Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Donald Keyhoe in National Geographic-Part One

Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988) had four stories in Weird Tales from April 1925 to May 1927. Two months after his last story for "The Unique Magazine" was published--at 12 o'clock noon on July 20, 1927, to be exact--Keyhoe took off on an aerial tour of the United States. That tour would take about three months and cover more than 22,000 miles in all. Keyhoe, referred to as Lieutenant Keyhoe for his previous rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, flew in an advance airplane piloted by Philip R. Love (1903-1943). Also on board was mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson. Following along behind them was the most renowned aviator of his day, Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974), piloting the most renowned of aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis. Keyhoe, who had previously been connected with the Byrd Polar Plane Tour of 1926, served as manager of Lindbergh's tour, and he wrote about it in The National Geographic Magazine of January 1928. Over the years, there were tellers of weird tales in the pages of The New Yorker, but could Lieutenant Donald E. Keyhoe, U.S.M.C. (Retired), have been the only one to have written for or had his picture in National Geographic?

* * *

Many years ago, the man who lived upstairs from me walked away from his apartment and left it like the cabin of the Mary Celeste. It remained that way, pretty well undisturbed, for years. Then, last year, he died, and earlier this year his heir came and cleaned out what we wanted--and left the rest. That was over a weekend. On Monday morning, I saw that there were workmen cleaning out the apartment and throwing things into the bed of a pickup truck for delivery to the landfill. I saw a box of books go in the bed, and that was enough for me. I went out to talk to them. They said I could have anything I wanted of what remained in the apartment. I said I would take the books at least. They replied, "There are a lot more of them upstairs." I had to go to work. I asked, if I were to leave boxes and containers for them, would they save the books for me? They said yes. I think they were happy not to take books to the dump.

When I came home that afternoon, the whole front of my house was piled with books and magazines--hundreds of them. Could there have been a thousand or more? Anyway, included in those piles were hundreds of National Geographic magazines going back to 1915. And in those piles within piles was The National Geographic Magazine for January 1928 with a lead story, "Seeing America with Lindbergh," by Donald E. Keyhoe, forty-six pages in all and with dozens of photographs, most of them aerial views of the American landscape. Others are of members of the tour, as well as of spectators and dignitaries they met along the way. One of these photos includes a young Lieutenant Keyhoe, seated in front of Colonel Lindbergh:

Donald E. Keyhoe, shown at the bottom right, in The National Geographic Magazine, January 1928, page 11. He had just turned thirty years old when this picture was taken. Charles A. Lindbergh, who sat just behind him, was five years his junior. On Lindbergh's right is Philip Love, pilot of the advance plane. Love was later killed in an airplane crash in Nevada. The others in this picture are not identified, but I believe the woman on the lower left is Lindbergh's mother, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1876-1954). The man on the far right may be mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson, who flew with Love and Keyhoe in the advance airplane during their tour.

Pulp magazines have had a reputation for being a lowly form, made by undistinguished writers or just plain hacks for a simple, working-class, or barely literate readership. One of the reasons I have written about those who wrote letters in "The Eyrie" is to show that the readership of Weird Tales at least came from all walks of life and all levels of society, even from prominent and well-respected men and women. As for the writers, they, too, came from all walks of life. They, too, could be prominent, well-respected, able and active in other fields besides just writing. I have to tell you, it was a thrill for me to discover a writer for Weird Tales in a mainstream magazine of the 1920s. In fact, I would call this extraordinary. And I wonder if there is any equal in the pages of other magazines of that time.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Saturday, May 3, 2025

Nictzin Dyalhis & Donald Edward Keyhoe

Nictzin Dyalhis (1873?-1942) had his first story in Weird Tales in April 1925. So did Donald Edward Keyhoe (1897-1988). Dyalhis' story was of course "When the Green Star Waned," a science-fantasy set in the solar system of the future. Keyhoe's story was "The Grim Passenger," a tale of Egyptian archaeology and a pharaoh's curse. "The Grim Passenger" is, then, about the past. As it turns out, it is also set in the past, the past, that is, of 1925. You'll have to read the story to find out the year. I don't want to give away Keyhoe's twist ending.

