Who Was the Editor of the First-Anniversary Number of Weird Tales?

In the previous entry, I went back in time to January 30 of this year. Now I'm going even further back to almost the beginning of 2024, to an entry of January 6. That entry is entitled "Weird Tales in the First Year (and More)." A question came up in that entry, namely: Who was the editor of the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales? Some comments went back and forth. I can't say that we have a definitive answer. I'm not sure there will ever be a definitive answer. But I would like to summarize what we know.

First: Edwin Baird edited Weird Tales from its inception until, presumably, April 1924 (or maybe only March). There isn't any editor credited in that issue, nor in the issues preceding or following it. Baird was also the editor of Detective Tales, a companion title to Weird Tales and one that preceded it in print, beginning with a first issue on October 1, 1922.

In the spring of 1924, The Rural Publishing Corporation, publisher of both Weird Tales and Detective Tales, was in financial trouble. Co-founded by Jacob C. Henneberger and John M. Lansinger, The Rural Publishing Corporation came to an end with the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales of May/June/July 1924. Baird went with Lansinger and Detective Tales. That left Henneberger with Weird Tales--and no editor.

In my entry of January 6, I called the anniversary number "jumbo-sized" and a "triple issue." It was actually neither. That number, or issue as we say now, had the same number of pages as the first two issues of the magazine, 196 in each. So it wasn't jumbo-sized exactly, although that's still a lot of pages. Also, it wasn't a triple issue, even if it covered a three-month period. In fact, the May/June/July issue of 1924 was a stated quarterly issue, the first and as far as I know only quarterly issue during the first run of the magazine, i.e., from 1923 to 1954. By the way, Edwin Baird died in September 1954, which was when the last issue of Weird Tales came out. I might call that weird, or an instance of the workings of Weird.

So who was the editor of the first-anniversary number of Weird Tales?

Well, in The Weird Tales Story (1977), author Robert Weinberg wrote, without citation: "Otis Adelbert Kline and Farnsworth Wright put together one gigantic issue," i.e., the first-year anniversary issue. (p. 4)

In The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), author John Locke went into more detail, quoting, first, Kline, who claimed editorship of the issue in a letter to Robert E. Howard's father, dated 1941; and, second, quoting Henneberger, who wrote in 1924 that Baird was the editor until the last issue, i.e., the first-anniversary issue. According to Mr. Locke, Wright had also served as an uncredited editor since April 1924. He wrote: "Wright was the actual editor of the issue in its early stages of preparation [. . .]." Wright quit the company in anger, though, at which point, "Kline was recruited as temporary editor [. . .]." (p. 168) John Locke's conclusion: "all three individuals [Baird, Wright, and Kline] edited the issue!" (p. 168)

Biographer, essayist, book reviewer, and encyclopedist Phil Stephenson-Payne left comments under my entry of January 6, 2024. He had credited Edwin Baird as editor of the first-anniversary number in his online source, The FictionMags Index. (Forget what I have done in this blog. Mr. Stephenson-Payne has done far more in his career.) He quoted an article written by Robert Weinberg and published in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (Greenwood Press, 1985) as follows: that the first-anniversary number was "assembled by Jacob Henneberger and Otis A. Kline from dummies assembled by Baird." After consulting with Mike Ashley and John (presumably) Locke, he left a comment quoting John, as follows:

The short version is that Baird initiated work on the Ann[iversary] Issue in the midst of the "reorganization," which was editorial until the financial axe fell. Mid-course, Baird was pulled off of W[eird] T[ales] to devote his exclusive time to Detective Tales. Wright came in as a part-time interim editor for WT (while J[acob] C[lark] H[enneberger] unsuccessfully tried to recruit [H.P.] Lovecraft). Wright found out about the many debts to contributors, couldn't get any resolution from JCH, and stormed out in protest with the Ann[iversary] Issue unfinished. JCH got Kline to get it out the door. It's fair to say that the issue was edited by Baird, Wright, and Kline, in that order. I don't think it follows that any two of them worked together as co-editors. (Italics and boldface added.)

That sounds like a good and reasonable answer to the question: first Baird, then Wright, and finally Kline had a hand in editing the first-anniversary number, all or some with an assist from Henneberger. Lovecraft famously declined the editorship of the magazine at around that time. What a different world it would have been if he hadn't! In any case, the May/June/July 1924 issue of Weird Tales was the last for several months. Like a revenant, though, it came back in November 1924, then and for the next fifteen and a half years edited by Farnsworth Wright.

