jeer at

back an image of their stunted, monstrous

flight, their

been done, that

a wearisome atomic round, to

the jagged pinnacles

pay them sneer with sneer. Best,

scoffers,

mountains they

headlong stumbling

thrills’s

when

illusion.

said you?

there’s

and they run

insist aren’t there,

insane laughter echoing in their ears.

Oh, but your doubts go deeper, Grim that

it’s

air,

When haven’t men going somewhere been laughed

your backs, scoff at the

burnish your armor

off in

the cold blasts that brim the passes chill your

lungs strain to gulp the icy

cut and bruise your feet

You

is

Face, eh?

no more

and that the future

You think

that everything

true eeriness in

—

life,

only a tag end

if

but just

—belongs

some pragmatic plodding breed who never heard Pan pipe or feared the

darkness that’s between the stars? That

And

yet that’s just

how

I

feel part of

is

to laugh! Pass

me

the wine^skin.

the time.

how untrue! When each new fact, like an old witch, has as familiar some new mystery, when each conquered realm opens a new wilder, wider frontier, when man’s about to leap to the planets No! The fault’s in us. Open your eyes, close your ears to the drug' But

.

murmurous voices of the will see

plains, polish the

wonders undreamed

of,

made gleaming woods where

in the darkling Fritz Leiber,

“Fantasy on the

innumerable

—and

Eyes,’’

by

don’t

I

Wonder

eyes by rocks like these at

danced. March,” Arkham Sampler

mean

bright

as great as in

Stonehenge and

satyrs

MARSHALL McLUHAN Hungry

.

windows of your mind, and you

gadgetry to prick desires and empty pocketbooks. archaic times

.

Fritz Leiber,

1,

No.

In a story called

2 (Spring 1948):

“The

43-44

Girl with the

an ad photographer gives a job to a not too

75

Leiber

Fritz

promising model. Soon, however, she

is

“plastered

over the country”

all

because she has the hungriest eyes in the world. “Nothing vulgar, but just the same they’re looking at you with a hunger that’s

more than

sex.”

Something

Abstracted from the body that

become “something more than itch,

may be gives them

similar

finds “the horror

their ordinary

girl

spots.

want everything

I

everything that’s hurt you bad. .

.

.

I

want

Betty’s legs ...

wanting me.

want your

I

meaning, they

photographer

In this vampire, not of blood but of

life.

behind the bright billboard

want your high

a pedestal.

hypnotizes the country with her

.

.

.

you on and on and then show you death.” She I

on

said of the legs

finally accepts the attentions of the

barely escapes with his

sex and something

sex,” a metaphysical enticement, a cerebral

an abstract torment. Mr. Leiber’s

hungry eyes and

all

I

want your

spirit,

he

She’s the eyes that lead

says to him: “I

that’s

first girl

want you.

made you happy and ...

want that

I

want your mother’s death

I

who

...

I

licking

want your

Feed me, baby, feed me.”

life.

Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial

Man

(Boston: Beacon

Press, 1951), p. 101

DAMON KNIGHT

Conjure Wife, by

Fritz Leiber,

is

easily the

most frightening and (necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of horror stories. survives,

Its

premise

that witchcraft

is

flourishes, or at

still

all

any rate

an open secret among women, a closed book to men. Under the

rational overlay of 20th-century civilization this sickly growth, uncultivated,

unsuspected, “.

.

army,

still

.

I

I

manages

to propagate

itself:

when my boyfriend was in the keep him from getting shot or hurt, and

don’t do much. Like

did things to

I’ve

him so that he’ll keep away from other women. And kin annemt with erl for sickness. Honest, I don’t do much, ma’am.

spelled

And “.

it .

.

I

don’t always work.

Some

I

And

learned from

from Mrs. Neidel

—she

lots of things

Ma when

I

I

was a

can’t get that way. kid.

And some

gots spells against bullets from her

grandmother who had a family in some European war way back. But most women won’t tell you anything. And some spells I kind of figger out myself, and try different ways until they work.”

Tansy Saylor, the wife of ultra-conservative small

a promising

American

young sociology professor

college,

is,

like

at

an

most women, a witch.

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

76

She

is

an

also

modern young woman, and when her husband

intelligent,

happens to discover the evidence of her witchcraft (not advancement, which he ascribes to magic

Norman

is

compounded

own

easy

luck, but certain small packets of dried

&c.) he’s able to convince her that her faith

leaves, earth, metal, filings,

in

his

of superstition and neurosis.

She burns her charms;

Saylor’s “luck” immediately turns sour. But this

is

not

ail

— the

Balance has been upset.

The

witches’ warfare

between

battle

.

.

.

was much

fortified lines

—

like

trench warfare or a

a state of siege. Just as reinforced

concrete or armor plating nullified the

shells, so

countercharms

and protection procedures rendered relatively futile the most violent onslaughts. But once the armor and concrete were gone, and the witch who had foresworn witchcraft was out in a kind of

no man’s land For the realistic mind, there could be only one answer. that the

enemy had discovered

weapon more potent than

and was planning

battleships or aircraft,

would turn out to be a instantly

a

Namely

to ask for a peace that

The only thing would be to strike the secret weapon could be brought

trap.

and hard, before

into play.

Leiber develops the theme with the utmost dexterity, piling up alternate

mundane and

layers of the at the

end of Chapter

outre, until at the story’s real climax, the shocker

14,

1

am

not ashamed to say that

I

jumped an inch

out of my seat. so skillfully

From that point onward the story is anticlimax, but anticlimax managed that I am not really certain I touched the slipcover

again until after the

which, perhaps,

Damon

is

last page.

all

Leiber has never written anything better

.

.

.

that needed to be said.

Knight, “Campbell and His Decade,” In Search of Wonder (Chicago: Advent,

1956), pp. 31, 33

FRANCIS LATHROP stories stand

without

out

loss of

is

What seems

that the two heroes are

romance and

make the Fafhrd-Mouser cut down to a plausible size to

a believeddn eerie, sorcerous

atmosphere and

with a welcome departure from formula. They are neither physical supermen of the caliber of

Conan and John

like Tolkien’s Strider, etc.,

Carter, nor moral or metaphysical giants

and Moorcock’s

Elric.

They win out by one

— Leiber

Fritz

77

quarter brains, and at least

and

self-interest, blind spots

laugh at themselves

One’s

galling.

fifty

—even

if

They have an engaging and an

vices, a gallantry of sorts,

ability to

the Mouser occasionally finds the

may be

impression

first

percent sheer luck.

that the

comedian and Fafhrd the somewhat stupid hero and the Mouser the comic

but a

relief,

Mouser

the darkly clever

man, or Fafhrd the

straight little

is

quite

last

reading reveals the

self-

infatuation underlying and sometimes tripping the Mouser’s cunning, and also the amiable

wisdom that now and then shows through

Fafhrd’s lazy

complacency. Francis Lathrop, [Review of Swords in the Mist, Swords against Wizardry, and The

Swords of Lankhmar], Fantastic 19, No.

TOM

SHIPPEY

.)

all

from

cool and rational tone,

its

its

(.

.

the

1

(October 1969): 129-30

way through Conjure Wife draws power

everyday setting, while

its

central images

the cement dragon, the Prince Rupert drop, the shattering mirror carry a physical as well as a magical explanation.

The

paragraph, indeed, offers a rational explanation (that are psychotic) as

takes place just as long as

explain events. However,

does not

fit

all

women

involved

it

all

are Professor Saylor saying evasively “I

all

don’t really know”. All this makes Conjure Wife it

all

book’s penultimate

an alternative to the fantastic one (that they are

witches), while the last words of

of fantasy, that

—

also points out

fit

one

one rather strict definition is

uncertain about

one way

how

to

which Conjure Wife

in

the normal development of ‘Frazerian’ science fiction, for

all its

pioneering motifs and explanations.

That

is,

that most ‘worlds where magic works’ are alternate worlds, parallel

worlds, future worlds, far-past worlds. Conjure Wife to be set in a recognisable present.

but

loses, inevitably, a quality

It

one of the very few

gains from this, of course, in realism;

of romance.

even the glimpsed presence of He

is

Who

It

has witches, and

spells,

Walks Behind; but there

are

and

no

centaurs, or werewolves, or mermaids, or basilisks, or any of the other ancient

The only dragon in Conjure Wife an urge in many writers and readers to

images of fantasy. there

is

clearly

and use them as

much

to

mankind

this urge,

again, partly

no doubt

out of a kind of intellectual for so long,

it is felt,

powerful though

it

is,

a

cement one. Yet

resurrect these images

as a result of ‘escapism’, thrift: ideas

are too is

is

good

to

but at least

compulsively attractive

throw away. Nevertheless

met by an equally powerful current of

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

78

some

scepticism. Twentietlvcentury readers, especially those with

scientific

training or inclination, cannot even pretend to believe in anything that

makes no

sense,

i.e.,

anything that has no rationalistic theory to cover

and The Golden Bough provided

Frazer

it.

a rationale for magic, as exploited

by Leiber in Conjure Wife. But he dealt only with natural

forces.

Tom Shippey, “The Golden Bough and the Incorporations of Magic in Science Fiction,” Foundation No. 12 (March 1977): 123-24

JOHN CLUTE the heart.

Our Lady

Here

is

of Darkness

a mistake is

from

Fritz Leiber,

though

it

warms

Whatever one

a mistake of displacement.

reads of Leiber, in whatever genre he presents to us his skill and touch, the

implied author (the author visible in the text,

who

we have

all

a right to

know)

speaks to one seems to exhale a kind of shy sacrificial gravitas, however

happens to

garish or commercial the story he’s telling

seems brave

for

an adult person

like Fritz Leiber to

be. It

expose himself without

condescension or disguise to a readership comprised of people young, claquish, aggressive, intrusive, authors,

and

to punish those

who

we tend

shop to be amenable to claims of complicity.

Our Lady

in

mourning that

lies

like us

demand complicity

of our

turn a blank face, or (like Silverberg) a

mask of anguish. Perhaps anguish comes too all right,

to

somehow

close to the foul rag

And

and bone

perhaps Leiber was after

of Darkness, to avoid telling the tale of anguish and

palpably at the heart of

its

inspiration,

and instead

displace that story into a routine tale of externalized haunting,

to

even though

injected with elements of an sf rationale, a good deal of social realism scarifyingly illuminating about

life

in California

now (and

in our future

soon enough), and some interesting speculative musing about what the

modern world But

I

don’t

may be beginning to do to us. believe it. I don’t know (and have no city

right or inclination to

speculate about) whether the real Fritz Leiber behind the sacrificial decency of the implied Fritz Leiber

we

read in his texts

is

or

is

not an anguished

do know that the implied author of Our Lady of Darkness sounds singularly ilbaNease in his efforts to present us the story he does as though

man;

it

I

were the

best of us

.

real story. .

Thin

ice

does seem to bring out the jocosity in the

.

John Clute, [Review of Our Lady of Darkness], Foundation No. 14 (September 1978): 64-65

79

Leiber

Fritz

JEFF

FRANE

Wife),

(Norman) succeeds

lost

In the vividly shocking climax of the novel (Conjure in saving (Tansy’s)

life,

but finds that she has

her soul in the process. Through the anticlimactic scenes of the book,

them work together to recover it. Even now, Norman is not convinced that what he has seen has really been magic. The more

the two of entirely

evidence that accumulates, the harder the rational portion of his mind

What he

resists.

own fully

attempts to do then

rationalize the evidence to

is

fit

his

—rather unsuccess-

preconceptions. Fie attempts to convince himself

— that the three other women

over Tansy’s behavior

a result of her

is

and that

are truly psychotic

own

their control

neuroses and their psychoses.

Therefore, he decides that his actions must play along with their obsessions if

he

to rescue

is

Tansy from her catatonic

state.

At

does credit magic, he can only do so by thinking of

when he

those times it

in terms of science,

with the same concrete rules that govern the other sciences. Fie succeeds in developing a rationale to

a science

account

for

magic having been discredited

as

— that the laws of magic proceed through evolutionary changes

which invalidate previous approaches and formulas. Through modern symbolic logic,

he develops the essence of various

Tansy’s soul It is

spells so that

he can recover

— or rescue her from her psychotic tormentors.

this struggle

Norman Saylor that creates the successful tensions dilemma is that of the reader, who throughout the

within

within the novel. His

story has suspended disbelief

and accepted the proposition that magic does,

Norman had

willingly accepted the evidence of witchcraft

in fact, exist. If

that surrounded

the reader’s

own

him

(as

is

often true in contemporary tales of witchcraft),

skepticism would have been reinforced.

Jeff Frane, Fritz Leiber

(Mercer Island,

JUSTIN LEIBER

in that. lary

and

arcane

lose himself in.

They impose on style;

lore.

Starmont House, 1980),

Fritz

would seem

to

have found

These are pulp, lowbrow genres

18

those

who

write

them

a colorful

just

what he

—no pretension

and gaudy vocabu-

they also impose a special sort of atmosphere, landscape, and

Excepting science

fiction,

they are alone

among pulp forms

combining brawny, physical combat with the cut and thrust of Finally, these forms dictate clever,

action;

p.

In his initial choice of supernatural horror and

sword and sorcery genres, shy

needed to

WA:

even the emotional punch

is

gimmicky

much

intelligence.

plot construction

restricted.

One can

in

and rapid

write recipes

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

80

and people do.

for these genres,

seems to follow that one reveals nothing

It

about oneself in this type of writing except that one knows the recipe and

can follow directions. Further, because these are both physical and minor

them

genres, to write

reveals

no pretensions

to high art or fair fame. Rather,

they generate a relatively small circle of initiates and playful semiprofession' als.

Perhaps in this cozy circle

Fritz

found something of a replacement

for

“the company,” his father’s Shakespearian band. Indeed, Shakespeare himself was both a “humble player” of a popular art

and archmage of an arcane fellowship, and with

this. Fie

was not only

have been, but stage.

as

his plays continually reverberate

his characters in that they

were people he might

Bergson suggests, Shakespeare also played these roles on

Shakespearian actors take particular relish in those “humble player”

speeches which suggest that one part of a

“humble

player,”

who

is

playing Shakespeare himself acting the

in turn

is

playing a particular role.

did Shakespeare create his actors and their ethos as the

onstage characters, but he to hallow

Perhaps

made

it

flip side

of the

easy for traditional Shakespearian actors

deep within the conviction that Fritz

Not only

am

“I

should have been more wary.

Shakespeare.” the play, occasionally,

If

the thing to catch the conscience of the king,

it

is

is

always ready to cast

murky, indirect, and devastating reflections of the playwright. The Shake' spearian actor does not run that risk of looking through a telescope at a strange and entrancing world only to find a terrifying reflection of the actor’s self.

The view

that high art

suggests not only that

and

it

is

confessional and consciously selTreflective

may be

therapeutic but also that

it

is

dangerous

painful. Justin Leiber, “Fritz Leiber

and Eyes,”

Philosophers

Look

at Science Fiction, ed.

Nicholas

D. Smith (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), pp. 179-80

TOM STAICAR alists

because he

is

one.

Leiber has repeatedly written about individm

As an

actor, the child of actonparents, a pacifist

who feared being drafted, a college teacher in a stifling atmosphere he hated, and as a writer who disliked the nine'toTive office routine, Leiber has always led

what most Americans would consider an unusual existence.

The

Sinful

Ones explores

this

theme from

several angles. For example,

Jane has lived in secrecy, hunted by the group of awakened ones jealously guard their nearly unique status.

She has

a cache of food

who

and drink

stored in the stacks of a large library, where she can hide. Elsewhere, she

Leiber

Fritz

81

observe the “rules” of

tries to

life:

don’t stand out, don’t be early or

blend

don’t be

in,

first

or last in line,

Otherwise, you will be spotted as

late.

truly alive.

The bulk Carr. At all

of the novel

taken up with chases and escapes by Jane and

is

melt into the normal

lives

with a feeling

rhythm of

cally

for the

As Jane

they once lived. life as

to blend in

tells

it.

You automatic

to.”

sense of inertia in this machinelike world resembles the views about

time expressed in Leiber’s stories about time

which tends

to negate small changes in

travel.

Time has

pattern.

its

a strong inertia

According to Leiber,

history reflects great events, such as major battles lost or

the

and to

Carr, “You’re born

the machine wants

do and say what you’re supposed

The

them

times the option remains open for

won, and ignores

In The Sinful Ones, one person’s refusal to perform an action

rest.

usually ignored,

and people go on much

Although Leiber seems rather

they have, working around

as

disdainful about the mass of

humanity

the novel, he shows that he does care about average people speculates, “I

wonder

if

wonder

if

we haven’t been wrong

in

it.

in

when Jane

some of our

perhaps there aren’t more awakened people than we

is

guesses.

I

realize, living

their lives in a trance, sticking to the pattern, but not just because they’re

nothing but machines, not

some hope

because their minds are black.” Leiber sees

for people, so long as they

Alienation

norms of

just

is

society

examine

the basic theme here.

their options in

The person who

becomes an outsider and an

outcast.

life.

goes outside the

When

other people

observe this nonconformity, they become upset, suspicious, or distrustful.

A

child

may be spumed by

by potential

friends.

his schoolmates

Carr and Jane

them. Leiber suggests that

feel this ostracism keenly,

this alienation

is

being aware, awake, and truly alive. Tom Staicar, Fritz Leiber (New York: Ungar,

BRUCE BYEIELD Campbell

suggests that

and an adult may be ignored

and

an acceptable price

it

alienates

to pay for

1983), pp. 29-31

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (Joseph)

many monsters encountered by

the hero are versions

of the father. In organizing the Fafhrd and Mouser stories, Leiber has given

them

father-figures in the

form of Ningauble and Sheelba. In “The Frost

Monstreme,” they do not oppose

their sorcerous mentors, but they

do face

near-equivalents in the invisible Oomforafor and the power magician

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

82

Khahkht. “Rime to oppose in

All these

Under

Odin and

Mouser

nomads

berserkers,

and

the heroes resemble physi-

and

their destructive impulses.

leads a fleet against the sea-nomads,

that Loki plans to destroy the fleet in order to

under Odin’s influence, Fafhrd’s

to the relief of a small town, are

die taking their

tempted to revert to

enemies with them.

heroes achieve victory only by resisting the gods’ plans.

moment, the Mouser

who

Fafhrd,

Oomforafor, ble for the

and

revises Loki’s spell

limits

deserts his responsibilities to rescue is

less lucky.

girl,

he has

so

much

felt guilty

He

is

At

the

an adolescent

named Mara,

is

from

girl

response

like his first lover,

about ever since he abandoned her. Fafhrd rescues

severing Oomforafor’s hand, but his ally and ex-lover, Oomforafor’s

girl,

sister Hirriwi, tells

him

that she would have rescued the girl and prophesies

that he will suffer “for deserting your

men

to chase this girl-chit’’. Rejoining

wear

his forces, Fafhrd recovers his sense of duty, refusing to let his forces

Vague apprehensions make the nooses on the pretense that he needs them to brace his

the noose that

him

last

destructive power.

its

attempts the rescue, not because he

because she

as

Newhon.

whom

to destruction. Similarly,

marching

their nature

The

moment

versions of the Father

strayed from our world into

the two gods,

Loki’s influence, the

lure the

the

who have

Loki,

to represent the heroes’ past

learning at the last

whom

them even more powerful

gives

figures, especially

seem

cally,

Isle’’

collect

is

the sign of subjection to Odin.

wrist for archery. His apprehensions prove well-founded

revised spell banishes

Odin and

Loki,

who

when

takes the nooses

the Mouser’s

and

with them. Having needlessly mutilated Mara’s abductor, Fafhrd

same mutilation himself. Leiber passes quickly over

this

his

hand

suffers the

development

in his

interview with Jim Purviance, explaining only that he realized that his

heroes had never been hurt, and that Fafhrd’s adjustment to his handicap

would give

fresh story material.

true that Fafhrd’s loss

fits

These motivations

are valid, yet

Odin

in his

the god’s aspect that

who,

as

also

well with the idea expressed in The Hero with a

Thousand Faces that suffering represents maturation achieved rejecting

it is

at a cost. In

morbid and destructive aspect, Fafhrd comes to resemble is

absent from “Rime

Campbell mentions,

sacrificed

Isle’’:

Odin

is

a quester for

wisdom

an eye and crucified himself in pursuit

of this goal. In metaphorical terms, Fafhrd overcomes his monstrous image of the Father and reaches maturation by imitating the Father.

thwarting of Loki emulates Loki’s

own

The Mouser’s

subversions, and, by defeating his

Father-image, he also matures, although at a lower cost. Bruce Byfield, Witches of RI:

Necronomicon

the

Mind:

A

Press, 1991), p. 61

Critical Study of Fritz Leiber

(West Warwick,

.

1

83

Leiber

Fritz

Bibliography Night’s Black Agents. 1947.

Gather, Darkness! 1950.

Conjure Wife. 1953.

The Green Millennium. 1953. The

Ones (with

Sinful

1972

Bulls, Blood,

(as You’re All Alone),

and Passion by David Williams). 1953,

1986

(as

The

Sinful Ones).

Destiny Times Three. 1957.

Two

Sought Adventure: Exploits of Fafhrd and

the

The Big Time (with The Mind Spider and Other

The

Gray Mouser. 1957.

Stories ). 1961.

Silver Eggheads. 1962.

Shadows with Eyes. 1962.

H.

P. Lovecraft:

A

Symposium (with

others). 1963.

The Wanderer. 1964.

A

Pail of Air. 1964-

Ships to the Stars (with

The Night of Tarzan and

The

the

The Million Year Hunt by Kenneth Bulmer). 1964.

Wolf. 1966.

the Valley of

Gold. 1966.

Secret Songs. 1968.

The Swords of Lankhmar. 1968. Swords against Wizardry. 1968. Swords

A

1968.

in the Mist.

Specter

Haunting Texas. 1969.

Is

The Demons of

the

Upper

Air. 1969.

Night Monsters. 1969.

Swords and Deviltry. 1970. Swords against Death. 1970.

The Best of

Fritz Leiber. 1974.

The Book of

Fritz Leiber.

The Second Book of The Worlds of

Our Lady Rime

Isle.

Fritz Leiber. 1975.

Fritz Leiber. 1976.

of Darkness

Swords and

Ice

1974.

1977.

Magic. 1977.

1977.

The Change War. 1978. Sonnets

to

Bazaar of

Jonquil and All. 1978. the Bizarre.

1978.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

84

Heroes and Horrors. Ed. Stuart Schiff. 1978. Ship of Shadows

.

1979.

Ervool. 1980, 1982.

The World Fantasy Awards: Volume 2 The

First

(editor;

with Stuart David Schiff). 1980.

World Fantasy Convention: Three Authors Remember (with Robert

Bloch and T. Riches and Power:

The Mystery of Quicks around

The Ghost

the

A

E.

D. Klein). 1980.

Story for Children. 1982.

Japanese Clock. 1982.

the Zodiac:

A

Farce. 1983.

Light. 1984.

The Knight and Knave of Swords. 1988. The Leiber Chronicles:

Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber. Ed.

1990.

Gummitch and

Friends. 1992.

Martin H. Greenberg.

C.

Lewis

S.

1898-1963

CLIVE staples lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on After the death of his mother in 1908 he saw

little

several miserable years at private schools in England.

November

29, 1898.

of his father and spent

A private tutor prepared

him for Oxford, but he joined the English army and went to France in November 1917. He was wounded at the Battle of Arras in 1918 and returned to England, the next year resuming his studies at University College, Oxford.

He

received his B.A. in 1922, taught philosophy for one term (1924-25)

at University College, at

then spent the next thirty years

as a tutor in English

Magdalen College, Oxford.

As

a teenager Lewis

had discarded the conventional Anglican

became

of his parents and

for a

religion

time an atheist; but gradually he began

converting to Anglo'Catholicism. His early religious struggles are poignantly

etched in his autobiography, Surpiised by Joy (1955). His conversion was

complete by 1931, and

after publishing a

book of poems,

Spirits in

Bondage

(1919) and a novel, Dymer (1926), under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton,

Lewis began his

prolific career as a Christian apologist, literary scholar,

and

fiction writer.

Of his Letters as

Christian writings, The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) and The Screwtape

(1942) are the bescknown.

Mere

A series of radio broadcasts was collected

The Allegory of Love (1936) was Lewis’s first criticism, and he went on to write several other

Christianity (1952).

significant

work of

literary

distinguished volumes, including

A

Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century for the prestigious

,

to discuss literature

and theology and

came

Oxford

to

first

in 1939.

met

A

(1954), the latter

series.

a loose group of friends called the Inklings to read their

group included Lewis’s longtime friend Lewis had

Drama

Oxford History of English Literature

Around 1937 Lewis formed

(whom

Excluding

and

in 1926),

number of

discussions with the Inklings.

85

Owen and

works in progress. This

Barfield,

later

j.

R. R. Tolkien

Charles Williams,

who

Lewis’s works were developed from

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

86

main contribution

Lewis’s

to science fiction rests in his trilogy of novels

involving space travel, Out of

the Silent Planet

and That Hideous Strength (1945). Some of

(1938), Perelandra (1943),

his short stories also

approach

science fiction, especially those posthumously collected in The Dark

and Other

Stories

about time

volume

(1977), the

travel.

story of

title

which

is

Lewis has gained great renown

Tower

an unfinished novelette

as the

author of a Severn

novels for children, beginning with The Lion, the

series of fantasy

Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) and continuing with Prince Caspian (1951),

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), The Magicians Nephew (1955), and The Last Battle (1956). Both this series and the science fiction trilogy have been criticized as

being excessively heavy-handed in their religious symbolism. Lewis also

retold the

myth

of

Cupid and Psyche

We

in Till

In 1948 Lewis began corresponding with an

Davidman Gresham. He met her two years

She died

after

for the first

American time in

Helen Joy 1952, and in 1956,

in 1960, causing

forty years there to

Lewis to write the anguished autobiography,

become

who

left

Oxford

in

as

John

F.

1954

A

after nearly

Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Magdalene College, Cambridge, died on November

same day

writer,

her divorce from her estranged husband, he married her.

Grief Observed (1961). C. S. Lewis,

at

Have Faces (1956).

22, 1963,

on the

Kennedy and Aldous Huxley.

Critical Extracts

UNSIGNED this story

Like George MacDonald’s The Princess and

(The Lion,

the

writer has an underlying

good and

Witch, and the Wardrobe ) by a distinguished English

meaning

golden

lion,

it

is

it

a

theme.

is

It tells

of the struggle between

Good is personified White Witch. The imaginative

dramatic

called Narnia,

story.

and the children

in the story

through a wardrobe in an old English country house. Edmund, the

youngest boy,

and

its

Aslan; evil in the

country that they inhabit reach

in

make

evil in terms that

in the great

the Goblin,

is

tempted to

finally rescued

side

by Aslan and the others. There

between Aslan and the “good” followers.

The

with the White Witch, gets into her power,

four children

forest people

is

a

tremendous battle

and the witch and her

meet strange creatures

in Narnia,

evil

some of them

C. S. Lewis

87

admirably characterized. Perhaps the most appealing are the two beavers

who

the children about Aslan and lead

tell

wisdom and

a

humor

in the beaver

and

them

to him.

There

a

is

homely

good wife that bring them into

his

vivid contrast with the witch and even with the kingly Aslan.

Some

of the

word

spell of perpetual is

pictures are beautifully drawn.

winter on the

forest.

The witch

When Aslan’s power breaks

The

color of spring flowers.

story

is

illustrated

Narnia.

It is

an exceptionally good new

Unsigned, “Books Review, 9

I

for

Some

p.

for a

Merry Christmas,” Saturday

people seem to think that

I

began by asking

could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed

an instrument; then collected information about child-

fairy tale as

basic Christian truths all

creatures of

42

psychology and decided what age group

is

wood

“fairy tale.’’

Young Readers: Insurance

December 1950,

LEWIS

myself how

on the

Narnia

with black-and-white drawings

that effectively bring out the children, Aslan, and the

S.

it,

with the sound of running water and bird songs, with the scent and

filled

C.

has cast her

I’d

and hammered out

pure moonshine.

I

write for; then drew up a

‘allegories’ to

couldn’t write in that

way

at

list

of

embody them. This Everything began

all.

with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.

At

pushed

first

there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element

itself in

Then came (i.e.,

became

of

its

the Form.

a story) they

psychology. But the

the its

moment

own

I

accord.

As

was part of the bubbling.

these images sorted themselves into events

seemed

to

demand no

Form which excludes

thought of that

severe restraints

It

on

I

fell

description,

these things

in love its

of

it.

Its

is

the fairy

with the Form

and

close

tale.

And

itself: its

flexible traditionalism,

hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections

no

love interest and

‘gas’.

I

its

brevity,

inflexible

was now enamoured

very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness

of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the

sonneteer.

On that side the ideal

Form

(as

Author)

for the stuff

wrote

I

I

had

fairy tales

because the Fairy Tale seemed

to say.

Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

88

hard to

feel as

one was told one ought to

sufferings of Christ/

ought

An

to.

I

about

feel

God

or about the

thought the chief reason was that one was told one

And

obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

reverence

itself

harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost it

were something medical. But supposing that by casting

into

an imaginary world, stripping them of

school associations, one could

make them

as if

these things

all

and Sunday

their stained'glass

time appear in their

for the first

potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?

real

did

thought

I

one could.

That was the Man’s motive. But of course he could have done nothing if

the Author had not been

on the

boil

C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories

Other Worlds: Essays and

Stories, ed.

first.

May

Say Best What’s to Be Said” (1956),

Of

Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace

&

World, 1967), pp. 36-37

CHAD WALSH

Some

dimensions of the seven (Narnia)

make the

stories

doctrines

seem dragged

more

effective

have asked whether the symbolic

critics

handled in such a way

tales are

works of

literature.

Or

rather,

as to

do Christian

in by their heels, converting the stories at their

most theological moments into sugarcoated Sunday school instruction? Pen haps those best able to answer as children. as

they

I

this question are the

have had the chance to

move on

into college

books they might read.

I

talk with

people

many

of them, particularly

find

two

things: the first tales.

is

that children almost

This in no way obstructs or

engulfs the primary level,

which

become

and events operating on two

taken

is

simply a series of good

attempt of an older and pious

as the sly

read Narnia

and perhaps seek counsel on additional Lewis

always recognize a second level in the

alert to characters

who

man

know from fairy tales and of disbelief.’’ They enter into

stories.

levels.

This

science fiction

“willing suspension

the game.

as a special

Second,

may

or

this

rarely

all

about

They welcome

kind of talking animal and the focus of luminous meaning.

acceptance of Aslan and the whole other level of the stories

may not

take an explicitly Christian form, depending

of religious background the young reader has.

up

is

to sneak in religious

propaganda. Children

Aslan

But they

as a Christian instantly recognizes

talking animals

and begins to see

sort

The one who has been brought

Aslan

parallels

on what

as a

kind of Christ for the

with specific events in the

life

89

C. S. Lewis

The

of Christ.

child lacking this background sees in Aslan something awe-

some and compelling, however he may put

it

in words. It

is

interesting that

often readers of both backgrounds single out the most theological events

of the tales as the most effective episodes. This suggests that the firm

may be

theological themes running through the tales

a literary asset rather

than otherwise.

Another

factor

is

at

work

manner

allegory, in the

here. If the Chronicles of Narnia were a straight

of The Pilgrim’s Progress (or The Pilgrim’s Regress)

the reader would expect every event to have a precise correspondence with

some proclamation of Christian has in

its

occasional epiphanies and revelations, but

which the characters have

The

doctrine. In Narnia, it

life

simply goes on.

also has long stretches

interesting but rarely definitive adventures.

realism and detail of these routine experiences help to

points stand out

more

Chad Walsh, The vich, 1979), pp.

It

make

the high

sharply.

Literary Legacy of

C.

S.

Lewis

(New

York: Harcourt Brace Jovano-

131-32

MARGARET PATTERSON HANNAY

Lewis was perturbed

by the simpering, wishy-washy way goodness was portrayed in most religious teaching,

making children inevitably

to be bad.

He

delighting, by

feel that

it

was much more glamorous

agrees with the aesthetic tradition that art should teach by

making the reader enchanted with an

ideal.