"When the Green Star Waned" is in the prose style of the pulps. Dyalhis seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells, but it looks like the greater influence came from Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Martian tales. In contrast, "The Grim Passenger" is almost journalistic or documentary in its tone and style. It could almost be an article rather than a story. In fact, it's barely a story as we understand and enjoy works of fiction. It seems to exist mainly for its twist ending and the occult connection made between one event and another. It's a somewhat Fortean construction, or like an expanded vignette from Ripley's Believe It or Not! If it had been true or mostly true, it would have found a place in later books by Frank Edwards or Vincent Gaddis.

Nictzin Dyalhis had eight stories in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1940 and five more in other magazines during those same decades. These proved very popular with readers. It's a shame there weren't more, even if, as I suspect, they were revised or even rewritten by authors within Farnsworth Wright's stable. (Maybe Dyalhis was the Richard Shaver of Weird Tales.) Despite the popularity and success of his stories and the powers of imagination behind them, Dyalhis worked as a common laborer and a hardscrabble farmer. He lived in poverty and died in almost complete obscurity. He was survived by his wife and daughter. The daughter died not long ago. She had children of her own, and so the enigmatic Nictzin Dyalhis still has living descendants. I doubt that anyone knows his real name. The facts of his life are extremely scanty. At least one of the supposed facts in his obituary is wrong. 

Donald E. Keyhoe moved in different circles. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1919 and served as a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, eventually attaining the rank of major (with his service during World War II). Although he wrote scads of stories for the lowly pulps, he was also an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce and an associate of the most famous aviator of his time, Charles Lindbergh, for whom he managed a 22,000-mile aerial tour of the United States in 1927. I'll have more on that next time.

Keyhoe was born on June 20, 1897. Four days after his fiftieth birthday, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, another airplane pilot, saw a flight of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier in Washington State. These and other such objects of course became known as flying saucers, named for Arnold's description of the way they flew. (The original description was of crescent-shaped or flying wing-type aircraft. They were decidedly not discs.) Keyhoe became deeply interested in--eventually obsessed with--the flying saucer phenomena. In January 1950, True magazine published his article "The Flying Saucers Are Real." It proved a sensation, and Keyhoe expanded it into a book of the same name, published shortly thereafter.

Several more flying saucer books flew from his typewriter. The last came in 1973, which can be considered the last year of the flying saucer era. In 1957, he took over as director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), founded the previous year. Also in 1956, the film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, based on Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), was released. In this one, Hugh Marlowe played the hero instead of a louse, as he did in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is still a very watchable and enjoyable movie. Look for an alien abduction scene as a precursor to later, supposedly real-life abductions, such as in the case of Betty and Barney Hill.

Donald Keyhoe was a conspiracy theorist, though probably not the original conspiracy theorist when it came to flying saucers. On March 8, 1958, he appeared on ABC-TV on The Mike Wallace Interview, starring Mike Wallace and a Parliament cigarette. Keyhoe did pretty well in the interview, I think. Mike Wallace was not the savage interviewer of later years. Listen for the word "misinformation." The point of this is that Keyhoe and his subject, flying saucers, were taken seriously enough to have appeared on national television, where he was interviewed at length by a prominent and well-respected journalist. There has been recent media coverage of flying saucers, but this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Recent witnesses might long for the 1950s.

In his last book, Aliens from Space . . . The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects (1973), Keyhoe covered the whole phenomenon and its various (human) actors. He speculated on the physical appearance of aliens from space. He also suggested that aliens might be up to no good. It's interesting that his first story in Weird Tales appeared in an issue in which a tale of an alien invasion of Earth was so prominent. In his own story of April 1925, Keyhoe looked to the past. In Nictzin Dyalhis' story, maybe Keyhoe saw the future.

I think Donald Keyhoe went to his grave believing in what he saw as the truth behind flying saucers. He died at age ninety-one on November 29, 1988. His obituary appeared in the Washington Post. Major Keyhoe was survived by his wife and three children. I don't know whether he has any living descendants.