Thank you to Phil Stephenson-Payne, Mike Ashley, and John Locke for their information and clarifications. Thanks also to the late Robert Weinberg.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley. Text and comments by John Locke and Phil Stephenson-Payne are their own property.

Houdini Connections

I began writing about Harry Houdini and his association with Weird Tales nearly six months ago, on January 30, 2024. The occasion was the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Houdini issues of "The Unique Magazine." There were three Houdini issues in all. The first came along in March 1924. The last was the first-anniversary number of May/June/July 1924. So, even though nearly half a year has gone by since I first wrote on this topic, we're still in the Houdini-issue centenary.

Although Houdini's byline was attached to three stories in Weird Tales, he almost certainly did not write any of them. These three stories are:

• "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" (March 1924)

• "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" (April 1924)

• "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" (May/June/July 1924)

"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," also known as "Under the Pyramids" and "Entombed with the Pharaohs," is known to have been ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft. If readers didn't know about it before, Lovecraft's authorship of the story was revealed when it was reprinted in the July 1939 issue of Weird Tales. By then, the magazine was printing and reprinting everything it could by Lovecraft. After all, he had been their bread and butter for many years. I have proposed Otis Adelbert Kline as the author of "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt." John Locke has put forth Harold Ward as the author of "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover."

There were other connections between Houdini and Weird Tales. I wonder about the possibility that Kline, as a possible or the probable author of non-fiction fillers in the magazine, borrowed from Houdini a copy of The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences, and Calamities, published in two volumes in 1825, as his source. I don't know that Kline was in fact the author of those fillers. I also don't know that Houdini owned those two volumes. And I don't know whether there was any borrowing going on.

Houdini is supposed to have been the author of two installments of a letters column called "Ask Houdini." I would not rule out that the first was not Houdini's work after all. At least a couple of letters may have been plants, for they bear Harold Ward's initials and originated in or near northern Illinois towns where Ward lived or worked. The second installment reads more like something that came from Houdini's pen. We will probably never know who were the writers of the twenty-two letters that appeared in "Ask Houdini." I suspect that comparing initials to known authors in Weird Tales would lead to some candidates.

Among Houdini's other published works of 1924 was the book A Magician Among the Spirits, which came out in May of that year. C.M. Eddy, Jr., of Providence, Rhode Island, was the uncredited co-author or ghostwriter of that book. According to Wikipedia: "In 1926, Harry Houdini hired H.P. Lovecraft and his friend C.M. Eddy, Jr., to write an entire book about debunking religious miracles, which was to be called The Cancer of Superstition." That project fell through upon Houdini's death later in the year.

Like Edgar Allan Poe, the Great Houdini died in October, in his case on Halloween, October 31, 1926. If Poe died by violence, then maybe they had that in common, too, for Houdini died of peritonitis, possibly brought on by appendicitis and a blow or blows to the abdomen.  

Houdini's brother was also a magician, escape artist, and debunker of spiritualism. His birth name was Ferenc Dezső Weisz, but he was known as Theodore "Dash" Hardeen. The brothers performed together early on. Hardeen continued performing after Houdini's death. He was on stage in Hellzapoppin in 1938-1941. In 1936, Hardeen played a detective investigating a fake medium in a movie short called Medium Well Done It. Houdini's wife, Wilhelmina Beatrice "Bess" (Rahner) Houdini, was also in movies--or a movie, Religious Racketeers, released in 1938. The movie begins one day short of the ten-year anniversary of Houdini's death. Bess Houdini played herself. Also in the cast was Helen Le Berthon, daughter of Ted Le Berthon, who also wrote for Weird Tales. As in Houdini's career, the subjects of Religious Racketeers are spiritualism and fake mediums. Another connection to Edgar Allan Poe: Houdini and his wife had agreed to communicate, if possible, by way of a substitution code, as in "The Gold-Bug," after his death. Their coded message: "Believe."

The biographies of Houdini and his wife were adapted to film in 1953, with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh in the lead roles, and again in 1976 with Paul Michael Glaser and Sally Struthers. We watched The Great Houdini, also called The Great Houdinis, on television when we were kids. I have always remembered the scene and the terrible tragedy of Houdini receiving blows to his abdomen and dying from his injuries.

What grief. What terrible grief. But there was triumph, too, and imperishable love.

"Do Spirits Return?", a poster advertising shows by Houdini at the Lyceum Theatre, Paterson, New Jersey, on September 2 through 4, presumably in 1920. 