Emotions should

be evoked in order to develop the imagination, so that the person can conceive of a higher level of existence. “Imagination exists for the sake of

wisdom

or spiritual health

response to the world.”

now

be mocked

— the

The

rightness

and richness of a man’s

correct responses to

life,

must be carefully taught. Therefore, the older poetry,

bitter, virtue lovely,

setting

And

up models this

is

insisted

after

like that of

—“Love

delightful.”

is

These

Milton

sweet, death writers

were

each new generation to follow.

what Lewis himself

of Peter and the treachery of

than Edmund?

on certain themes

and children or gardens

for

may

and “conventional,” are not innate; they

as “bourgeois”

and Spenser, constantly

although they

total

When we

he has attempted to

is

doing.

Edmund, what

see

When child

he presents the heroism

would not rather be Peter

Lucy giving up her water ration

steal

rather follow Lucy than Eustace?

for Eustace,

water from the crew, what child would not

Again and again the children are confronted

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

90

when doing

with situations

the right will be painful and

have followed Aslan alone, even

told she should

if

difficult.

Lucy

is

the others were not

willing to come; she

must climb up to the magician’s study to help the

Dufflepuds no matter

how

frightened she

Lune of Archenland, even though he desert.

Jill,

Narnia

is

too,

is

Shasta must run to warn King

is.

exhausted by his

the

trip across

Eustace, King Tirian, and Jewel must fight bravely, although

being destroyed around them.

And

all

there are smaller decisions,

which change the course of events. For example, Puddleglum stamps

out the

of the Emerald Witch, burning his feet, and so dissolves her

fire

enchantment.

These

Good. Most

for the far

fairy tales react

more

attractive

on the

writers

make

lets us feel in

We

inevitably be desired with

THOMAS HOWARD beautifully made. valley,

no

Its

fabric

S.

Lewis

The is

Form which

if

once seen must

— the thing

(New

tales of

York: Ungar, 1981), pp. 59-60

Narnia open up to us a certain

which has been made

— made

shot through with glory. There

sea or forest, but bears the weight of this glory,

that does not mirror the exact pattern of this glory,

no

and exhibit there

is

no

faun, dryad, satyr, or

in

its

own form some

evil that

winged horse bit of the

—

is

no peak, no of the land

spell or incantation or

the obvious from the great glories and mysteries that press

—no

by Someone,

no law

taboo that does not reach through the veil that protects the

creature

(in Sappho’s

’’

Margaret Patterson Hannay, C.

a world

by “that

blowing from ‘the land of

but sensuous desire

phrase) ‘more gold than gold.’

is

air

says,

Law and Duty,

to the region of

our face the sweet

all

and long

he has a stern

for

have been deceived, he

righteousness,’ never reveals that elusive

It

us understand

the bad characters interesting, lively, and

which confines goodness

prosaic moralism

kind of world.

making

than the good ones; Lewis does not,

and splendid vision of goodness.

which never

readers,

mundane and

upon them.

No

that does not bear about

shape of that glory. And,

alas,

does not turn out to be fraud, parody, or counterfeit

of that glory. In every case, the appeal of evil in Narnia springs from illusion

and leads eventually to

Now, open up

if

that

to us,

is

it

sterility,

destruction,

and anger.

the sort of world which the

“fairy’’

chronicles of Narnia

turns out to be a world identical in every significant point

with the world that

all

myths and

religions

have told us we

live in.

Taken

C.

Lewis

S.

91

item for item, at

least

up to

this point,

Narnia turns out to be indistinguish-

and

able from the world that the sages

prophets have thought they saw. Indeed

seers

and

saints

and druids and

we could with no difficulty

translate

these items into the language of Jewish and Christian sacred texts. “It

world which has been made

no

peak,

“No

valley

.

.

—made by Someone” becomes Genesis

a

“No

but bears the weight of this glory,” becomes Psalm 19.

.

law of the land that does not mirror the exact pattern of that glory”

becomes Psalm 119. The

And

story of evil as fraud

and

illusion

is

told in Genesis.

so forth.

The

point of

all this is

that

if

we

find the chronicles of Narnia to be

inconsequential in their subject matter, then the world pictured by

and

1.

is

religions

is

myths

inconsequential.

Thomas Howard, C. pp.

all

S. Lewis:

Man of Letters

(Worthington, UK: Churchman, 1987),

24-25

SUE MATHESON

To

read the Chronicles of Narn ia

is

to

become

involved in the process of self-transformation which the Lion represents; this,

no doubt, accounts

for the series’ popularity. Professor Kirke’s

and the twentieth century are prime examples of what Jung

man

“lost in the isolation of consciousness

When

and

its

experience

.

.

.

truly imaginative.”

(.

.

is

a healer as well as

a fantasist

who

calls

fantasist.

True

is

a healing process,

which occur

there.

not hers.

No

To one

as selective narrator,

when

also takes

Aravis he is

I

says,

He

not only

literally

role of the author of the events

“Child ...

told any but their

I

am

telling

you your

own

own.” Aslan not only functions

he also explains events, providing expository lumps

necessary: to Shasta

Aravis,

on the

also

to Tolkien’s definition, Lewis

enter and enjoy at will, but Aslan creates Narnia.

he

and the

Narnia which he and the reader

creates the Chronicles of

creates Narnia, but

The

“another kind of

an Enchanter, the process of enchantment

extends to a function of the

story,

sufferings.”

.)

Since the reading process of the Chronicles

may

and

providing the reader with the healing

role,

experience of encountering what (D. H.) Lawrence

is

identifies as

the Lion created Narnia, he filled a gap in our social fabric.

Chronicles play a compensatory

Lion

errors

England

he

says, “I

was the lion who forced you to join

was the cat who comforted you among the horses of the dead.

was the lion

who

drove the jackals from you while you

slept.

I

I

was the lion

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

92

who

gave the Horses the strength of fear for the

mile so that you should

last

reach King Lune in time.” In effect, Aslan

is

own

his

Through the device of

fantasist.

he

Story,

heals with his Magic, manifesting the reality of the psyche by using the

process of the imagination. Story-telling

By creating

is

a part of the Mage’s

Enchantment.

Enchanter

a world of “arresting strangenesses” the

offers the

reader another reality: in the case of Narnia, the subjective vision of child-

The

hood.

constructor of his

zone of “absolute

as the

Aslan

is

own fantasy world, Aslan

reality.” In essence,

he

somewhere within

that experience

is

is

the sacred center.

us that

Lawrence

Mesopotamia between

old experience of the Euphrates,

what Eliade defines

rivers.”

says “is the

Underlying

the fantasy impulse, the primitive thirst for being which impelled primitive

man

to attempt to transform the profane into sacred time accounts for the

intensity of response to the Lion. Fantasy

(Tolkien), and so

is

“a natural

human

constructing according to archetype.

the fantasist re-creates in

level,

is

On

the profane

tempore as best he can, because

illo

activity”

it is

the

point from which the creation of the fantasy world takes place. In the

Chronicles of Narnia, the primordial image truly manifests the shamanistic function of the reader

may encounter

into our conscious world

because

new and

it

itself

is

form

relegating

secondary concern, since the

artist to a

in as direct a

it

itself,

as possible.

The

Lion’s eruption

indicative of the process of

Enchantment,

heralds the replacement of the old, decayed Signature with the

takes us back to that experience

which not even twentieth century

objectivism can destroy. Sue Matheson, “C.

S.

Lewis and the Lion: Primitivism and Archetype in the Chroni-

No. 55 (Autumn 1988): 17-18

cles of Narnia,” Mythlore

DAVID HOLBROOK

A

children offers a challenge

wardrobe?

It is

title

—how do

like that of Lewis’s first fable for

we connect

the kind of challenge a preacher characteristically makes,

and has done since the use of the exemplum a tacit understanding offered as metaphors

phors.

between author and

—

just as objects in

The mode belongs

Plain

Mans

Pathway

in the

to

dreams and visions come

examined

Heaven or

Middle Ages. There

is

listener that these objects are

to a long tradition in

aspects of “the journey of life” are

The

and a

a lion, a witch,

which moral and

as

meta-

spiritual

in terms of a journey as in

Pilgrim’s Progress.

As

a literary

man,

C.

Lewis

S.

93

knew many such

of course, Lewis

and one can find

allegories;

in his fable

writings elements from Spenser, medieval literature, the accounts of voyages

of ancient saints (for example, Brendan) and so on. (.

.

.)

Lewis himself tells us what the connection

and the witch. As one of the clear,

illustrations in the

Digory takes the apple from the tree of

He

prevent him.

The

life

is

between the wardrobe

Penguin edition makes

where

could only take this apple with the authority of the lion.

Christian will see that as a test of obedience having to do with the

forbidden

fruit,

Eden, and the Fall of Man. But

who

is

the Christianity in brackets and invoke psychoanalysis, in going

body is

as

a witch lurks to

the witch?

we could

through the birth passage into another world, where the dead mother

She

and she has blighted

there, in that world,

is

impulse to go into that world has to do with restoring her to

problem

that since she

is

what happens

if

she

is

who rejected given new life, or

the mother

is still

encountered,

In exploring the possible meaning like

the meanings (as

much

I

see

this,

is

I

am

the mother

like Lewis, lost his

mother

compelled by the quest

is

lost

the child’s world

needed to deal with

this

trauma, was

the child by dying,

brought back into

and be loved

—

fantasies

as a

for the

young

fantasies

processes of this kind.

and

child;

dead mother. is

(.

.

all

his work,

.)

that the situation

when

so dangerous that a substitute authority

is

reality. Lewis, like

other individuals

who

suffered

with a profound hunger to find the mother in order

left

The need

to complete “being.” to love

but the

account

many

But what then of Aslan? The answer perhaps

is

The

also taking into

them) of George MacDonald’s

influenced Lewis and that involve

MacDonald, believe,

life;

it.

world?

this (real)

I

argue that

through the wardrobe the children are going through the mother’s

to be found.

that

we put

If

—hence,

is

tremendous; and since

a fierce lion

is

an appropriate

doesn’t eat anyone, but he growls and shows his teeth.

he lacerates and unpeels people. The

oral

it is

He

an oral need, figure.

Aslan

has claws and

element in Aslan’s love must be

seen in complex with other oral elements in Lewis’s work

—Aslan

sings the

world into being; Lewis himself feared to eat certain foods because they

might arouse sexual eating heavenly food.

feelings; sin

Then

me

to

eating Turkish Delight; beatitude

(.

.

.)

Aslan’s particular kind of minatory

come from another source, from

of a figure in loco parentis.

is

there are creatures like the Harfangs and odd

references as to “eating a baby.”

authority seems to

is

the internalization

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

94

my phenomenological analysis, “the strong (oral) authority needed to invoke in my search through the birth-passage into the world of death for my dead mother who, The

title

of the

fable

first

we examine

virtually

means, by

I

I

might be a witch.” The very

feared,

fact that the fable

offered in terms

is

of such symbolism actually invites such an interpretation, and to interpret is

quite legitimate

—

Lewis hinted he believed.

as

David Holbrook, The Skeleton

in the

Wardrobe: C.

S. Lewis’s Fantasies:

A Phenomenolog

-

Study (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), pp. 27—30

ical

COLIN MANLOVE

Appearing

1950s, the Narnia

in the early

books represented a quite startling transformation of children’s

literature

doldrums of the 1940s. They helped begin a renaissance

after the relative

and to some extent reassured

in children’s literature,

who had for as W. E. Johns

librarians

and school-

teachers,

too long to contend with the popularity of such

authors

(of the “Biggies” books), or the multitudinous

too-readily digested works of Enid Blyton, of the potency of the genre. specifically, together

and

More

with the work of Tolkien, Lewis’s books ushered in

the present popularity of the genre of fantasy.

The

Chronicles of Narnia represented a return to the scope of children’s

work of Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Rudyard

fantasy seen in the Kipling,

and John Masefield. With

their admission of

nature of

evil,

their use of covert Christian

profound topics of

sacrifice,

themes and

death and resurrection, the

the measure of faith, the divine creation and ending of a

world, and the quest for the divine, they bring into children’s literature an

“adult” profundity of

which

done awkwardly. The

living strength of the Chronicles

such profundity it is

is

had long been

felt

Nor is the way

incapable. is

in

this

that

integrated with vivid characters and adventures, so that

possible to read the narrative without

significance,

and

more deeply

affected by

this,

it

likewise, it

becoming aware of any further

when made aware

of that significance, to be the

through the very surprise of

the Chronicles are profoundly

literary,

its

presence.

Beyond

both in the way that (unlike

most other children’s books) they draw naturally on the great cultural tradition of

Homer,

Virgil,

Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Bun-

yan, and in the clarity and complexity of their style and form. Lewis main-

tained that he did not write specifically for children at fairy-tale

mode

because, as the

title

all,

but wrote in the

of one of his essays has

it,

“Sometimes

95

C. S. Lewis

May Say

Fairy Stories

Best What’s to Be Said.” Before Lewis, whether in

William Thackeray’s The Rose and

Mary Molesworth’s The Cuckoo and The Wind Peter Pan,

the Ring,

Clock,

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books,

Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age

Willows, Edith Nesbit’s magic books, Sir James Barrie’s

in the

A. A. Milne’s “Pooh” books, or Arthur Ransome’s

reader had been asked to enter a child’s world;

any

entering that of the adult reader.

If

by Lewis’s books out of

that nothing

small

—

it

is

is

final ethic that

is

—can contain the very

large (just as, in

“mere.”

The

The Last

is

become great heroic figures

which

contemporary

Battle, a stable

Am

indeed!

literature:

“

to patronize sleep because children sleep sound?

I

because children like

it?”

startles

his child characters

in Narnia. In essay after essay after essay

war against dismissive attitudes toward children’s

taught

apparently

seen as once having contained the entire world). Lewis deliberately

us into awareness by the very abruptness with

the

the child’s world was

a fairy tale, a little world called Narnia, a group of

children is

this,

there

now

stories,

he makes

‘Juveniles,’

Or honey

After Lewis children’s literature was not, and was

not seen to be, quite so provincial again. Colin Manlove, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Patterning of a Fantastic World (New York: Twayne, 1993), pp. 8-9

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The Abolition of Man;

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Of Other

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Literature. Ed.

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Walter Hooper. 1967.

Christian Reflections. Ed. Letters to

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Tristram: Correspondence between C. S. Lewis and

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Mind Awake: An Anthology

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Narrative Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper. 1969.

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God

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Young C.

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S.

Lewis 1922-1927

Ed. Walter

David Lindsay 1876-1945

DAVID LINDSAY was born on March 3, 1876,

in Blackheath, outside of London.

His Scottish father, Alexander Lindsay, deserted the family shortly after

David was born, leaving

his English wife, Bessy

for herself and their three children.

Bellamy Lindsay, to provide

Lindsay attended the Lewisham Grammar

School, where he proved an exceptional student and

won

a university

scholarship; due to the family’s precarious finances, however, Lindsay to leave school at age sixteen to

work

London. Although

Price, Forbes in

as a clerk at the insurance firm of

a diligent

work immensely. He continued

disliked his

teaching himself

German and

had

and

successful clerk, Lindsay

his education

on

his

own,

studying the works of Schopenhauer and

Nietzsche. Lindsay’s I

in 1914.

family,

underwent a

life

He

radical

War

joined the Grenadier Guards (over the objections of his

who wanted him to join the Scots Guards) and spent the war working

as a clerk in

London. During

married in 1916

—

a

union opposed by both their

and Lindsay was released from and moved with

his wife to

on another planet

book was not and poor

progressed.

families, as she

daughters.

he resigned in

A Voyage that would

to

Silver,

When

whom

he

was twenty

the war ended

his post at Price, Forbes

1919 to pursue a

literary career.

Arcturus, a philosophical fantasy

become

his

best-known work. The

a success at the time of publication, receiving negative reviews

sales.

The Haunted

service,

Cornwall

In 1920 Lindsay published life

he met Jacqueline

this time,

They eventually had two

years his junior.

about

change with the onset of World

Lindsay had trouble finding a publisher for his next book,

Woman

He

(1922), a problem that would worsen as his career

published Sphinx in 1923 and followed with his only nonfan-

tasy work, the historical

novel Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, in 1926

(published in the United States as

A

Blade for Sale in 1927). In 1929,

monetary problems forced the Lindsays to move to Sussex, where they eventually ran a boarding-house in Brighton.

98

,

David Lindsay

99

Lindsay’s last published novel, Devils Tor (1932), was a financial and critical failure

and

ended

effectively

became

his literary career. Lindsay

extremely depressed and neglectful of his health, which was compromised

by an inherited blood disease. In 1945 the Lindsays’ house in Brighton was hit

by a

German bomb; although

through the bathroom ceiling

and worsening

which

his

the

bomb

failed to explode,

it

crashed

Lindsay was taking a bath, injuring him

as

mental condition.

He

finally

developed a dental abscess,

he, ever suspicious of doctors, deliberately concealed until blood

He

poisoning developed.

died on July 16, 1945, leaving a diary and two

unpublished manuscripts, The Violet Apple and the unfinished The Witch,

which were published

in 1976.

Critical Extracts

UN SIGNED to

A returns

However much one may resent such a book as A Voyage one must pay tribute to the cleverness which enables Mr. David

Lindsay to capture the elusive quality of the worst kind of nightmare. does not content himself with giving us a vivid description of

conceivably might be on another planet; regions of space in order that the riddle of

we

human

one might expect a temporarily unbalanced mind were potent is.

for just

one

critical instant longer

Mr. Lindsay’s imagination

not controlled

it

are transported to

is

towards any coherent

result.

is

if

—human, superhuman, and

each other never becomes

between the

startling

clear;

diabolic

mercifully,

For instance, the hero of the

—whose

relation to

in

what appears

fog.

number him and

of to

his progress.

to be simply the

morbid fancy; but we doubt whether many readers

noisome

never

than powerful, and he has

and often gruesome episodes which mark

to pursue the possible

it

nor can we find any connecting link

There may be an intention of allegory riot of

remote

an anaesthetic

adventure, Maskull, encounters on his journey in Arcturus a entities

it

may be studied very much what

to arrive at

—which,

prolific rather

as

existence

and the solution thence afforded

in true perspective;

life

He

will

be inclined

hidden meaning over a quagmire and through a

For the book

is,

at

any

rate, consistent in respect of its

uniform

unwholesomeness; the keynote being struck in the opening chapter, which recalls Baudelaire, or

Poe

in his

most

grisly vein. It

is,

no doubt,

a legitimate

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

100

aim of the writer of

make

the gorge

fiction to

make

p.

to

Arcturus], Times Literary Supplement,

You remark

—

‘Poetry

is

go further and say

I

the works of creative genius are the children of the union of the

all

male and female elements, and that Moreover, ‘male’ and metaphorically, but

‘female’, in

it

my

is

the female that produces them.

opinion, are not to be understood

The male body

literally.

contains female atoms and

combinations of atoms, and in genius the proportion of

this

—

men of genius have often a feminine appearance’ not because they men of genius, but on account of their excess of female physical atoms,

faces of

or whatever

With it isn’t,

we may

call

them.

regard to Carlyle’s dictum that ‘genius

taking pains’

is

female element

than in the generality of men. Hence your very true fact that ‘the

larger

are

30 September

generated by the clash

of the male and female elements in the personality.’

is

think, to

637

DAVID LINDSAY that

we

rise.

Unsigned, [Review of A Voyage 1920,

the flesh creep; scarcely,

—

in that case the world

is

—

‘genius

is

infinite capacity for

might be full of geniuses. Unfortunately,

and so another definition must be sought.

the final one!)

an

is

My own

(I

do not say

the infinite capacity for striking into

it

new

paths’.

David Lindsay, Letter to

H. Visiak (9 February 1922), “Letters to

E.

from David Lindsay and Victor Gollancz,” (1971):

no it

is

to say, there were

telling

{.

.

.)

ADAM International Review Nos. 346-48

Lindsay was not a

many unresolved

what might have happened

deserved.

basic thesis

Its

One must

is

if

contradictions in him. There

Areturns

a Buddhistic

grown up man

fully

workb rejection. Lindsay wrote:

regard the world not merely as the

home .

.

of illusions, .

The most

sacred and holy things ought not to be taken for granted, for

examined rest.

.

attentively, they will be .

.

Behind

this

found

sham world

is

had achieved the success

but as being rotten with illusion from top to bottom.

the

H. Visiak

46-47

COLIN WILSON that

E.

lies

as

if

hollow and empty

as

the real, tremendous and

David Lindsay

101

awful MuspeLworld, which knows neither Individuals; that

The

last

an inconceivable world.

to say,

is

nor Unity, nor

will,

sentence identifies Lindsay clearly as a mystic, or at least as some

who

extreme kind of Kantian philosopher conditions of our world

—

space, time

believes that

and so on

—

the ‘necessary’

all

somehow not

are

at all

necessary.

But the deepest vein in Lindsay’s nature was not of mysticism, but a kind

He was

of Scots religious seriousness.

and anyone who has read Carlyle Lindsay also reminds ‘a

me

stranger to revelation’,

and an admirer of Carlyle,

will see the similarity of

who

of the mystic William Law,

and whose

temperament.

declared himself

Devout and Holy

Serious Call to a

with self-discipline and strong-mindedness.

identifies religion

One

a relative

notes the awkward style of the novels, and

Lindsay’s problem as a writer was (his)

it

is

(.

.

Life

.)

clear that part of

immense shyness and

Arcturus swings into a powerful un-selfconscious stride after

constraint.

its stiff

begin-

ning. After this book, Lindsay was aware that he was writing for publication.

The

‘reader over his shoulder’

may

pity

he was not more

H.) Lawrence,

to suffer

who

from self-consciousness, and

write as he I

like (D.

explain the stiffness of the prose.

would

talk.

Among

is

who was

a

too sure of himself

consequently never afraid to

Lindsay wrote to

letters

It’s

H.) Visiak,

(E.

found a perceptive fragment from some unknown correspondent that

summarises the

With

faults of Lindsay’s style:

this [mystical]

Lindsay

I

am

in sympathy,

simply has to be endured for his sake. .The Lindsay

about ‘high

He

vulgar.

style’; his

life’ is

in hotels

and the other

who

writes

ignorant, pretentious and inherently

is

a hopeless victim of

Mark Twain’s

‘nickel-plate

characters never go, they proceed, they can’t just get

into a train, they

must journey by

first-class,

they don’t leave,

they take departure, they don’t say yes, they assent. In short, they

They

are hopelessly underbred.

which

I

last

remember

While (.

.

.)

this

have met

to

borrowed from the maid.

talk in a stilted,

.

.

in a

ceremonious

penny novelette

it is

not perhaps entirely

one experiences the intuition that the novel was not if

had

.

makes the point with pungency,

What would have happened

I

style

his true

fair.

medium.

Carlyle had tried to launch himself with a

novel instead of Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution?

The

interesting

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

102

thing

that the unique quality of Lindsay’s

is

unworthy material, making

his

Colin Wilson, “Lindsay by

E.

J.

B. Pick,

H. VISIAK

E.

Lindsay’s imperturbable composure was but the sun

He was

A returns it all,

Of

this,

I

Withal, he was extremely sensitive,

a walk,

It

day,

I

remarked that

as

have

I

said,

I

A

ranked

as

it

happened,

my

occurred during

one night,

remarkable

a

(.

.

Suddenly

arrested by the very strange aspect of the

moon.

I

.)

illustration,

stay at Ferring, while

in the countryside.

it

some kind of mystical

was the key^word to his imagination

was afforded,

demonstration.

hungry

however, he was a mystic, and here he tried to express

felt it

I

dissatisfied,

with Kafka’s The Castle, he blushed.

in genius

by the word, dark, which involved, intuition.

unhappy,

radically

When, one

extremely impressionable.

Beneath

upon

H. Visiak (London: John Baker, 1970), pp. 42-44

for recognition in the literary world.

to

itself

and Mystic,” The Strange Genius of David Lindsay

as Novelist

facedayer of a great deep.

Voyage

stamps

still

oddly memorable.

it

Colin Wilson, and

mind

even

we were out

a

for

was brought to a stand,

It

was

white, yet having a transparent, vacuous appearance, as

at the full, bright, if it itself

was an

orifice in space.

‘Oh, just look at the moon!’

He was

already looking up at

His face looked wild and

exclaimed.

I

it.

and he cried with

tragic,

ought never to have been born in 1

to

was amazed, but

I

‘White,’ he murmured. ‘White, empty.' startling emphasis,

‘I

this world!’

said mechanically, ‘In

what world, then, ought you

have been born?’ ‘In

no world!’

He went on

urgently as

to express himself, to

if

he were under

make me understand.

I

a stress, a great urgent desire

cannot

recall his actual words,

but they were spasmodic, disjointed, intensely passionate endeavours to express a yearning, an ideal, an antithesis, the unearthly, unimaginable contrast to normal experience, sense sensation; the absolute negation of

mundane

conditions: an unthinkable and, to me, appalling state of arctic

or extra^arctic abstraction. ineffable

To

himself,

— the Muspel, or ‘Divine

it

was something pure,

Light’ or his Arcturus in

its

essential,

positive aspect,

David Lindsay

103

as inexpressible.

I

suppose,

with the great paradox, Pick, Colin Wilson,

J.

PICK

B.

one

it

(

The

would correspond

not this, and it is not that.’ Knew Him,” The Strange Genius of David

as

and

I

E.

attraction,

Lindsay by

J.

B.

H. Visiak (London: John Baker, 1970), pp. 100 -101

can be interpreted in several ways. In

Violet Apple)

an allegory of love and marriage

is

to the Buddhistic Nirvana,

‘It is

H. Visiak, “Lindsay

E.

it

—the

bewildering

original

and sense of joint destiny and kinship; the blind,

idealistic passion;

the lapse into prosaic domesticity; the slow return to deepest fullness. In another sense

it is

and resurrection: the death of

a parable of death

and communion, and

selLpride, swallowed in the experience of sublimity

resurrection in simplicity and truth. In a sense closely akin to this

image and parable of the performing the

common

common

task,

through the

Before the apple, illusion and ignorance; the

task’.

and eventually

common

task

an

sublime and

life'Criterion of ‘attaining to the

an experience of sublimity;

apple,

it is

after the apple,

a dedication to

an acceptance of the

work which

an experience of the sublime. All

with a very remarkable simplicity and economy of means.

will recreate

this

is

achieved

The book

has a

kind of beauty that does not depend upon the words themselves but upon its

very essence. Its

as to

theme transcends that of Devil’s be

falsified

T or which, with a sublimity so laboured

from pure perception, charts the fated achievement of a

marriage whose sole aim

is

the production of a superhuman saviour. In The

Violet

Apple the sublime relationship

draws

down

is

own

its

the sublime into a reality which

all

justification.

This books

can recognise and by

its

very simplicity grows conviction like a tree. J.

B. Pick,

“The Unpublished Novels: The

Genius of David Lindsay by

J.

B. Pick,

Violet Apple

and The Witch,” The Strange

Colin Wilson, and

H. Visiak (London: John

E.

Baker, 1970), p. 157

ERIC

S.

RABKIN

David Lindsay’s

A

Voyage

to

A returns

(1920), a

powerful and confusing work set largely on a distant planet, obviously springs

from the world of science

fiction.

for the exercise of utterly logical

One

—

purist’s definition of that

scientific, if

you

will

—

genre calls

extrapolation. Yet

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

104

even

novel

in a paradigmatic science fiction

(1895), the future setting

is

device of the time machine fantastic.

made

justified,

like Wells’

science fiction,

All science fiction

itself.

The Time Machine

is

by the fantastic to

some extent

Yet the extent to which science fiction can use the startling and

assumptiomreversing devices of the fantastic

is

much

greater than Wells

made clear. (. .) The story begins when two Englishmen, Maskull and Nightspore, come .

An

to a seance intended to thrill jaded sensibilities.

As

appears.

apparition,

the guests watch, a

which

man

room and

rushes into the

The man,

dies with a hideous grin.

know Nightspore and

offers to take

of Surtur, apparently

some type of dembgod. Lindsay

him and

apparition indeed strangles the

Krag, turns out to

his friend to Arcturus in search

follows the effective

hocus-pocus of the seance with the strange science Maskull soon encounters

abandoned Scottish observatory from which Krag proposes

at Starkness, the

to leave. for as

There Maskull

he goes up,

its

which he hasn’t the strength

finds a tower

to climb,

gravity increases geometrically: gravity as inverse

Of course,

there

is

no

tion for this kind of gravity, but once introduced,

it

functions “scientifically,”

electromagnetic phenomenon.

extrapoiatively, with mathematical precision isters a ritual

to is

arm wound

walk up the ambiguous.

in the

same realm

makes science science

itself. (.

The bulk

with ease.

stairs

What

to Maskull

after all

as

should

.

arrives.

He admin-

magic suddenly allows Maskull

narrative attitude toward science here

we make

of our science

if it

functions

.)

of the novel

is

Maskull’s journey across Tormance, each episode

locale,

more extrapolative science science fiction

between the

Krag

magic? By writing science fiction as fantasy, Lindsay

new Within each environment, we The

this

until

fiction a tool for questioning the ostensible precision of

employing a new

in

The

and

—

extraliterary justifica-

is

characters,

find an inner logic such as fiction.

pushed

logic within

and new modes of perception.

far

(.

.

we would expect

.)

toward fantasy by the utter conflict

each episode and the discontinuous perceptual

changes that accompany each of the frequent and unexpected changes of locale. Just as Alice enters a

new world each time

she jumps over a brook

new world each obeys its own science

in Through the Looking Glass (1872), so Maskull enters a

time he continues on his journey. That each locale fictional logic extrapolated

from

its

own

repertoire of fantastic assumptions

does not prevent the overall effect of the book to be, as with Lewis Carroll’s

work, that of a thorough fantasy. (...)

David Lindsay

105

Lindsay was as well aware of his science fiction forebears as he was of his

mythic sources.

(.

.

.)

But in the

in the utterly unjustified leaps

sense,

and from mythology

mad

rush from episode to episode, and

from physiology to physiology, from sense to

to mythology, Lindsay has also created a fantasy

that shows toward perception, that

fundamental of science, the same

first

deep ambivalence that Mary Shelley

felt

toward refined science alone. In

treating science as a question of perception, Lindsay begins to create a

framework

for questions that

moral odyssey, and

finally see the journey as a

When we

need not concern science alone.

feel the despair of its painful

message of uncertainty, then Lindsay has succeeded in entering the great flux of

Western

religious debate.

He

has exploited fantasy to extend the

range of science fiction into ultimately serious myth. Eric S. Rabkin, “Conflation of

Genres and Myths

Arcturus,” Journal of Narrative Technique

BERNARD SELLIN Lindsay’s ideology. There

7,

No.

in

visible,

on the

Voyage

to

2 (Spring 1977): 149-52, 155

The Witch reveals no is

A

David Lindsay’s

change

drastic

in

contrary, the continuity of an

ideology already partially revealed previously. Lindsay, however, by the richness of his explanations, his association of elements hitherto separated,

and

his care to

go to the root of matters, has produced a book of enormous

interest to

anyone studying

when one

considers his writing, extending over

his ideology. Perhaps the

most striking

some twenty

feature, is

the

that

The

years,

homogeneous nature of the whole output. There can be no doubt

Witch will be of value to anyone trying to interpret the labyrinth of symbols in

A Voyage to Arcturus.

The

in Lindsay’s first novel, with

essential basis of The Witch

man

is

already contained

as the prisoner of the tangible world, the

quest for spirituality, the beneficial effect of pain and sacrifice, music as a

message from the hereafter and as a technique of expression, and the need to suffer in order to be able to reach a superior level of consciousness.

distinction

between

‘spirit’

and

‘self’,

as present in

to the separation of the ‘green sparks’

Arcturus.

of a

and the

The Witch, ‘whirls’

in

is

A

The

analogous

Voyage

to

Muspel has become ‘The Unself’, whilst Krag has taken the form

woman

in Urda.

The

pessimistic outlook inspired by

Schopenhauer

varied slightly, even to the extent of being coloured with Christian

ogy in The Violet Apple.

is

mythoL

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

106

One

notable absentee, however, from The Haunted

Woman

onwards,

is

Crystalman. Although the windfall of one solitary novel, he will undoubtedly

remain Lindsay’s most memorable character. Even though the values that

he personified continue to be denounced with no

virulence than before,

less

Crystalman himself appears no more in the form of such an autonomous character and unifying symbol. Lindsay’s imaginative power, on the contrary,

moved toward

embodied sometimes

his antithesis in the Divinity

Great Mother and sometimes

in

Urda, or the

vital principle.

in the

Along with

Crystalman, there also disappeared the conception of an evil God, the incarnation of a primitive Divinity, reigning over the visible world. idea by

to be

Evil

it.

is

inherent in

life.

The

delusions of

contaminated by Evil

is

is

no longer any question

man

merely serve to increase

present in Devil’s Tor. In The Witch, there

still

of

which the Creator allowed himself

The

his unhappiness. Bernard Sellin, “ The Violet Apple and The Witch,” The tr.

Life

and Works of David Lindsay,

Kenneth Gunnell (New York: Cambridge University

HAROLD BLOOM

Press, 1981), pp.

229-30

he added to Lady Gregory’s

Yeats, in the note

Cuchulain of Muirthemme, in 1903, spoke of that traditional element in

romance when “nobody described anything because

was

all

figurative:

and rushing to the

Tormance

(in

A

ensnares Maskull

is

to

we understood

description”

always losing oneself in the unknown,

limits of the world.”

Voyage

Promethean quest

“One was

as

A returns),

This

is

certainly the world of

where every antagonist to Maskull’s

only another pleasure, another rejected otherness that

briefly, intensely,

and to no purpose.

A

narrative that

is

nothing but a remorseless drive to death, beyond the pleasure/pain principle,

can proceed only by a systematic because the reader in pleasure,

and

is

assault

upon the

reader’s sensibilities,

the antagonist, whose motive for reading at least begins

desires to

end

in pleasure. Lindsay audaciously sets as

many

obstacles for the reader to break through as his master Carlyle did, but the

reader (.

the

.

who .)

persists will

there

mode

is

be rewarded, albeit somewhat belatedly.

not the slightest doubt but that Maskull

is

(.

.

.)

doom-eager, in

of Shelley’s Poet in Alastor, or of Ovid’s Narcissus.

He

is

also

astonishingly violent, and awesomely capable of enduring the really unbearable climates, regions

and beings of the accursed world of Tormance. The

typical inhabitant of

Tormance

is

summed up

in the description of

one

David Lindsay

107

particular ogre as

someone “who passed

his

whole existence

murdering, and absorbing others, for the sake of his

Maskull

is

hardly interested in his

own

walking due North upon Tormance.

some of faces,

dream

us

obsessively, in

and that you

It is

work

own

soon

as

as

possible

Maskull

that singular kind of nightmare

which you encounter

and only gradually do you come

delight.” Since

delight, hut only in his

sublimity, a very curious narrative principle goes to starts

own

tormenting,

in

a series of terrifying

to realize that these faces are terrified,

are the cause of the terror. Maskull himself

once the most

at

is

remarkable and most frightening consciousness upon Tormance, and Maskull after all

is

precursor

technically a lost traveller, cut off in space and time. His truest

(.

.

.)

may be Browning’s Childe Roland, who

is

himself far darker

than the dark tower he searches out. Lindsay’s narrative thus has the shape of a destructive kindlier flame, but finding nothing because

path.

there ter

it

fire

seeking for a

burns up everything in

its

As we discover only in the book’s last scene, after Maskull is dead, is no Muspel or divine flame anyway, because Nightspore’s true encoun-

with the Sublime, beyond death,

results in his beautiful realization “that

Muspel consisted of himself and the stone tower on which he was

By then, the exhausted reader has transferred to Nightspore,

his identification

sitting.

It is

(.

.

the true plot of

is

.)

That exhaustion, and the

textual violence provoking

or Sublime splendor of Lindsay’s book, at the very center of

real

the progressive exhaustion of the reader, through

violence and through identification with Maskull, which Lindsay’s narrative

.

from Maskull

from Prometheus-Narcissus to what Blake called “the

Man the imagination.”

.” .

modern

it,

are the

and place the book,

I

fantasy, in contrast to the

Neochristian Inklings which despite

all

uncanny

would argue, works of the

their popularity are quite peripheral.

Tolkien, Lewis and Williams actually flatter the reader’s Narcissism, while

morally softening the reader’s Prometheanism. Lindsay strenuously assaults the reader’s Narcissism, while both hardening the reader’s Prometheanism

and yet reminding the reader that Narcissism and Prometheanism verge

upon an

identity. Inkling fantasy

is

soft stuff,

benefits from a benign transmission both of

because

romance

it

pretends that

tradition

it

and of Chris-

tian doctrine. Lindsay’s savage masterpiece compels the reader to question

both the sources of fantasy, within

handing-on of tradition. Fantasy freedom

is

won,

if

at all,

is

the reader,

and the benignity of the

shown by Lindsay

to be a

mode

in

which

by a fearful agon with tradition, and at the

108

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

price of the worst kind of psychic over-determination,

masochistic turning of aggressivity against the

which

self.

Harold Bloom, “Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy,” Bridges

George

E. Slusser, Eric S.

the sado-

is

Fantasy, ed.

to

Rabkin, and Robert Scboles (Carbondale: Southern

Illinois

University Press, 1982), pp. 13-15

DOUGLAS A. MACKEY

Is

the world as

we know

nation implanted in our minds by an evil aspect of God, a suffers

under his

The answer

own

demiurge

sparks of vital spiritual “crystallizes”

them

but a halluci-

God, who

false

limitations of fate?

of David Lindsay in

affirmative. Lindsay’s

it

fire

is

A

Voyage

Arcturus (1920)

to

called Crystalman.

of Muspel,

into living forms.

domain of

When

He

clearly

is

green

steals the

Surtur, the true

God, and

Lindsay’s hero Maskull tours

the planet Tormance, he confronts an amazing series of individuals, each

with different sensory organs such the chest

woman

—and correspondingly

as third eyes or tentacles sprouting

differing philosophies

and theologies. The

Joiwind, a beautiful and unselfish child of nature, identifies the

Creator (Crystalman) as her virtue, she has

God and accepts

made an

Tormance, truth and beauty

the state of nature as good; despite

intellectual error, as Maskull later realizes.

are not the same. Beauty

.

.)

When

The

radical gnostic sensibility separates appearance

the gnostic tries to purify the

pneuma

is

God

the true

in gnosticism?

“Hebrew mythology,

reversed:

In

Jahweh

is

reality.

no more

According to William Irwin Thomp-

cast in the mirror of Gnosticism,

But a passion

for truth will always

on Tormance

is

at the

the Saviour.”

as the Devil.

be considered evil where the real Devil

(Crystalman) masquerades successfully as God. Krag

what he

is

comes out

the true God, Surtur, appears under the incarnation

of the ugly, unpleasant Krag, considered by most

end of the novel. Maskull

dies

is

only appreciated for

and

releases Nightspore,

pneumatic spark, who ascends the tower of Muspel. There he gains a

vision of Crystalman as a it

.)

of the influence of material

the Devil, and the serpent in the garden

A Voyage to Arcturus,

his

.

than a hallucination.

Who son,

(.

from

existence, he does so out of conviction that this existence has reality

On

and pleasure constitute

the net of Crystalman which ensnares the sparks of Muspel light. (.

from

in

life

shadowy body who feeds on Muspel

forms that are driven to strive painfully for pleasure.

fire,

trapping

“He compre-

109

David Lindsay

hended

at last

how

the whole world of will was

doomed

to feel anguish in

order that one Being might feel joy.” Nightspore realizes that the entire

created cosmos

is

Crystalman’s, and Muspel

in the spark of green

Muspel

light that

him by guiding him;

has saved

enlightenment by questing

(as

is

is

nowhere

else but in himself,

his very being. In a sense

he has earned

in another way,

his

Krag

own

Maskull) for truth amidst a bewildering

make

variety of types of error. Jacques LaCarriere

comment

a relevant

in

The Gnostics:

The

man

soul

feeds

is

not immortal by nature,

and

can only become so

it

sustains this privileged fire

which he

carries within

him. Otherwise, ineluctably, he will return to nothingness.

Man

is

if

.

.

.

called upon, in this struggle against the generalized

oppressiveness of the real, prefer, to nourish, fortify,

to create

a soul for himself, or

if

you

and enrich the luminous spark he

carries

in his innermost being.

Krag does not fight Nightspore’s battle It is

for

him. Gnosis

earned, not bestowed. In Elaine Pagel’s words,

is

“The gnostic understands

Christ’s message not as offering a set of answers, but as

engage in a process of searching.”

When Gangnet

an active process.

encouragement to

(Crystalman in disguise)

bestows a mystical ecstasy of selT annihilation upon Maskull,

be delusory. self

is

The kind

it

proves to

of pleasure that seems to promise transcendence of

the subtlest of Crystalman’s deceits. Gnostic transcendence

possessed, accepting not abnegation before

God

is

self-

but rather identification

and merging. Douglas A. Mackey, “Science Fiction and Gnosticism,” Missouri Review (1984): 113-15

1

Bibliography A

Voyage

to

A returns.

1920.

The Haunted Woman. 1922. Sphinx. 1923.

Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly (A Blade for

Sale).

1926.

Devil’s Tor. 1932.

The

Violet

Apple and The Witch. Ed.

J.

B. Pick. 1976.

7,

No.

2

A. Merritt 1884-1943

ABRAHAM MERRITT was born on January 20, in Beverly, New Jersey. He attended school

1884, to a Quaker family living in nearby Philadelphia but

was

forced to drop out of high school and later withdraw from taking law classes at the University of

Pennsylvania owing to his family’s financial

In 1902 he obtained a job that exposed year, exiled

work

him

him from

as a

difficulties.

cub reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer

to a wide range of

human

experiences and, for a

the United States to prevent his testifying in court

on criminal evidence he had uncovered. Merritt spent the year mostly Mexico and Central America, exploring Mayan ests in

,

ruins

and cultivating

in

inter-

anthropology, archaeology, and history that he would later put to

use in his fiction.

After rising to the position of city editor a year after his return to the

United

States, Merritt took a position as assistant editor of the Hearst

syndicate’s American Weekly in story,

New

York

in 1912. In 1917 Merritt’s first

“Through the Dragon Glass,” was published

An adventure

fiction magazine, All-Story Weekly.

and Oriental mystery, stories.

The

its

in the popular general

tale

leavened with fantasy

exotic flourishes set the tone for

following year he wrote a novella,

all

Merritt’s

“The Moon Pool,” about

a

malignant entity lurking in the ruins of Micronesia that abducts unwary travelers into another dimension.

Reader acclaim was so tremendous that

Merritt was persuaded to write a novel-length sequel,

the

Moon

Pool,”

which developed

“The Conquest of

ideas introduced in the novella into a

lost-race epic with science fiction overtones set in a subterranean world

beneath the Caroline for

Islands. Merritt extensively revised the

hardcover publication under the Merritt’s second novel,

The Metal Monster

book 1946), an ambitious attempt for speculations on the origins of a

Crestfallen, Merritt

The Moon Pool

title

two

stories

in 1919.

(serialized 1920; published as

to use the lost-race fantasy as a vehicle life,

met with

a

lukewarm reception.

withdrew from fiction writing until 1923, when positive

response to his novella

“The Face

in the

110

Abyss”

(later incorporated into

A. Merritt

its

111

novella-length sequel,

return.

With The

“The Snake Mother,”

Ship of Ishtar (1926)

in 1931) induced

and Dwellers

in the

him

to

Mirage (1932)

Merritt perfected his trademark type of story in which a heroic character’s

removal to an exotic fantasy land experiencing internecine war romantic love he experiences while there

good and

resolve conflicting impulses of

—

evil

help others to overcome their adversaries.

forces

him

— and the and

to confront

within himself before he can

With

these novels, Merritt

achieved a popularity among his reading public second only to that of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In 1928 Merritt published Seven Footprints

with supernatural elements. horror genres in his sequel Creep,

last

Shadow!

He

Satan

,

a suspense novel

pursued this splicing of the mystery and

two novels, Burn, Witch, Burn! (1933) and

(1934).

American Weekly and his career for a revision of

to

1937 Merritt became editor of the

In

as a fiction writer effectively

The Metal Monster

in 1941 for

a pulp magazine comprised mostly of reprints

Famous

where

ended, except

Fantastic Mysteries,

his

work experienced

a revival in the 1940s. Merritt died suddenly of a heart attack while

business expedition to Florida

Hannes Bok, one of

on August

several fantasy

death,

“The Fox

Merritt’s short fiction

and Other

Stories,

Woman”

on

a

21, 1943.

Between 1946 and 1947

and science

fiction writers strongly

influenced by Merritt’s writing, finished two stories ritt’s

its

incomplete

left

and “The Black Wheel.”

A

at

Mer-

collection of

and uncompleted story fragments, The Fox

Woman

was published posthumously in 1949.

Critical Extracts

UNSIGNED

Fantasy, romance, adventure; something of mystery,

something of the supernatural; a weaving together of ancient legends, older by

far

than any historical records, with the

scientific

knowledge of the

present day; and side by side with these, yet far above and mastering them, the power of

human

love and willing self-sacrifice, the whole held together

by a shimmering, glittering web of imagination

—such,

ours can briefly describe

romance of The Moon

In certain ways,

it is

it,

is

this fascinating

in so far as

nearer akin to such tales as those of She and

World Shook than to any others of which we can think

at the

words of Pool.

When

the

moment, but

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

112

it

is

very far indeed from being a mere echo or imitation of Sir Rider

And

Haggard.

novel, then

it

if it is,

title

page, a

first

marks the debut of a writer possessed of a very unusual,

perhaps one might is

indeed, as would appear from the

call

it,

The book

extraordinary richness of imagination.

very long; adventure follows adventure and marvel marvel; but the author’s

energy and

climax

fertility

when

of imaginative resource never seem to lessen, up to the

in all

its

splendor of

evil,

radiant beauty, the “Shining One’’

sweeps forward to conquer the stronghold of the “Three.” Unsigned, [Review of The Moon Pool], New York Times Book Review, 23 November 1919,

p.

674

VINCENT STARRETT has a better tale to

does not begin to

Welsh

hills. It

is,

tell

Mr. Merritt (in Seven Footprints

said.

well as the English critic does his story of the

tell it as

none the

less,

a better piece of imagining, being in point

Written by Mr.

upon paper

Priestley,

it

great.

written by Mr. Priestley, and the result again a

is

dime novel

—

quite “cuckoo,” as

Mr. Merritt’s

taken on plausibility that would have made

Footprints to Satan

Satan )

than Mr. Priestley (in The Old Dark House), and

of fact one of the maddest yarns placed

somebody

to

selling at $2,

dimensional creatures of dime novels; not one

is

might have

However,

it

was not

disappointment. Seven

is

and

tale

its

creatures are the two^

memorable. The dialogue

is

banal and atrocious. Yet Mr. Merritt has an idea that was a good one, and the book contains some ingenious situations.

no doubt fortunate persons who

of those

in a story as long as

it

moves

When

girl.

he

For

feels

my own and

some veronal, and 11

is

this: If Sir

succumb

am

concerned

some

sleep.

The

Mr. Merritt’s health.

for I

think he should take

allonals failing,

he might

failing that arsenic in large quantities.

1928,

things,

I

try to get

Starrett, “Several

WILL CUPPY

or distinction

long as ultimately that ridiculous creature

part,

Vincent p.

all for style

another such book coming over him,

a couple of allonals try

care not at

rapidly, as long as all sinister forces

at length to the absurd hero, as

gets the

be read by thousands

will

It

Kinds of Detective Thrillers,”

What

this

New

York World, 22 April

department wants to know, among other

H. Rider Haggard’s name

is

a

household word, beloved

A. Merritt

113

by the populace, taught in our colleges and so on, why not A. Merritt’s.

(Of course,

to

it is,

some extent, but we mean

still

more

so.)

We

are rather

vague about the details of Allan Quatermain and the Lady known

She,

as

but they gave us a very special kick, and you’ll find the same voltage in the works of this Mr. Merritt, the which

we

urge you to try at your earliest

convenience.

Mr. Merritt has oodles of

originality,

being compared to Sir Rider; none the

and he must

in

lie

it.

and

is

doubtless a

less, it is

in the

Pool and Seven Footprints

to

fantastic imagery, his slick

maneuvering of illusion and

fertility in

fed

his destiny for the

you’ve perused The Face

If

trifle

up with

moment,

Abyss, The

Moon

Satan, you’re aware of this author’s talent for reality, his surprising

strange invention and his alLround scrivening powers.

not,

If

get busy.

you a hint, Leif Langdon, a gigantic young American of

Just to give

Viking forebears, accompanied by Jim Eagles, an educated Cherokee (they were chums at Dartmouth),

hits for the

Alaskan wilderness and comes to

the Valley of the Mirage, inhabited by the thrall

by the Ayjir, a fulLsized

High

Priest

people,

little

who

by Lur the Sorceress, Yodin the

tribe ruled

and Tibur the Laugher. Moreover,

there’s a lovely heroine,

adventures in the Gobi

Evalie,

and

Desert,

where the leaders of the Uighurs had recognized him

has

it all

lots to

do with

are held in

Leif’s earlier

as

Dwayanu

the Deliverer, who’s to bring back their ancient glories.

Ensuing events are

all

we have promised. What

leeches the size of walruses, and heathen

Lake of Ghosts, the Great Kraken love?

The catch

is

itself,

rites,

say to deadly flowers

and

the devil’s cauldron, the

the Ordeal of Khalk’ru and true

that Mr. Merritt never reaches that

much-too-much

stage

where the mouth-filling marvels degenerate into mere wind and silliness. The boy has

real writing

power and

is

Will Cuppy, [Review of Dwellers

June 1932,

WILLIAM

therefore required adventure reading. in the Mirage],

C.

WEBER terror

Mr. Merritt

—more than

But Burn, Witch, Burn

a large

come from

his pen,

is

is

hardly a

a decade ago

Pool, a Rider-Haggardish affair that has not

that has

York Herald Tribune Books, 12

p. 7

domain of death and years.

New

in the

he wrote The Moon

grown old with the passage of

without doubt the

and since The Moon

and terror-stricken audience.

new name

grisliest

Pool, the

A sinister Italian lady

piece of writing

most worthy of is

able to

endow

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

114

certain costume dolls she constructs, in a peculiarly horrible manner, with

the power of motion. She bends the dolls to her will and with needle-sharp

poniards ’round their necks they venture out by night and

them.

the blood of the hardiest mystery hound. This reader saw

It will chill

scuttling into dark corners the night

strange

little figures

yourself

— and wake up screaming.

William C. Weber, “Murder Will Out,” Saturday Review of 1933,

H.

P.

p.

about 45 or 50

Merritt

American Weekly, but

me

is

all his

all subjects.

main

that the original

his best work. Just

now he

is

genial,

He

is

and a

comparatively

his

little

known

brilliant

man

and

of

well-

He

Pool” novelette in the All-Story

is

doing a sequel to Burn, Witch, Burn (which he’ll

send me), whose locale will be the It

will bring in the

legendry of shadow-magic. Merritt has a wide

among mystical enthusiasts, and is a close friend of old Nicholas

was extremely glad to meet Merritt in person,

work for 15

audience

it

Literature, 25 February

Roerich, the Russian painter whose weird Tibetan landscapes I

7

associate editor of Hearst’s

fabulous sunken city of Ys, off the coast of Brittany.

admired.

Try

interests center in his weird writing.

“Moon

haven’t read but which he says

acquaintance

it.

a stout, sandy, grey-eyed

— extremely pleasant and

informed conversationalist on

I

he read

457

LOVECRAFT

agrees with

she bids

kill as

—but

years.

He has certain defects

for all that

he

I

have so long

have admired

— caused by catering

to a popular

the most poignant and distinctive fantaisiste

is

now

contributing to the pulps.

lent

me

the Mirage instalment

for

1

As

I

mentioned some time ago

—he has

a peculiar

—when you

power of working up an

atmosphere and investing a region with an aura of unholy dread.

I

think

everything of his except The Metal Monster and Burn, Witch,

I’ve read

Burn—-and thanks

to

him

these two deficiencies will probaly be remedied

before long. H.

P.

Lovecraft, Letter to Robert H. Barlow (13 January 1934), Selected Letters

1932-1934, ed. August Derleth and James Turner (Sauk City, WI: 1976), pp.

A.

341-42

MERRITT

fear.

what

Nor have it is

Arkham House,

I

You

ask

me

to define fantasy.

That

is

quite a job,

yet found any all-encompassing formula to satisfy

—although

I

am

quite sure of

what

it is

not.

me

I

of

A. Merritt

Some this

115

say that

it

is

the art of making the unreal seem real, but

a highly vulnerable definition. If

is

I

is

makes

By

true

become

reality?

unreal?

think that true fantasy must have two basic elements.

that

think

succeed in making the unreal real

I

to the reader, does not then the unreal cease to be unreal;

And what

I

poetry.

And

the second

mathematics

I

One

is

the spirit

the rhythm of true mathematics.

is

do not mean the

spirit

counting house, but the linked sequences, the

of the abacus, or of the

clarity,

the inevitableness of

those higher mathematics which can crystallize the idea, for example, of relativity.

A. Merritt, “What in the

Moon

Is

Fantasy?”

There

),

of H. P. Lovecraft,

who

Oswald Train, 1985),

is

of

kinks. This

Satan. This

is

as

same tone of voice.

to be explained away, his prose lost to

the style which (Sam) Moskowitz called “restrained, almost

compared

effort to

opposed, for example, to that

apparent, for instance, in Seven Footprints

is

infelicity of this formulation, it;

style of the

which the fantasy elements were

journalistic in tone.” Brian Aldiss has teased

in

361

told everything in about the

minor importance, or were

its

p.

Merritt: Reflections

evidence that the intoned

Merritt wanted to write a story in

of relatively

Sam Moskowitz, A.

cited in

was a mannerism with Merritt,

fantasies

many

1941

Pool (Philadelphia:

JAMES BLISH

When

(

but there

is

Moskowitz for the characteristic

a certain

amount of justice hidden

to the style of the fantasies, that of Satan

be “poetic,” and

Moskowitz meant.

It is

is

more

closely reportorial,

certainly an

shows much

which probably

improvement upon that of

is

less

what

Merritt’s

contemporary Sax Rohmer, upon whose Dr Fu-Manchu Satan was apparently modeled.

much restraint, however. “The Moon Pool” (1919) is almost unreadable now stuffy, empty and dated; and its sequel, “Conquest of the Moon Pool,” is no better. Their magic, whatever it may have been forty-five years ago, has vanished with time. The style of both Merritt seldom showed that

—

is

windy and cliche-ridden,

quency.

The

scientific rationale

may have seemed

—

being ungrammatical with great

again, regardless of

fre-

how convincing

it

when terms like magnetism and radioactivity allowed to mean anything an author found it conve-

in 1919,

were apparently being nient, like

as well as

Humpty Dumpty,

to say that they

meant

—has been turned by time

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

116

The

into nonsense. professor, a

characters are stock: a fey Irish- American, a pedantic

Scandinavian

sailor

who

invokes Norse gods, the perennial

Russian spy, and so on. (In successive rewrites, of which Merritt did many, his Russian villains often got

changed into Germans, and then back into

Russians again in a determined effort to keep the cliches current.)

The major fantasies to read

trouble with The

have survived

them without

that Merritt’s novel its

Moon

Pool

however,

,

lies

faults as serious, in the sense that

one’s eyes glazing over by page 68.

is

not about anything;

events together. Unlike the similarly

wooden

sion

is

difficult to

pith and system for

The

possible

difference

him

Moon

dream

Pool appears

life

—though even

and using

that conces-

defend in the face of the deadness of the novel

which the reader cannot give the reader access to

is

fantasies of Haggard, or

to be purely a private work, written out of Merritt’s

may have

it is still

has no central idea to draw

it

the similarly overwritten fantasies of C. A. Smith, The

images which

elsewhere; other

share. Indeed, the only attempt Merritt

—but

made

to

them was to cram them into a completely predictable

plot with cardboard inhabitants.

Why,

then, has this crude performance been so highly touted for so

years? Nostalgia

certain

may provide one

many

answer; and the book does contain a

amount of misty sensuality, some

places with strange-sounding names.

derring-do, and a

number of faraway

also the perfect

It is

demonstration

that these three standard ingredients of romantic fantasy cannot produce a

good book

by themselves.

all

James Blish (1957),

(as

More

William Atheling,

Issues at

Jr.),

Hand (Chicago: Advent,

SCHUYLER MILLER

P.

“Exit Euphues:

it

liked the sound of words;

Wordsworth, Scott variety that was

1970), pp.

Monstrosities of Merritt”

80-82

Merritt grew up in and wrote for a

generation that was enamored of words. vocabularies;

The

It

and

built

delighted in large and varied its

poetry was of the Tennyson,

on these

things.

It

was

also a

generation to which far parts were, almost by definition, romantic and colorful.

The

East was the mystic East, and just about everything in

to be wonderful. In fact, just about anything

The fills

essence of

his scenes

seeming music;

all

A. Merritt’s writing

is

unknown was

it

had

wonderful.

in his use of these qualities.

He

with the gaudiest of colors, the most flamboyant of orientalhis people are strange

and

exotic; his places are in this world

— A. Merritt

117

yet out of allusion

it,

on

in the unexplored corners

allusion,

be.

He

drawing them out of strange sounding mythology

the better-educated sector of his readers

knew what he was

those days, and

where anything may

knew quite

talking about.

a lot about

—and

mythology

in

(The authenticity of these

Dunsany and Lovecraft made

allusions isn’t essential, of course;

piles

theirs

up

out of whole cloth).

Our

generation,

on the other hand, has seen the

usually under military auspices

and

full

of foreigners.

— and found them

The romance

of

unknown

far parts of

uncomfortable,

dull, dirty,

places

is

the world

pretty well gone,

We have also lost our taste for words. Like Rudolph Flesch, we want our words and our sentences short and simple. We want them to refer directly to us, or to things we know. We want the realism of except in science fiction.

today’s successful novelists,

and the bare-bone cacophony of modern poetry.

In fact, Saturday Review’s

John Ciardi covered the change pretty well when

he said that

based on economy of words.

Merritt it

real

poetry

is

—and Tennyson—

is

not poetry but rhetoric,

The

we find in and we’ve no time for stuff

in 1957. If

is

you accept

what

ruled out practically by definition.

where

on

this evaluation of

others,

even

in his

own

is

He

good writing

for today, Merritt

used whole phrases and clauses

day, used single adjectives.

He

picture, all painted with broad strokes of a dripping brush.

I

strung picture

think (Virgil)

Finlay could do a complete Merritt novel in a series of fantastic fulhcolor

tableaux and lose very like

frames in a Technicolor, wide-screen spectacle.

This

one

of the story: the successive scenes are almost

little

why

is

like Merritt’s short stories better

—the Face hovering

scene

and better

in the abyss

that’s

same token the novels were better

As he went on into his books,

The Face

as eight part serials

than

it.

drifting

By the

as three-parters,

one

sitting.

How much plantation

Merritt put more and more

human

action and motivation

in three

cake can you eat

ingly.

than his novels. You get

— the slug-people — the Dweller racing down the moon-path—and

terrific

in the pit

I

chunks than taken

one time?

at

and

at

his “e”

in the

Abyss

(communicative energy) -index goes up accordis

crammed with fascinating people and creatures,

but in The Metal Monster very

little really

happens to the harassed characters:

they just stand and look at a series of set pieces in which the metal creatures

The concept of metallic life was terrific for themselves were crammed with sound and color,

go through their calisthenics. the time, and the scenes

but Norhala

is

—

no Snake Mother

she’s

not even Anita Ekberg.

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

118

I

we have

hate to believe that

lost

the love of words and the ability to

enjoy their lavish use in painting fantastic pictures. This Burroughs’ Mars

— the

lush

“Green Kingdom’’

Conan and Northwest Smith and P.

in Elizabeth

the Gray Mouser.

is

why

I

still

like

Maddux’s book

And the best of Merritt.

Schuyler Miller, “The Reference Library,” Astounding Science Fiction 60, No. 5

(January 1958): 142-43

SAM MOSKOWITZ

From the vantage point of the somewhat more sophisticated modern reader, “The Conquest of the Moon Pool” reveals glaring flaws. In contrast to “The Moon Pool” there are sequences that show obvious signs of haste. The movement of events follows the standard pattern of thrillers of an earlier period. The characters of the Moon Pool stories are stereotypes: Larry

Von

O’Keefe, the Irishman; Olaf, the Scandinavian;

Hertzdorf, the treacherous

different political climate,

handmaiden

Lakla, the

is

German (who,

in a later edition

and

in a

converted to Marakinoff, the Russian devil);

(personification of good),

and Yolara, dark

priestess

of evil.

Along with them

are such stock chillers as frog

dead-alive men, and the love scenes

men, dwarf men, and

make no concession to

a world climbing

out of Victorian prudery.

Yet the novel holds magic for

more than

it

readers.

It is

a hint of the strangest mysteries,

author never terrifying,

its

falters in his brilliant

and the

bizarre. It also

keeps that promise.

The

an honest

story. It

evokes

and the imagination of the

preoccupation with the unearthly, the

promises rich, colorful, heroic action and

age-old struggle between good and evil, with the

cleavage sharply differentiated, forms the basis of the plot. In this contest, the reader

is

thrilled

by

flights of

imaginative fantasy equal to the best of

H. Rider Haggard. Greatest victory of all, Merritt transcended the coldness and dehumanization that frequently

accompany pure

fantasy. His

word

pictures shape a

mood.

Humanity shines from brilliantly original

one of

this

his

work. For every stock character there

own

creating.

The Shining One,

pure force with fantastic powers, becomes believable as

its

is

a

a robot of

intelligence

acquires humanlike drives of personal pride and desire for achievement and

power.

The

Silent Ones, ageless godlike

men from an

ancient civilization

A. Merritt

119

which created The Shining One

—now aloof and

inscrutable

—

upon

call

ancient science to thwart the ambitions of this strange thinking force and

When

dreadful omniscience.

its

now

flames

ebon eyes

in their

great tears, streaming

down

—

they have destroyed their creation: for the flickering fires

were quenched in

the marble white faces.”

Basic patterns for other Merritt novels were established in The Pool. Later stories

“No

would always be

on the

built

Moon

conflict of light against

darkness. There would always be a beautiful priestess of evil, and the villains

would be memorable, symbols of repulsion

some women Burn

!

—

in

brilliantly characterized.

— the

frog

men

in

“The Snake Mother,”

Forms which

The Moon

are generally

men and

Pool, the spider

Ricori, the gangster, in Burn, Witch,

are converted by literary sorcery into sympathetic

and admirable

characters.

Sam

Moskowitz, “The Marvelous A. Merritt,” Explorers of

Science Fiction (Cleveland:

BLEILER

E. F. terms,

one could

call

If

him

World Publishing Co,

the Infinite:

Shapers of

1963), pp. 194-95

one wanted to characterize Merritt

in simple

the most romantic (in the late-ninteenth century

sense of the word) major science fiction and fantasy writer of his day. This

romantic quality was highly regarded, and Merritt was one of the authors

most frequently imitated by young

writers.

Today, we are more apt to find things in Merritt’s writing, particularly his early writing, that should

not be imitated, but admitting weaknesses

should not preclude seeing strengths.

He had

a fine imagination,

of his stories was innovative in significant ways.

each motif

as a fulfillment,

exhausting

its

He had

and each

the knack of treating

potential. Thus,

one can take

sentimental treatment of survival after death no further than “Three Lines

Old French.”

of

Merritt could be an exciting writer, and he could digress from the pulp

milieu in unusual ways. be,

and

his skills

He was an

evolved

as

excellent craftsman

he grew

older. If

when he wanted

to

he was always concerned with

love and dualism (good versus evil) he constantly varied their embodiments.

Yet despite these strengths, the ultimate feeling today for the

most part an unsatisfying

writer.

is

that Merritt was

Perhaps the problem was lack of

literary integrity, a too great cleaving to the attitudes

and wish

fulfillments

of his fleeting audience, with the result that his stories are filled with

now'

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

120

dated material.

he was cleverer than most of

If

he has paid a higher price in the end, the

Munsey pulp magazines

for

of the 1920’s

his colleagues in doing this,

what appealed

may

to the readers of

strike readers of the 1980’s

as itself a fantasy world.

many

In

instances, Merritt carried out his emotional topicality to such

an extent that when the Zeitgeist changed, the older position was to accept or

of

Old

even ludicrous or

French,’’

repellent.

Such

which today seems obscene,

intelligent writer to play

upon

feelings of

is

difficult

the case with “Three Lines

a deliberate attempt by a very

bereavement

World

arising out of

War L Perhaps there was an element of cynicism in Merritt’s work that his contemporaries did not

see.

Could

a professional

newspaperman high

Hearst empire be other than intellectually hardboiled? a situation like that of

mushy

stories

was revealed?

Was

a

about the Flebrides under

pseudonym of Fiona Macleod, and threatened

secret

there perhaps

William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, where Sharp,

professional journalist, wrote florid,

the

Or was

in the

to stop writing

Merritt equally wrapped up in his work?

if

We

the

do

not know. Is

any of Merritt’s work worth reading today, other than

documents? The mythic quality of Dwellers structuring

and inner drama,

still vital.

is

Burn, Witch, Burn! and Creep, Shadow!

moments

are also fiction,

it

in the other

is

Mirage, with

in the

A

as historical its

formal

sense of peril emerges from

an excellent suspense

major works. As

story.

There

for the rest of Merritt’s

belongs back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, perhaps occasionally to

be stroked for nostalgia, but maintainable only by taxidermy. E. F. Bleiler,

“A. Merritt,” Supernatural Fiction Writers, ed.

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), Vol.

RONALD FOUST from

its

2, p.

use of mythic archetypes as well as from is

its

Once again, Merritt journey. The protagonist,

to make.

archetype of the

York:

its

unique force

peculiarly personal

Merritt’s fictional autobiography, the

book that completes the psychological odyssey that

him

(New

842

Dwellers in the Mirage derives

quality. Fdere, the reader senses,

prepared

E. F. Bleiler

all his

bases the action

earlier

work

on the mythic

Leif Langdon, travels not only

spatially within the novel’s various setting (the

Gobi

desert,

Alaska and

the land of the Mirage), but also backward through time as he atavistically

A. Merritt

regresses

121

from his

modem identity to that of a prehistoric ancestor, Dwayanu,

ruthless warrior priest of the ancient Ayjirs.

While these

spatial

and temporal

journeys are highly entertaining devices which allow Merritt to create some of his most colorful descriptions of warfare and carnage, they are secondary to the motif of the inward journey; that

theme of the bewildered

to the

is,

and individuation. At the beginning of

individual’s quest for identity

his

quest the protagonist exists in a painful condition of multiplicity of which

he

only partially aware. His conscious ego- identity (that of the decent

is

him by

rational man), created for

his

modern environment,

is

suddenly

attacked at intervals with increasing force by an atavistic personality, a

savage and seemingly alien self that has been buried in his subconscious of his

life.

As

this id-identity gains strength,

it

presses for release

and

all

finally

attempts, with temporary success, to usurp control of his consciousness; the repressed “alien” self seeks, in effect, to possess the hero, to

his

concept of Fate can be

identity. Psychologically considered, the ancient

understood

become

as the success or failure of the individual’s

attempt to coordinate

the competing claims of these two identities and finally to subordinate the

anarchic demands of the unconscious to the more moderate and rational

needs of consciousness.

which Merritt

The

power derives

novel’s

in part

from the way in

uses the Jungian archetype of the night-sea journey

perilous quest to achieve

— the

some goal which takes the hero inward

confusing psychological maze of conflicting demands

—

to a

as a basis for

an

exploration of the universal theme of man’s divided nature.

theme

In Dwellers in the Mirage, this of the protagonist,

Everyman. The identity) with

mastery of the less

whose first name

fiction’s ultimate

Dwayanu Self. The

is

is

a

symbolized by the multiple identities

pun establishing him as an archetypal

purpose will be to confront Leif (the ego-

them in a contest for Dwayanu represents nothing

(the id-identity) and to pit stakes are high since

than the universal force of anarchic un-reason. His temporary capture

of Leif’s personality mid-way in the text liberates long-dormant energies

and

initiates

an atrocity that deeply

ultimately mastered

archetypal

modem

Dwayanu and

scars the protagonist after

he has

returned to his modern identity.

for Leif’s character, then,

is

The

that of the Gemini, the

divided and eternally warring Twins, which Merritt has modernized by treating

them

as

But Dwellers

two aspects of the divided psyche of

in the

Mirage

and mythic archetypes.

It is

most personal; the unity of

is

more than

a

mere manipulation of

Merritt’s best science its

effect,

his protagonist.

romance because

which saves

it

literary it is

his

from the problem of

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

122

the double-structure that plagued his earlier work, derives from the sustained

emotional sincerity of its tone and from the loving but, for Merritt, relatively unsentimental treatment of

romance, however;

it

its

characters.

also his last.

is

It is

not only his best science

The novel

gives the impression of

gathering together and exhausting the preoccupations of the earlier fictions

and of freeing Merritt of unable to come to

earlier

a

demon

of his unconscious with

which he was

grips.

Ronald Foust, A. Merritt (Mercer

Island,

WA:

Starmont House, 1989), pp. 55-56

Bibliography The Moon

Pool. 1919.

The Ship of

Ishtar.

Seven Footprints

The Face

in the

to

1926. Satan. 1928.

Abyss. 1931.

Dwellers in the Mirage. 1932.

Through

the

Dragon Glass. 1932.

Burn, Witch, Burn! 1933. Creep, Shadow! 1934.

Three Lines of Old French. 1939.

The Story behind

the Story.

1942.

The Metal Monster. 1946.

The Fox

Woman

(with The Blue Pagoda by Hannes Bok). 1946.

The Black Wheel (with Hannes Bok). 1947. The Fox

Woman

and Other

Stories.

Ed.

The Challenge from Beyond (with C.

Donald A. Wollheim. 1949.

L.

Moore, H.

Howard, and Frank Belknap Long). 1954.

P. Lovecraft,

Robert

E.

Mervyn Peake 1911-1968

MERVYN PEAKE was born on July

9,

1911, in Kuling, China, where his parents

were missionaries. Peake spent most of his childhood in Tientsin, attending the Tientsin British

community

he explored service

Grammar School and

in spite of his delicate health. His family retired

Gothic

built in the

to

England

style in

for the sons of missionaries,

and

in

early age

1929 he

Eltham

failed his

house

Wallington, Surrey; Peake attended a school

Eltham College

in south

to study art at the

exhibited his work in several

however, he

from missionary

in 1922, settling in a large Victorian

Peake demonstrated a talent

left

which

there and the Chinese towns and countryside,

and returned

At an

absorbing the traditions of both the

London

for

London.

both drawing and writing,

Royal Academy Schools.

He

galleries during the 1930s. In 1933,

examinations and was refused readmittance to the

Royal Academy. For the next two years he lived mainly on the island of Sark, in the

Channel

Islands,

working

he returned to London to work on

at a private gallery there. In

1935

and writing, teaching

part-

his painting

time at the Westminster School of Art; there he met a painter,

Gilmore, Peake’s

whom

first

he married in 1937 and with

war

he had three children.

book, an illustrated children’s story entitled Captain Slaugh-

terboard Drops Anchor,

When

whom

Maeve

was published

in 1939.

the war broke out, Peake attempted to gain an appointment as a

artist, but,

art projects

although he remained

in the

army from 1940

were repeatedly rejected. After spending

six

to 1942, his

months

in

an army

hospital recovering from a nervous breakdown, he was finally transferred to a unit of artists in 1943.

He was

sent to

Birmingham

to

draw a picture

of a cathode ray tube, and this experience with glassblowing would lead later to the writing of a collection of poems entitled

At

Germany where he provided concentration camp at Belsen.

the end of the war he traveled to

with drawings of the

The Glassblowers (1950). the army

After the war Peake returned to the island of Sark and pursued his writing career.

He had been working on

the

first

123

of his three fantasy novels set in

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

124

Gormenghast, Titus Groan

,

since 1939, and

was published in 1946.

it

was followed by Gormenghast in 1950 and Titus Alone

“Boy

in Darkness” (first published in 1956),

cycle.

is

in 1959.

Letters

A novelette,

Gormenghast

also part of the

Peake also wrote another children’s book,

It

from a Lost Uncle

(From Polar Regions) (1948), and a mainstream novel, Mr. Pye (1953). His several plays written in the 1950s were staged throughout

on the whole poorly

received.

much

Peake continued to be a the

England but were

many volumes he

sought-after

book

illustrator,

and among

Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark

illustrated are

(1941), Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1943), the Brothers

Grimm’s Household Tales and

( 1

946 ) Stevenson’s Dr ,

.

Jekyll

and Mr Hyde (1948), .

Balzac’s Droll Stories (1961).

Peake returned to London with his family in 1949, working

at the

Central

School of Art in Holborn. In 1951 he moved to a house in Kent, but the

home

next year he returned to his family his father.

in

Wallington upon the death of

During the mid-1950s his health began to deteriorate. The third

volume of the Gormenghast cycle was much hampered by

his illness,

and

notes survive for a projected fourth volume. Eventually Peake was diagnosed as

having Parkinson’s disease and,

he died on November

17, 1968.

after

spending several years in hospitals,

Around the time

of his death a renewed

interest in fantasy fiction led to the republication of his

His wife assembled Peake’s Progress writings

H

and drawings,

(

1978), a large

Gormenghast

trilogy.

volume of his uncollected

as well as several separate editions of his illustrations.

Critical Extracts

HENRY REED

In the face of Titus

much that he shame. mean that I

has sworn so act of

I

has no words

Groan

left

I

feel like a soldier

with which to describe the

should like to describe the book as fascinating,

but the semantic of the word has become so disgustingly eroded that inconceivable that to say that

it

any longer conveys any meaning.

Mr. Peake’s

first

novel holds one with

by saying: Part One: Gormenghast.

No

part

two

its is

I

is

much younger even than

am therefore

glittering eye.

It

it is

forced

begins

discoverable throughout

the entire length of the book (well over four hundred the hero

who

modern pages) and

Tristram Shandy by the time the book

Mervyn Peake

125

The

ends; he has in fact not spoken up to that point. anticipate further volumes.

ever so

much enjoyed

The book, which vast castle in

now and then was I

megalomaniac

aristocrats

to

have

I

for review.

an unidentifiable landscape and

who

at

live in a

an unnamed time,

have read since childhood.

I

left

is

do not think

I

about the ancient family of Groan,

nearly pure story-telling as any book that every

come;

will

me

novel sent to

a

is

hope they

I

reader

is

as

admit

I

uneasily conscious that by the contrast of the

and the hut-dwellers

contemporary

at their gates, a

contrast might be adumbrated; and the internal struggle for power inside

the castle

itself

might also “imply” something. But

could, and chide myself for being a victim of the intellectual

out as often as

I

inhibitions of

my

time. In any case even a Marxist might find so riotous

an embellishment of Titus Groan,

his favourite

themes a

though long and Gothically

a genuine plot in the strictest sense, in order to

know what

will

Nannie

and

it

little frivolous.

detailed,

it.

Its

and the mysterious Keda, with her two

.

.)

not wayward;

its

setting, there

gallery of characters

Slagg, appears oftener than

a success: she recalls, rather strongly,

is

(.

it

has

persuades you to read on simply

happen; in spite of

particularly dream-like about

old nurse,

shut these thoughts

I

lovers

can be

who

Farm; though her part in the action will doubtless

wonderful.

easily put

kill

Meriam, the hired

is

nothing

is

up with,

each other,

girl in

The

is

not

Cold Comfort

be revealed

later

as

indispensable. Otherwise the characters are a joy: Swelter, Flay, the Prunesquallors, Steerpike, Barquentine, the Countess,

and deluded something

I

twins, like

Cora and

more than most things because they

love power, and that’s

also remarkable for

its

thwarted

least the

Clarice. (“I like roofs,” said Clarice; “they are

houses they cover, and Cora and

we

and not

I

like

why we

are

on top of the

being over the tops of things because

are

both fond of

roofs.”)

The book

is

gigantic set-pieces of action. Steerpike’s daylong

climb over the great roofscape of Gormenghast, and the

final conflict of

Flay and Swelter in the Hall of Spiders, are magnificently thrilling.

Henry Reed, “New Novels,” New Statesman and Nation, 4 May 1946,

ROBERTSON DAVIES

No

brief description of

is

a

323

Mervyn

books can give a satisfactory idea of their quality. The plot

Gormenghast

p.

is

Peake’s simple:

huge and remote earldom ruled by the family of Groan;

the Groans are ruled by complex, inherited

ritual,

and the days of the Earl

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

126

and

his family are lived in strict accordance

ceremonies; change

is

To

unthinkable.

the scholarly seventy-sixth Earl,

Sepulchrave, and his birddoving Countess, child inherits his father’s life.

At

last

which he

and

title

with the orders of a master of

is

born a son, Titus. In time the

rebels against the circumstances of his

he leaves Gormenghast behind him and goes out into the world,

dominated by

finds fully as arbitrary, as

with eccentrics, as the family domain. In the end young Titus

home, only

to leave

knowing that he

again,

it

packed

irrationality, as

will

never be

re-visits his

free of

in

it

his heart.

Such

no

a skeleton of the plot gives

Gormenghast

idea of the richness of the books.

peopled with fantastic creations; the castle

is

riddled with passages that everyone has forgotten, people

even a complete boys’ school, with

seen, containing lesser

its

Hay, the

The

appurtenances.

Earl

valet, Swelter, the chef,

titular

is its

a city in

is

a large

who

head, but the real rulers are

As sometimes happens central figure

minor creation

my

opinion,

is

in this

modern fiction. The atmosphere drawings come to life.

of

in novels full of highly coloured characters, the

army of

Steerpike,

loneliest

in

the one least successfully brought to

is

The

the Lady Fuchsia, the Earl’s older child and

is

that of Fuseli’s

is

one of

and Sourdust, the master of ceremonies

one of the most interesting heroines

Gormenghast

are rarely

staff, as

succeeded in time by his son Barquentine, a malignant dwarf.

and most neglected creature

itself,

who

oddities.

Mervyn

life.

Titus

is

a

Peake’s best character, in

begins as a kitchen-boy at Gormenghast, and

by a hair-raising career of intelligence, craft and ruthlessness, to be master of ceremonies

Groan

and

rises at last

real ruler of the castle. Steerpike

is

a

magnificent adventurer, and in the third volume Titus Alone we feel the

want of him very This

is

badly.

a long novel,

at the highest pitch all

his

through

He

it.

is

is

not able to keep his invention

on the

action.

You must

no neatly carpentered, simple

—but now and then they

take this long book as you find

tale,

and

a painter as well as a writer,

extended passages of description are masterly

are a drag is

and Mervyn Peake

it;

here

but a great, walloping gallimaufry of

imagination, thrilling adventure (the fight between Flay and Swelter, in

which

Earl Sepulchrave perishes,

fiction), poetry,

humour and

unusual response in

its

is

the best fight

I

know

sheer inventive exuberance.

readers, but

it

rewards

them with

and wonderful that they are worth twenty times the

of in It

modern

asks for

an

riches so strange

effort.

Robertson Davies, “The Gormenghast Trilogy” (1960), The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies, ed. Judith Skelton

Grant (New York: Viking, 1990), pp. 201-2

Mervyn Peake

127

JOHN BATCHELOR Alone

is

Despite the sad state of

an important addition to the two

and

original feature

friend

is

and apart

earlier Titus books,

own moral growth

from the masterly handling of Titus’s

latter part, Titus

its

most interesting

its

the creation and presentation of Muzzlehatch. This

is

an anarchist, a pirate by inclination with the flavour of the sea

much

surrounding

that he does, a self-contained mature

friendship with the boy and

whose mature love

with a comfortable self-knowledge. As he drives unblushingly,

on

own

his

for

man whose

solid

Juno do not conflict

home Muzzlehatch

reflects,

imperfections:

His unfaithfulness; his egotism; his eternal play-acting; his gigantic pride; his lack of tenderness; his deafening exuberance; his selfishness.

His self-centredness soldiers

who

(Chapter 33, 2nd edition)

healthy and unashamed, like that of the spivs and

is

fascinated Peake in his ‘Head-Hunting’

and the war, and one can see Muzzlehatch the

last

and richest portrait in

Captain Slaughterboard, the (in a

poem

in

The

which includes Long John Silver, The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, ‘Caliban’

a series

sailor in

and

p.

are at peace with themselves.

‘There comes a time

through constellations of conjecture, is

inhabit

(London: Duck-

122

RONALD BINNS from which there

who

male extroverts

A Biographical and Critical Exploration

John Batchelor, Merfyn Peake: worth, 1974),

as the successor to these aliens,

Glassbloivers), those vigorous

their skins with confidence

poems of the 1930s

no

return’,

is

in

when

the brain, flashing

danger of losing

Peake commented in Boy

in

itself in

worlds

Darkness. Before

the progress of mental illness necessitated permanent hospitalisation Peake did

manage

largely to

and the world that

complete Titus Alone. The chapters are

Titus,

now

much

twenty, discovers outside Gormenghast,

Gormenghast conjured up an ancient, feudal world, and in the single figure of Steerpike.

we

By

evil

is

homeland.

radically different to anything previously experienced in his

Titus Alone

shorter,

contained

itself

contrast, in the unidentified world of

get a vision of the future,

more science

fiction

than Gothic

romance, more urban and contemporary than the temporally and geographically

remote society of Gormenghast. Titus enters a world of

police, prostitution, prisons, courts

and asylums,

cars, slums,

at the heart of

which

lies

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

128

the sinister factory, a place of death and

burning bodies. This reveals that Belsen

evil,

surrounded by the stench of

together with the dying

last feature,

preyed on Peake’s mind, though

still

can’t comfort her.

I

see.

There

is

no

I

can’t love her.

veil across

Her

much

“I can’t sustain

girl:

suffering

is

too clear to

far

no mystery: no romance. Nothing but

it:

factual pain, like the pain of a nagging tooth.”

speaking as

worth noting

it’s ‘

the ambivalence of Titus’s response to the suffering her.

Black Rose,

girl,

as Titus, expressing his

’

a

This seems to be Peake

anguish at a world which had

cruelly violated the fancies of his tranquil earlier

life.

A

realistic portrayal

of Belsen was outside the scope of his imagination; instead he placed his

memories of the camp

inside the larger, despairing vision of a futuristic,

highly technological totalitarian society.

The

characterisation in Titus Alone

is

impoverished in comparison with

the earlier two volumes of the trilogy. Muzzlehatch reincarnates Flay, and the beautiful, demonic Cheeta

is

more than

reminiscent,

of the cunning beast-humans of Boy in Darkness.

the other main character, Juno, the

first

It

name,

just in

seems significant that

woman whom

Titus has a sexual

relationship with, should turn out to be a kind of mother-substitute, twice his age

and

at the other

in the novel serves as a

sexuality

extreme from the wispy ‘Thing’. The

which runs through the and

flees,

him

trilogy.

bomb

in

At

the end a vast, foul explosion

mind)

at the

cave where his attempted rape of the ‘Thing’

from the world of imagination and romance. At the

for ever

close of the trilogy the outcast Titus, unlike

not met a

obliterates the factory. Titus

returning one day, by accident, to the very edge of his

domain, arriving back expelled

woman who

as (Leslie) Fiedler puts

is it,

his equal. for this

anything but continuing jottings for a fourth

David Copperfield, has

He seems doomed life

and

sexuality,

flight or self-destruction’.

volume

it

Titus Alone

‘it is

hard to

hard to conceive of

From

Peake’s sketchy

seems, indeed, that he merely envisaged

further picaresque adventure, further flight. But

end of

still

to perpetual solitude;

kind of romance protagonist

imagine a real acceptance of adult

a child at the

scene

reminder of the theme of repressed or displaced

(perhaps Peake had the atom survives

final

he

is

if

Titus

in

is still

some ways

nevertheless a particularly twentieth-

century figure: unhoused, a refugee whose responses are ‘no longer clear and simple’, a

youth whose burden of knowledge

and the sense of

his

own

one of

‘tragedy, violence

perfidy’.

Ronald Binns, “Situating Gormenghast,”

30-32

is

Critical Quarterly 21,

No.

1

(Spring 1979):

Mervyn Peake

129

JOSEPH L. SANDERS years old,

In “Boy in Darkness,” Titus

imprisoned within the

still

He

castle’s ritual.

is

just fourteen

already

knows

that

he hates “the eternal round of deadly symbolism,” and on the night of

his

fourteenth birthday he instinctively seizes the chance to escape. His flight

him

takes

into a nightmarish country outside the castle. There, captured

by two grossly ugly, semi-human creatures, the Goat and the Hyena, Titus

Lamb

carried toward their master, the

is

—

in the person of

whom

Peake

simultaneously attacks religion and science.

The

religious implications of the

Lamb

alone, blind, in an underground apartment

blood-red 1

Peter 1:19), and his hands

is,

is

lit

move

lives

by candles and carpeted in

Revelation 7:14, 12:11). His face

(cf.

The Lamb

are first apparent.

“angelically white”

is

“in a strangely parsonic way.”

(cf.

The Lamb

of course, a traditional religious symbol of innocence and purity; Christ

Goat mumbles that

is

to

true because

Lamb with

Lamb

God” (John “ himself that the Lamb

described as “the

he

1:29). In Peake’s story, too, the

of

tells

so.’ ”

us

the heart of

‘is

So the Goat and the Hyena

religious awe, as they pray to him:

and breathe and

are!’ ” (cf.

they are. Specifically, the

“

‘O thou by

Revelation 5:13). Their awe

he did not create them in the

Lamb

place, the

first

and

life

Lamb

is

has

the change they have died except for the

and

treat the

whom we

justified;

live

though

made them what

has changed the natures of

shaping them to resemble the beasts they are most

love,

all

living things,

like spiritually.

With

Goat and the Hyena who have

survived because of “their coarseness of soul and fibre.” Most recent to die

was the Lion, It

who “only an age ago, had collapsed

was a great and

terrible fall: yet

aegis of the dazzling

degradation.” religion,

Titus,

by making the lion

spiritual virtue.

lie

ironically fulfilled

down with

flutter “like little

While the boy

his nature too, but

was merciful,

mockery of power.

for,

.

.

.

under the macabre

Lamb, the one time king of beasts was brought

Thus the Lamb has

Lamb’s hands

it

in a

to

an image from popular

the lamb.

Now,

as

he surveys

white doves,” another symbol of

sleeps, the

Lamb

with “his hands together,

as

waits, lusting to

change

though in prayer.”

The host of specifically religious suggestions and images, in a story that until now has been devoid of such concern, suggests very strongly that Peake is

here referring to the Christian religion as a debasing influence. Peake’s

treatment of Gormenghast’s values imposed

on the

ritual

dislikes

individual from outside, offering

relevant for himself and encouraging So, here, the

shows that he

Lamb can

break

down

him

in

any system of

him nothing directly

whatever weakness he possesses.

but not build; despite his worshippers’

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

130

praise,

the

he does not

Lamb glories

really

in his power. True, in

denying them freedom to develop is

how

understand

incidental to his

own

to

keep

changing

his creatures alive. Still

men he has destroyed them,

for themselves; to the

gratification.

modern technnology.

In addition to religion, however, Peake attacks

However

different faith in religion

and

and

systematically to manipulate

who

gives

man

nullify

operate

it;

When

human

religion

beings,

human

The country beneath which

is

employed

functions as a

it

when

by the same token,

the satisfaction of godlike control over

a religious purpose for him.

can

faith in science appear, they

function in the same way for their believers.

science for the priests

Lamb, however, that

beings,

science it

Lamb

the

serves lives

is

littered

with the waste and debris of science and industry. Underground,

also,

a

is

dead wilderness of metal: “there had been a time when these

deserted solitudes were alive with hope, excitement and conjecture

on how

the world was to be changed. But that was far beyond the skyline. All that

was

left

was a kind of shipwreck.

metal; moribund,

stiff

A shipwreck of metal

.

.

He, too,

on change, though only.

He

vistas of forgotten

thousand attitudes of mortality; with not a

in a

not a mouse; not a bat, not a spider. Only the Lamb.” in this setting.

.

who worked

like those

like that of the others

it is

The Lamb

in metal

rat,

belongs

and stone thrives

a sterile, ego-directed

change

hungers excitedly for more living things to alter according to his

desires.

Joseph L. Sanders, for the Future, ed.

“

‘The Passions in the Clay’: Mervyn Peake’s Titus Stories,” Voices

Thomas

D. Clareson and

Bowling Green University Popular

GORDON SMITH groups.

There

are his

L.

Wymer

Press, 1984), Vol. 3, pp.

(Peake’s)

own

Thomas

book

(Bowling Green,

OH:

97-98

illustrations fell

into several

original creations, like Captain Slaughterboard

Drops Anchor or Letters from a Lost Uncle; there are books like Treasure Island, Alice in

Wonderland and The Hunting of

long familiar and particularly tions almost as

much

‘sib’

the

Snark,

to his imagination;

to hand, like Ride a Cock-Horse

Tales. All these are superbly successful.

which were

and there

a part of

it.

he

first

are collec-

and Grimm's Household

But he was also superb treating

familiar subjects, like Witchcraft in England by Christina Hole. illustrated a book,

soaked himself in the

all

text, until

less

When Mervyn he

felt

almost

This was particularly true of Dickens and the drawings he did

Mervyn Peake

131

House. Each book he read was an education, and Dickens was

for Bleak

The

revelation.

sheer sweep of his creativeness, the vividness of his descrip-

tion, the liveliness of his conversations, the fantastic quality of his imagina-

tion and his

human oddities:

own mind, and

all

had, as he himself insisted, a considerable influence upon

what he was already engaged Gordon Smith, Mervyn p.

these struck sympathetic chords in Mervyn’s

in writing, the

A

Peake:

trilogy.

Memoir (London: Victor Gollancz, 1984),

100

ANTHONY BURGESS

Peake has been praised, but he has also

been mistrusted. His prose works

are not easily classifiable; they are unique

the books of Peacock or Lovecraft are unique. Moreover, he has too

as, say,

many

talents:

he

Peake

style in

book

He

Personal

‘Gormenghast’

is

a fine poet

illustration

is

and

a highly original draughtsman.

inimitable,

and

it

The

has been greatly imitated.

has, in his total mastery of the literary as well as the pictorial art, only

one peer

—Wyndham Lewis.

dissimilar, but

Their aims in both

arts

could not be more

Peake and Lewis come together in an approach to descriptive

writing which owes a great deal to the draughtsman’s trade.

seem slow-moving, that

is

If

their

books

because of the immense solidity of their visual

contents, the lack of interest in time and the compensatory obsession with filling

up space. Titus Groan

is

aggressively three-dimensional.

opening description of Gormenghast, where the term

what we

architectural quality’ exactly conveys solidity

is

‘a

Look

at the

certain ponderous

are in for. But

around the

an extra dimension, one of magic, showing the poet

as well as

the draughtsman: ‘This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from

blasphemously This sounds Titus Groan,

among

the

of knuckled masonry and pointed

fists

at heaven.’ like ‘Gothic’ writing, but the

we seem

term

is

inadequate.

As we

read

to be given clues directing us towards the daylight

of a literary category, but

all

the keys change into red herrings.

—Nettel

Take the

who

names of the

characters, for instance

in the tower

above the rusting armoury’); Rottcodd, curator of the Hall of

(‘the octogenarian

lived

the Bright Carvings; Llay, Swelter, Steerpike, Mrs Slagg, Prunesquallor.

These story.

are fitting for a

They

Peacock novel,

are farcical, but the

for

mood

is

Dickens or

for a

comic children’s

not one of easy laughter or even

of airy fantasy: the ponderous architectural quality holds everything down,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

132

and we have to take the characters very is it

names. Nor

seriously, despite their

appropriate to think in terms of a gallery of glorious eccentrics (a very

British concept).

Nobody

flies

away from

belongs to a system built on very rigid

Anthony stock,

Burgess, “Introduction,”

NY: Overlook

TANYA

a centre of normality; everybody

rules.

The Gormenghast

Press, 1988), pp.

between 1948 and 1949 on the

Mervyn Peake (Wood-

2-3

GARDINER-SCOTT

J.

Trilogy by

was

Gormenghast

island of Sark,

written

and won the Royal Society

of Literature award for 1951, along with Peake’s book of poetry, The Glassblowers.

It is

a

more

than Titus Groan,

easily accessible

novel in terms of plot and organization

Peake has already familiarized the reader with his

as

descriptions of setting, most of his characters, the seeds of action and the

Castle

itself.

Only Titus seems

to age as a character,

from seven to seventeen,

in the course of the novel; the other characters develop according to the

directions suggested in Titus Groan, causing an impression of stasis

change

new

at a different level

characterization

Having

is

from that in the

on

and introduced most of

set his scenes

freedom.

specific

He

Titus book.

The

only major

that of the Professors.

Groan, to some extent a preface focus

first

and

themes

— of

for the action of

loyalty, evil,

his characters in Titus

Gormenghast, Peake can

menace and, most importantly,

does this through a combination of set descriptive pieces and

action, with the proportion of action considerably higher than in Titus

Groan. As in that novel, the Castle a reflector

own

is

a location both physical

and enhancer of the moods of

right gathering to resist the forces of

and culminating

in his

—

morning

inhabitants, a character in

change

(as

embodied

death and the restoration of order)

Batchelor points out, the of time

its

title

of the novel. Peake focusses

Titus’ day of escape, his night with Flay

to the Castle; the

morning

evening of his

tracking of

him

flight

is

in Steerpike

thus, as (John)

on

specific blocks

and return the following

to evening cycle of the Poet’s ceremony; kills

Barquen-

with Fuchsia and the following morning’s

Ceremony of the Carvings, Titus’ sequence when Fuchsia dies and Steer-

to the Aunts’ bodies; the

escape and return to the Castle; the pike

its

—

the day of Irma’s party; the day Steerpike visits the Aunts and tine; the

and psychic,

finally killed

— and he has chapters

(45 and 51-52, for example)

where he telescopes the passing years and Steerpike’s schemes. But the

Mervyn Peake

action

133

essentially sequential, although within the sequences plots are

is

juxtaposed, time becomes subjective according to the state of

mind

of the

character (for example, the schoolroom scene in chapter 14), and Titus and

Fuchsia both have flashbacks to earlier days.

The novel opens with

poem

that sets up the distinction

roles of Titus,

childhood and Earldom. The

a fine prose

between the private and public

rhythms of the prose, the sentence fragments, the reversals of

Biblical

sentence order and the compelling images of labyrinth, shadow and architecture

make

it

a dramatic opening, suitable to Titus’ centrality

and

sense of the dramatic as played out with Steerpike in the novel.

sphere space

own

The atmo-

of mystery and agelessness and the intermingling of time and

is

— “there

are days

when

some of the action of which haunted heads,

is

and

carried

from an

in

on

inside the characters’ heads,

motion whose thoughts were

attic rafter or

all

and present that opens action, or

if

not,

hung

veered between towers on leaflike wings.”

Peake surveys the dead/exiled and the living the reader up to date with

tone of the novel,

reality sets the

as suggested in this fusing of the past

— “an arabesque

like bats

no substance and the dead

the living have

are active.” This blurring of fantasy

it

his

that has

in a

happened

summation that brings

in Titus

Groan and conveys

a sense of the intervening five-and-a-half years before the opening of this

next novel. Batchelor

calls the effect

“rough but strong,

like the

opening

of a folk-tale”; indeed, folktale and allegory are two of the genres Peake

fragmentarily exploits in his telling of the

Tanya J. Gardiner-Scott, Mervyn

tale.

Peake: The Evolution of a Dark Romantic

(New York:

Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 99-100

PHILIP

REDPATH

In

many ways

Titus

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In both works there

an almost

total

absence of the

titular hero,

is

it

reminiscent of

a slow, leisurely progress,

is

is

open,

menaced by death. He

by fleeing to the Continent. But in fact

all

of the

done through the writing of the novel. To write takes longer

running

is

than to

live,

became

a threat,

and

if

Tristram can continue writing about his

he can continue to

life

before death

exist in the written space of the novel.

By the end of the book Tristram (the writer)

is

and an ending that

promising more. In Tristram Shandy the narrator attempts to escape

Groan

subject)

have not chronologically coincided. At

and Tristram (the narrator/ least

one of them, therefore,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

134

By the time he came

will survive.

to write Titus Alone, illness

threatening Peake physically and mentally.

He had moved

was seriously

Titus out of the

imaginative space of Gormenghast into a world more recognizably that of the real,

modern world of himself and

which Peake was dying.

in

But

his readers.

this

was the world

Titus Alone therefore chronicles a desperate

attempt to return to the imaginative realm of Gormenghast in which the

mind divorced from the sick body could exist. The problem was that, in many respects, Gormenghast was a mental and physical reaction. The mind could not be divorced in Cartesian terms so completely from the body.

Peake admitted that Titus Groan was something he had to purge from

body “rather

his

having to be

like

sick.”

When

Gormenghast he found himself prevented by

tried to reconstruct

body and the

his sick

took on his concentration. Titus Alone can thus be read as a

illness

tary

he

on the imaginative

feat of Titus

Gormenghast

is

a world created of words,

continue to exist without

architect. If

its

comment

Groan and Gormenghast and on the

The

impossibility of returning to the world created in them.

that

toll his

it is

it is

tragic irony

self-sufficient

and can

dream come

a solipsist’s

is

true,

also turned into Peake’s nightmare.

it

Although there Titus Alone

are three Titus books, the

unfinished in that

is

it is

is

not properly a

composed of fragments which

would have worked out and expanded into that

work a

which we now have. The fragments that comprise the one hundred

concentration, but

it

the castle was

forever out of Gormenghast. Titus’s escape from the castle

sanity.

But

as

second book,

Mr

Flay, a reluctant exile

illness

and banishment

Lordship? No, boy, no

from his kingdom was

Gormenghast reality

— the

is

also

.

.

.

all readers,

’’

Peake’s

illness.

not a reaction against reality:

The

a

form

threatening to his

in this context are closely related:

accompanied by

reality of language.

felt so

is

from Gormenghast, implies in the

but banished.’

be no more than a network of

it

(.

own self-banishment .

.)

constitutes an imaginative

black marks on the white page

signifiers

which

are

may

open and available

to

but writing also guarantees a certain concreteness, a state of

permanence. its

if

powers of

Peake had to stop writing, and death took

of self-imposed banishment from the area Peake

‘111,

failing

was concentration that was required

to be rebuilt. Because of illness

“

author

more acceptable form than

and twenty-two short chapters are indicative of Peake’s

him

its

trilogy.

What

Peake’s books will always signify

is

Gormenghast and

existence as a signified in the minds of the readers. Titus, therefore, does

not need to return to Gormenghast; without even seeing

it

at the

end of

Mervyn Peake

Titus Alone

135

he can turn away assured of

its

existence,

its

autonomy, and

its

permanence: His heart beat out more rapidly, for something was growing

some kind of knowledge.

A

thrill

of the brain.

A

.

.

.

synthesis. For

Titus was recognising in a flash of retrospect that a

new phase

of

which he was only half aware, had been reached. It was a sense of maturity, almost of fulfilment. He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him.

Peake could also turn from Gormenghast, certain that inhabit

it

it

was because of a

failure of the physical

if

he could no longer

body and not of the

imagination. “Mervyn Peake’s Black House:

Philip Redpath,

No.

Ariel 20,

1

1

An

Allegory of

Mind and Body,”

(January 1989): 68-69, 73

Bibliography Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor. 1939. Shapes and Sounds. 1940.

Rhymes without Reason. 1944. Titus Groan. 1946.

The Craft of Letters

the

Lead

Pencil. 1946.

from a Lost Uncle (From Polar Regions). 1948.

Drawings. 1949.

Gormenghast. 1950.

The Glassbbwers. 1950.

Mr. Pye. 1953. Figures of Speech. 1954.

Titus Alone. 1959.

The Rhyme of

the Flying

Bomb. 1962.

Poems and Drawings. 1965.

A A

Reverie of

Bone and Other Poems. 1967.

Book of Nonsense. 1972.

Selected Poems. 1972.

Drawings. 1974. Writings and Drawings. Ed.

Maeve Gilmore and Shelagh Johnson.

1974.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

136

Twelve Poems 1939-1960. 1975.

Boy

in

Darkness. 1976.

Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings. Ed. Sketches from Bleak House. Ed.

Maeve Gilmore.

1978.

Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen. 1983.

—

M.

P. Shiel

1865-1947

Matthew phipps SHIEL was bom on J uly 21,1 865 on the island of Montserrat in the West Indies. He was the son of an Irish preacher, Matthew David Shiel, and Priscilla Ann Shiel, who had previously had eight daughters. At ,

the age of fifteen Shiel was crowned king of the small island of Redonda,

and successors to

War

(1899)

is

this title retain control of

partially set

His novel Contraband of

it.

on Redonda. Shiel attended Harrison College,

Barbados, from 1881 to 1883. In 1885 he sailed to England and enrolled

London, but apparently

at King’s College,

studied medicine for a few

months

at St.

without a degree.

left

He

also

Bartholomew’s Hospital.

Shiel had begun writing as a boy; at the age of twelve he had written a full-length novel.

Around 1890 he began

a career in journalism. His

first

book, Prince Zaleski (1895), contained three long stories about an eccentric detective. Shiel also wrote several adventure novels with Louis Tracy under

the

pseudonym Gordon Holmes. Shapes

in the Fire

(1896) was a well-received

story collection that contained “Vaila,” a tale Shiel later rewrote into

House of Sounds”

(in

The Pale Ape and Other

Pulses, 1911),

which H.

Lovecraft considered one of the best horror stories ever written.

Carolina Garcia

Gomez

“The

He

P.

married

in 1898, but she died a few years later after giving

birth to a daughter.

By the turn of the century Shiel had become his

works are several novels

a prolific novelist.

The Yellow Danger (1898), The Yellow Wave

(1905), and The Dragon (1913; later titled The Yellow Peril )

novels

Weird novels

(

Cold

o’ It, (

—about

an invasion of Europe by Asians. Aside from several

possibility of

Steel,

known works

the

historical

Men

Do, 1904), and romantic adventure

Third Generation, 1903; The Lost Viol, 1905), Shiel’s best-

are

two

fantasies:

The Purple Cloud (1901), an apocalyptic

novel about the destruction of the (1901), about a

the

1899; The Man-Stealers, 1900), murder mysteries (The

1902; The Evil That

Unto

Among

man who

human

gains control of

137

race,

all

and The Lord of

the

the oceans of the world.

Sea

,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

138

From 1913

1923 Shiel published

to

unsuccessfully

on

he appears to have been working

which were neither published nor produced. During

plays,

he was

this period

little;

London and

living alternately in

He

Paris.

married

Lydia Fawley around 1918; they separated in 1929. By the 1920s Shiel’s productivity increased again: he published several mystery novels

Old

Woman Got Home

of his earlier novels for a

Men Are

the

1927; Dr. Krasinski’s Secret, 1929; The Black Box,

1930), a collection of tales ( Here

Young

(How

new

Comes

the

Lady, 1928), and revised several

edition published by Victor Gollancz. The

Coming! (1937)

is

Although Shiel

a science fiction novel.

scorned organized religion, he was fascinated by the figure of Jesus, and

Above

several of his novels (The Last Miracle, 1906; This religious themes. Late in life

1933) are on

All,

he was working on a long

treatise entitled

Jesus.

home

Shiel spent his last years at a

A

young man named John Gawsworth became fascinated with

and

assisted in Shiel’s later writing, collaborating

The

Invisible Voices

is

now

forgotten, but

and

a

volume of

on February

Literature (1950). Shiel died

work

on

his

volume of

a

work

stories,

(1935), and later editing a posthumous collection of

Shiel’s Best Short Stories (1948)

17, 1947.

essays, Science, Life,

Much

and

of his voluminous

The Purple Cloud and some short

a following for their bizarrerie of conception

1

Horsham, Sussex.

called L’Abri in

stories retain

and exoticism of

style.

Critical Extracts

ARTHUR RANSOME elled

room

it is

I

knocked, and went into the most dishev-

possible to imagine.

There was

a big

bed

in

it,

unmade, the

bed-clothes tumbled anyhow, several broken chairs, and a washing-stand

with a basin out of which someone had taken a

bite.

The

novelist, in a

dressing-gown open at the neck, and showing plainly that there was nothing

was writing

but skin beneath

it,

he covered them.

A very pretty little Irish girl, of about nineteen or twenty,

picked them up as they

fell,

best to quiet the baby

who

They stood up when

came

disorder, but the

I

at a desk,

throwing off his sheets

and sorted them, sprawled in,

all

at the

same time doing her

over her, as she

and the novelist

baby howled so loudly that

it

as fast as

sat

on the

floor.

tried to apologise for the

was impossible to hear him.

— M.

139

P. Shiel

“Take

out!” he shouted to the

it

and carried I

it

out of the room.

(.

girl,

and she obediently picked

later,

and always the room was

same condition, the child howling, the wife but working.

How

drop from his desk. Sometimes

he could work! Sheet

when

me

to

He was

out of his hand. wife its

and child

work completely

could write in any

soon

as

in the

as the

pen was

quite contented in the lodging-house, living with

in a single

He seemed more amused

room.

inconveniences. “After

intellect,

off his

used to

down and smoke,

sit

He

while his pen whirled imperturbably to the end.

and he could throw

after sheet

upon him he would be

called

I

in the

pretty, untidy as ever, the great

middle of a chapter, and then he would ask

noise,

up

.)

.

saw him more than once there

man unwashed

it

all,”

he would

say, “I

and the pretence would be exposed

than annoyed by

have to pretend to superb once

at

if

I

let

such things

worry me.”

“A

Arthur Ransome, pp. 256-57,

Novelist,” Bohemia in London

(New

York: Dodd, Mead, 1907),

260

Speaking of (W. Paul) Cook, he hath just lent H. P. LOVECRAFT me two books, one of which is Bram Stoker’s last production, The Lair of the White Worm. (. .) The other volume Cook lent is a very different proposition, since it contains what both Cook and oh, how different! .

—

I

solemnly declare to be a peerless masterpiece

— the

the generation, and by a living and almost wholly

book

is

a collection of weird tales by

M.

P. Shiel,

finest horror-story of

unknown

and

is

author.

called

—

The

after the

— The Ape. Some of the things mediocre, though though hardly weird. Three or four smooth. One —“Huguenin’s Wife”, “The superfine “The Great King”, and the masterpiece! How can describe “The House of Sounds”. Yes —

opening story

Pale

are

are

diabolically clever,

is

Bride”,

are

this last

its

all

poison-grey “insidious madness”?

of the

(1908)

House of Usher”, I

shall

or that

is

If

I

I

say that

it is

one feature mirrors

very like

my own

“The

“Alchemist”,

not even have suggested the utterly unique delirium of arctic

wastes, titan seas, insane brazen towers, centuried malignity, frenzied

and cataracts, and above cosmic

SOUND

another of

Fall

.

.

my own.

.

all

waves

hideous, insistent, brain-petrifying, Pan-accursed

God! but

after that story

Shiel has done so

much

I

shall

better than

never

my

try to write

best, that

I

am

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

140

left

breathless

America

and

— and almost

H.

And

inarticulate.

Donald Wandrei (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House,

My first

happens to be lucky enough to Lord of

Letters:

impressions of Shiel were rather

think, indeed, that this might be anybody’s experience, unless

I

the

in

255

CARL VAN VECHTEN mixed.

unknown

Frank Belknap Long (7 October 1923), Selected

191 1-1924, ed. August Derleth and p.

virtually

is

so in his native Britain.

P. Lovecraft, Letter to

1965),

man

yet the

Sea

for

,

curiously

uneven

execution

—and

hit first

better novels,

The

example, for the work of this imaginative adept

—not

a little of

is

bearing the mark of undue haste in

it

and appraisement

intelligent perusal

its

upon one of the

he

is

further compli-

cated by the fact that this author from year to year has varied his “tone,” style

and form yielding to the mood of the new matter presented. Unfortunately, did not start out with the best books. in that

same Keynote Series which

I

began with Prince

originally harboured

and The Three Impostors (by Arthur Machen), and I

liked

it,

but the next two volumes that

names here

whom I

I

— almost caused me

automatically opened.

I

read

—

I

do not

not mention their

However, book-sellers

new packages which number of books by Shiel

to dispatch

recall the exact

do remember that when,

I

The Great God Pan

shall

had examined with mounting enthusiasm before

Purple Cloud, but

published

could honestly say that

I

to forsake the quest.

had put on the scent continued

I

I

Zaleski,

I

reading this extremely long novel at four a.m.,

at I

one

I

stumbled upon The

sitting,

I

had finished

cried aloud with the

morning

stars.

Nevertheless,

if

they are lucky enough to begin with one of the better

of Shiel’s romances, most readers,

fancy, will find

I

it

necessary to acquaint

themselves with several others before they can appreciate with any exactitude the magic of this writer or can capitulate to his special charm.

novice in the matter, to be vitality

sure,

should be perfectly aware at once of the

and glamour, the presence of the grand manner, whether he

Sea, but

Shiel, apparently, to

will see further

an early reader,

of wild romances in the Cristo. It

is

only a

manner

little later

Any

than is

a

this, at first,

I

in

am

The Lord of not so

the

sure, for

mere maker of plots, a manufacturer

of Jules Verne or of the

Dumas

that one perceives that here there

of is

Monte -

a philo-

sophic consciousness, a sophisticated naivete, an imaginative au dela, of

M.

P.

which the satisfy

plot

is

only the formal expression. Shiel,

M onte-Cristo,

any admirer of The Count of

also satisfy

two

141

Shiel

any reader

who

feel

I

convinced, will

but, in the end,

he

will

George Meredith or Herman Melville,

cares for

whom

with

writers, as unlike as the Poles in themselves,

the author of

The Lord of the Sea has a certain esoteric affinity, and gradually it will further become evident that Shiel may be compared more reasonably with the

W.

H. G. Wells of the early romances, and even with

H. Mallock, than

with the creator of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Carl Van Vechten, “Matthew Phipps Shiel” (1924), Excavations: A Book of Advocacies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), pp. 150-52

THOMAS EARLE WELBY tales as

I

The two main

merits of such of his

read twenty odd years ago were the largeness of the central idea

and the flaming romanticism of the

style.

Both merits

are very rare in

of the kind. Writers of mystery or adventure stories, or, serial

stories

may

‘intrigue,’ as

if

they

the cant phrase goes, or excite

but the trick of the thing, once explained,

us;

more broadly, of

melodrama, usually pride themselves on their ingenuity; and

have ingenuity, the

work

is

explained away; whereas

mind long after the reader knows what gruesome, what you will, it really is an idea. And

Shiel’s central idea remains in the

the issue like

is.

Fantastic,

most genuine

Then

there

is

ideas,

it is

of a massive simplicity.

the flushed romantical

gant efflorescence. Romanticism run mad, there

is,

breaking out into an extrava-

style,

might be

it

said.

But frequently

amidst the hot colouring and the frenetic vigour, a surprising

propriety of simile and metaphor.

With anguished

Take

this,

from a melodramatic passage:

gradualness, as a glacier

stirs,

tender as a nerve

moved, I stole, toward her through the belt of bush, the knife behind my back stealthy though slow till there came a restraint, a check I felt myself held back had to stop one of the sheaves of my beard having of each leaf that touched me,

— —

I

— —

—

caught in a limb of prickly^pear.

The amount

of things said in those few lines

‘As a glacier are

stirs,

is

matter for wonder.

tender as a nerve of each leaf that touched me’: those

words that would have been applauded in Stevenson, because his way

of writing invited readers to be

on the

alert for felicities.

But here, in Shiel,

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

142

the similes are not merely

new and

much

remarkable; they are very

to the

purpose, and convey the icy cruelty and nervous agitation of the dual

And

man.

the grotesque check to his murderous progress

reconciling us to the purpose of his evil self by

which he has

into

Thomas

Earle

Welby

“M.

(as “Stet”),

an invention

reminder of the savagery

fallen as supposedly, for all purposes

one survivor of a poisoned

actually, the

its

is

till

this

encounter

earth.

P. Shiel,”

Back Numbers (London: Constable,

1929), pp. 100-101

MARY ROSS ipate eagerly,

M.

With

the gusto his readers have learned to antic-

The Purple Cloud ) paints one of the most

P. Shiel (in

mankind

captivating romantic dreams of sole survivor starts again to is

a

—

cosmos stricken

a

work out the myth of the

young physician who had been engaged

in

first

which

in

a

man. His narrator

an Arctic expedition; when

came he was at the North Pole itself, looking for the first time with humanity’s eyes on the secrets that eternity had kept inviolate. Only there, in intolerable cold, did the deadly volcanic gas spare a man, the purple cloud

for at that

low temperature

was precipitated

it

as rain.

And

he pushed

as

southward, past the companions of his expedition, unaccountably dead, he

he had come back to a world where flowers

realized slowly that

where man’s inventions stood

man

himself and

all

of peach blossoms.

Back

(.

as

.

in

which

.)

should be run by liquid has actually

come

motor

week-ending

Constantinople

monuments on every hand, but

bloomed,

other breathing creatures lay dead amid a faint scent

in 1901, for purposes of

cars,

still

air.

But his

into being.

for wine,

romance, M.

He

Adam

P. Shiel postulated that ships

lacks the

runs up and

down

magic carpet which

in ships

and

trains

and

in Gallipoli to get salycilate of soda, dashing to

but never does he have

—nor apparently imagine

an airplane. However, even with the North Pole discovered and airplanes achieved, there tales

is

no whit

which people have

justify

themselves.

eventually, his Eve,

of appetite,

less

told

imagine, for the cosmic fairy

from time immemorial to soothe, divert and

How Adam

Jeffson ran riot in his world

and by her was

nepenthe to any one harassed by

more fundamental immediate

I

civilized again,

is

first-rate foolery,

traffic regulation,

realities. If

and found, potent

income tax blanks, or

you would

summon up

a really

M.

143

P. Shiel

glowing and persuasive orgy of the imagination, here

do your bidding. Mary Ross, “A World p.

May

1930,

MARSH

The English Review is quoted as saying of M. P. T. “Had Carlyle shared Coleridge’s penchant for laudanum, he might

have written

thus.’’

And The New

drunk with the hottest tells

York Herald Tribune Books, 4

14

FRED Shiel,

New

Toy,”

for a

Aladdin’s lamp to

is

us of a wilder

juices of our language.’’

if

not of the

Coming you observe an Irishman making

“A

letter.

genius it:

“He

Mad, drunk or

of.’’

would seem to be deserving of his

them anyway,

said,

Arthur Machen puts

wonderland than Poe dreamed

apocalyptic, Mr. Shiel

that prompted

York Evening Post once

blurbs, of the spirit

Young

In The

a fairyland of science

finding the “little people’’ in the astro^physical heavens,

Men Are

and

politics,

making mysticism

of mathematical formulae and with Irish fancy and recklessness scattering

himself about in what to distressing. little

think he

I

method

is

my more

sober

mad. But there

way of thinking is

on the whole some poetry and some virtue if

in his madness.

Fred T. Marsh, [Review of The Young Books, 12

December 1937,

EDWARD SHANKS Purple Cloud.

p.

Men Are

I

would say

New

a few

When

it

words more about The

liable to

describe and they lose their meaning. This

book would appear

the public mind. That failure did

particular spot

on the

have trodden the

to date

was written the North Pole was

unreached, and the recent failure of Nansen to reach

Shiel, the idea that there

York Herald Tribune

become dated. The the period which they purport to

Books about the future are

with some definiteness.

Coming!],

10

contemporary world moves forward into

itself

is

make

it

was

credible the fancy

still

which

lively in

inspired

was something mystically forbidden about

surface of the earth.

ice of the Pole

Now

not one but several

and we are told that

it is

still

this

men

destined to be

Clapham Junction of the airlines of the future. But who cares a rap about this when he reads Shiel’s account of Adam Jeffson’s journey or the

regards

it

as

anything but a proper and adequate prelude to the tremendous

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

144

fantasy

which follows? This book was

a legend,

an apocalypse, out of space,

out of time. In speaking of Shiel,

it

he was a ‘one-book’ man. be.

There

is

To some which

a parallel case

is

will always first

avoid giving the impression that

difficult to

extent at any rate, that he must always

worth mentioning. Herman Melville

is

and foremost be the author of Moby Dick. For

as

many

generations ahead as one can see critics and readers will continue to pay at

any rate lip-service to that one book. But among the readers thus

enced some

will always seek in other

which made that one

or frustrated

So

it

work can be seen to seek

it

out.

about him I

mean,

The

be with Shiel.

will

will

that he

is

books the qualities however attenuated

great.

gold which shows so richly in his finest

and there

in all the others

They

will always

be rewarded. For the

first

and

had the character of a poet and

Old Testament manner. His

in the

be readers anxious

it

He

a prophet

—

I

could not

with the demands made on authors did, his it

own

indomitable inner

would be possible

to read a

—

a prophet,

vision always approached the

one has to own,

believed intensely in what he saw, whether

was a depopulated world or a world

economic theory. He may

thing to be said

last

apocalyptic, just as his style often approached (sometimes,

too closely) the dithyrambic.

influ-

self

set right

tell

who

by the application of an

—have attempted

to

compromise

desire popular success. If

kept on breaking

I

doubt whether

his

books without

in.

whole page of any of

he ever

recognizing the author. Edward Shanks, “The Address of Edward Shanks

at the Funeral of

Shiel” (1947), cited in A. Reynolds Morse, The Works of

Study in Bibliography (Dayton,

Vol.

2,

Part

2,

pp.

and one of

A

Reynolds Morse Foundation/JDS Books, 1980),

Shiel’s last important

Men Are Coming and ,

his

P. Shiel Updated:

469-70

SAM MOSKOWITZ The Young

OH:

M.

Matthew Phipps

it is

most damning novels.

at

A

once one of

work of his

fiction

was

most imaginative

sort of super flying saucer lands in

England and fantastic flaming-haired creatures whisk away an aging Dr.

Warwick. They

travel three times the speed of light to the first

Jupiter. There, the

Warwick

in a

moon

of

unhatched egg of one of the space creatures engages Dr.

prolonged discussion on philosophy, science, sociology, and

M.

145

P. Shiel

religion. Dr.

Warwick

given a draught of immortality and a parting message

is

from the space creatures: Farewell.

bear you this message from the Egg’s Mother; that she

1

resonance with your

sets a detector to

rays: so,

if

in

an emergency

worthy of her notice you, having on your psychophone, send out your soul in worship to her, she

still

journeying in this eastern

region of worlds, your wish will reach her.

Returned to earth and immortal, Dr. Warwick organizes the “young men” into a group of virtual storm troopers to defeat the “old

planning a “fascistic” movement. to overthrow religion

A

and

will

perform a

cate, top, or stop

political goal of the

substitute science (reason) in

revolutionary war ensues.

them he

The

To win

scientific

tells

“miracle” and ckiallenges religion to dupli-

him. Fie sends a message out to the space creatures to

They respond with

drowns or

place.

over the people, Dr. Warwick

power of science over

create a universal storm, thereby illustrating the religion.

its

men” who are “young men” is

which

a globular hurricane

and inadvertently destroys the

kills millions,

sinks land masses,

air fleet

of the “old

men” who have the “young men” just about licked in a fair fight. As far as bloodshed is concerned, Shiel scoffs at the notion that “the next war will wreck civilization.” Wars are merely “inconveniences,” he avers, concluding, “ Cursed are the

meek! For they

shall not inherit the

earth.”

Sam

Moskowitz, “The World, the Devil, and M.

Shapers of Science Fiction (Cleveland:

DON HERRON calls

How

the

Old

Woman Got Home

devotee, this book ranks

many

problems.

The mother

of hero

World Publishing Co., 1963),

pp.

155-56

Mr. (A. Reynolds) Morse, Shiel’s bibliographer,

idiosyncratic novel, in a style only

presents

P. Shiel,” Explorers of the Infinite:

among (.

.

“real Shiel.”

M.

P.

That

it is

—

a fast-moving,

Shiel ever used. For the Shiel

his best. For the mystery fan,

however,

it

.)

Caxton

Hazlitt

is

kidnapped; reason unknown.

A

couple of suspicious characters have been noticed in the neighborhood by Hazlitt, but

he

is

preoccupied with finding a hand-to-mouth living, eating in

soup kitchens, searching for work wealth,

is

—then suddenly he comes

installed in a luxurious

townhouse

.

.

.,

and

into miraculous

forgets about his

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

146

mother

for a

When

few chapters.

Hazlitt

mother’s apartment has been found

ajar,

there

is

all right.

Even when her abduction away

Europe on a

to

woman

How

given

it is

Old

the .

.

my

.

woman

with the old

will see

I

her on

it

off

gone:

him:

—Tuesday

say.”

confirmed, Hazlitt allows hismelf to be drawn

to be interrupted in his effort to find the old

on Science and

countless times, usually for speechifying

Shiel said of that in

trip,

is

informed that the door of his

moment, throwing

“Really?” went Hazlitt; then in a

“Well, but she

is

Woman Got Home political system.”

that

The

it

had the

politics.

“distinction,

on

chapters of exposition

among the characters, halt the action like a collision with a brick wall. Words and intellectual concepts rush on at breakneck pace. But movement toward finding the old woman, solving the

his system, given in conversation

mystery, stops.

To

Shiel clearly was not writing a simple mystery.

point as

enough

he were engaged in writing

if

a true

criticism. Possibly the reason Shiel,

carp over this or that

whodunit would be petty

once he became established

as

an author, chose to work in so many different genres was so that he could

convey

his concepts

on Science

to several different audiences, readers

who

might not come across them otherwise. Therefore Shiel spread the word

on Science

who But is

who

to those

read mysteries, those

who

read romance, those

read adventure, in case some of these readers did not read in if

Hazlitt

falls

all fields.

short as a desirable hero for a mystery, and he does, he

equally unfit to be a Shielian overman. In Hazlitt the contradictions of

Shiel himself are embodied. Shiel, so life

not

the idea of the overman of his

life

his

but as a writer of popular fiction. Shiel, obsessed with

as a scientist

last years

enamoured of Science, who spent

who

conquers

in poverty

and

all

with his

who spent the man with great

abilities,

virtually forgotten.

A

ideas that did not manifest themselves in his actual existence. Hazlitt in

the novel also mouths

overman

is

contingency

the right words; he does nothing else right.

The

a superior figure, trained, able to take care of himself in any

—

yet Hazlitt earns nothing by

wealth in the novel his escape attempts successful,

all

is

given to him.

fail;

comes too

and the

When

last

late: his rescuers

end of the novel does Hazlitt take

means of he

is

his

own

effort.

His

imprisoned at one point

attempt, which might have proven

break in the door. Only at the very

truly purposeful action,

and then he

blunders ruinously. Hazlitt’s ineffectual presence as the main character destroys this

book

as a mystery,

and only the sleuthing of Mary Semper, a

M.

147

P. Shiel

woman who

neighborhood, provides a rallying point.

lives in Mrs. Hazlitt’s

Mary Semper

is

coolly logical, never misses a beat, a fine detective figure

much too brief to offset Hazlitt’s persona. How the Old Woman Got Home is great fare for those interested in Shiel’s ideas, in his monumental command of language, but it shows that mere style however fast-paced the wording does not make up for the lack of all in all,

but her scenes are

—

—

sleuthing action, which

is

the substance of a mystery.

And regretfully Shiel’s

characters are motivated by hidden relationships, as in The Lost Viol, and

not by dark enough forces to produce a murder. Without murder, a mystery

many

novel does not provide

Don

thrills.

Herron, “The Mysteries of M.

Essays, ed.

P. Shiel,” Shiel in Diverse

Hands:

A

Collection of

A. Reynolds Morse (Cleveland: Reynolds Morse Foundation, 1983), pp.

189-90

BRIAN STABLEFORD of

M.

P. Shiel

He was

a considerable extent, the concerns

common concerns of the more serious writers of romance. He wrote several future war stories and one

were the

early British scientific disaster story.

To

He was

interested in evolutionary philosophy

and socialism.

deeply suspicious of the hold which religious ideas had over the

One could say the same of Wells and of Beresford, modifying hardly a word. To all these matters, however, he brought

minds of

a

his contemporaries.

determined idiosyncrasy of viewpoint which isolated him

Although parts of

it

his particular

complex of

ideas

as a writer.

was his alone, the individual

were firmly rooted in nineteenth century thought. More often

than not, they were rooted in aspects of nineteenth century thought that were themselves eccentric and which have since credibility they

once had.

George rather than of Marx; rather than of Darwin. deist rather

Shiel’s

his evolutionism

Even

his

is

is

any fashionability or

the economics of Henry

the evolutionism of Spencer

dogged insistence on being reckoned

a

than an agnostic or an atheist cannot conceal the fact that his

anticlericalism

is

allied to the ideas of

Comte and Ludwig rised his position in

to be

Thomas Henry Huxley, Auguste

Feuerbach. Thirty-seven years of living

century had not shaken Shiel’s

wanted

economics

lost

from the trap of age.

to these ideas

the twentieth

when he summa-

Men Are Coming. No doubt he would have a young man in spirit, but in fact he had not escaped

The Young

reckoned

commitment

in

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

148

The genuinely

original aspect of Shiel’s philosophical system

to be

is

found in his social and moral philosophy. The character of his commitment

commitment to Fabianism, and though he borrowed his economic theory from Henry George (or, perhaps, came to the same conclusions on his own) his political rhetoric is very to socialism

very different from Wells’

is

from George’s.

different

For Shiel, the exploitation of the working classes by capitalists and land-

was not bad simply because

lords

it

was exploitation.

He was

not at

all

make the way that

interested in lifting the yoke of misery from the workers simply to

them

comfortable. Exploitation

nineteenth century

was bad

religiosity

We

What

are,

stifled scientific inquiry. It

The

injustice of the system

for Shiel; the suffering of individuals

was of no conse-

mattered was that evolution was being held back.

itself

is

an

evil,

suspect metaphysical system

in his

for the body.

it

(.

.

.)

of course, perfectly free to decide that Shiel’s brand of moral

collectivism

absurd, but

for Shiel, in precisely

was bad: because

mind, rather than

for the

was a minor matter, quence.

was bad,

we cannot say

advocacy of

it.

It is

that

and given that

it

is

embedded

we might even be tempted it is

in a highly

to dismiss

it

as

incoherent or that Shiel was inconsistent

the presence of this underlying pattern of thought

many of Shiel’s plots, and makes them both fascinating More than any other leading figure in the history of British

that enlivens so

and disturbing. scientific

romance he presents an imaginative challenge

work does not have the imaginative but is

it

is

fertility

to the reader. His

of Wells’ speculative fictions,

not so easy to take up an intellectual position relative to

his:

he

harder to engage in intellectual dialogue. Brian Stableford, “The Politics of Evolution: Philosophical Fiction of

M.

P. Shiel,” Shiel in Diverse

Hands:

Themes

in the Speculative

A Collection of Essays,

ed.

A. Reynolds

Morse (Cleveland: Reynolds Morse Foundation, 1983), pp. 390-91

E. F.

BLEILER

Eminent

Shiel’s overall literary stature

literary figures like

ton Murray, and L. is

likely to

is

highly ambiguous.

Russell,

John Middle-

Hartley have praised his work, but a modern reader

be more impressed with Shiel’s defects: melodramatic

development, that

P.

Rebecca West, Bertrand

is

difficulties

flattered

if

called

plots,

weak

with form, cardboard characters, and a message

an eccentric variety of socialism.

contrary estimations be reconciled?

How

can these

M.

149

P. Shiel

The

answer, probably,

means that

is

that Sbiel

is

a writer’s writer, by

which one

a fellow artist can admire certain aspects of technique. Shiel’s

imagination was remarkable and his

remarkable

vowebsound’’ (“On Reading’’).

moment, the

the

(.

.

is

As for Shiel

not very strong, and his devoted

the writer

— the

novelistic daredevil

who plotted like Cecil flamboyant Napoleons who smashed mankind

decorated his writing like Tiffany

DeMille and chronicled

and of every (accented)

.)

cultus of Shiel

followers are few in number.

who

a

handling assonances, and his mind was so programmed

gift for

that he was perpetually “conscious of each consonant

At

one

He had

could match Shiel’s use of the decorated style of the 1890’s.

else

No

enormous.

stylistic virtuosity

glass,

—

B. in

purple prose, drew horrible monsters from beyond death, hid Jesus comfortably in Tibet, shattered the landed aristocracy of England, pulled diamonds

from the sky

—while he never

not dead. The Purple Cloud remains the best the

Sea

is

Dumas, and the

is

man” novel; The Lord of the manner of Alexandre

“last

a fine, overloaded fantasy of history in

pere;

promise, his best work

fulfilled his early

How the Old Woman Got Home is a demonstration of virtuosity;

stories of Shapes in the Fire are the best things of their sort since

Poe. E. F. Bleiler,

“M.

P. Shiel,”

Supernatural Fiction Writers, ed. E.

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), Vol.

1,

pp.

F.

Bleiler

(New

366-67

Bibliography Prince Zaleski. 1895.

The Rajah’s Shapes

in the Fire:

an

An

Sapphire. 1896.

Being a Mid-Winter-Night’s Entertainment in

Two

Parts

and

Interlude. 1896.

American Emperor (with Louis Tracy). 1897.

The Yellow Danger. 1898. Contraband of War:

Cold

The

Steel.

A

Tale of the Hispano- American Struggle. 1899, 1914.

1899, 1929.

M amStealers:

The Lord of

An

the Sea.

Incident in the Life of the Iron

1901, 1924.

The Purple Cloud. 1901, 1929. The Weird

o’ It.

1902.

Duke.

1900, 1927.

York:

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

150

Unto

The

Third Generation. 1903.

the

That

Evil

Men

Do. 1904.

The Yellow Wave. 1905. The Lost

Viol. 1905.

The Late Tenant (with Louis Tracy). 1906. The Last Miracle. 1906, 1929. The White Wedding. 1908. The

of Lies. 1908.

Isle

By Force of Circumstances (with Louis Tracy). 1909. This Knot of Life. 1909.

The Pale Ape and Other The House of

Pulses. 1911.

Silence (with Louis Tracy). 1911.

The Dragon (The Yellow

Peril).

The Hungarian Revolution:

1913.

An Eyewitness’s

Account by Charles Henry Schmitt

(translator). 1919.

Children of the Wind. 1923.

How

Old

the

Here Comes

Woman Got Home. the

1927.

Lady. 1928.

Dr. Krasinskis Secret. 1929.

The Black Box. 1930. This

Above

All.

1933.

Say

Au

The

Invisible Voices

Not Goodbye. 1933.

R’voir But

(with John Gawsworth). 1935.

(Poems.) Ed. John Gawsworth. 1936.

The Young

Men Are

Coming! 1937.

Best Short Stories. Ed. Science, Life,

and

John Gawsworth. 1948.

Literature. Ed.

John Gawsworth. 1950.

The Good Machen. 1963. Xelucha and Others. 1975. Prince Zaleski and

The

New

Cummings King Monk. 1977.

King. Ed. A. Reynolds Morse. 1980.

—

Clark Ashton Smith 1893-1961

CLARK ASHTON SMITH was born on January nia, the

13, 1893, in

Long Valley,

Califor-

only son of an Englishman, Timeus Smith, and a California native,

Fanny Gaylord. In 1902 Smith’s father purchased a Auburn, California, where he

built a

tract of land outside of

house that had no

electricity or

running

water.

Smith completed grammar school but withdrew from high school

after a

few days, declaring his intention to be a poet. Later he refused a

Guggenheim

scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley. Smith

became, however, prodigiously self-educated by reading the dictionary and the Encyclopaedia Britannica through at least twice.

As an

adolescent Smith wrote

many

stories influenced

by Poe, William

Beckford, and the Arabian Nights, including a 100,000-word unpublished novel, The Black Diamonds.

He

at the age of seventeen, after

sold his

first stories

which he abandoned

to the Black

Cat

in

1910

fiction for fifteen years,

concentrating instead on poetry. The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) created a

in California literary circles,

stir

and Smith was hailed

genius” akin to Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne.

Much

as a

“boy

of this early verse

sings rhapsodically of the boundless gulfs of the universe, especially a long

poem, The Hashish-Eater; third volume,

Ebony and

or,

The Apocalypse of

Crystal:

Poems

in

Evil,

contained in Smith’s

Verse and Prose (1922). Smith

was greatly influenced by George Sterling, with

whom

he maintained an

extensive correspondence between 1911 and 1926. Smith’s later poetry

volumes

Odes and Sonnets (1918), Ebony and

The Dark Chateau (1951),

Spells

and

Philtres

Crystal,

(1958)

—

Sandalwood (1925),

failed to attract

much

attention outside the fantasy and science fiction communities. His poetry includes translations from French, particularly of Baudelaire, and

poems

written in French and Spanish. His Selected Poems, whose preparation Smith

completed in 1949 but which was not published until 1971, includes more than 500 of his poems, but many remain uncollected and unpublished. His prose

poems

are considered

among

the finest in English. 151

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

152

Between 1913 and 1921 Smith that

suffered

—

to support himself.

to the

He

—

fruit picking,

well digging, min-

contributed a column of pensees and aphorisms

Auburn Journal between 1923 and 1926. Around

who never

although largely a recluse a reputation as a

left

time Smith,

this

the state of California, developed

bohemian fond of wine, women, and unconventional

and philosophical beliefs. He carried on

woman, Genevieve K. in

illnesses

him a semLinvalid. Recovering his health, Smith now found himself

left

obliged to undertake various menial jobs ing

from various nervous

Sully,

social

a lengthy relationship with a married

and perhaps had

with other

liaisons

women

Auburn. In 1922 Smith

writers

came

into contact with H. P. Lovecraft,

and the two

remained close correspondents until Lovecraft’s death

in 1937.

It

was perhaps from Lovecraft’s example that Smith resumed the writing of fiction: in

later

1925 he wrote “The Abominations of Yondo,” and a few years

he began writing voluminously

for the

weird and science fiction pulp

magazines, notably Weird Tales and Wonder Stories. In such tales as

“The

City of the Singing Flame’’ (1931) and “The Monster of the Prophecy”

(1932) he effected a distinctive union between pure fantasy and science fiction.

Many

of his tales

fall

into cycles using a

common

setting.

Among

the most notable of these are the tales of Averoigne (a mythical region in

medieval France), Poseidonis (an island off the coast of Atlantis), the

lost

continents Zothique and Hyperborea, and the remote planet Xiccarph.

Smith’s

first

volume of tales was the selTpublished Double Shadow and Other

Fantasies (1933).

Smith’s fiction writing was inspired in part by the need to support his parents,

who

suffered increasing health problems in their later years.

When

they died (his mother in 1935 and his father in 1937), Smith’s output of fiction declined sharply

and he turned his attention to painting and sculpture.

All his major collections of tales

Out of Space and Time (1942),

Lost Worlds

(1944), Genius Loci (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960), Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964),

from his

and Other Dimensions (1970)

stories of the 1930s.

—

are largely

drawn

These volumes were published by Arkham

House, whose founder, August Derleth, maintained a close correspondence with Smith from the late 1920s to Smith’s death. In his later years

Smith

suffered increasing neglect, as his writing fell out

Some and museums. He

of fashion with the developing fields of fantasy and science fiction.

of his artwork was, however, displayed at local galleries

married Carol Jones Dorman, a divorced mother of three children, in 1954.

Clark Ashton Smith

He

wrote

less

and

153

less

with the passage of time, and he died on August

14,

1961, in Pacific Grove, California. His work, however, continues to attract

Roy A. Squires, chapbooks of Smith’s work, notably the poem cycle The

a small cadre of supporters. His literary executor,

issued

many

Hill of

small

Dionysus (1962). His few essays were collected as Planets and Dimensions (1973); his Letters

H.

to

poems were published

appeared in 1987; his complete prose

P. Lovecraft

in 1988;

and

a large

volume of his uncollected

stories,

fragments, and synopses, Strange Shadows, was edited by Steve Behrends in

1989.

Critical Extracts

AMBROSE BIERCE

Kindly convey to young Smith of Auburn

my felicitations on his admirable “Ode to the Abyss” with dignity and power. as

has

It

“The Romes of ruined Moreover,

But

I

He stage,

like is

it is

a

a large theme, treated

striking passages

—such,

spheres.” I’m conscious of

rhetoricians for liking that, for to earth.

many

—

it

jolts

my

for

example,

sin against the

the reader out of the Abyss and back

metaphor which

belittles, instead

of dignifying.

it.

evidently a student of George Sterling, and being in the formative

cannot

—why should he?—conceal the

Ambrose

George Sterling (8 August 1911), The

Bierce, Letter to

Bierce, ed.

fact. Letters of

Ambrose

Bertha Clark Pope (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1922), pp.

180-81

GEORGE STERLING

Who

accouchement of the immortal? take this book in our hands.

I

believe that

A bold

only in years remote from these; and is

one of those things that

I

of us care to be present at the

we

so attend

assertion, truly,

who

first

to

and one demonstrable

— dust wages no war with

should most “like to

are

dust.

come back and

But

it

see.”

Because he has lent himself the more innocently to the whispers of his subconscious daemon, and because he has set those murmurs to purer and

harder crystal than

we

others, by so

much

the longer will the

poems of

^

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

154

Clark Ashton Smith endure. Here indeed

and so

Here we

rust.

much of our

literature

mkhregion” see and

cypresses,

shall find is

larded.

elfin rubies

upon

feel

none or burn

shall

one

a

moth

in Imagination’s “mystic

at his feet, witchTires

brow

his

loot against the forays of

of the sentimental fat with which

little

Rather

is

glow in the nearer

wind from the unknown. The brave

hunters of fly^specks on Art’s cathedral windows will find

little

here for

their trouble,

and both the stupid and the ovensophisticated would best

stare owlishly

and pass

But

let

him who

nor skyscrapers.

by: here are neither kindergartens

worthy by reason of his clear eye and unjaded heart

is

wander across these borders of beauty and mystery and be George

Ebony and

Sterling, “Preface,”

Ashton Smith (Auburn, CA: Auburn

DONALD A. W ANDREI his

poems

Poems

He

is

is

Verse and Prose by Clark

in

Journal, 1922), p.

Imagination

an offering to both.

are

Crystal:

glad.

[ix]

his god, beauty his ideal;

the poet of the infinite, the envoy

of eternity, the amanuensis of beauty. For even as beauty was deity to Keats

and Shelley, so not celebrated

it

it

as

tangible substance.

them with

is

and

to him,

in

its

praise has

he written. But he has

an abstract term or an aesthetic

He

quality, but as a

more

own and

filled

has constructed entire worlds of his

creations of his

own

boundary between that which

fancy. is

And

his beauty has thus crossed the

mortal and that which

is

immortal, and

has become the beauty of strange stars and distant lands, of jewels and cypresses

and moons, of flaming suns and comets, of marble palaces, of

fabled realms

and wonders, of gods, and daemons, and

Space have been his servants, the universe steeds afar;

and the heavens

his

and he has found there

his

and

Some

Time and

domain; with the

stars his

tramping ground, he has wandered in realms a

wondrous beauty and a strange

of his early dreams and the enchanted road to greater, illusory

sorcery.

all

fear,

the goal

manner of

things

fantastical.

of his

poems

are like

shadowed

gold;

some

are like flame'encircled

ebony; some are crystabclear and pure; others are as unearthly starshine.

One

is

coldly wrought in marble; another

are a few glittering diamonds;

aflame, glowing with a secret flower,

is

curiously carved in jade; there

and there are many rubies and emeralds

fire.

Here and there may be found

a

poppy

an orchid from the hot-Ted of Hell, the whisper of an eldritch wind,

a breath

from the burning sands of regions

infernal.

The

wizard

calls,

and

Clark Ashton Smith

summons come

at his imperious

portal to the

155

haunted realms of

who can open

that those

the

fill

air.

A

wander

rises in

the dusk, a treasure-house of gold,

rare incense.

and

women,

tapestries

adorn the

The

sky

is

firmament with

silver

moons. The sky

moon, the

seas of Saturn, the

wars and wonders on some distant is

no place

to popular desire.

have a huge ability

outworn.

Some

sale,

now

burning. Stars hurtle to

is

One may watch

sunken fanes of old Atlantis,

Ashton Smith

useless to search his

It is

for the

work

conven-

for offerings

but die with the author.

Some

writers

have

skill

may and

but desire wealth or immediate fame; their work has not so great a

A

very few have what

called “genius.”

is

write primarily for themselves, or with a certain small group of people

who know

literature in

mind. They are

their prose or poetry with care their lifetime,

and

artists,

labor.

word

They

who

artists;

are

and they fashion

seldom appreciated in

and never have widespread popularity, but the highest minds

who

of every age enjoy their work. These are ones ages,

black. But

authors pander to the public taste; their books

popularity but endures longer.

They

and

star.

in the poetry of Clark

tional, the trite, the

walls,

and

blaze, or suns of green, of crimson, of purple, flame

destruction or waste away. All mysteries are uncertained.

There

passionless

And fabulous demogorgon and hippogriff

guard the golden gateway to the hoarded wealth.

a landscape of the

transmuted so

is

and heavy perfumes, and poisons, and dank odors

in the corridors; silks

and again white comets

open the

may listen to the murmuring waters of phantom throng; and the fen-fires gleam;

ivory; soft lutes play within; fair

fuming censers burn a

across the

wonder

their

to

the door

marble palace

and ebony, and passionate,

arise;

and

faery;

Acheron, or watch the passing of a

and the slow mists

and daemon

genie, witch,

will

speak across the ages to come.

Ashton Smith belongs. One will examine

It is

speak to us across the

to this class that Clark

commonplaces that have so largely crept into our literature; and by so much as he has avoided ephemeral and written of immortal things, by so much the his

poems

in vain for the

longer will his work endure. Donald A. Wandrei, “The Emperor of Dreams,” Overland Monthly ber 1926):

H.

P.

84,

No. 12 (Decem-

380-81

LOVECRAFT

Of younger Americans, none

of cosmic terror so well as the California poet,

artist,

and

strikes the fictionist

note

Clark

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

156

Ashton Smith, whose

bizarre writings, drawings, paintings,

and

stories are

the delight of a sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his background a universe of remote and paralysing fright

on the moons of Saturn,

evil

—jungles of poisonous and and grotesque temples

iridescent blossoms

in Atlantis, Lemuria,

and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of spotted death-fungi spectral countries

beyond

“The Hashish-Eater”, and incredible stars. is

is

earth’s rim. His longest in

in

and most ambitious poem,

pentameter blank verse; and opens up chaotic

vistas of kaleidoscopic

nightmare in the spaces between the

Smith

In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception Mr.

Who

perhaps unexcelled by any writer dead or living.

else has

seen such

gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spaces and

multiple dimensions and lived to H.

P. Lovecraft,

tell

the tale?

“Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), Dagon and Other Macabre

Tales, ed. S. T. Joshi

(Sauk City, WI:

CLARK ASHTON SMITH themes have attracted

Arkham House,

1986), p. 412

In writing fantastic science tales, two

me more than

and have seemed to

others,

offer the

amplest possibilities and the deepest stimulus to imagination: the interplanetary

Among

and the inter-dimensional themes.

be classed, more or

those of

my

stories that

science fiction, the majority have

less accurately, as

dealt either with worlds remote in space, or worlds

hidden from human

perception by their different vibratory rate or atomic composition.

Among my Flame’’

is

several inter-dimensional stories,

the best.

I

owe

its

can

(.

.

.)

think “City of Singing

I

inspiration to several

camping sojourns amid

the high Sierras, at a spot within easy walking distance of the Crater Ridge described by Angarth and Hastane.

wholly in

its

which

it

is

a wild eerie place, differing

geology and general aspect from the surrounding region, exactly

as pictured in the story. It

almost at

The Ridge

first

impressed

my

sight the contiguity of

imagination profoundly, suggesting

some unknown,

invisible world to

might afford the mundane approach and entrance. And, since

have never explored the whole of

its

area,

I

am

I

not altogether sure that

the worn, broken column-ends found by the story’s narrators do not really exist lie

in

somewhere among the curiously shaped and charactered stones that such strange abundance there!

All fantasy apart, however, worlds

is

it

seems to

me

that the theory of interlocking

one that might be offered and defended.

We

know nothing

of the

Clark Ashton Smith

157

ranges of vibration, the forms of matter and energy, that

may

lie

beyond

the testing of our most delicate instruments. Spheres and beings whose

atomic structure removes them from beside the Earth,

no

oblivious of our existence

less

between planes of space, though

more

at least

may float through or than we of theirs. Transit

detection

all

with obvious material

filled

difficulties,

is

readily comprehensible than time-travelling.

Clark Ashton Smith, “Planets and Dimensions” (1940), Planets and Dimensions:

Gary K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage

Collected Essays of Clark Ashton Smith, ed.

Press,

1973), pP 56-57 .

FRANCIS

T.

LANEY

I

had of course heard

a great deal about

Clark Ashton Smith, and seen many pictures of him, but none of

me

prepared at first,

adequately for the

man

himself.

(.

.

but as he gradually comes to feel that he

not ridicule his

mode

of

life

.)

Smith

is

is

among

friends

this

had

extremely shy

who

will

and thought, he unbends, and becomes one of

the most gracious hosts and entertaining conversationalists

I

have ever

known.

We spent the afternoon drinking wine, collection. His books, a choice

talking,

and varied

beautiful illustrated editions, are very

lot,

and being shown Smith’s

including

much worth

many

surpassingly

examining, but the real

came from the surprisingly large quantity of artwork, mostly the creation of Smith himself. His sculptures, using the small boulders picked up in his yard, are somewhat known to fantasy lovers, several of them having been stab

shown on the

dust jacket of Lost Worlds and in the illustrations in (H. P.

Lovecraft’s) Marginalia.

imagined

—

at least a

There were

more of them, however, than

far

I

had

hundred.

But the high point of the afternoon came when Smith brought out a stack of original drawings and paintings at least two feet thick. Perhaps 25 or 30 of

them were commercially published

most of Smith’s drawings from Weird (Lovecraft’s)

ones, including the originals of

Tales,

“The Thing on the Doorstep”.

and the Finlay original from (.

.

.)

There were

early Boks, including a couple of wonderful unpublished ones,

lished

Roy Hunt drawing

Smith’s

made up

own

also several

and an unpub'

of Tsathoggua.

drawings and paintings, every one of them unpublished,

the rest of the stack. Nothing of his that has been published gives

any inkling of the man’s stature

as

an

artist.

In technique, of course, he

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

158

lacks a for

it

good

with subtle and bizarre

and above

structure,

all

ideas,

by a surprisingly good sense of form and

by his unconventional and often superlative use of

color.

Most of the paintings

much

like

that

But he more than makes up

deal, being entirely self-taught.

are

done

in

showcard paint, or something very

they tend to be garish, but yet there

it;

is

a certain use of restraint

makes even the most unrestrained ones quite acceptable. Perhaps twenty

show

entities

from the Cthulhu Mythos; the remainder are

landscapes, divided about equally between alien plant

non-human

extraterrestrial

architecture and

life.

Francis T. Laney, Ah, Sweet Idiocy! (Los Angeles: Francis T. Laney

& Charles Burbee,

1948), pp. 27-28

FRITZ LEIBER theme of which few other

is

I

can hardly think of a Smith

The

not death.

“The End of the Story” and a champion paganism. The even better

very fine

Averoigne chiefly

tales of

story, the principal

“The City of the Singing Flame” shows a passionate concern for life battling doom which is absent from most of the tales, where Smith is simply the devoted chronicler of death, ever ready with his fabulous forms and colors

and sounds

Smith

know

of.

is

A

to

do the Grisly Lord gorgeous honor.

germ from Poe,

and cruelty of Eastern legends

tiny borrowings

few days ago

metropolitan writer.

He

of

Smith on other

guessed. posterity

The more is

to put

is

Fritz Leiber, “Letter,”

—

.)

Harlan

Ellison, a

tough and

Perhaps the influence

Melville, for

example

I

have

—the slower

at his rightful level.

Emperor of Dreams:

A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography by Donald

Sidney-Fryer (West Kingston, RI: Donald

JEAN MARIGNY

to

.

deeper and more far-reaching than

a writer stands alone

him

(.

me writing science fiction?”

writers

—nothing

“Did you know that ‘The City of

instantly said,

the Singing Flame’ started

I

between him and Lovecraft were merely

mentioned Smith

I

writers

him, except in the most general or minor

playful expressions of a literary friendship.

A

.)

from George Sterling, perhaps an

a little fire

else in literature contributed to

The few

.

one of the most uninfluenced and original

sui generis,

acid drop from Bierce, the color

fashion.

(.

M. Grant,

1978),

p.

103

Clark Ashton Smith’s work scarcely corresponds

to the definitions customarily given to the genre of the fantastic. In fact,

Clark Ashton Smith

159

only in a small number of tales like “The Hunters from Beyond” can there

be found that “strange, almost unbearable irruption into the real world”

which Roger directly into

Smith

Caillois has mentioned.

an unreal world which

is

ing world of everyday reality. This

is

fond of plunging his reader

not necessarily opposed to the reassun

is

particularly true in the tales of the

The

Averoigne, Hyperborea, and Zothique cycles.

into these imaginary worlds; he must accept their

them

entirely,

knowing

in

advance that

narrated events will be vain.

We

that ambiguity, that uncertainty

do not,

all

inseparable

is

norms and can

rational explication of the

which according

who come back

mummies,

skeletons,

Todorov

to

is

the central

to

life

in

He

this conception.

“Necromancy

that

excels, in fact, in

drowned and halTeaten

in Naat,” or the hordes of

and decomposed corpses who emerge from

their

tombs

“The Empire of the Necromancers.”

in

There

is

Smith

a latent sadism in these tales of

—he

is

fond of visibly

how^

describing scenes of torture or of particularly cruel vengeance. Smith, ever, never reaches the limits of the unbearable

to Stoker

— and he never founders

of his contemporaries. Smith

is,

in the

—

in contrast, for example,

cheap eroticism of a good number

moreover,

embarks upon traditional fantastic themes:

much

less effective

when he

his vampires, werewolves,

lamias are not very terrifying and incite us more often to laughter. is

that

if

descriptions of macabre or horrible scenes like the

corpses

Smith

we agree with Lovecraft from pain and horror, we must acknowledge

Smith places himself well within

first

upon

rely

as a general rule, find in

condition of authentic fantasy. Moreover, fantasy

reader enters head

most lacking

in

Smith

the forces of Evil which

is

we

find in a Lovecraft, a Blackwood, or a

literary art

which the

which is

is

situated

on another

above

his

pen the place of a brush. Where other authors

part to suggest,

in

Smith

is

Dantesque abysses,

fond above

it

are content for the

is

raise

an

and most

of describing with a riot of detail

all

peopled with disquieting monsters,

his evocations of danses macabres, his

stamped with a strange poetry

level:

work.

writer takes the place of a painter,

rarely equalled. His extraordinary lands

his

Machen,

at the heart of Poe’s

art

all visual,

What

that profound conviction as to the powers of

or again that pathological obsession

Clark Ashton Smith’s

and

him

cosmic visions

to the level of the great creators

of Fantasy, and he sometimes chances, in this precise regard, to surpass his

mentor and friend Lovecraft. Jean Marigny, “Clark Ashton Smith and His World of Fantasy” (1978), Joshi, Crypt of Cthulhu

No. 26 (Hallowmass 1984): 7-8

tr.

S.

T.

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

160

RAY BRADBURY

Rereading these

me

one of the reasons why they have stayed with they are, above

sensually compelling.

all,

writer must learn

how

it

and

sights, sounds, smells,

textures,

you

about where you want them. From that point on, no matter

resist

Take one

CAS

them.

has rarely strayed

far

and texture

—

A Rendezvous in Averoigne:

Ashton Smith (Sauk City, WI:

Arkham House,

JOSHI

The

prose

poem

this first writer’s

and you plunge into

into language.

Ray Bradbury, “Introduction,”

T.

from

step across the threshold of his stories,

color, sound, taste, smell,

s.

things a fiction

first

high, wide, or grotesque the miracles you introduce, your readers will

be unable to law.

realize

such a long while:

for

of the

I

an atmosphere, providing a frame of reference. Once

you have trapped your readers in just

One

years later,

the business of enclosing his characters, and therefore

is

his readers, in a scene,

have them

many

tales

Best Fantastic Tales of Clark

1988), pp. ix-x

has traditionally

(.

.

.)

been designed,

seems, to exemplify the great dictum of Oscar Wilde (himself a master

“The

prose poet):

artist

is

the creator of beautiful things.” Beauty

— the

beauty of love or passion, of Nature, of a novel mood, image, or conception, or merely the self-created beauty of language

Smith accomplishes Simile

is

dominant mode

an entire prose poem, and one

Seven Kisses”

—

for

“I kiss

faint flush, like the reflection of a rose

thy cheeks, where lingers a

upheld to an urn of alabaster”

one of the most exquisite images

in all literature.

nearly any sort of prose fiction requires a certain

prose

poem

is

under no such

rarely causes surfeit here, as

Like the best poetry, of his philosophy. In

it

many

some

restriction;

cases this

is

poems can be read

more obvious than

revealed in the grim colloquy of

Skeleton”, while

“The Touch-Stone” illusions,

existence possible”. But Smith

of realism, the

and the plethora of poeticisms

of Smith’s prose

is

common

modicum

Whereas

occasionally does in Smith’s fiction.

the bitter atheist

ously) “the

the desideratum. That

ways needs no demonstration.

of the “Litany of the

as

is

this goal in all these

frequently the

must rank

—

others:

Smith

“The Corpse and the

lays bare (perhaps a little too obvi-

the friendly and benign images that is

as a facet

at his best

when he

make our

inserts the philosophical

message subtly and unobtrusively; and “From the Crypts of Memory” is

perhaps the finest of his prose poems for

its

(.

.

.)

poignant depiction of the

weight of accumulated history that hangs over us

all.

It is

we who dwell

Clark Ashton Smith

“beneath the

161

palls of twilight

and monuments of the

and silence thrown about the towering tombs and when we die we

Past”,

and death

a passing of shadows,

itself as

know

will

“the years as

the yielding of twilight unto night”.

Next to poetry, the prose poem is the most concentrated form of expression in literature.

It is

form because

a rarely used

of both poetry and prose

—

it

requires supreme

command

and

structure;

their separate rhythms, imagery,

and although Smith learned much about the form from such French masters as Baudelaire

and Huysmans,

it

not unwarranted to deem Smith the

is

greatest prose poet in English. His poetry

may be

his

most monumental

achievement, his prose his most popular; but his relatively few prose poems, all as finely

his

most

chiselled as a sculpture of Bernini or

and

flawless

Canova, may perhaps be

satisfying work.

S. T. Joshi, “Introduction,” Nostalgia of the

Unknown: The Complete

Prose Poetry by

Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Marc Michaud, Susan Michaud, Steve Behrends, and S. T. Joshi (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988), pp. vii-viii

STEVE BEHRENDS

Smith’s interest in prose lay in the glittering

surface of the writing, not the intellectual or thematic depths. in exoticism

and the ultra^human,

He

revelled

names, in descriptions of

in coined

unearthly flora and strange, vaponhung sunsets.

An

early critic,

Arthur

Hillman, wrote that “Clark Ashton Smith may be a Prophet of Doom, but

he

is

robed in hues of gorgeous purple and gold. Although the

acceptance of the utter humanity

through his

[of

the universe] runs like a sombre thread

tapestries, all are beautiful.”

might be likened to a maker of

fatalistic

Carrying this imagery further, Smith

fine carpets (of the flying variety, to strain

the metaphor), who, to insure the sale of his product, at times employed

conventional patterns, but whose delight came from the rich color of his thread and the delicate perfection of his weave.

His prose writings partake of

technique involved object or scene

is

is

skills

developed

earlier as a poet.

the heavy use of metaphor and simile, by which an

likened to something of purer or more intense emotional

content. Smith’s preference was to describe what something

than what

it is,

A favorite

is like,

rather

forsaking realism and exactitude for emotional power.

a result, his descriptive passages are in the true sense of the word.

The

imbued with meaning, and

As

are evocative

interplay of descriptions with story dines,

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

162

or the tensions underlying his scenes, ranges from the obvious (a wizard

preparing to announce his curse

parchment of doom”)

a shut

is

said to

to the

have

more

lips “like a

pale-red seal

on

subtle (a group of dead sailors,

the victims of an arctic demon, stare with eyes “like ice in deep pools fast frozen to the bottom”)-

And

occasionally, the use of

description to presage or contain within itself ing.

some

metaphor enables a happen-

future scene or

For example, in “The Voyage of King Euvoran” a necromancer causes

a stuffed bird to fly from the

crown of

a king

and to head out over the

the utterance that accomplishes this reanimation

is

the crying of migrant fowl that pass over toward

“shrill

sea;

and eldritch

unknown

as

shores in the

night.”

These and other atmosphere

for

literary

each of the

of a sorcerer: he

felt

techniques were employed to establish a definite stories.

Smith likened

he was practicing

his authorial role to that

a “verbal black

magic ... of prose-

rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counterpoint, and other resources, like a sort of incantation.”

somewhat

similar style of

recognizable,

and so great

The

resulting prose-style (like the

contemporary author Jack Vance) is

stylistic

is

instantly

the degree of continuity in Smith’s writings

that prime examples of this prose-style are easy to

himself gave us an explicitly characteristic

—and

come

by.

But Smith

deliberately self-parodic

exemplar of his writing. In 1934, by which time Smith had established himself as a major fantasy writer, he was asked by Fantasy Magazine to

produce a characteristic piece of writing. The magazine’s editors asked the “top writers” in the field to describe a author’s identity

lit

cigarette in such a

would be instantly apparent. Smith’s entry

way that the reads:

Ignited in the rich and multi-hued Antarean dusk, the tip of the

space pilot’s cigarette began to glow and foulder like the small scarlet eye of

some cavern-dwelling chimera; and an opal-grey

vapor fumed in gyrant

spirals, like

incense from an altar of

pagany, across the high auroral flames that soared from the setting of the giant sun.

Included in this exemplary paragraph are an allusion to classical mythology (the chimera), examples of his elaborate vocabulary (“foulder,” “gyrant,”

“pagany”), and two instances of metaphor.

Smith chose was called)

And we

note that the setting

for his “Cigarette Characterization” (as the magazine’s series

is

a grand, colorful,

and exotic one.

Steve Behrends, Clark Ashton Smith (Mercer Island, pp. 12-13

WA:

Starmont House, 1990),

Clark Ashton Smith

163

STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ its

series of increasingly bizarre

“The Colossus of Ylourgne”, with

events culminating in the rampage of the

most awesome monster to appear

in Smith’s fiction,

comes

closest of

any

of the Averoigne tales to evoking the sense of wonder in Smith’s otherworldly

Here again, though, the plot

fantasies.

one concerned with human ambi-

is

and downfall. The

tiousness that results in overreaching

story tells of

Nathaire, an ugly and deformed sorcerer of “minikin stature” reviled by the

Vyones. Hounded from the

citizens of

Ylourgne where he fashions a simulacrum skin and tissues of corpses into

he takes up residence

in nearby

as tall as the cathedral

out of the

city,

which he

projects his soul.

When the creature

begins to ransack the countryside, the people of Averoigne discover one final surprise:

“the face of the stupendous monster

Satanic dwarf, Nathaire

—

God

’ ’

no more than

own

life.

Smith appears

was

the face of the

possesses the

(literally)

its

power

image, his handiwork

a desperate act of psychological

pensation by which he hopes to achieve the stature in

.

Although Nathaire

in his ability to create a being in his

revealed here to be

.

re-magnified a hundred times, but the same in

implacable madness and malevolence!

of

.

is

overcom-

he was denied

even the sorcerers of Averoigne

to be saying that

are unable to transcend their flawed humanity, a point

he drives home

symbolically in the final image of the monster dispatched by a sorcery that

compels

it

Nathaire,

to dig

now

its

own

grave,

lie

down

in

it,

and

rot to pieces,

even

as

powerless to stop the process of natural corruption, protests

vehemently. Stefan Dziemianowicz, “Into the Woods:

The Human Geography

of Clark

Ashton

Smith’s Averoigne,” Dark Eidolon: The Journal of Smith Studies No. 3 (Winter 1993):

6-7

B

Bibliography The Star -Treader and Other Poems. 1912. Odes and Sonnets. 1918.

Ebony and

Crystal:

Poems

in

Verse and Prose. 1922.

Sandalwood. 1925.

The Double Shadow and Other Nero and Other Poems. 1937.

Out

of Space and Time. 1942.

Fantasies. 1933.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

164

Lost Worlds. 1944.

Genius Loci and Other Tales. 1948.

The Dark Chateau and Other Poems. 1951. Spells

and

Philtres.

1958.

The Abominations ofYondo. 1960. The

Hill of Dionysus:

A

Selection. [Ed.

Donde Duermes, Eldorado ?

Roy A.

Squires.] 1962.

y Otros Poemas. 1964-

Tales of Science and Sorcery. 1964-

Poems

in Prose.

1965.

Other Dimensions. 1970. Fugitive Poems. [Ed.

Z othique. Ed. Lin

Roy A.

Squires.] 1970. 4 vols.

Carter. 1970.

Hyperborea. Ed. Lin Carter. 1970. Xiccarph. Ed. Lin Carter. 1971. Selected Poems. 1971.

Planets

and Dimensions: Collected Essays. Ed. Charles K. Wolfe. 1973.

Poseidonis: Tales of Lost Atlantis. Ed. Lin Carter. 1973.

The

Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed.

Grotesques

et Fantastiques.

KlarkasDTon and

Ed. Gerry de la Ree. 1973.

M ostro Ligriv.

Poems: Second

Fugitive

Dennis Rickard. 1973.

Ed. Gerry de

Series. [Ed.

Roy A.

The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith.

[Ed.

la

Ree. 1974.

Squires.] 1974-77. 6 vols.

Rah Hoffman and Donald Sidney-

Fryer.] 1979.

[As

It Is

Letters to

Written. Ed. Will Murray. 1982.]

H.

P. Lovecraft. Ed. Steve Behrends. 1987.

The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Steve Behrends. 1987-88. 6 Nostalgia of the

Unknown: The Complete

Prose Poetry. Ed.

Susan Michaud, Steve Behrends, and

vols.

Marc Michaud,

S. T. Joshi. 1988.

Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed.

Steve Behrends, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and

Rah Hoffman.

1989.

The Devils Notebook: Collected Epigrams and Pensees. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer

and Don Herron. 1990.

,

R. R. Tolkien

J.

1892-1973

JOHN RONALD REUEL TOLKIEN, born on January Africa),

where

philologist, translator,

and fantasy

1892, at Bloemfontein, Orange Free State

3,

his father

them

shortly, died in

Tolkien attended his

left in

the guardianship of their local parish priest.

won

year. In

Grammar School and King

When

In 1911 Tolkien

(now South

who had planned

South Africa the following

St. Phillip’s

mother died

in 1904,

he and

his

Upon

Edward’s School.

younger brother Hilary were

a scholarship to study classics at

Oxford University;

Somme,

first

in

graduation he entered the army and in 1916 married Edith

Bratt; the couple later

the

to

England

however, he soon changed his area of study and in 1915 took a English.

was

was a banker. In 1895 Tolkien was taken to England

by his mother for reasons of health, and his father, join

writer,

but in

had four children. Tolkien fought

in the Battle of

November 1916 he contracted trench

fever

and was

invalided back to England. In 1917, while convalescing, he began to write The Book of Lost Tales, a vast

compendium

of poetry, epic prose, chronology, and mythic detail

concerning the world in which many of his set.

Although he never finished arranging

tion, since his

death a great deal of

it

primary material for publica-

The

Silmarillion (1977).

More

of

remains unpublished; the work grew continuously throughout

Tolkien’s lifetime, and he was relatively

this

works of fantasy would he

has been edited and published by his

son, Christopher Tolkien, beginning with this material

later

known

to describe his published novels as

unimportant distractions from the business of primary background-

creation.

After the war Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he joined the

staff of

the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1920 he became a Reader in English at

Leeds University. His first scholarly publication,

A Middle English Vocabulary

appeared in 1922, and in 1924 he was promoted to Professor of English Languages. In 1925 he produced an edition of Knight in collaboration with E. V.

Sir

Gordon and was 165

Gawain and

the

Green

elected Rawlinson and

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

166

Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon he

retired in 1959,

at

Oxford.

He remained

at

Oxford

until

and from 1945 onward he was Merton Professor of

English Language and Literature.

At Oxford he became

a

member

of the

Inklings, a group of friends that included C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams,

Dorothy

L. Sayers,

and

Owen

Barfield, to all of

whom

he read aloud

works in progress. In 1936 he delivered Oxford’s annual Sir

Memorial Lecture, which

The Monsters and

“Beowulf:

saw print

later

Israel

his

Gollancz

as the influential critical essay,

the Critics.”

Tolkien’s popular children’s book The Hobbit (1937) proved to be only

the preface to his phenomenally successful epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, published in three

Two Towers

volumes

The Fellowship of

as

its

in the

quasi-epic events;

dim

Ring (1954), The

(1954), and The Return of the King (1955). This trilogy draws

deeply from Tolkien’s study of Anglo-Saxon in both

and

the

it is,

its

invented language

in effect, a fantasy epic set in “Middle-earth,”

prehistory of the Earth, and involves the quest to destroy a ring

of infinite power before

it

can

into the hands of an evil

fall

Dark Lord,

Sauron. Critics have praised the mythological scope and structure of the work, although some have deprecated the forces of good and the forces of felt this

dichotomy very deeply,

its

evil.

too clear-cut dichotomy between

As

a Catholic, however, Tolkien

as did his colleagues in the Inklings.

Tolkien’s shorter works of fantasy include “Leaf by Niggle” (1945), Farmer Giles of

Ham

(1949), The Adventures of

Wootton Major (1967).

“On

Bombadil (1962), and Smith of

Lairy-Stories,” a lecture delivered in 1939,

and

discusses his theories of folklore

Tolkien died on September his

Tom

2,

fantasy.

1973. Besides the volumes derived from

background notes on Middle-earth, other works published since

include a set of Knight, Pearl,

modern English

and

Sir

translations of Sir

Orfeo (1975), a selection of

Gawain and

his death the

letters (1981),

Green

and

a

collection of lectures and essays, The Monsters and the Critics (1983).

Critical Extracts J*

R. R.

TOLKIEN

To make

a Secondary

World

inside

which the

green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour

and thought, and

will certainly

demand

a special skill, a kind

J.

R. R. Tolkien

167

Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art:

of elvish craft.

and

in

indeed narrative

story-making in

art,

its

primary and most potent mode.

To the elvish craft, Enchantment, Fantasy aspires, and when it is successful of all forms of human art most nearly approaches. At the heart of many man-made

stories of the elves lies,

open or concealed, pure or

it) is

centred power which

may

inwardly wholly different from the greed for

self-

the

is

elves, in their better (but

them

that

Fantasy

we may

—even

if

learn

mark of the mere Magician. Of

still

perilous) part, are largely

what

is

the elves are,

product of Fantasy

itself.

which (however much

it

desire for a living, realised sub-creative art,

outwardly resemble

alloyed, the

this desire the

made; and

it is

the central desire and aspiration of

from

human

the more in so far as they are, only a

all

That creative

desire

is

only cheated by counterfeits,

whether the innocent but clumsy devices of the human dramatist, or the malevolent frauds of the magicians. In

and so imperishable. Uncorrupted and domination;

it

this

world

it is

for

unsatisfiable,

does not seek delusion, nor bewitchment

seeks shared enrichment, partners in

it

men

making and

delight,

not slaves.

To many,

Fantasy, this sub-creative art

the world and

all

that

has seemed suspect,

is

if

in

it,

which

plays strange tricks with

combining nouns and redistributing

not illegitimate.

To some

it

adjectives,

has seemed at least a

childish folly, a thing only for peoples or for persons in their youth.

Fantasy insult

in

human

a natural

Reason; and

perception is

is

activity. It certainly

of, scientific verity.

which they did not want

for,

to

know

it

make.

If

men

(it

would not seem

the clearer

were ever in a

state

or could not perceive truth (facts or

evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. get into that state

.)

nor obscure the

On the contrary. The keener and

the reason, the better fantasy will

.

does not destroy or even

does not either blunt the appetite

it

(.

If

they ever

at all impossible), Fantasy will perish,

and become Morbid Delusion. For creative Fantasy are so in the world as

but not a slavery to itself in

it

founded upon the hard recognition that things appears under the sun;

So upon

logic

between

arisen.

frogs

and men,

on

a recognition of fact,

was founded the nonsense that displays

the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll.

distinguish

have

it.

is

fairy-stories

If

men

really could

not

about frog-kings would not

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

168

Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. put to evil uses. of

may even delude

It

what human being

conceived not only of

can be

ill

done.

the minds out of which

in this fallen elves,

It

world

is

false

can be

came. But

it

Men

that not true?

have

but they have imagined gods, and worshipped

own

them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors’

But they have made

It

evil.

gods out of other materials: their notions, their

banners, their monies; even their sciences and their social and economic

demanded human sacrifice. A busus non tollit usum. Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness theories have

of a Maker. ].

“On

R. R. Tolkien,

Fairy-Stories” (1939),

The Monsters and

George Allen

Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London:

the Critics

& Unwin,

and Other

1983), pp. 140,

143-45

C.

S.

LEWIS

Lord of I

When

the Rings),

was sure

it

I

reviewed the

hardly dared to hope

I

deserved. Flappily

am

I

it

first

volume of

this

work ( The

would have the success which

proved wrong. There

is,

however, one

piece of false criticism which had better be answered: the complaint that

the characters are

was mainly concerned with the struggle between good and of Boromir,

it

hazard a guess.

someone and

ill

in

is

Volume I in the mind

either black or white. Since the climax of

all

evil

how anyone could have said this. man judge what to do in such times?’’

not easy to see

“How

Volume

shall a

II.

I

“As he has ever judged,” comes the

have not changed

.

.

.

reply.

will

asks

“Good

nor are they one thing among Elves and

Dwarves and another among Men.” This

is

the basis of the whole Tolkinian world.

I

think some readers,

seeing (and disliking) this rigid demarcation of black and white, imagine

they have seen a rigid demarcation between black and white people. Looking at the squares, they

assume (in defiance of the

facts) that all the pieces

must be making bishops’ moves which confine them

to

such readers will hardly brazen

two volumes. Motives,

even on the right

side, are

out through the

last

color.

But even

now traitors usually began intentions. Heroic Rohan and imperial Gondor

mixed. Those

with comparatively innocent are partly diseased.

it

one

who

are

Even the wretched Smeagol,

till

quite late in the story,

J.

R. R. Tolkien

169

has good impulses; and, by a tragic paradox, what finally pushes the brink

There

an unpremeditated speech by the most

is

are

two Books

in

now

each volume and

the very high architectural quality of the romance

up the main theme. In Book

Then comes

material, continues.

is

the change. In

and regrouping themselves

are grouping

main theme,

isolated

from

this,

on

trumpets, steel

And

Book

I

builds

and

V

the fate of the

huge complex of forces Mordor. The

between

But we are never allowed

and the

it

rest.

On the one hand,

going to the war; the story rings with galloping hoofs, steel.

On

mice on

figures creep (like

are before us

occupies IV and the early part of VI (the

to forget the intimate connection is

a

all.

much retrospective

in relation to

latter part of course giving all the resolutions).

the whole world

revealed.

III

company, now divided, becomes entangled with

which

ail six

that theme, enriched with

II

character of

selfless

that

him over

the other, very far away, two tiny, miserable a slag

heap) through the twilight of Mordor.

we know that the fate of the world depends far more on the small movement than on the great. This is a structural invention of all

the time

the highest order:

it

adds immensely to the pathos, irony, and grandeur

of the tale.

This main theme

now

is

not to be treated in those jocular, whimsical tones

generally used by reviewers of “juveniles.”

It is

entirely serious: the

growing anguish, the drag of the Ring on the neck, the ineluctable conversion of hobbit into hero in conditions which exclude of infamy.

Books

it

Without the

The book first

is

we know

not quite the same men. I

(.

fear

.

.)

too original and too opulent for any final judgment on a

reading. But

rereadings,

tolerable.

hope of fame or

by the more crowded and bustling

relief offered

would be hardly

all

have

little

at

once that

And

has done things to

it

us.

though we must ration ourselves

doubt that the book

will

soon take

its

place

We

are

in our

among

the indispensables. C. S. Lewis, “The Dethronement of Power” (1955), Tolkien and

the Critics: Essays

onJ.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 12-13, 16

EDMUND WILSON

The most

and the most conspicuous of

his defenders has

That Auden

is

a master of English verse

distinguished of Tolkien’s admirers

and

a

been Mr. W. H. Auden.

welbequipped

critic of poetry,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

170

no one,

as they say, will dispute. It

on the badness of Tolkien’s Lord of

the Rings

—but

verse

is

he comments

significant, then, that

—there

a

is

good deal of poetry

in

The

apparently quite insensible through comparative

is

lack of interest in this other department to the fact that Tolkien’s prose just as bad. Prose

ness.

What

I

and verse are on the same

believe has misled Mr.

Auden

with the legendary theme of the Quest.

problems.

is

.

level of professorial amateurish' his

is .)

own

It is

special preoccupation

indeed a tale of a Quest,

an extremely unrewarding one. The hero has no serious

but, to this reader,

temptations;

(.

is

lured by

What we

no

insidious enchantments, perplexed by

get here

traditional terms of British

is

a simple confrontation

melodrama

—

— of the Forces of

in

no

more or

serious less

the

Evil with the Forces

of Good, the remote and alien villain with the plucky

home'grown

little

hero. There are streaks of imagination: the ancient tree'Spirits, the Ents,

with their deep eyes, twiggy beards, rumbly voices; the Elves, whose nobility

and beauty

is

elusive

handled. There

is

and not quite human. But even these

never

much development

on

getting

no

instinct for literary form.

in the episodes;

more of the same. Dr. Tolkien has

might have come out of

little skill at

The characters talk Howard Pyle, and as

a

been able to as Dr. little

visualize

Tolkien

is

who

him

is

made

ters are

narrative and

personalities they 1

at all. For the

do not

had still no conception

to play a cardinal role.

I

had never

most part such characterizations

able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped: Frodo the good

Englishman; Samwise, his dogdike servant,

respectful,

you simply go

storyTook language that

impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, of the wizard Gandalph,

are rather clumsily

and never deserts

his master.

who

talks lower'dass

These characters who are no charac'

involved in interminable adventures the poverty of invention

played in which

is,

it

and

dis-

seems to me, almost pathetic.

Edmund Wilson, “Oo, Those Awful Ores!” (1956), The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), pp. 328-29

CATHARINE R. STIMPSON serious

Many

find Tolkien’s moral vision

and impeccable. Surely men ought to be both courageous and charita'

men ought not to be haughty and selfish. Of course, the good is creative. Of course, evil is corroding, then corrupting, and finally canceling. However, Tolkien seems rigid. He admits that men, elves, and dwarfs are

ble.

Surely

J.

R. R. Tolkien

171

and

a collection of good, bad,

indifferent beings, but

divides the ambiguous world into two

nice and nasty. morality. tic.

A

unambiguous halves: good and

evil,

writer has the right to dramatize, not to argue, his

However, Tolkien’s dialogue,

star

means

Any

he more consistently

plot,

and symbols are

terribly simplis-

always means hope, enchantment, wonder; an ash heap always

seem

despair, enslavement, waste. Readily explicable, they also

to

conceal intellectual fuzziness and opaque maxims. Moreover, Tolkien gives

way

and out of the action cavalry charges in the

more old-fashioned Westerns. a regressive emotional pattern. For Tolkien

is

irritatingly, blandly, traditionally

more

place

faith in battles

no matter what either beautiful

masculine.

Not only does he

apparently

than in persuasion, but he makes his women,

most hackneyed of stereotypes. They

their rank, the

and

in

at Tolkien’s will, are as sophisticated as last-minute

Behind the moral structure is

and thaumaturges, leaping

to a lust for miracles. Wizards, weapons,

are

Although the

distant, simply distant, or simply simple.

adoration of dwarf Gimli for elf queen and mother figure Galadriel neatly parodies the excesses of courtly love, their

women. However,

More

often

women

some of Tolkien’s men do worship

their devotion

is

and mawkish.

callow, shallow,

are ignored, unless, like the hobbit Rosie Cotten, they

are a necessary adjunct to a domestic scene, or, like the warrior lass

a necessarily

fillip for

the plot.

.

.)

hardly surprising that Tolkien generally ignores the rich medieval

It is

theme of the

conflict

between love and duty. Nor

most delicate and tender the

(.

members of holy

is

it

startling that the

feelings in Tolkien’s writing exist

fellowships

between men,

and companies. Fathers and

surrogate figures, also receive attentive notice.

When

infantile, or else

detail.

it

sidle

up

becomes coy

burgeons into a mass of irrelevant, surface, descriptive

Unlike very many good modern

he simply seems a

sons, or their

Tolkien does

to genuine romantic love, sensuality, or sexuality, his style

and

Eowyn,

little

writers,

he

childish, a little nasty,

Catharine R. Stimpson,

J.

R. R. Tolkien

(New

is

no homosexual. Rather,

and evasive.

York: Columbia University Press,

1969), pp. 18-20

PAUL

H.

KOCHER

the blocks of stone

lie

If

The Hobbit

scattered about in a

is

a quarry

much

looser

it

is

and

pattern than that in which the epic assembles those which

one less it

in

which

imposing

chooses to

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

172

borrow. For example, Bilbo’s enemies are of evil, as

is

to

happen

serial,

not united under any paragon

The Hobbit’s

in the epic.

trolls,

and dragon know nothing of one another and are

They

are certainly not

shown

is

company

all

on

acting

in the story

to confront exciting perils

is

to cause

unaided

own.

Gandalf to leave

for a time.

Nor

{.

.

.)

way with the Ring, which comes out of no one. Also, as there is no alliance on behalf of

that magician linked in any

nowhere belonging evil so there

to

none against

is

Dwarves, elves, and

it.

men

act mainly for

forced

upon

Even then the

issue

their selfish interests, often at cross-purposes, until a coalition

them by is

their

and nebulous

to be servants of the nameless

Necromancer, whose only function Bilbo and

goblins (ores), spiders,

army

a goblin

relatively localized

Some

hostile to all at the very end.

and not worldwide

time in The Hobbit, but

and uncertain and Bilbo’s world

it is

ramifications.

its

geography tends to be rudimentary

not given a continental context.

(.

.

.)

In fact, since

never called Middle-earth until we run across a reference

is

to the constellation of the

we may be pardoned

Wain

for

assuming, of course, that

the Great Bear) in

(stars in

wondering whether

we have not

it is

its

northern

any place in particular,

read the epic. Tolkien has not yet

learned to take the pains he later takes to

own

its

of the places later to be brilliantly visualized in the epic appear

for the first

sky,

in

is

make

us accept this world as our

planet Earth and the events of his story as a portion of Earth’s distant

prehistory.

The

case

is

Hobbit

who

will reappear in

the same for the individual characters and the races in The

from a children’s of stature for

tale to

all

Sauron, Gandalf

the Rings.

Tolkien’s abrupt leap

an epic of heroic struggle requires a radical elevation

of them. is

The Lord of

As

the Necromancer of The Hobbit

not yet Gandalf.

The

who

tricks

dwarves into his house, and the resurrection to against Sauron.

.

like,

from Tolkien’s treatment

seriocomic.

He

is

“dreadfully

needs nothing short of a total

literary

sent by the Valar to rally the

West

.)

Much of this need for upgrading arises

who

who

Beorn into accepting thirteen unwanted

become the messenger (.

not yet

wizard of the child’s story

“never minded explaining his cleverness more than once,” afraid” of the wargs,

is

of

the characters and the plot of The Hobbit

them

in

many

situations of that tale as

evidently believes that the children will enjoy laughing at

them sometimes, as a relief from shivering in excitement sympathetically with them at others. In truth, The Hobbit is seldom far from comedy. Tolkien begins by making Bilbo the butt of Gandalf’s joke in sending the dwarves

J.

R. R. Tolkien

173

unexpectedly to eat up

all his

on

food, proceeds

to the lamentable

of the troll scene, hangs his dwarves up in trees, rolls

them

humor

in barrels,

touches the riddle scene with wit, makes the talk between Bilbo and

Smaug

home

to find

triumphantly ridiculous, and tops

it

all off

with Bilbo’s return

goods being auctioned off and his reputation for respectable stupidity

his

in ruins.

It

must be acknowledged that the comedy

is

not invariably successful

and that Tolkien’s wry paternal manner of addressing does not always avoid an

air

of talking down,

which

his

sets

young

the teeth

Nevertheless, The Hobbit was never meant to be a wholly serious

young audience

his

The Lord of

on

edge.

tale,

nor

to listen without laughing often. In contradistinction,

the Rings

does on occasion evoke smiles, but most of the time

go too deep for laughter. In the interval between the two stories

issues

its

listeners

the children are sent off to bed and their places taken by grownups, young

young

or

at heart, to hear of a graver sort of quest in

secretly engaged.

life is

Paul H. Kocher, Master of Middle-Earth: The Fiction of

Houghton

DEREK Rings are

which every human

BREWER

S.

R. R. Tolkien (Boston:

30-33

One

of the fine things in The Lord of the

the increasing horror of Frodo’s journey, especially after he and

is

on

Mifflin, 1972), pp.

J.

own. The effectiveness of the journey

their

is

partly

interweaving of the adventures of the other members of the those of Frodo, and Tolkien shows great varied narrative events; but the

the Ring'bearer himself. is

most wanted

evil:

is

Company with

inventing significant and

naturally enough,

of this particular quest

grain.

found in the

is

lies

with

that

what

Not only must good struggle

against

not only must Frodo labour through miserable physical circumstances:

but there

is

for the

hero a struggle within himself, to do what he must do,

but can hardly bear to do. to

main power,

The paradox

most against the

skill in

Sam

show

this situation, yet

Tolkien

is

No it

subtle or realistic characterisation

reaches

down

is

needed

into our deepest sense of identity.

extraordinarily good at creating that visionary dreariness in the

world, that sinking of the heart that comes, for example, to an unprofessional soldier,

when

enough

in ordinary existence,

We

the orders for the attack are received, but which recurs often

from the most

trivial

examples to the greatest.

have to do something, of our own choice, that we do not want to do.

There

is

in

human

consciousness a deep sense that the ultimate goodness

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

174

of the universe requires an ultimate sacrifice of the self that would usually

seem

when

to be the ultimate personal disaster. it

is

entirely solitary;

when

(.

.

Self-sacrifice

.)

is

most poignant

know

apparently no one can ever

of

the lonely painful deed that has been ungladly volunteered, and that has

apparently been of

no

This solitary heroism

avail.

convincing in that Tolkien does not totally

Sam

Frodo’s,

is

him

isolate

and the more

physically, since

remains with him for various purposes of the narrative. But Frodo

becomes progressively withdrawn even from Sam. In the journey to the Crack of

Doom

of the

Tolkien succeeds in creating the sense of

physical difficulty and cost that realises

last stages

romance sometimes

to achieve.

fails

He

most vividly the appalling landscape, the aching struggle towards

the repellent yet desired objective, barely relieved by the blessed brief oblivion of exhausted sleep. This assertion of the will

is

not despair; an

which denies the self. No doubt Tolkien’s war-experience

contributed to the imagery, but

it is

to create such experiences in our

but perhaps not

which

a hopelessness

is

of the nature of literature to enable us

own minds

out of the very

events, in our

less significant

own

much

smaller,

when

individual lives,

any kind of moral and physical achievements have been sought. Very in

life is

achieved without some

virtues of

romance

is

that

its

self-sacrifice

and some

strain.

One

little

of the

remote adventures can so well symbolise quite

ordinary and usual predicaments.

Tolkien achieves the

final perfect twist to the

Frodo, at the very brink of success, relinquish

it.

Quest when he makes

This seems to

me

a fine

comment on the feebleness of the human will. Then Gollum springs forward, the despised, hated, barely tolerated, yet pitied enemy, and bites off both ring

and

good

in

finger, to fall himself into the its

own

despite,

Crack of Doom. Even

may even be given

splendid narrative turn, unexpected yet true, also symbolically significant of a

view of

S. Brewer,

“The Lord of

of interest in

full

life. It is

Storyteller: Essays in

the Rings as

Memoriam,

ed.

may do

a pitiful satisfaction.

It

itself,

is

a

yet

entirely within the rules

of the romance, yet entirely translatable into the terms of our Derek

evil

Romance,”

J.

own

world.

R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and

Mary Salu and Robert T.

Farrell (Ithaca,

NY:

Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 256-57

JANET MENZIES circumstance of daily

life.

The Lord of

The craze

the Rings

has

of the ’60s and ’70s

now is

itself

become

a

a seminal influence

J.

R. R. Tolkien

in the ’80s. It

The blockbusting film Star Wars shows many signs of its influence.

concerns the epic theme of good fighting

gestes of

mankind caught up

to evil,

and

his adversary

is

The ‘new figures.

evil.

(.

.

a

is

There are

wizards,

Saruman, a wizard turned

Gandalf figure whose own death

.)

romantic’ pop wave also shows a Tolkienish desire for heroic

Adam Ant

went back

and Toyah’s preoccupations like plain.

in the age-long struggle.

Obi Kenobi,

eventually a triumph over

and the movements and

evil,

shape of Jedi knights. Darth Vader

too, in the

is

175

Costumes

Charming;

to fairy-tale roots for his Prince

are with white horses galloping across a

are those of

Mordor-

Norse war-lords, noble savages, Arthurian

So many of pop videos could be the very landscape of Middle-earth; they show

knights, princes and princesses: the heroes of earlier times. today’s

an impersonal, changed world of

fantasy.

They possess the same concrete appreciation of a potent physical world which Tolkien inspired in me. This is not simply a response to having been brought up in a Tolkien generation. Nor does it wholly reflect the adolescent love of sensations. Today’s experience

impersonal; Tolkien provides the

is

trappings of heroism. His externalized outlook leads us into the abstract

means nothing to me’ is a repeated phrase (listen to Ultra Vox’s song ‘Vienna’) which voices a recognition of the baselessness of our situation. Actions are felt intensely, but they remain cold and remote;

world of the

geste. ‘This

events are enthralling, but formalistic.

As to

it

It is

a child

as

a

The Lord of

an adult

find

I

book of and

it

the Rings

(.

.

.)

meant everything

me; coming back

superficially attractive but ultimately unsatisfying.

for adolescence.

Of its

author

showed me how

to perceive the world, but

understanding of

it.

I

Robert Giddings (London: Vision

CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN

can only say that Tolkien

he did not convey

Janet Menzies, “Middle-earth and the Adolescent,” ed.

to

J-

Press, 1983), pp.

R- R- Tolkien:

me an

The Far Land,

70-71

In fact Lord of the Rings

one drawn from many disparate sources but

to

a novel nonetheless,

is

a novel,

embodying

most of the technical features associated with novels since the eighteenth century is

— even

understood

a realistic novel for

most of its length, provided that “realism”

as a set of conventions for the delineation of plot

rather than as a theory about the world.

It is

and character

furthermore an identifiably

modernist novel, one that incorporates myth and a variety of elements from

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

176

the distant literary past in a self-conscious creation. In conception,

it

way

to achieve a wholly

bears a closer resemblance to The Waste

than to any medieval Arthurian work. Although of imaginary history

(.

.

twentieth century and

.)

its

the alert reader

dilemmas of

is

it is

set in a

new Land

remote period

never allowed to forget the

totalitarian power, technological

and individual choice. With occasional exceptions, the source-

obliteration,

hunting to which Lord

has driven baffled scholars and critics

of the Rings

footnoting of T. S. Eliot’s literary allusions.

as futile as the

of the book (a complicated meaning, reducible to

no simple

has to do with twentieth-century problems and

is

is

The meaning

set of assertions)

directed at twentieth-

century readers. It is

precisely the

contemporary significance of Lord of the Rings, however

subliminally apprehended, that has led to the polarization of opinion about

Of

it.

the attacks

all

made on

it,

the most implausible

is

the charge of

escapism. Far from encouraging us to take refuge in a world of dreamy Elves,

Lord of

the Rings

is

a

comparison with The is

enlightening.

fanatics

when

What it lacks Lord of

positions for

really

is

dominated by dreamy

finished,

and

is

was a disappointment to everyone but a few

it

seems to embody. Those

who admire

explicitly twentieth-century virtue it

the book praise

loyalty,

its

characterizations,

it

it

determina-

— environmental

do so because they consider

snobbish or worse in

its

in 1977.

tend not surprisingly to focus on the moral and social

sensitiv-

authoritarian,

apparently unquestioning acceptance

of hereditary inequalities, condescending at best in

shallow in

it

altogether a different kind of work, and in praising or

Those who attack

militaristic,

Elves,

human concerns that have any bearing on contemporary life.

which

—an

A

desultorily for half

showing us powerful examples of heroism, courage,

tion, ity.

is

critics

it

which

readers.

its

the author’s son Christopher published a version of

the Rings

attacking

Silmarillion,

on

social designs

That book, which Tolkien worked on

and never

a century

book with moral and

and above

all

its

portrayal of

morally simplistic in

its

women, descrip-

tion of a war to the death between good and evil. Christopher Clausen,

“J.

R. R. Tolkien:

The Monsters and

the Critics,” The Moral

Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,

1986), pp.

88-90

KATHARYN

W. CRABBE

mously published account of the

The First

Age

Silmarillion,

of the world,

Tolkien’s posthuis

the densest, the

J.

R. R. Tolkien

177

most

difficult,

As

backdrop to The Lord of

a

and

for the general reader the least attractive of all his works.

and The Hobbit, The

the Rings

Silmarillion

perhaps the most essential of Tolkien’s works; at the same time least able to

majestic, or horrifying,

The

may be

Middle-earth

Silmarillion as a

So while The

Silmarillion

is

poem

exquisite, or

is

simply staggering.

Tolkien’s most ambitious project,

ways his most flawed performance.

(.

it is

in

many

.)

.

Beowulf, which Tolkien studied and loved, The Silmarillion

not really a narrative in the sense that

it

tells a story in a

sequential manner. Instead, the collection of tales with modifications, and contradictions

come from

cross-references,

its

presented as a mythology which, having

is

hands and divers

divers

straightforward and

cannot be expected to achieve

places,

any great degree of inner consistency. The pose of the narrator, then, translator or as

To that

say,

it

the

whole has neither unity of tone

nor unity of style. In addition, the number of characters

is

is

stand alone as a unified vision. Although individual tales from

this chronicle of the earliest age of

Like the

it

is

as a

an editor obviates criticism of the lack of unity in the work.

however, that The

Silmarillion lacks narrative unity

work

lacks structure. Indeed, the

is

is

not to say

highly structured, taking the form

of a triptych, a three-paneled picture often used as an altarpiece. This structure seems to

have been part of Tolkien’s own plan

Christopher Tolkien notes in the Foreword that the “are included according to

The

my

is

Quenta

Silmarillion,

the

and the

rise

As

Third Age.

carries the

of in

men

in the

an actual

A kallabeth

story of the decline of the

and Of

the Rings of

triptych, the central panel

most meaning, but the two

central panel, give a perspective relative

or “History of the

flanked on one side by the story of the creation in the Ainulindale

and the Valaquenta, and on the other by the elves

and third panels

father’s explicit intention.”

large central section, the

Silmarils,”

first

for the work, for

on

is

Power and

the largest and

side panels provide a context for the

it,

and direct the eye toward

emphasis to be placed on the three panels

is

it.

a function not only

focused straight ahead and

of size but of orientation, for the central panel

is

so seems independent, while the side panels

make connections with

and defer to

central panel tion,

earth.

The

Silmarillion

It is, at

because

it is

is

it.

Thus by placement of the

parts

and by propor-

the same time, a symbolic representation of the

W.

Crabbe,

the

an account of the history of the elves of Middle-

in the nature of

Katharyn

The

J.

myths

to link gods, demigods,

R. R. Tolkien

(New

fall

of

man

and men.

York: Continuum, 1988), pp. 112-15

.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

178

B

Bibliography A Sir

Middle English Vocabulary. 1922

Gawain and

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Green Knight

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with E. V. Gordon). 1925.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. 1936.

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Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (editor). 1962.

The Adventures of

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Red Book. 1962.

Tree and Lea/. 1964.

The Tolkien Reader. 1966. The Road Goes Ever On:

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Smith of Wootton Major. 1967. Sir

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The Father Christmas The

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Mr.

Bliss.

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Tolkien. 1981.

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Finn and Hengist: The Fragment and

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One: The Legends of Aman. Ed.

Charles Williams 1886-1945

CHARLES WALTER stanby williams was born

in

1886, to a middlewlass Anglican family. In St.

Albans, and Williams attended

confirmed

as

an Anglican

in 1901,

St.

London on September 20, 1894 his family moved to

Albans Grammar School. He was

and throughout

his

life

he retained

devotion to the Church of England. For two years beginning in 1902

his

WiL

London (now the University of London), difficulties forced him to leave before completing

liams attended University College,

but his family’s financial his course of study.

Williams worked

Bookroom; then,

in 1908,

Oxford University year he

Press,

for four years as a clerk at the

he became an editor

where he worked

whom

met Florence Conway,

at the

London

for the rest of his

he married

Methodist

life.

office of

The same

in 1917; they

had one

son.

During his twenties Williams developed an interest in magic and the occult and joined the Hermetic Order of the

remained a member only

he was exposed would

Throughout

later

his career

in his early years

briefly,

of the Hermetic concepts to

Williams considered himself primarily a poet, and

he published only poetry, beginning first

War

in

in

1912 with the

novel was Shadows of Ecstasy, written

Williams was unable to find a publisher

see print until 1933.

which

appear in his writing.

collection The Silver Stair. His in 1925; but

many

Golden Dawn; although he

Heaven, his

first

for

it,

and

it

did not

published novel, appeared in

1930, by which time he had already built a minor reputation as a poet, critic

(

Poetry at Present, 1930),

Verse, 1927;

and editor (A Book of Victorian Narrative

The Oxford Book of Regency Verse, 1928); but

that Williams

is

best

it is

for his novels

remembered today. They include Many Dimensions

(1931), The Place of the Lion (1931), The Greater Trumps (1932), Descent into Hell (1937),

and All Hallows’ Eve (1945). These distinctive works

a complicated series of symbols

and supernatural or

convey the core of Williams’s philosophical and 180

utilize

fantastic events to

religious thought.

They

Charles Williams

became

181

some

quite popular in the 1930s and attracted

among them

W.

T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and

influential admirers,

H. Auden.

Aside from his novels, Williams gained some recognition

many

them

of

Cranmer

— including The Masque

Chelmsford (1939)

at

religious themes. His Collected Plays appeared in 1963.

biographies of Sir Francis Bacon (1933), James

Rochester (1935).

(1939)

is

(1934), and the Earl of

I

is

an important

while The Descent of

beliefs,

an informal history of the Christian church. Witchcraft

of Black Magic in Christian Times (1941)

— on

Williams also wrote

He Came Down from Heaven (1938)

statement of Williams’s theological

Thomas

of the Manuscript (1927),

and Judgement

of Canterbury (1936),

for his plays,

:

the

Dove

A History

a study of the interrelationship

is

of witchcraft and Christianity.

Soon

after the

outbreak of World

War

the staff of the

II

London branch

of Oxford University Press was relocated to Oxford, and there Williams was

introduced by C. S. Lewis to the Inklings, a group of writers

from their works-improgress. Along with

regularly to read to each other

Lewis and

J.

who met

R. R. Tolkien, Williams rapidly became one of the three

dominant members. Through Lewis he

also

poetry at Oxford University, which awarded

May

Williams died suddenly on

15, 1945, in

became

a lecturer

on English

him an honorary M.A. Oxford

after a

in 1943.

seemingly minor

operation.

Critical Extracts

UNSIGNED say of

“It

The Place of

the book

is

impossible to describe this novel,’’ the publishers

the Lion.

No

one

is

likely to challenge that statement;

not only impossible to describe,

to understand. This

America and certainly

is

is

the

first

it is

almost equally impossible

work of Mr. Williams

in certain respects

it

to be published in

introduces a writer of genuine

one who cannot be shoved into

But the fantasy Mr. Williams has written

a corner is

hoist

gifts,

and thereafter ignored.

on the petard of

symbolism and very often comes to resemble nothing so much

its

own

as learned

nonsense.

One cannot out, unless

one

enjoy or appreciate the fantastic, as E. M. Forster pointed is

willing “to pay a

little

extra”

—

to accept, in other words,

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

182

whatever

improbable or incredible in the picture presented. That

initially

is

the reader’s imagination must cooperate, resent.

But the soul of good fantasy

to enlarge the possibilities of

life

no

details

who

it

wrong

all

is

“justify” the talking. Fantasy

And

that

is

tual implications (.

.

ability

its

encumber

it

with reasons

an animal

right to introduce

it is all

which

to educe pseudo-scientific reasons lost so

is

soon

as

calls

it

why The Place of the Lion nonsense. The heavy frame

Williams has placed around his picture; the

value.

to

it,

the reason

often seems close to

deny or

with broad, free strokes, and any attempt

can only work harm. Thus, but

talks,

imaginativeness, in

lies in its

to intellectualize the fantastic, to explain

and

intelligent person will

which he attempts

to

is

attention to

not a success and so

which Mr.

of learning

and

religious, intellectual

deduce from

it,

itself.

spiri-

quite ruin the picture’s

.)

The mind simply cannot grapple with Mr. Williams’s hierarchy intellectual, spiritual

— of symbols;

terms of creative literature.

at least

As mental

—

physical,

cannot grapple with them in

it

exercise the thing, perhaps, can be

done. But the fantasy grows dull and the erudite symbolism grows unintelligible;

our wits are so overworked that our emotions have no opportunity for

expression.

The whole

thing

is

a great deal of a pity, for there

that Mr. Williams, besides being imaginative

and extraordinarily

is

also witty

gifted in the use of words. Individual scenes are superbly

vivid, but there are too

in a meaningless

and well-read,

no doubt

is

few of them.

The book

and unsuccessful way.

It is

is

to be

impressive enough, but

hoped that

in future

Mr.

Williams will confine himself to life on one plane rather than half a dozen. Unsigned, “A Learned Fantasy,” New York Times Book Review, 1 May 1932, p. 18

T.

S.

ELIOT

and the natural was

To

(Williams) the supernatural was perfectly natural,

also supernatural.

profound insight into

Good and

And

this peculiarity

Evil, into the heights of

depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate

thrill,

gave him that

Heaven and the

and the permanent

message of his novels.

While

this

theme runs through

most apprehensible Hallows’ Eve.

what

all

of Williams’s best work,

in this series of novels,

Not having known him

literary influences

from

in

in his earlier years,

were strongest upon him

some influence from Chesterton, and

War

it

Heaven I

made to All

do not know

at the beginning.

especially, in

is

I

suspect

connection with the

Charles Williams

183

novels, an influence of present,

it is

most present

fainter in the later work.

difference. Chesterton’s a

meaning which

it

is

Man Who Was

The

it

is

War

in the first novel, (.

.

The

meant

.)

But

I

in

If this

influence

is

Heaven, and becomes

suggest a derivation only to point a

Man Who Was

Thursday

is

an

allegory;

to be discovered at the end; while

in reading, simply because of the swiftly

surprises,

Thursday.

moving

plot

it

has

we can enjoy

and the periodic

intended to convey a definite moral and religious point

expressible in intellectual terms.

It

gives you ideas, rather than feelings, of

another world. Williams has no such “palpable design” upon his reader. His

aim

is

to

make you

partake of a kind of experience that he has had, rather

than to make you accept some dogmatic

belief.

This gives him an

with writers of an entirely different type of supernatural with writers

ton’s:

as different as Poe,

Le Fanu and Arthur Machen.

Walter de

la

thriller

affinity

from Chester'

Mare, Montague James,

(...)

The stories of Charles Williams, then, are not like those of Edgar Allan have never known a healthier' Poe, woven out of morbid psychology minded man than Williams. They are not like those of Chesterton, intended

—

And

to teach the reader.

I

they are certainly not an exploitation of the

supernatural for the sake of the immediate shudder. Williams

about a world of experience

known

us to believe in something, he

had.

When

I

we

say that

of Charles Williams,

credence to

There

is

all

I

to him:

is

telling us

he does not merely persuade

communicates

this

experience that he has

are persuaded to believe in the supernatural world

do not mean that we necessarily give complete

the apparatus of magic, white or black, that he employs.

much which he

has invented, or borrowed from the literature of

the occult, merely for the sake of telling a good story. In reading All Hallows’ Eve,

we

can,

if

we

like,

believe that the

for controlling mysterious forces

suitable natural gifts

and

could be used with success by anyone with

special training.

the machinery of the story

methods of the magician Simon

no more

We

can,

on the other hand,

find

credible than that of any popular tale

of vampires, werewolves, or demonic possession. But whether credulous or

incredulous about the actual kinds of events in the story, that they are the vehicle for

which the author he

is

at

is

we come to perceive

communicating a paranormal experience with

familiar, for introducing us into a real

world in which

home.

T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” Ail Hallows’ Eve by Charles Williams grini

& Cudahy,

1948), pp. xiv-xvi

(New

York: Pelle-

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

184

GEORGE

P.

Williams

the Christian faith, seen from a rather special and individual

is

point of view.

WINSHIP, may be

It

no longer hold

to or

In general, the

JR.

theme of Charles

that the majority of nominally Christian countries

even recognize Christian doctrine, although they are

sympathetic to what they consider Christian sentiments. Williams confronts

with strange assertions and startling images, such

his readers

as that of the

Emperor. In The Greater Trumps,

(.

.

.)

he uses Tarot cards to stand for the correspond

dences in the real world between natural elements or ideas and

One

beings.

realm. as a

is

the Emperor, the token on papyrus of Order in the civil

A few pages after he appears on the card,

policeman directing

Williams, as

card

traffic

(.

a Christian theme.

is

human

.

The

.)

He

him again

a character sees

vision of a disciplined world, to

accepts authority and even hierarchy

consonant with the true nature of things, the same hierarchy that Dante,

and before him the so-called Dionysius, delighted to describe his verse

Williams used hazel rods

as

in heaven. In

symbols of measurement, or rhythm

and of order generally, including the punishment of unruly servants.

in verse,

and even the authority of the

Slavery, corporal punishment, are repellent to the

modern

liberal imagination,

society against any manifestation of hierarchy

is

and

civil police

this revulsion of

a condition

which not only

Christians but elected magistrates must recognize and deal with. that Williams rests too

much

poetic weight

upon the

of a policeman; but the novelist could retort that

it is

our

It

may be

rather trivial figure

the central task of

poetry, especially in the genre of prose fiction, to reveal the deeper implications of the (.

.

.)

commonplace.

When he

of such strange,

simply bad.

(.

.)

.

writes at his best,

which

is

magnificently,

uncanny action that when quoted

More mundane pages

the larger scale he

a novel.

The

is

better,

later stories are

in passages

in isolation they

sound

are usually clear, but not always: astonish-

some trouble with grammar.

ingly for a professional editor, Williams has

On

it is

although he learned slowly

admirably planned.

how

to

The symmetry

compose of paired

characters in The Greater Trumps and Descent into Hell evinces a firm sense

of design. Characterization

is

perhaps not important in stories of this particu-

lar type,

but he has one rare excellence.

are the

most

difficult to create

It is

in fiction

recognized that good people

and that Williams excels

in

presenting sanctity. But surely his greatest talent, and that upon which his authority as an honest witness must

rest,

is

his ability to present to our

Charles Williams

185

imagination what

beyond

is

denied by our presuppositions, to make real what

lies

reality.

George

P.

Winship,

The Fantasies of C.

Jr.,

S.

“The Novels of Charles Williams,” Shadows Lewis,

].

of Imagination:

R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, ed.

Mark

R.

Hillegas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 118-20, 123-24

HUMPHREY CARPENTER

‘1

saw Shakespeare

5

,

he wrote

in a

poem, In a

Tube

station

on the Central London:

He was smoking a pipe: He had Sax Rohmer’s best

novel under his arm

(In a cheap edition)

And the Evening News. He was reading in the half-detached way one He had just come away from an office And the notes for The Merchant Were

does.

in his pocket,

was the first line he thought of) ‘Stil quiring to the young-eyed cherubins’, But his chief wish was to be earning more money. Beginning

This

poem shows

tions of time

(it

Williams’s total disregard for the conventional distinc-

and space, the natural and the supernatural, and

setting extraordinary events against

why should

talk about seeing Shakespeare,

station? If

he wished to write

Stone of Suleiman, then

let it

mundane backgrounds. it

If

his habit of

he wanted to

not happen in a Tube railway

a novel about the magical properties of the

be

set in

modern London and

let

the partici-

pants include the Lord Chief Justice and his secretary. (This was

Many

Dimensions, published in 193 1, and including in the character of the secretary

Chloe something of

a portrait of ‘Celia’.)

Or

if

the plot was to concern the

appearance in the material world of ‘huge and mighty forms’, the Platonic archetypes themselves, then

let

those archetypes appear in the most ordinary

landscape that he knew, the Hertfordshire countryside surrounding St

Albans. (This was The Place of if

his subject

the Lion,

published in the same year.) And,

was to be the Tarot cards and their supernatural relation to

the ‘eternal dance’ of the universe,

let

the terrifying results of the use and

abuse of those cards be experienced by a

modem

middle-class citizen at a

house on the South Downs. (This was The Greater Trumps, published in 1932. Shadows of Ecstasy was eventually issued a year

later.)

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

186

These novels were power.

all

concerned with the rightful and wrongful use of

And here somebody reading them may find himself in some confusion,

for Williams’s ideas of right

of Ecstasy

it is

and wrong often seem extremely odd. In Shadows

becoming

disturbing to find the ‘hero’ Roger Ingram

War

of the ‘villain’ Considine. In

in

Heaven

that Williams seems to have almost as

at first puzzling to discover

it is

much enthusiasm

for the cause of

the black magicians as for the Archdeacon and his friends. Greater Trumps,

when Aaron Lee and

seems to take sides with them victim.

What

much

as

as

And

in

The

grandson Henry use the Tarot

his

which they hope

cards to raise a great storm by

a disciple

to

murder

a

man, Williams

with Coningsby, their intended

has happened to his moral sense?

The answer is that in these novels he was not principally concerned with moral issues. The question of the nature of good and evil occupied his mind, but he did not discuss

it

in

depth in the novels, reserving

Down

dramas and his theological study He Came

moment he was

content to leave

it

for his religious

it

from Heaven. For the

somewhat on one

and to judge

side,

the characters in his novels not by such terms as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but by differentiating their attitudes to the supernatural.

such people

Damaris Tighe in The Place of

as

Low

in the scale

who

the Lion,

merely

come studies

the history of supernatural beliefs without considering what she herself

should believe. novels

—who

though

this

Low

too in the scale are those

—and there

desire to use supernatural powers for their

may be

evil

it

many in own ends;

are

the

but

does show a proper awareness of those powers.

Higher are those persons such

Lord Arglay in

as

Bernard Travers in Shadows of Ecstasy

who are

Many

Dimensions and Sir

true agnostics,

having decided

neither to believe nor to disbelieve but to remain with open minds; and their unruffled scepticism, characteristic of in

its

there

way admits is

rarely

that belief

more than one

one aspect of Williams himself,

come those few who commit themselves fully

Highest of

is

possible.

in

each novel

—

to the supernatural, resigning themselves utterly into result

is

(as

it

sometimes

is)

Humphrey Carpenter, The

all

its

hands, even

if

the

physical death. Inklings:

C.

S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams,

and Their Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), pp. 95-96

GLEN CAVALIERO ist,

(.

.

.)

Williams was not an instinctive novel-

in the generally accepted sense of that term. His

two

final novels

succeed

Charles Williams

187

because in them he ceased trying to be one. For what in all of

them

is

the sense of the transcendent as

it

most memorable

is

shines through the world

of space and time. In this respect the books are genuinely original and impressive. Especially striking

is

the way in which the supernatural manifest

tations are seen as being precisely that

—supernatural. They do not engage

with the world of appearances, they take

There

over.

it

is

none of that

uneasy intrusion of the paranormal in terms of the normal that we find in

Out and wholly floundering Moon-

the average occult novel, as in Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides

(1935) or Aleister Crowley’s partly

And

(1929).

child

mystic,

satirical

through his narrative technique Williams, not himself a

able to present dramatically the conclusion of

is

ence that

spiritual reality co-inheres in material reality.

to coin, in terms of his various myths,

such

‘The

as

all

Way

to the

Angelicals’ and ‘The

experience

is

Stone

is

able

is

‘The Knowledge of the

in the Stone’,

is

So too he

memorable epigrams of redemption,

Knowledge of the Dance’.

being evolved that

visionary experi-

A

language for religious

specifically symbolic

and

allusive:

confusion between appearance and reality being raised by or about

it,

no the

balance between belief and scepticism can be verbally contained.

The logical outcome of this process

is

found in Descent into

Hell. Williams’s

treatment of occult themes had been moving towards an all-inclusive vision

may be termed

that

multispatial.

The debate

in

Shadows of Ecstasy

as to

the nature and true term of romantic experience concludes with the affirmation of unity set forth initially and dramatically in the four succeeding books,

and acted out and

more

set forth definitively in the final one. Parallel to the

selective exploration of division-in-unity leading to unity-in-division

carried out in the criticism, biographies

and

plays,

we

find Williams using

the novel form to enlarge his vision in more general and more widely referential terms.

The

On

novels themselves occupy an ambiguous place in his total output.

the one hand, they are certainly his most well-known and popular

writings,

and are arguably

of his time.

On

his

most original contribution to the

the other hand,

when

set alongside novels written out of

other traditions than the metaphysical or occult, they dwindle into

Only when read

literature

triviality.

in the context of his total output does their significance

become apparent.

The

human power-drives as they are confronted with the inevitable constrictions of human existence. Starting first six

reveal an evolving awareness of

with the consciousness of sublimity, of endless

possibility,

of romantic

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

188

yearning, Williams’s thought leads inexorably to a consideration of the

providence of God.

A

convinced Christian, he was never a

did not embrace religious belief because rather,

he saw

it

as the necessary

criticism, biographies

it

facile one.

He

consoled or even inspired him:

accommodation of the

self to fact. In his

and plays he concentrates on personal experience;

but in the novels the individual dramas are given a wider setting.

The

metaphysical imagery provides an impersonal set of counters with which to out the rules of the game.

set

Glen Cavaliero, Charles

(Grand Rapids, MI: William

Williams: Poet of Theology

B.

Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 164-65

MARY HADFIELD

ALICE

More than any other

of his books,

the early novels have produced speculations about Charles Williams’s desire

power and capacity

for

not follow Williams’s say

own

Much

critical rule of

of

it

springs from those

attending to what words actually

material.

The manuscript a half,

of the drama scribbled in 1902

shows a juvenile idea of power

number

of his

armed

— the

when he was

Prince’s campaigns

forces, lists of his

country (including a canal 500 miles long).

allow

it

sixteen and

and

victories,

household and plans

It is

for his

the kind of fantasy of power

that most of us have in youth and carry over into adult

to

who do

and deriving conclusions only from them. Fortunately, we now have

more source

the

for cruelty.

life, till

we

slowly

to be replaced by reality. Perhaps, however, few are so sensible as

keep no traces of ‘If only.

tion of a

young man

.

.

.’

Certainly to the vivid and ranging imagina^

like Charles,

they would

come

easily

enough, and

persist longer.

Fifteen years later, bubbling with ideas, emotions and words, he

show

for

them one book

had

to

of poetry published, another accepted, and a minor

editorial job. In

1917 he married, so taking one leap forward, and joined

the Order of the

Golden Dawn,

so taking another.

Marriage took him further into love, religion, poetry, and to The Outlines of Romantic Theology.

The Golden Dawn took him

into a wider world of

people he would not otherwise have met, of study of

and of participation

happened

to be the

in rituals.

It

Golden Dawn.

new ways

of power,

could well have been the Masons;

it

— 189

Charles Williams

Thus when he began

to write novels the

two

combined.

levels of his life

Their underlying structure derived from religion, romantic love, and his work; their superstructure from his interest in the workings of material and

magical power; their excitement from the clash between the two. the story bases are, one cannot help feeling, a

trifle

Some

corny: an African

of

High

Executive (surely a throwback to 1902 with a touch of Rider Haggard); the

Stone of Suleiman; the Tarot

Platonism and the Grail are

cards.

But the corniness does not matter,

for

it

far better.

provides the accidents of the stories,

not the essence.

An

Alice Mary Hadfield, Charles Williams: York: Oxford University Press, 1983),

KATHLEEN SPENCER

p.

Exploration of His Life and

Work (New

103

Shadows of Ecstasy, the

liams wrote, does not introduce the fantastic at

all,

even

first

novel Wil-

in dialogue, until

the fifth chapter, some seventy pages into the book, and does not give

By

narratorial confirmation until the eleventh chapter (out of fourteen). contrast, his last novel,

A lEHallows’

Eve, opens with the consciousness

both reported thoughts and actions, and

free indirect

speech

— of

a

young

woman named Lester Furnival who lives in London at the end of World War II: on the fifth page of the text, she suddenly realizes that she is dead. Yet her consciousness remains the very end of the novel.

do not enter the story

volume

is

intact,

The

until the

and we enter into

it

periodically until

ordinary “rear’ world and living characters

second chapter. Another peculiarity of

this

that from the very beginning the narrator commits himself to

the actuality of the fantastic events, telling things about the occurrences that the characters do not

up to that stage gradually.

know

—unlike the

It is as

developed a new confidence in his

The rhythm and pace but the goal does not. In of the fantastic, Williams of his

own

if,

at the

is

end of

his

when he

life,

Williams had

may

vary from novel to novel,

of his novels, more so than in most examples

writing about events which, despite the opinions

culture to the contrary, he believed to be possible.

was not his own

leads

story, or his audience, or both.

of his presentation all

earlier novels

fictional evocations of the supernatural in

That

is,

it

which he believed

but rather the conception of the universe upon which his fictions were based: a universe where the supernatural

is

real,

world, and governed by laws allowing readers to

coinherent in the natural

comprehend

it.

This belief

— WRITERS OF ENGLISH

190

goes a long

way

to explain the special quality of Williams’s novels, the kind

of stories he chooses to

tell,

the heroes he selects, the assured, confident

tone of the narrative and, above

which blends the ordinary

The

fantastic genre

liams chose,

real

all,

— the

fantastic,

world with incredible characters and events.

can be used

which was,

his choice of genre

for

many

purposes besides the one Wil-

at least in part, to give his

audience a vivid experi-

ence of the numinous world in which he believed. Other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers use the genre for this sort of pleasant

propaganda

for Spiritualism or

same purpose,

as a

Theosophy or magic. Some

fantastic tales are just for the fun of the marvelous adventure or provide

the special pleasures of the ghost story, the delightful frisson of being (safely) scared witless. Other tales, like most of what tic

Fantastic (a

more

Tobin Siebers

precise term for the works

calls

Todorov

Roman-

the

discusses under

the label of the fantastic), use the genre more seriously to explore the

problems of subjectivity through the device of unreliable narrators and the unusual states of consciousness

with which

many Romantic

Whatever the purpose analysis to

which

I

artists

frenzy, hallucination,

dream

were obsessed.

which the

fantastic has

been

put, the sort of

have here subjected Williams’s novels can be

approach to any fantastic

and then confirms the reliability, or

to

—madness,

text.

The pace

at

which the narrative hints

fantastic, the source of that

whether the text ever commits

a useful

confirmation and

itself at all (as in

sense that the true fantastic consists of those texts

which

at its

Todorov’s

refuse to

commit

themselves to the actuality of the events being described) can provide sensitive clues to the central concerns of the text

why

and can suggest reasons

the author has chosen the fantastic as the appropriate genre for the

tale.

Kathleen Spencer, “Naturalizing the Fantastic: Narrative Technique in the Novels of Charles Williams,” Extrapolation 28, No.

DENNIS

L*

WEEKS

While

1

existentialism plays an important part

in the underlying philosophies of Williams’s

cant idea behind his writing

is

(Spring 1987): 72-73

life

and work, the most

signifi-

the theory of Coinherence and Substitution.

(...)

Coinherence demands that we in the past, those people existing

who have existed who will yet live in

realize that all people,

now, and individuals

Charles Williams

the future, are

nee

191

bound together by some common bond.

(.

.

.)

Thus, Coinhere'

time/event related.

is

Many

Dimensions

is

perhaps the novel which best exemplifies the time/

event assumption in Coinherence because Williams makes blatant use of the stone and

move people through time and

types to

its

apparent adherence to physical laws. Williams

what appears

write about

is

not the

we must look

materiality

and intelligence

Coinherence,

as

and Aristotle

to Plato

to the celestial bodies.

(.

first

person to

to be science fiction, at the very least fantasy, by

using the stone in this special way. For the origin of time,

space without

.

as

they explore the idea of

in their discussions of angels as

“prime movers”

.)

Williams matured his conception of

in 1937, also assumes that all

to the point that

for the

a path. This path, as previously determined, its

it

Companions of the Coinherence people moving toward Coinherence are on

he was able to write the seven steps

painting, “Paradise,” with

movement through

on

pilgrims

is

best illustrated in Brea’s altar

their

Brea’s painting also assumes, by the pilgrims

that Coinherence has two pathways

way toward heaven. moving away from heaven,

— one toward heaven and Coinherence,

and one path leading away from Coinherence.

It

is

the pathway toward

Coinherence that Williams’s good characters eventually end up moving

The

along.

made

opposite pathway

is

reserved for his evil characters,

who have

their conscious choice to tread this road, eventually reaching

damna^

tion.

Whether

the

movement

is

toward Coinherence or damnation, Williams

has identified the entire progress toward Coinherence by the collective of “the redeemed City,” which

means

all

title

generations past, present, and

The City is the metaphor that Williams uses to denote those individm who are coinhered with the Godhead. Coinherence is, thus far, a combi'

future. als

nation of time/event reality and movement, upon recognition of the relation to is,

Unity (Williams’s term

for

self in

God), toward Coinherence. There

however, the idea of Substitution that must be tied into Coinherence

for a

complete understanding of Williams’s theories. Substitution springs

out of the catalyst of love. In the case of Substitution’s relationship to

Coinherence, love

is

altruistic, as

seen for example in Descent into Hell and

All Hallows’ Eve.

In Descent into Hell, Peter Stanhope

is

able to substitute himself, that

bear the burden of worry, for Pauline Anstruther,

who

lives in

is,

constant fear

of meeting her doppelganger, who, she does not realize, represents past

.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

192

generations searching for Coinherence. There

understand that her double understand Substitution

first

Stanhope. (.

his

.

.)

(.

ironically,

is,

critics.

No

for Pauline to

her salvation, for Pauline must for

her by Peter

.)

.

as a building process that

seven steps and explained in his

many

no reason

an unselfish act completed

as

Williams saw Coinherence

course,

is

series of

is

based upon

seven novels. There

are,

of

other themes in the novels that have been explicated by other

other critic or study, however, has examined the novels as an

man who was committed enough in his devoted to setting man upon the path of Unity

outpouring of a deeply religious beliefs to write

seven books

wracked by indecision and lack of

in a century

Charles Williams and one that

is

wrapped

faith.

This was the goal of

in a mystical shroud of fantasy

and metaphysics which awaits the discerning reader who and learn the seven

Coinherence

steps toward

as

is

willing to study

they are explained in the

novels. Dennis in the

1

L.

Weeks,

Steps toward Salvation:

Seven Novels of Charles Williams

An Examination of Coinherence and Substitution (New

York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 102-5

Bibliography The

Silver Stair. 1912.

Poems of Conformity

1917.

Divorce. 1920.

Poems of Home and Overseas

Windows of Night. A

Myth

the

with V. H. Collins). 1921.

1924.

Book of Victorian Narrative Verse

The Masque of

A

(editor;

(editor). 1927.

Manuscript. 1927.

of Shakespeare. 1928.

The Oxford Book of Regency Verse The Masque of

Perusal. 1929.

Poetry at Present. 1930.

Heroes and Kings. 1930.

War in Heaven. 1930. Many Dimensions. 1931. The Place of

the Lion.

Three Plays. 1931.

1931.

(editor;

with H.

S. Milford).

1928.

.

Charles Williams

193

The Greater Trumps. 1932. The English

Mind. 1932.

Poetic

Bacon. 1933.

Reason and Beauty

A

in the Poetic

Mind. 1933.

Short Life of Shakespeare by E. K.

Chambers

(editor). 1933.

Shadows of Ecstasy. 1933. James

1934-

I.

The Ring and

Book: The Story Retold. 1934-

the

Rochester. 1935.

The

New

Book of English Verse

Thomas Cranmer

Queen The

(editor;

of Canterbury

with others). 1935.

1936.

Elizabeth. 1936.

Story of the Aeneid, Retold. 1936.

Stories of

Henry

Great Names. 1937.

VII. 1937.

Descent

1937.

into Hell.

Taliessen through Logres. 1938.

He Came Down from Heaven.

1938.

A Short History of the Holy Chelmsford: A Pageant Play. 1939.

The Descent of the Dove: Judgement

at

The Passion of Christ The

New

Religion

and Love

A

in

(editor). 1939.

The Figure of

Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love. 1941.

History of Black Magic in Christian Times. 1941.

The Forgiveness of

1942.

Sins.

Beatrice:

A

Study in Dante. 1943.

Letters of Evelyn Underhill (editor). 1943.

The Region of

To

Church. 1939.

Christian Year (editor). 1941.

Witchcraft:

The

Spirit in the

the

Summer

Stars. 1944.

Michal: After Marriage. 1944-

The House of

the

Octopus. 1945.

All Hallows’ Eve. 1945.

Solway Ford and Other Poems by Wilfred Gibson (editor). 1945. Flecker of

Dean

Close. 1946.

Arthurian Torso, Containing

the

Posthumous Fragment of “The Figure of Arthur.”

Ed. C. S. Lewis. 1948.

Seed of

Adam

The Image of

and Other the

Plays. 1948.

City and Other Essays. Ed.

Selected Writings. Ed.

Anne

Ridler. 1961.

Anne

Ridler. 1958.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH

194

Collected Plays. 1963. Letters to Lalage:

The

Letters of Charles Williams to Lois

Lang- Sims. Ed. Glen

Cavaliero. 1989. Outlines of Romantic Theology. Ed. Alice Essential Writings

on

Spirituality

Mary

Hadfield.

1990.

and Theology. Ed. Charles Hefling. 1993.

:

BOS 0

3

PUBLIC

L

BRARY

9999 02836 510

2

r-

Harold Bloom

Humanities

and Albert

New

Professor of the

Sterling

Yale University and Henry W.

at

A.

is

Berg Professor of Knglish

at

the

York University Graduate Sehool. He

is

the author of twenty-one books and the editor

of

more than

and

thirty anthologies of literature

literary criticism.

Bloom’s works include Shelley's

Professor

Mythmaking 1959 ), I he Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats ( 1970), A Map of Misreading ( 1975), Kabbalah and Criticism ( 1975), and Agon: >

(

Towards a Theory of Revisionism Anxiety of Influence

1973

(

)

1982

(

).

The

sets forth Profes-

sor Bloom’s provocative theory of the

literary'

between the great writers and predecessors. His most recent books are

relationships their

The American Religion (1992) and Western

Canon

Professor

(

1994

The

).

Bloom earned

from Yale

his Ph.D.

University in 1955 and has served on the Yale

He

faculty since then.

a

is

1985 MacArthur

Foundation Award recipient and served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry

Harvard University

in

1987 -88. He

is

at

currently

House series Major Literary Characters and Modern Critical Views, the editor of the Chelsea

and other Chelsea House series

in

literary'

criticism.

Jacket illustration: Lee

(

Private

Max

Collection;

Resource, NY).

Ernst

©

(

1891-1976), Gypsy Rose

ARS,

NY; courtesy of Art

WRITERS OF ENGLISH: LIVES AND WORKS

MODERN FANTASY WRITER: This volume provides detailed biographies, a wide selection of

and comprehensive bibliographies of the fifteen most significant fantasy writers of the mid-twentieth century, including Ray Bradbury, E. R. Eddison, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, andj. R. R. Tolkien. critical extracts,

I

don’t particularly care about ghosts, vampires or werewolves;

they’ve

been

by

killed

much good

repetition.... There’s

stuff

buried in the green leaves of childhood and the heaped dead leaves of old age. I want to get at that, too. I want to write about

humans; and add an unusual, unexpected

twist.

— RAY BRADBURY To make

Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. a

7

-J.

WRITERS OF ENGLISH: LIVES AND WORKS

is

R. R.

TOLKIEN

an ongoing series

from Beowulf to the present. Each volume contains biographies, biographical and critical extracts, and bibliographies of the authors covered, and features a series introduction by Harold Bloom, “The Life of the Author,” as well as a special introduction to each title. covering the entire range of literature

in English

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS ISBN 0-7910-2223-4

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