In looking through Aliens from Space, I came upon the name of another teller of weird tales. He was Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994). By a strange coincidence, Carr also had his first story in Weird Tales in 1925. Entitled "The Composite Brain," it was published in the March issue. As it turned out, Carr became special advisor to NICAP, and so his path crossed that of Major Keyhoe three decades or more after they had had their stories in Weird Tales. Carr had lots of ideas, one of which was called Operation Lure. But this idea wasn't new at all. It had first been proposed in that decade of origins, the 1920s, in the pages of Popular Mechanics. It, too, seems to have been influenced by H.G. Wells in that Martians have been watching us and we have in turn observed phenomena on the surface of their Red Planet. It seems there is always watching and listening going on . . .

Next: Donald E. Keyhoe in National Geographic.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

The Falling Man

The illustration on the cover of Weird Tales for April 1925 is for "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis. The artist was Andrew Brosnatch. It shows a man who appears to be falling into a mass of aliens that have invaded Earth. In actuality, the aliens have levitated him the way a Roman might hold a grape over his open mouth. The intent is the same: the aliens mean to eat him. In a moment, they will let go with their powers of levitation and he will plunge into their mass, where they await with their "triangular, gaping, hideous orifices." The man is spared his fate by the merciful actions of the Venus-Men.

Andrew Brosnatch's cover illustration makes me think of Christian art, especially depictions of Hell and the casting into Hell of sinners. His garb is also redolent of ancient or biblical dress. First is Brosnatch's cover, then an example of the falling man from Christian art:


"Casting the Damned into Hell," the right wing of a triptych entitled The Last Judgment, by German-Flemish artist Hans Memling (ca. 1430-1494). See in particular the figure on the middle right.

There are many more examples of the falling man, cast into Hell, in Christian art. If you go looking for such imagery, be ready for some nightmarish, yet fascinating, depictions of Hell, some of which remind me of William Hope Hodgson's description of our nightmarish future in The Night Land (1912).

Depictions of Icarus by European artists show a similar falling man from pre-Christian and pagan times. The image of the falling spaceman is common in science fiction art, the art of the future. (I guess apocalyptic art is art of the future, too.) Here's an example of that:

The Fallen Spaceman by Lee Harding (1973), with art by John and Ian Schoenherr. Be aware that I have adjusted this image from an online photograph of the cover. This is not a true representation of the original.

I don't know whether Andrew Brosnatch intended to evoke thoughts of the fall of man from the Book of Genesis, of the sinner and the damned cast into Hell, or of the general image of man falling from grace or from great heights into opposing depths. Those of us with religious upbringing and education can't avoid seeing such things, though.

I have just one more thing. My nephew and I noticed a long time ago that all of the major characters in Star Wars sooner or later fall into a pit. The same thing happens to Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood, also to characters in The Lord of the Rings saga. That fear, dread, and terror at falling or plunging, or being cast into pits and depths, must be deep in us, no pun intended, and always ready to come forth. 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Sunday, April 27, 2025

April Aliens & April Invasions

The cover story and lead story in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales is "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis. The "Green Star" of the title is Earth as seen from the planet Venus. The men of Venus have noticed that the green light of Earth has faded and that their neighboring planet has gone silent. These two developments have raised the alarm on Venus. The great men of that planet decide to travel to Earth to find out what has happened. (1, 2)

"When the Green Star Waned" is about an alien invasion of Earth. The aliens of the story have enslaved Earthmen and it is we who prove weak, helpless, and powerless to save ourselves. The heroes and rescuers in "When the Green Star Waned" are in fact Venus-Men rather than Earthmen. That alone makes for an unusual story. There are other ways in which "When the Green Star Waned" is unusual or innovative.

Nictzin Dyalhis' story is an early example of weird fantasy, science fantasy, space fantasy, or the weird-science type of story. Later science fiction would treat the same kind of situation--going up against alien invaders of other planets--except that it is Earthmen who are the heroes and rescuers. It is we who free the oppressed, enslaved, or exploited peoples of those planets. The same kind of plot became a staple of the television show Star Trek, broadcast four decades after "When the Green Star Waned" was published. The episode "Operation--Annihilate!", first broadcast in April 1967, is an example. The plot of that episode has similarities to The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein before it (1951) and the movie Alien afterwards (1979).

There was a contrary development during the Flying Saucer Era of 1947 to 1968 or 1973. During that era, aliens from outer space were often represented as good and caring and benevolent. They were our space brothers, or like angels from on high. Their purpose in coming to Earth was to save us from ourselves. This is what much of the Contactee phenomenon of the 1950s was about. The space brother/space angel/space savior idea was captured pretty well in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951.

A description of the alien invaders in "When the Green Star Waned" must have sounded familiar to readers of what was then called the pseudo-scientific story (see "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud in Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), scientifiction (Hugo Gernsback's name for stories of this type), or the scientific romance (a term more commonly used in Great Britain, I think). A passage from "When the Green Star Waned":
     And here we found life, such as it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok's height, with a gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.
     Well it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok's imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk--how, I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings--to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished--save for a few fragments of its edges--smitten into nothingness by the vibrations hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

Here is a similar passage, of the narrator's first encounter with an alien, in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, first published in Pearson's Magazine from April to December 1897:

    A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

    Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

    Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

Dyalhis' aliens aren't quite the same as Wells', but his description of them is close enough that I sense the influence of the latter upon the former. Wells' prose here found echoes in that of H.P. Lovecraft, too, I think. Maybe there was an influence there as well.

By the way, Nictzin Dayalhis was the originator of the term Blastor, later blaster, a weapon that will forever be indispensable in our fight against alien invasions.

Next: Andrew Brosnatch's Cover.

Note
(1) Light as an indication of life has been in the news as I write, for a spectrographic analysis of the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b shows signs of what some scientists believe could be life on that planet. (A skepto-graphic analysis might show something different.) The indicating compounds are sulfurous. Sulfur has of course been associated with Hell, the Devil, and a general wickedness or evil. Hold onto that thought for next time.

(2) The silence of the planet Earth in "When the Green Star Waned" makes me think of Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. In Lewis' version, Earth is "silent" because we are under a kind of cosmic quarantine, the reason being that human beings are "bent," another way of saying, I guess, that we are fallen in our nature. Hold onto the idea of a fallen man for next time as well.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Monday, April 21, 2025

Gatz, Kurtz, & Ántonia

For my next feat, I will attempt to connect Shakespeare to Conrad to Fitzgerald and Cather to mid-century urban horror to twenty-first-century cosmic horror. Edgar Allan Poe will make an appearance, too . . .

If you look hard enough and think hard enough, if you let your mind wander freely, you can make connections among any number of fictional works. So I'll give it away right away and let you know that this isn't much of a feat after all. This is just a brain, an eye, and a memory at work. I'll start with three novels in English published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . .

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899), My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918), and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) have at least one thing in common, for all three are first-person narratives told by a friend and observer of a great person. Here is Nick Carraway on Jay Gatsby:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. (Chapter 1)

Now Marlow on Kurtz:

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.

     "Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things." (Chapter III)

And finally Jim Burden on Ántonia:

     I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my window on its way up the heavens. I was thinking about Ántonia and her children; about Anna's solicitude for her, Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's jealous, animal little love. That moment, when they all came tumbling out of the cave into the light, was a sight any man might have come far to see. Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade--that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer: Ántonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came home in triumph with our snake; Ántonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm; Ántonia coming in with her work-team along the evening sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. (Book V, Chapter II)

     It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

Whereas Gatsby has "an extraordinary gift for hope," Kurtz would seem a man in despair, or tipping on its edge. Although his is a "gift of noble and lofty expression," his last words are unclear, ambiguous. What does Kurtz mean when he cries, "The horror! The horror!"? Both are men of ambition, though. As a young man, Gatsby embarked upon a program of self-improvement. His ultimate ambition is to capture the heart of a woman. Kurtz's ambitions lie elsewhere. He has his Intended, but he has gone far away from her and never sees her again, dying as he does in Africa. Gatsby is a quintessentially American character, but Kurtz could be as well, at least at a basic level, for he goes away from woman and civilization into the wilderness. As for Ántonia, she is another kind of person altogether, "a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." Only she among these three characters has children.

Like Marlow, Jay Gatsby--originally James Gatz--served on board a craft, in his case the yacht of a wealthy man. Nick describes Gatsby as "extravagantly ambitious." Nothing deters him in his pursuit of his dream. Gatz's journey--soon Gatsby's--takes him from North Dakota to the Great Lakes, the West Indies, the Barbary Coast, finally to Long Island. Like Kurtz, he dies afloat. Whereas Kurtz departs from this earth on a boat bearing him downriver, like a latter-day pharaoh, Gatsby's life ends in a bitterly ironic way, in a swimming pool, on a pneumatic mattress. The yacht of his youth is in the distant past. His last craft is the size and dimensions of an open grave.

Marlow makes a different kind of journey. He travels from a great city into the dark heart of Africa, there to find and fetch back Kurtz, like Orpheus after Eurydice. He is his own Charon, or maybe his boat is a new Argo and his adventures in Africa a new argosy told to men on board a different craft, years later, upon the still, darkening waters of the mouth of the Thames. His earlier boat churns up and down river as he looks for Kurtz, then carries him away. The yawl Nellie, named for a woman, comes to rest in the very opening sentence of Heart of Darkness, and Marlow begins his tale, told only to men.

In his journey upriver, Marlow looks upon the deep, green, and wild world on its banks. This is a place mostly untouched by Europeans. In his upriver journey, his boat beats against the current. The journey downriver is easier on the boat but harder on Kurtz its passenger. In the end, he has on his face a look of "an intense and hopeless despair."

At the end of The Great Gatsby, Nick broods upon his own experience in knowing Gatsby:

     Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Marlow has a darker vision, I think, but Nick Carraway's words on the "fresh, green breast of the new world" are something like Marlow's in his encounter with an old and green and dark Africa. The American encounter with the wilderness is hopeful and full of positive awe and wonder. The European encounter--Marlow's and Kurtz's--must be far less so. And then there is the famous closing of The Great Gatsby:

     Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning--

      So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If time is a river without banks, then we can never go ashore and the future is unreachable. The river carries Marlow back to the sea--the point of origin for all of us--and bears Gatsby--all men--into the past. In My Ántonia, there are rivers, riverbanks, and bluffs high above, but these are places for play, or they are part of a great and awesome landscape, or they are rivers to cross: no one in My Ántonia goes lengthwise, up or down a river. And the only sea in Nebraska is a sea of grass. The breath of the prairie wind makes waves across its surface.

In My Ántonia, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda also make their journeys. Jim is from the East, specifically Virginia. Ántonia is from even farther east, from Bohemia. Both arrive in Nebraska--like Jay Gatsby's home state, a place on the Great Plains--as children. Ántonia remains and lives out her life in this place close to the earth. The plants in her landscape are not wild but cultivated, planted and tended, grown and harvested. Her farm is green and is not one of gray ashes. Like Nick Carraway, Jim Burden goes east, to New York City, thus nearly cutting himself off from his past and his friend. The main characters in The Great Gatsby are from the Midwest and the Great Plains, or what was then or before called the Middle Border, as was their creator. Like Jim Burden, Willa Cather was from Virginia but grew up in Nebraska. Like Gatsby, she died in New York, though in the city rather than on the island. Of these three novels, My Ántonia is the most positive and affirmative. In fact, it's one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, one brimming with love and affection. Curiously, the last word in both The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia is "past."

I have written before that someone should look into connections between Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. I'm not ready just yet to talk about Shakespeare in this essay. Instead I'll make a brief connection between Poe and Conrad. The climactic event in Poe's long short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) is of course the fall of the House of Usher. Towards the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow goes to visit with Kurtz's unnamed Intended. He tells her a lie about Kurtz and practically flees from her presence, telling the men who are listening to his tale, "It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head."

In October 1941, Unknown Worlds published a story by Fritz Leiber, Jr., called "Smoke Ghost." This story is justly famous among fans of fantasy and horror. I don't care much for the ever-finer dividing of genre fiction into evermore minute sub-genres and sub-sub-genres, but I feel okay about calling "Smoke Ghost" an example of urban horror. Here is a passage describing the urban landscape through which the main character, Catesby Wran, moves:

      It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly wind-blown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive, almost beautifully ugly, though in no sense picturesque; dreary, but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and total wars. The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper.

And now here are the opening paragraphs of Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, published sixteen years before:

     About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

     But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. 

Note the descriptions of advertisements in both. This is the America of the twentieth century.

(Is Catesby an intentional echo or eye rhyme of Gatsby?)

My second-to-last connection is between Shakespeare and Conrad. This is actually not a connection I have made. I'm just following the lead of Richard Meek of the University of Hull, who, on a website called Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, wrote an essay called "'Nothing like the image and horror of it': King Lear and Heart of Darkness." You can read his essay by clicking here. I don't know Shakespeare well enough to have recognized the influence of King Lear upon Heart of Darkness when I read Conrad's novel, but even I can see that when somebody writes several nevers in a row, he's probably echoing Shakespeare, and that very thing happens when Marlow goes to meet with Kurtz's Intended, who says: "'I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.'"

I wrote about Conrad and Heart of Darkness recently because I was looking into a possible connection between the author, his novel, and the cosmic horror of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I didn't find anything conclusive. I don't think Kurtz's final cry is about horror in a cosmic sense. I think his thoughts are elsewhere. But if Heart of Darkness was influenced by King Lear, then there is this:

"King Lear -- '. . . Shakespeare staring cosmic horror in the face and refusing to back off,'" a quote from Matt Wolf, "London-Based Theater Critic," in an advertisement for a performance of King Lear, from the Muskegon (Michigan) Chronicle, May 16, 1999, whole page number 77.

A final note: The Great Gatsby is now one hundred years old. More than a few people have written on the book and its anniversary. I have read two otherwise good online essays on it, but both mention our current president, and I wonder why. Is that really necessary? Better yet, will it age well? The answers, I think, are no and most definitely not. Anyway, I hope this essay gives everyone enough to read for a while. It might be some time before I write again.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Friday, April 18, 2025

Crosses on the Cover of Weird Tales

Today is Good Friday, representing the day on which Jesus Christ died upon the Cross. Weird Tales was of course a popular and secular magazine, although I would guess that most of its writers were either Christians or Jews, or nominally so.* I'm sure there were some atheists in there, too. Even so, "The Unique Magazine" published stories that have a religious background, or they contain references to religion and faith, or some of their characters are believers in God. Six years ago, I wrote about Easter stories, of which there were at least three in Weird Tales. You can read what I wrote by clicking here. If anyone finds more Easter stories, I would be happy to hear about them.

I have found crosses on six covers of Weird Tales. Most of these are incidental to the picture. Three are of crosses as headstones or parts of headstones. The first illustration below, created by Hugh Rankin, shows men who look like Crusaders, but the crosses on their surcoats appear to be upside down. And they are looking to a cross upon which a bat is hung. So even though this looks like it could be a Christian scene, it's not. It's actually an inversion and corruption of Christianity. Reading the story confirms as much. The third picture below, by C.C. Senf, is a picture of torture or punishment. It sure looks like the red-robed cultists are affixing a woman to a cross.

Regarding the second picture below, illustrating "A  Million Years After" by Katherine Metcalf Roof, I am reminded of something I noticed several years ago in the comics page. It used to be that in the comic strip Beetle Bailey, drawn by the late, great Mort Walker, any long view of Camp Swampy would show the camp church or chapel with a cross on top. That's what churches are like. But then, after Mr. Walker died, an editor must have gotten ahold of the strip--an editor who must think of crosses as being exclusive or offensive, I guess--because the cross disappeared. There was and still is a chaplain, Chaplain Stainglass, but he appears to be a preacher without portfolio, for the Cross is the symbol of his Christian faith and now it's gone from his chapel. What a ridiculous and insulting thing for the people behind Beetle Bailey to do. How stupid and petty. But we should remember that there have always been and always will be anti-Christian people, ideas, and actions--until there aren't anymore. Anyway, Happy Easter to Everyone, even if you don't believe in anything.

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*One of those writers was a Christian minister, Reverend Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932).

Weird Tales, December 1928, with cover art by Hugh Rankin. Cover story: "The Chapel of Mystic Horror," a Jules de Grandin story by Seabury Quinn.

Weird Tales, November 1930, with cover art by C.C. Senf. Cover story: "A Million Years After" by Katherine Metcalf Roof.
Weird Tales, February 1932, with cover art by J. Allen St. John. Cover story: "The Devil's Bride" by Seabury Quinn.

Weird Tales, April 1939, with cover art by Virgil Finlay. Cover story: "Susette" by Seabury Quinn.

Weird Tales, May 1946, with cover art by Ronald Clyne. Cover story: "The Valley of the Gods" by Edmond Hamilton.

Weird Tales, January 1952, with cover art by Jon Arfstrom. I talked to Jon Arfstrom at PulpFest, in Columbus, Ohio, in the last year of his life. He said that this was a portfolio piece that he submitted to Weird Tales. The editor decided to run it as a cover, but the proportions were off, and so a green shape was added to the top of Mr. Arfstrom's illustration and the main title logo placed over the top of it. The cover text reads "The Black Island" by August Derleth, but I can't say that Derleth's is the cover story.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Thursday, April 17, 2025

The Four Big L's

To us, the Weird Tales of 1923 to 1954 is a completed body of work. It's all one piece and will forever be unchanging and unchangeable. But to readers in its time, especially in its early years, the magazine was still opening up for them, still alive and growing. It must have been like a journey made in a new land. No one knew what vistas and what new marvels would appear around each bend in the road. It was exciting to them. You can tell it by the letters they wrote to "The Eyrie." I wish we still had all of those letters, including those that were never published. Alas, every day, week, month, and year, another library at Alexandria must be burned.

Early on there must have been authors who showed real promise. For example, Canadian author Julian Kilman (1878-1954) had five stories in the first year of Weird Tales. Readers never heard from him again. They loved "Invaders from Outside" by J. Schlossel (Joseph H. Schlossel [1902-1977]), published in the January issue of 1925. But Schlossel had just two more stories in Weird Tales, in 1925 and 1926.

On the other hand, readers saw right away the promise in H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and they clamored for more. Lovecraft's name is almost synonymous with Weird Tales. We think of him as one of the Big Three of the magazine, a trio that also included Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) and Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961). Even by April 1925, though, Lovecraft was recognized as a big name. In "The Eyrie" that month, the anonymous editor--Farnsworth Wright--let readers know what was in store for the following issue or issues, writing, "In addition to Burks, Owen and Quinn, you will have stories by the four big L's--La Spina, Leahy, Long and Lovecraft."

"The Four Big L's"--if that were a more euphonious appellation, it could have been the name of a rock 'n' roll band from the early 1960s.

Before writing about the Four Big L's, I should mention the other three:

  • Burks was Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974), then in the U.S. Marine Corps but writing fiction about places he had been to, including tales of Santo Domingo.
  • Owen was Frank Owen (1893-1968), who would prove a very prolific author and editor. He had a very popular story, "The Wind That Tramps the World," in the April issue of 1925.
  • Quinn was of course Seabury Quinn (1889-1969), who went on to write more stories and other works for Weird Tales than anyone else.
Now the Four Big L's:
  • La Spina was Greye La Spina (1880-1969), a very popular author and one of few who would have stories in Weird Tales during every decade of its original run, from the 1920s to the 1950s.
  • Leahy was John Martin Leahy (1886-1967), also a very popular author but who disappeared from Weird Tales after 1928. I have never read his stories. They sound promising. I would like to think that his membership in the Four Big L's was well deserved.
  • Long was Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994), a young author who, in 1925, had recently had a brush with death but who would go on to live longer than all of the others. He was a member of Lovecraft's circle.
  • And of course Lovecraft was H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), who stood above most writers in Weird Tales for his erudition, imagination, and tireless reading, writing, editing, helping, guiding, advising, thinking, and theorizing, also for his formation of a coherent and consistent worldview and, above that, cosmic-view.
So for a time, there were the Four Big L's, and what a time it must have been for readers of Weird Tales. And now I wonder whether there were other editorial groupings of big names. We'll have to keep our eye out for mention of them in "The Eyrie."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley