Brennan: Double Life and In Weird Tales
Joseph Payne Brennan lived a double life as a writer. His short stories were mostly in the pulp genres, Westerns in the period 1948 to 1956, supernatural horror and fantasy from 1952 onward. He began his writing career, however, as a poet, primarily a nature poet, and it was as a poet that he wished to be remembered. His first published work was a poem, "When Snow Was Hung," which appeared in 1940 in the Christian Science Monitor. About two thousand more poems flowed from his pen over the next five decades. These were published in the New York Times, the University of Kansas City Review, and Voices, among other titles, including many newspapers. In living his double life, Brennan edited and published his own periodicals, Macabre (23 issues, 1957-1976), in which he compiled tales of supernatural horror and fantasy, and Essence (47 issues, 1950-1977), a journal of straight poetry.
Brennan was a latecomer to Weird Tales. Though he had read the magazine since his teenaged years and had made submissions from time to time, Brennan did not have a story published in "The Unique Magazine" until "The Green Parrot" in July 1952. Three more stories followed: "Slime," the cover story for the March 1953 issue; "On the Elevator," published in July 1953; and the "The Calamander Chest," one of Brennan's own favorites, published in January 1954. Then, disaster struck: in September 1954, after thirty-one years in print, Weird Tales came to an end. "I felt as if my world had come apart," Brennan later wrote. "I was depressed for months." It was probably no coincidence that just three years later Brennan launched his own magazine of weird fiction, Macabre.
August W. Derleth (1909-1971) also lived a double life as a writer. Like Brennan, he published in the fields of weird fiction and straight poetry, especially nature poetry. Under his Arkham House imprint, Derleth issued hardbound volumes of weird fiction from 1939 to 1971. One of these was Joseph Payne Brennan's Nine Horrors and a Dream, published in 1958 in an edition of 1,336 copies with a dust jacket design by Frank Utpatel (1905-1980). Ballantine Books reprinted Nine Horrors and a Dream in 1962. The cover artist was Richard M. Powers (1921-1996). The contents of Brennan's book:
- "Slime" (originally in Weird Tales, Mar. 1953)
- "Levitation" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)
- "The Calamander Chest" (originally in Weird Tales, Jan. 1954)
- "Death in Peru" (originally in Mystic Magazine, Jan. 1954)
- "On the Elevator" (originally in Weird Tales, July 1953)
- "The Green Parrot" (originally in Weird Tales, July 1952)
- "Canavan's Back Yard" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)
- "I'm Murdering Mr. Massington" (originally in Esquire, Feb. 1954)
- "The Hunt" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)
- "The Mail for Juniper Hill" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)
Brennan's dedication reads: "To the Memory of Weird Tales 1923-1954," as if the magazine were a departed loved one. But as editor Marvin Kaye (1938-2021) later called it, Weird Tales is the magazine that never dies. It has come back again and again. And Joseph Payne Brennan may have been the only author to have had something published in the first incarnation of 1923-1954 and in the revivals of the 1970s and '80s and in the second-longest run of the magazine under editors John Gregory Betancourt, Darrell Schweitzer, and George H. Scithers. Here are his credits for Weird Tales:
- "The Green Parrot" (short story, July 1952)
- "Slime" (novella, Mar. 1953)
- "On the Elevator" (short story, July 1953)
- "The Calamander Chest" (short story, Jan. 1954)
- "Orchids from Author" (Letter to "The Eyrie") (Summer 1974)
- "Fear" (novella, No. 2, Spring 1981)
- "John Mason Sidd" (poem, Spring 1988)
- "Because" (poem, Summer 1988)
- "Haunted House" (poem, Summer 1988)
- Letter to "The Eyrie" (Summer 1988)
Thirty-six years--did any author in his own lifetime have a longer career in the pages of Weird Tales?
To be continued . . .
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