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The Return of Tolkien the Progressive Bugaboo

Two years ago I wrote about a progressive moral panic prompted by the election of Giorgia Meloni to the premiership of Italy. Progressives thought that she is a fascist and the return of Mussolini. They were able to trace her fascistic leanings to an interest she has in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, also to her attendance of at least one Hobbit Camp in her native country. Tolkien will come up again before the end of this article, so be on the lookout for him.

Now here it is two years later, and though times have changed, times have also not changed. Signora Meloni has been in office for a while now, but there hasn't been any return to fascism, even if she supports, as Mussolini did before her, war against Russia and in Ukraine. I would call that a dark spot on her record. Anyway, Europe was against her ascendancy, too. In September 2022, at around the time of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins' birthdays, Ursula von der Leyen threatened the use of "tools" against Italians and the workings of their democracy, should they choose her. As we all know by now, we're supposed to be in favor of democracy unless it doesn't go our way.

A few weeks ago, Signora Meloni and Frau von der Leyen were at the G7 Summit along with a lot of other people who are called leaders, including our own president, John Gill. Both wore pink. Being Italian, Giorgia Meloni was dressed very stylishly in an outfit that was at once odd, flattering, and very attractive, if not stunning (an overused word). She pulled it off with daring and panache. (Not the outfit, the wearing of the outfit.) Her German/European counterpart was actually only in half-pink. Her bottom half was clothed in Nazi-gray.

In looking at pictures from the summit, I don't see any in which the two were standing very close to each other. I doubt that was mere happenstance. The Italian prime minister is very expressive. Her eye rolls are epic and her glaring is devastating. You don't want to be on the wrong side of her. But very graciously and very gently, she rounded up poor, befuddled John Gill when he started to wander off and brought him back into the group. (She probably saved him from going down a gently sloping surface. We know how dangerous those can be.) Now it turns out that Frau von der Leyen has secured a second term as president of the European Commission, even though Italians, in their wisdom, voted against her. Giorgia Meloni was politic in her response. "We have cooperated so far," she said in an interview with Corriere della Serra, "and will continue to do so in the future." As in France, it took the formation of a coalition of supposed moderates with socialists and other leftists to thwart the people who oppose them, people who love their families, their lives and livelihoods, and their country more than they could ever love an ideology.

We have some of that here, too. All of it actually. Last week, the party of Abraham Lincoln chose its candidates for president and vice-president. And once again--or I should say, continuously--progressives are in a moral panic about all of it, but about one thing in particular. As it turns out, the man who will probably be our next vice-president, like Giorgia Meloni, is a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien. He even named his company, Narya Ventures, after a place in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga. But guess what happens when you move--like puzzle master Wil Shortz--the N in Narya to the end of the word? You get Aryan. ARYAN! Yes, the Republican candidate for vice-president, is, like his master, a Nazi! We have the evidence! One of the geniuses on a mainstream media outlet (which will remain nameless in this space) has discovered this bit of knowledge and believes it a key to our understanding of what she calls the far right and the alt-right, "both in Europe and the United States." Watch out, Giorgia Meloni, she's onto you!

J.R.R. Tolkien was without a doubt a conservative thinker and author. He was also a Roman Catholic. To be the one makes him, in the minds (a big word in this case) of progressives, a right-winger, maybe even a Nazi, or at least close to being a Nazi. To be the other makes him more or less a terrorist. Progressives despise conservatives and will do anything, including inciting and carrying out acts of violence, to prevent conservatives from gaining and holding power. (These are called "tools.") They also despise the Catholic Church as a rival belief system: progressivism, leftism, and socialism are jealous gods and will have no other gods before them. They of course also violently resent the power and the prestige of the Church. They believe these things should be theirs and theirs alone. All of that aside, they show themselves to be ridiculous when they say or imply that people who like Tolkien and his works are fascists or Nazis or right-wingers or white supremacists. What's wrong with just liking a story because it's good or powerful, exciting or edifying, or--maybe most important of all--because it carries us away?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Shelley Duvall (1949-2024)

Actress Shelley Duvall died today, July 11, 2024. She was seventy-five years and four days old. Most people remember her as the female lead in The Shining (1980). I remember her for her performance in one of the most powerful and touching episodes of The Twilight Zone, broadcast on September 27, 1986, entitled "A Saucer of Loneliness."

"A Saucer of Loneliness" was adapted by David Gerrold from an original story by Theodore Sturgeon, published in Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1953. Sturgeon's story has been reprinted many times since, and you can understand why once you have read it. Inspiration struck him before he began and he wrote his story in about four hours.

Shelley Duvall played several roles in movie and television adaptations of science fiction, horror, and fantasy stories, as well as tall tales and fairy tales. In 1989, she created and was executive producer of the TV show Nightmare Classics. There were four episodes in all. Three were adapted from original stories by tellers of weird tales Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ambrose Bierce. Only Henry James out of the four original authors was not in Weird Tales. The Shining was also by an author who was in Weird Tales, Stephen King, though of course he was in a later incarnation of the magazine.

Shelley Duvall was at the height of her career during the 1970s, when great auteurs were at the forefront of moviemaking. She was in fact discovered by one of them, Robert Altman. She had great appeal on screen and unusual looks, too, but then in the 1970s actors and actresses were allowed unusual looks and an unusual manner. In looking at pictures of her today, I realized that she had a passing resemblance to Italian actress Mariangela Melato, who was also an actress of the 1970s and who was also associated with a great auteur, in her case Lina Wertmüller. Mariangela Melato was in The Seduction of Mimi (1972), a very funny movie, but I would recommend watching first Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974), in which she gave a great performance, in which she looks very beautiful, and which has a great bossa nova soundtrack by Piero Piccioni. 

Almost all of these people are gone now.

The closing of "A Saucer of Loneliness" may be a comfort to those who still have far to go in life:

". . . even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough."

We send wishes for an end to loneliness for those who are lonely and condolences to the friends and family of Shelley Duvall.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Freedom & Unfreedom

Independence Day was last week. For the benighted of the world--a growing group by the way, judging from recent events--that was the day in 1776 that we declared we would throw off the yoke of British and kingly tyranny and would be a free people and an independent nation. On July 4, 2024, we in America celebrated. On that same day in the country of our old colonial masters, the people threw off the so-called Conservatives of the United Kingdom and put a new yoke around there necks by electing a lot of leftists and socialists to Parliament. I'm not sure that anybody can defend the Conservatives--or Tories as we called them two and a half centuries ago when we chased them out of our new nation--with a straight face. They got what they deserved, I think. Now I suspect the British people will get what they deserve once their new representatives are installed. The place was already on its way to becoming Airstrip One. Now the whole process can be accelerated.

Three days later, France elected its own brand of leftists, socialists, and worse. Rassemblement National got more votes than any other party, and yet they'll be kept out of power by a coalition formed in opposition to them. I saw a short video of a large gathering in France in celebration of that result. There wasn't a French flag in sight but plenty of flags representing the Jew-haters of the world. In other words, leftists, socialists, and members of the religion of pieces got together to deny Marie Le Pen's party a shot at running the country. It seems like I have heard something like this before . . .

Michel Houellebecq is a French author. In 1991, he had published an essay called "H. P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie." Since then, M. Houellebecq's essay has been reprinted several times, not only in French but also in German and Spanish. In 2005, McSweeney's Books published an English-language version as H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. People in Europe who work in high literary forms are a lot less squeamish about these things than are their American counterparts. Even so, figures as varied as Leslie Fielder and Jack Matthews wrote about--or at least mentioned--H. P. Lovecraft. In any event, Michel Houellebecq has attached his name to the lowly genres of pulp magazines.

Michel Houellebecq was born in the 1950s. Like Cthulhu, he's from an island in the southern hemisphere. M. Houellebecq has written what you could call science fiction. He even has an entry in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. For people who like circles and connections, consider that his publisher is Flammarion. In 2015, two days before Islamists murdered the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Flammarion issued M. Houellebecq's novel Soumission. I haven't read this book, but I can tell you a little about its plot. Very little, actually, but enough: in 2022, just two years past now, a coalition of socialists and Muslims forms to prevent--you guessed it--Marie Le Pen from assuming power (executive rather than legislative) in France. We've said it before and we'll all say it again: science fiction is not about predicting or prognosticating on the future. It's about extrapolating future events and situations from what we know about human nature, science, human history, and so on. But you've got to give M. Houellebecq credit. Almost a decade ago, he called it. Maybe not in the particulars, but he called it.

In our revolutionary period of the eighteenth century, we strove--albeit imperfectly--towards greater freedom and the recognition of the unalienable rights of men (and women). In France's revolutionary period, they traded one form of tyranny for another that was arguably far worse. Now they're doing it again, I think, they and the British, hand in hand. We're watching them. I hope we decide not to follow.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Harry Houdini & Psychical Research

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," written by Otis Adelbert Kline, was the first serial to appear in Weird Tales. Part one was in the first issue, dated March 1923. Part two followed in April of that year. At the opening of part one, the narrator learns that his uncle has died. That would make "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" the first "Uncle story" in Weird Tales. You might question whether the "Uncle story" was or is actually a thing, but I'm pretty sure that it is. I remember when we were kids watching and enjoying a movie called Let's Kill Uncle (1966), with Nigel Green in the title role. A Thousand Clowns (1965) starring Jason Robards and Barry Gordon, may also be an Uncle story. Maybe what we need is an Internet Uncle Story Database (IUSDb).

The narrator of Kline's story lets us know that his Uncle Jim was involved in researching psychic phenomena. He was a member of the London Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart. Both were real organizations. The London society was formed in 1882, the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884. In "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," there is a séance, some automatic writing, and a lot of ectoplasm flying, flowing, and oozing through the room. These elements of spiritualism appear in earnest in the story, although, to his credit, Kline didn't exactly fall for spiritualism. Instead he proposed a materialistic or naturalistic explanation for all of its elements. He also placed everything under God, and so nothing under God can be called supernatural. To call anything under God supernatural would of course be an oxymoron.

Kline had stories in several issues in Weird Tales over the next year. He wrote the essay "Why Weird Tales?" for the first anniversary number of May/June/July 1924. He probably also edited (or co-edited) that issue. After a little more than a year, Kline seems to have begun changing his tune when it came to spiritualism and psychic phenomena. Here is the opening text from his Dr. Dorp story "The Malignant Entity" (Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924):

     "I TELL you, Evans," said Dr. Dorp, banging his fist on the arm of his chair for emphasis, "the science of psychology is in much the same stage of development today as were the material sciences in the dark ages."

     "But surely," I objected, "the two centuries of investigation just past have yielded some fruit. It cannot be that the eminent men who have devoted the greater part of their lives to this fascinating subject have labored in vain." 

     The doctor stroked his iron-gray Van Dyke meditatively.

     "With a few--a very few exceptions, I'm afraid they have," he replied, "at least so far as their own deductions from observed phenomena are concerned."

     "Take Sir Oliver Lodge, for example--" I began. 

     "The conclusions of Sir Oliver will serve as an excellent example for my analogy," said the doctor. "No doubt you are familiar with the results of his years of painstaking psychical research as expounded in his books."

     "I believe he has become a convert to spiritism," I replied. 

     "With all due respect to Sir Oliver," said the doctor, "I should say that he has rather singled out such facts as suited his purpose and assembled them as evidence to support the spiritistic theory. It may seem paradoxical to add that I believe he has always been thoroughly conscientious in his investigations and sincere in his deductions."

     "I'm afraid I do not quite follow you."

     "There are times in the life of every man," continued the doctor, "when emotion dethrones reason. At such a crisis the most keen-witted of scientists may be blinded to truth by the overpowering influence of his own desires. Sir Oliver lost a beloved son. Only those who have suffered similar losses can appreciate the keen anguish that followed his bereavement, or sympathize with his intense longing to communicate with Raymond. Most men are creatures of their desires. They believe what they want to believe. Under the circumstances it was not difficult for a clever psychic to read the mind of the scientist and tell him the things he wanted to hear."

     "But what of the many investigators who have not been similarly influenced?" I inquired. "Surely they must have found some basis--" 

     I was interrupted by the entrance of the doctor's housekeeper who announced--"

Poor Oliver Lodge. But then nobody made him or people like him try to force their beliefs onto the world. Kline could just as easily have been writing about Arthur Conan Doyle, who also lost a son and who also, seemingly, let his feelings get in the way of his proper thinking.

So in 1923, Kline included some of the trappings of spiritualism in his first story, but by mid 1924, he seems to have become more skeptical of the whole business--if Dr. Dorp was saying what Kline wanted him to say, that is. So what happened in the interim? Maybe Kline fell under the influence of Harry Houdini, who signed his agreement with Weird Tales magazine in February 1924 and who busied himself in and out of its pages with busting psychic mediums and debunking the claims of believers in spiritualism. I have suggested that Kline, as the probable author of nonfictional fillers in Weird Tales, borrowed The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences, and Calamities (two volumes, 1825) from Houdini, who is known to have had a vast library. I have also suggested that Kline was the ghostwriter behind "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt," published under Houdini's byline in Weird Tales in March and April 1924. It's clear that Kline was intelligent and widely read. Maybe he saw the wisdom in Houdini's point of view. And maybe the London Society for Psychical Research saw it, too (or came to see things the same way anyway, independently of Houdini), for in 1930, there was a split in its numbers. Arthur Conan Doyle left that year. Others may have also. I can't say for sure, as I haven't looked into this business very closely. And I don't really want to, for spiritualism and its related psychic or parapsychological phenomena are so thoroughly uninteresting to me, being as they are completely ungrounded in fact or reality, and dripping, as they are, with lying, ignorance, gullibility, whining, special pleading, shabbiness, and so on. There are other, more interesting frauds and scams at work in the world. If you have only so much time to read about such things, you should choose the ones that interest you.

On November 18, 1922, Scientific American announced that it would pay $2,000 to anyone who could take a spirit photograph under test conditions and $2,500 to any medium who could produce physical effects from supposed spirits, again under test conditions or controlled conditions. (See Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls by William Lindsay Gresham [McFadden, 1961], p. 201.) Houdini put up $5,000 of his own money for similar purposes. Scientific American formed its Committee for Psychical Investigations, a name similar to but not to be confused with those of the London Society for Psychical Investigations and its American counterpart. At some point, Houdini became a member of that committee. And when his tour of the vaudeville stage ended in February 1924, he went out on a new lecture tour designed to talk about and expose fraudulent mediums. I'm pretty sure he was involved with Scientific American and its investigations for several months, possibly a year or more, around that time.

Houdini's stories and his letters column in Weird Tales, "Ask Houdini," coincided with his lecture tour that spring. In May 1924, his book, A Magician Among the Spirits, written on the same subject, was published. And that summer, Houdini exposed a psychic medium known as "Margery," real name Mina Crandon, of Boston, as a fraud. Houdini's investigation of Mina Crandon forms a major episode in his many biographies.

There had been plenty of that before and there would be still more to come for Houdini. Looking back on all of this, I have the impression that spiritualism in America was in decline by the mid to late 1920s. The lesson in all of it might have been: Don't mess with Houdini. By the way, there may have been some Houdini-adjacent content in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales in the form of a nonfiction filler entitled "Woman Fails to Win Psychic Prize." That item, on page 74, is about the Reverend Mrs. Josi K. Stewart of Cleveland, Ohio, whom Scientific American had shot down the previous October. She wanted the prize. She went home with nothing, perhaps not even a lovely parting gift. Was Otis Adelbert Kline the anonymous author of that brief article? Maybe. And here's another by-the-way: Scientific American is currently involved in another fraud and scam, in this case transgenderism. The problem this time is that the magazine is on the same side as the fraudsters and scammers, the people who are trying their best to harm children. Shame on them and everyone who believes as they do. We can only hope that Scientific American goes down the tubes as a result of this and so many other bogus and idiotic ideas that they hold and have tried to promulgate in the world.

Weird Tales in 1923-1924 is full of content about spiritualism, psychic mediums, séances, spirits, psychic phenomena, automatic writing, ectoplasm, and so on. In the first half of 1924, the Great Houdini addressed those things in his "Ask Houdini" column and in his three ghostwritten stories. The kind of research I'm doing right now on spiritualism and psychic phenomena in Weird Tales could go on and on. But I'm getting close to the end of this series on Harry Houdini. I have one more part to go. Then it will be on to other things.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Fiction versus Spiritualism

I have written before that Weird Tales was the first magazine in America devoted to fantasy fiction. Now that I have read whole issues and many individual stories from the first year and more of the magazine, I find that not to be true. Or if it is true, it wasn't true until there was an entire issue of Weird Tales devoted exclusively to fantasy fiction. In other words, every story in a given issue would have to be a fantasy of one kind or another for Weird Tales to have been the first fantasy magazine in America. And when did that happen? I'm not sure. I would have to keep reading.

As we have seen, weird fiction is not necessarily fantastic: weird is in the real world and in our lives. It is at work in both. Nothing supernatural, nothing based in fantasy need happen for it to be weird. So maybe Amazing Stories, which made its debut in April 1926, was the first American magazine devoted to fantasy, science fiction being a sub-genre in the larger and vaguely defined genre of fantasy. But that's assuming there wasn't a whole issue of fantasy fiction in Weird Tales between March 1923 and March 1926. That seems like a tall order, but it would take a lot of reading to confirm or deny the notion. I'm not there yet.

Weird fiction is about the past. I have lumped it with the other more conservative genres of romance, supernatural horror, adventure, historical fiction, and so on. Science fiction may stand alone as the only progressive genre, although not all science fiction is progressive. There is, after all, conservative science fiction, too. In recent decades, authors have tried to make weird fiction more progressive. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that works. I can't imagine, though, rooting for or sympathizing with a protagonist who is engaged in a Marxist struggle against his hated bourgeoisie, or who wishes to silence and oppress, if not murder, Jews or Christians or women (the original kind) or anyone else who disagrees with him, or who believes that we can and must save children from harm by cutting off their breasts and genitals, or on and on through the parade of horrible, naïve, or just plain idiotic ideas that make up progressivism. Edgar Allan Poe wrote from the viewpoint of men living in pathological states of mind, but I don't think we're supposed to identify with mad Montresor or the unnamed narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart." Besides that, those two characters and others like them have only murder on their minds. They're not trying to lay waste to the past, or impose totalitarian systems upon the earth, or bring about an end to history. There isn't any ideological motivation behind their actions.

It's hard for us to imagine now just how close to the Victorian era was Weird Tales at its inception. We picture pulp fiction as part of the fast-talking, fast-moving culture of the 1930s and '40s. And yet, in 1923, there were still vast holdovers from the previous century and the pre-war era: twentieth-century America was still living in many of its old forms and not yet aware of all of its new ones.* Spiritualism was one of those old forms, a holdover from a previous time, not yet aware that it was itself as dead as its subjects, as dead as the concept in physics of the luminiferous ether. That concept was slain by Albert Einstein as well as by anybody. Maybe its date of death was in 1919, the same year in which J.C. Henneberger (a Victorian figure in his own right) arrived in Indianapolis, soon to issue, with his business partner, first, Detective Tales, then, in March 1923, Weird Tales.

But wait, you might say, you just said that weird fiction is about the past. Wasn't the nineteenth century part of that past?

The answer is, of course, Yes. But weird and an awareness of weird are older still. Spiritualism is comparatively new. You might even call it an innovation. It was certainly an outgrowth of nineteenth-century culture, which was, truth be told, very closely interested in science and the idea of progress. Weird lives apart from technology; spiritualism is tied to it. Spirit photography is as good an example of that as anything, but how many stories based in spiritualism have you read that include some scientific or technological means for detecting, proving the existence of, or even dispelling spirits? William Hope Hodgson's stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder are full of gadgets. There are also ghost-finding gadgets in early stories in Weird Tales, including in Otis Adelbert Kline's adventures of Dr. Dorp. We still see that kind of thing in the instruments that contemporary ghost-hunters use. Employing material instrumentation to find something that is supposedly not material at all--they are spirits after all--hardly makes sense, but here we are.

Spiritualism and all of its trappings were in early stories in Weird Tales. The first story to appear in the magazine, "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard Hawkins, and the first serial, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline, both include elements of spiritualism. Hawkins' story is in fact a transcription from the dead, made possible only by automatic writing, the same trick that Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife tried to play on Harry Houdini in 1922. But spiritualism didn't have any legs and soon grew tired. There was going to have to be something else to take its place if Weird Tales was going to go very far in its field. I think an awareness of weird--weird, which predated spiritualism by more than a millennium--would do. So would H.P. Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror or science fantasy, a twentieth-century--or at its earliest a nineteenth-century--development. I don't know whether Houdini helped to make spiritualism go away, but he sure didn't hurt the cause.**

Houdini's stance against spiritualism, mediums, séances, and so forth also goes against the premises of so many early Weird Tales stories. Like I wrote the other day, he was not a natural fit for the magazine. Readers loved their spirits and their séances. Witness the letters published in "Ask Houdini." But maybe we should look at him and his presence in another way. In old Westerns, the new sheriff comes into town ("The new sheriff is near!") and says to the bad guys, "This town ain't big enough for the both of us." They had to ride out, either on their horses or in a hearse. Either the boondocks or Boot Hill would be their destination. So maybe Houdini was like that sheriff, saying, in effect, weird fiction can have either spiritualism or something better, but it can't and shouldn't have both. And it can't have both me and spiritualism. Not that Houdini laid down any kind of ultimatum. Not that Houdini and Weird Tales parted ways because of any conflict or difference of opinion on these things. (I think it more likely that their arrangement simply fell apart as the magazine did at about this time of year, one century past.) It's just that there were two opposing world-views, and, in competition with each other, the superior world-view won and spiritualism was shown the door. Readers and writers still hung on to spiritualism for a long time to come--there are trappings of spiritualism in Weird Tales as late as 1938 when Manly Wade Wellman's three-part serial "The Hairy Ones Shall Dance" was published in the magazine. (Published under his pseudonym Gans T. Field, "The Hairy Ones Shall Dance" was in the January through March issues of 1938.) But if spiritualism was already worn out and creaky in 1923, it was way worn out, and creakier still, fifteen years later. Wellman's including elements of spiritualism in his story actually weakens it in my mind. It also shows him as not yet having matured as a writer or a thinker. In any case, I'm not sure that any writer or reader of weird fiction today would countenance the whole business. Leave spiritualism to TV ghost-hunters and their gadgets. Let us instead have weird in our weird fiction.

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*In 1923, the most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction were Edith Wharton, born in 1862, and Booth Tarkington, born in 1869.

**Another weakness of spiritualism is that it can work only in small, dark, and enclosed spaces, the natural habitat of the psychic medium, without whom none of it is possible. Weird works everywhere and all the time, even--by way of cosmic thinking not easily attained before the twentieth century--into the vast physical universe, all the way to the most distant and trackless stars. And of course it works for everyone. You might say that spiritualism, requiring a medium, is elitist, while weird is thoroughly democratic. In spiritualism there are experts.*** Weird can happen to anybody, no intermediary needed.

***And now here's a note to my note. It occurs to me now that pulp-era spiritualism and technocracy may have run on parallel tracks, even if they weren't connected at all. The proto- and early science fiction of that same era may have been more closely technocratic than was spiritualism. A return to weird and the creation of weird fiction, then, may have been a reaction to nineteenth-century science and progress, reaction being characteristic of certain brands of conservatism.

 

Technocracy has to do with gadgetry and technology-based processes, of course, but the key ingredient in technocracy is the expert, the one who knows and the one to whom we are to defer. (Maybe in that respect, technocracy is a kind of gnosticism.) In spiritualism, the expert is the medium or the psychic investigator. In technocracy (or bureaucracy), the technocrat is the expert. In either case, the expert is unassailable. In any system based on expertism (my new word), questioning the expert is verboten. Skepticism, let alone criticism, is not permitted. So: the coronavirus is naturally zoonotic. It came from a wet market in China. It did not escape from a laboratory. It certainly wasn't manufactured. Vaccines are safe and effective. They prevent disease. You must receive at least one if you are to be safe and to keep others safe. Masking, six-foot distancing, lockdowns, and wiping down your groceries and mail work. They prevent the transmission of disease. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are not effective against coronavirus. They are quack treatments. Only patented medicines work. (At this point, maybe we can call them--all of those things that are called vaccines--patent medicines instead. By the way, the spellchecker in Blogger doesn't even like the word hydroxychloroquine. That might just be a coincidence, but it could also indicate that we are not even to speak its name.) You may not question the experts on any of this. If you do, you're a xenophobe, a terrorist, an insurrectionist, a science-denier.

Now, an aside, an aside inside of a note to a note to a main article from which we are so far away that I can barely see it anymore: the concept of the expert might be related to the concept of the superhero or the superior man. Taken a little further, it might be related to the leader of a cult or to the cult of personality. Science fiction during the Golden Age of the 1930s and '40s, specifically the science fiction of John W. Campbell, Jr., and Astounding Science-Fiction, was caught up in the superhero/superior man idea. Very often, the powers of the superior man are psychic rather than physical. "Slan," by A. E. van Vogt, serialized in Astounding Science-Fiction in September-December 1940, is an example of a story about the psychic-superior man in science fiction. And we should remember that Campbell, reputed to be an exemplar of hard science fiction, began his career in college as a psychic investigator. I'm not sure that he moved very far beyond that, even late in life.

To return to the original topic, if spiritualism and technocratic or bureaucratic expertism have anything in common, it's that they don't and can't stand up to scrutiny. They can't stand the light of day and can operate only in the dark. And with spiritualism, it is literally only in the dark that it can operate. Anyway, the spiritualism craze and the technocracy craze ended a long time ago, but like TV ghost-hunting, technocracy and the cult of the expert are still with us. By the way, the advent of technocracy in America is dated to--guess when--1919.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley