Four Men-Part One

Two figures cast their long shadows over the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. They are of course Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. But it seems to me that there is more of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort than Poe or Lovecraft in Weird Tales #367. From Nietzsche comes the theme and imagery of staring into voids and abysses. From Fort comes the idea that we are merely the property of superior beings from outer space. I think there is very little if anything of Robert W. Chambers in this issue, even if his name is mentioned first.

• In "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, a man stays at home at Christmastime to watch TV. (Fun fun.) Among the shows he watches is Quatermass, a British TV serial from 1979. As I understand it, the premise of the show is that people on Earth are being harvested by aliens for their protein. Human beings, then, are essentially cattle, in other words, property. (Cattle is from the same root word as chattel, i.e., the Latin capitale, meaning "property.") This is the Fortean aspect of Mr. Cornell's story. Now the Nietzschean aspect:

The door opens. He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. (p. 24)

I take that to be an oblique reference to a quote from Nietzsche:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (From Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Chapter 4, No. 146) (1886)

• The reference to Nietzsche is more direct in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan:

I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me. (p. 38)

The reference to Fort is also more direct:

I think we're fished for. (p. 38)

It's also kind of indirect in that those italicized words refer to Edmond Hamilton's overtly Fortean story "The Space Visitors," from 1930.

• In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, the title character says that on his trip to the Moon, he:

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

Here's the Fortean concept to go with the foregoing Nietzschean one:

"We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings."

Whose playthings? According to Bonneville, we are the playthings of "Our Owner." (p. 53) So, again, we're property.

There is an alien presence in "The Traveler" by Francisco Tignini, "Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick, and "Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon, while the void appears right in the title of Carol Gyzander's story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide." I can't say that any of these stories has both a Nietzschean and a Fortean aspect.

As for the other two stories, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, and "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, Poe and Lovecraft have a more prominent place in the former, while Mr. Campbell's story is the most Lovecraftian of all. And if cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror, then "Concerto in Five Movements" is perhaps closer than any to the concept of cosmic horror.

The title of this little essay is "Four Men," but I have written about only two of the four. The other two will come along in part two of this series.

To be continued . . . 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & Lost Lands

One sub-sub-genre of fantasy and adventure fiction is the tale of lost cities, lost lands, and lost continents. Sometimes those places that are lost are sunken cities and submerged continents. Atlantis is a lost continent, lost in time and lost beneath the sea. You could say that Cthulhu's sunken island crypt is a lost land, too. In the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), the cover story, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story," by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, refers to Edgar Allan Poe's "City in the Sea," also to several other lost lands, continents, and islands. And this is where I would like to write about Robert W. Chambers again.

In Robert W. Chambers' collection The King in Yellow, first published in 1895, there is a story called "The Demoiselle D'Ys." This story is not within the King in Yellow series that opens the book, even if there is a character named Hastur in the story. Nor is it exactly in the Paris series that closes Chambers' collection. It actually sets itself apart from those two series. "The Demoiselle D'Ys" is a fantasy. It draws from the legend of Ys or Kêr-Is, a seaside city in Brittany that became disastrously inundated. Ys, then, is a city in the sea, a lost land, a drowned place.

The Demoiselle D'Ys of the title is lost, too, but lost in time rather than in space. Chambers' version of her story is a familiar one in which a man of our own world encounters a lovely and mysterious woman, either in the past, out of the past, or from some other fantasy land. Usually, but not always, she becomes lost to him. In Dian of the Lost Land by Edison Marshall (1935) there is an example of the woman who is not lost. Rather, the man becomes lost with her by giving up on his own world and remaining with her in hers. Maybe when Chambers returned to the United States in 1894 or so, he felt like he had lost a magical or mystical world, that of France, where he had studied art for some time.

Unlike Philip, the protagonist in "The Demoiselle D'Ys," Chambers fetched back a woman from his lost land. Her name was Elsie Vaughn Moller. She was born in Paris on March 22, 1881. The two were married on July 11 or 12, 1898, in Washington, D.C., when he was thirty-three and she was just seventeen. They had a son together, Robert Husted Chambers, also called Robert Edward Stuart (possibly also Stewart) Chambers (1899-1955). The younger Chambers' parents both died in the 1930s, Robert on December 16, 1933, Elsie on November 3, 1939, an unhappy decade for the Chambers family and for the Europe of their past. I have a feeling that the Chambers were unhappy anyway.

Robert Husted Chambers was a writer, too. He had four stories now listed in The FictionMags Index, these published from 1920 to 1934. Some of his stories were collected in a book, John Tom Alligator and Others, published in 1937. He does not seem to have had a very happy life. He was married at least three times and had at least one other engagement broken. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I and World War II, finally attaining the rank of captain, but he was discharged with a medical condition. He died fairly young, at age fifty-five, seventy years ago last month. He appears to have died without issue, and so Robert W. Chambers doesn't have any direct descendants. There may still be Chambers descendants, though, the progeny of his brother, architect Walter Boughton Chambers (1866-1945), with whom Chambers had studied in Europe.

Next: Four Men.

"La Cathedrale engloutie" ("The Drowned Cathedral"), a woodcut by M.C. Escher based on one of Claude Debussy's Préludes and before that on the legend of the lost city Ys.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & the Language of Cosmic Horror

Robert W. Chambers' name is the first to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, published in 2023). This is in "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column but has become simply a place for the editor to write about whatever pleases him. If you have ever read Chambers' book The King in Yellow (1895), you might recognize aspects of cosmic horror in its pages. I believe it to be there anyway. Chambers' early take on cosmic horror has been an inspiration for other writers in this now popular sub-sub-genre of fiction. I'm not sure that his take exists in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, though. The authors in that issue seem to have gone down a different road, actually two parallel roads laid down a long time ago by Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort. There are two prevailing themes, too. One, from the former, has to do with peering into voids. The other, from the latter, has to do with our existence as mere property of higher and more advanced intelligences. Both are pessimistic or negative, even somewhat nihilistic. Both can be applied in the writing of cosmic horror stories.

If you have read Weird Tales #367, you might have noticed the appearance and reappearance of the words void and abyss. If this were Pee-Wee's Playhouse and those were the secret words, there would have been a lot of screaming. There must be, I think, lots of different aspects of cosmic horror, or different ways of writing about it. The authors in that issue seem to have limited themselves pretty badly, though. So were they required to apply certain narrow interpretations of that term by the editor, or were they free to look into their own interpretations and simply settled on more or less the same across the board? I don't know. Either way, I don't think things went very well. Writers of genre fiction are supposed to let their imaginations roam. The writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have kept theirs pent up.

The words void and abyss are not in The King in Yellow. There is no cosmos, cosmic, universe, galaxy, or galactic either. Chaos appears, but it's used in conventional ways (x2). There is mention of stars, but most of these are in the first half of the book, black stars being a recurring phrase (x4).

Following are two passages that come close to the language of cosmic horror but don't quite get there. From "The Street of the First Shell":

"And through the smoke pall the lightning of the cannon played, while from time to time a rift above showed a fathomless black vault set with stars."

From "The Yellow Sign":

With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I think what happened here is that Chambers wrote too early in the history of weird fiction or genre fiction and, much more broadly, too early in--or before--the modern era. Although there were lots of scientific discoveries regarding astronomy and physics in his time, Albert Einstein's postulations of special and general relativity were still in the future, as was Edwin Hubble's discovery, more or less, of a greater universe outside our own galaxy. (Hubble's discovery was reported in November 1924 when the first issue of the revived Weird Tales was on the newsstand. He presented it in person on January 1, 1925, or one hundred years ago last month. So 2024 or 2025, depending on how you look at it, is the centenary of our awareness of the universe.) Also still in the future were modern art, modern music, modern poetry and fiction, the terrible disasters of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and a proliferation of isms that grew out of and fed into these many developments. A popular writer of the late nineteenth century could have looked upon human existence from a cosmic perspective, but I'm not sure he could have seen very far, nor would he have had necessarily the background or experience to write what is, very often--too often--nihilistic fiction. Cosmic horror need not be nihilistic, but in the hands of too many of the authors in Weird Tales #367, that proved to be the case. We could have had something different, something with more imagination, insight, vigor. We could even have had a taste of Chambers-style cosmic horror and his fin-de-siècle ennui and decadence. But that wasn't to be, I guess, and I wonder why.

Next: More on Robert W. Chambers.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Tellers of Weird Tales in The New Yorker

The first issue of The New Yorker was dated February 21, 1925, one hundred years ago today. Unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker has been published continuously since its inception. Also unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker is a general interest magazine. It is and was a slick magazine, too, whereas Weird Tales was a pulp magazine for about as long as pulp magazines lasted. (Weird Tales switched to the digest format in 1953.) Even so, over the years, The New Yorker has published stories by authors of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Some of them seldom if ever touched the pulps. They include Shirley Jackson, John Collier, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates. Others were actual contributors to Weird Tales, including Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and cartoonist Gahan Wilson. The New Yorker has written on these pulp genres and their authors, including an article on Robert A. Heinlein in the issue of July 1, 1974. It even had a Science Fiction Issue dated June 4 & 11, 2012, which included a story by Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, I guess at the time the magazine was available on the newsstand and in the library. There have been lots of flying saucers, aliens, monsters, ghosts, and witches on the cover of the magazine and of course macabre cartoons inside, most famously by Charles Addams. Anyway, there may have been other tellers of weird tales in The New Yorker, but I won't go searching for them. If anyone makes such a search and cares to share his or her results, I'll be here. Just drop me a line.

Happy 100th Anniversary to The New Yorker!

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Shakespeare in "The Eyrie"

Sometimes there was verse in "The Eyrie." The authors of that verse aren't credited in bibliographies. I can understand why. But for the sake of completeness, and for the sake of not missing out on things that might prove interesting and edifying, maybe we need a list of the authors of verse who appeared in "The Eyrie."

William Shakespeare wasn't the first, but his name came up in the February issue of 1925, one hundred years ago this month. That was part of an ongoing discussion on horror and what some readers called "necrophilia" in the pages of the magazine. Following is an excerpt from "The Eyrie." Farnsworth Wright's was almost certainly the editorial voice. (Boldface is added.)

(The quote begins:)

We recently attended a performance of "Romeo and Juliet"; and as we heard Jane Cowl deliver Juliet's speech before she takes the poison, we realized that the same speech, if published in a WEIRD TALES story, would be denounced by some of our indignant readers (not many, but surely by some) as "gruesome", "shocking", "offensive". A few of our good friends would undoubtedly write letters asking us why we so offended against good taste as to draw such a "disgusting" picture of Juliet awaking at midnight in the vault,

"Where, for these many hundred years, the bones

Of all my buried ancestors are packed;

Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,

Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,

At some hours of the night spirits resort: --

Alack, alack! is it not like that I,

So early waking--what with loathsome smells,

And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,

That living mortals, hearing them, run mad --

Oh, if I wake, shall I not lie distraught,

Environed with all these hideous fears.

And madly play with my forefathers' joints,

And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?

And in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,

As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?"

But there will be no indignant letters, because we have quoted this from the thousand-souled Shakespeare. And what about "Hamlet", with the stage strewn with dead bodies in the last act? And the ghost of "the blood-boltered Banquo" at Macbeth's banquet? And that gruesome scene where Macbeth washes his hands of the murdered Duncan's blood:

"What hands are these ? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."

We fear Shakespeare would fare quite badly at the hands of some of our readers. And the gentle Poe, who is still America's favorite author, and growing in popularity year by year (although the man himself died poor and neglected seventy-five years ago) -- how would Poe fare if he were writing today? Hardly better than he fared during his life. But the weird tales of that great master remain as a precious heritage to the whole world.

Considering the present unceasing popularity of the works of this great master of weird literature, we have no fear for the future of WEIRD TALES so long as the magazine remains weird.

(End of quote.)

And now here we are one hundred years later and Weird Tales (such as it is) is still being published.

(By the way, Jane Cowl played Juliet in performances in various places in Illinois in 1923-1924. In November 1924, she was at the Garrick Theatre in Chicago. Maybe that was when and where Farnsworth Wright saw her perform.)

Romeo and Juliet, Act V Scene III: Juliet Wakes in the Vault to Find Romeo Dead by G. Goldberg.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Louise Garwood (1900-1980)

Poet, Author, Newspaper Feature Writer, Teacher
Born January 29, 1900, Houston, Texas
Died March 21, 1980, Seton Medical Center, Austin, Texas

Louise Ford Garwood had an admirable career as a poet, author, journalist, and teacher. She was born on January 29, 1900, in Houston, Texas. Her parents were Judge Hiram Morgan Garwood (1864-1930) and Hettie Page (Love) Garwood (1867-1918). Louise Garwood attended Columbia University, although I'm not sure she graduated from there. In late 1923, she won the Florence Sterling Prize from the Poetry Society of Texas for her poem "Dusty Shoes." She also won second place in the competition for the Alamo Prize for "A Joy Forever." In addition to writing poems and short stories, Louise covered the Broadway stage for newspapers in Texas. She also wrote syndicated newspaper feature articles for Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA). Later on, she wrote for the Houston Press.

Here are some of Louise Garwood's credits:

• "The Miniature," a poem in the Corsicana Daily Sun, December 16, 1922.

• "Do You Know Your Library?" in the Houston Post, May 20, 1923.

• "Mrs. Lovett Warns Against Superficial View of Paris Life" in the Houston Post, June 24, 1923.

• "The 'Makers' of Writers" in the Houston Post, October 7, 1923, which mentions Harry Kniffin, who also contributed to Weird Tales.

• "Rainbow Tears," a poem set to music by Wilson Fraser and published in 1925.

• A syndicated feature article on philanthropist Anne Morgan, 1927 (NEA).

• A syndicated feature article from November 1928 on the play Machinal, written by Sophie Treadwell, based on the Ruth Snyder-Albert Gray murder case, and featuring Zita Johann (1904-1993), who went on to star in The Mummy (1932). The execution of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair was photographed surreptitiously. That photograph became famous.

• "Bond," a poem in Cupid’s Diary, September 4 1929.

• "Reality," a poem syndicated in 1929.

Louise Garwood wrote two short stories and three poems published in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1931. Her story "Fayrian," from one hundred years ago this month, is a poetic fantasy of murder and suicide.

Louise traveled to Argentina with her brother in 1931. Louise also taught dramatic art at the LaSalle School of Music, Dramatic Art and Dancing, in South Bend, Indiana, circa 1933-1934. By 1950, she was hospitalized at San Antonio State Hospital, a Kirkbride Plan hospital for the insane. She lived for another three decades and died on March 21, 1980, at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas. She was eighty years old.

Louise Garwood's Stories & Poems in Weird Tales
"Fayrian" (short story, Feb. 1925)
"Candle-Light" (short story, Nov. 1925)
"Ghosts" (poem, July 1926)
"The Living" (poem, Sept. 1929)
"Ghost" (poem, Dec. 1931)

Further Reading
None known.

Louise Garwood (1900-1980), a passport photograph from 1922.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Lawrence on Dostoevsky

Here is a quote for all authors, aspiring, beginning, well established, and otherwise, including those writing in Weird Tales:

"As far as I'm concerned, in proportion as a man gets more profoundly and personally interested in himself, so does my interest in him wane."

--from "On Dostoievsky and Rozanov" by D.H. Lawrence (1936)

Dick Heine (1897-1977)

Author, Clock & Watch Maker, Meteorologist
Born November 25, 1897, Talladega, Alabama
Died May 15, 1977, presumably in Talladega, Alabama

Richard Toole Heine, Jr., who wrote as Dick Heine, was born on November 25, 1897, in Talladega, Alabama, to Richard Heine, Sr., a jeweler, and Carrie V. (Weatherly) Heine, a law secretary. Dick Heine graduated from Talladega High School in 1917, and by 1920 was in Phoenix, Arizona. He worked there as a meteorologist, a fitting occupation, I guess, for a man whose mother was named Weatherly. Heine was employed by the U.S. Weather Bureau, an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, then the U.S. Department of Commerce. Heine was in Phoenix in 1920 and 1930. By 1940, he was back home in Talladega. Something must have happened to him, because he was then unemployed. In the U.S. Census of 1950, he was listed as unable to work.

Dick Heine had four stories in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1927, the first being "The Jungle Presence," a brief tale published 100 years ago this month, in February 1925. Heine's brother-in-law, Charles E. Planck, was also a writer. He wrote magazine articles on aviation, as well as a hardbound book, Women with Wings (1942).

The Heine family seems to have stuck together. It's nice to think that that's what really happened. Dick Heine died on May 15, 1977, presumably in Talladega, and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in the city of his birth.

Dick Heine's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Jungle Presence" (Feb. 1925)
"The Fiend of the Seine" (Nov. 1925)
"A Creeping, Crawling Thing" (Sept. 1926)
"The Algerian Cave" (July 1927)

Further Reading
"Dick Heine, Jr. Writer of Mystery Stories" in Our Mountain Home (Talladega, Alabama), October 28, 1925, page 3. This is a very brief article. In it, Heine's stories are perhaps euphemistically called "mystery stories." This is also a very early example of a newspaper article that mentioned Weird Tales by name.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert G. Bowie (1880-1959)

Author, Schoolteacher, Government Worker, Railroad Worker
Born November 2, 1880, Goresville, Loudoun County, Virginia
Died September 20, 1959, Washington, D.C.

Like Robinson H. Harsh, Robert G. Bowie was a railroad worker and an employee of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1918, when both men filled out their draft cards, both were employed by that agency, both to do with railroads, and both were based in the Karper Building (or Harper Building?) in Chicago. Both men also lived and worked in Washington, D.C., later in life. It seems like I have the right two men. Their shared story in Weird Tales, entitled "Crossed Lines" (Feb. 1925), takes place partly on a train and in the Chicago area.

Robert Gilmer or Gilmor Bowie was born on November 2, 1880, in Goresville, Loudoun County, Virginia, a place that no longer shows on the map but is located south of Lucketts. He was the grandson of Dr. Nelson Gray West (1832-1915), a prominent physician and a surgeon in the Confederate army. His parents were John N. Bowie and Mary Lloyd (West) Bowie. As a young man, Bowie was a schoolteacher in Mount Gilead, in his native county. On January 6, 1916, he married Harriet Emily Winkler (1892-1988) in Chicago. Like his presumed co-author, Bowie lived and worked in Chicago and Washington, D.C. I believe he retired from the railroad, even if he had worked at one time for the Interstate Commerce Commission. Bowie died on September 20, 1959, in the nation's capital and was buried at Union Cemetery, in Leesburg, in the county of his birth.

Robert G. Bowie's Story in Weird Tales
"Crossed Lines" with Robinson H. Harsh (Feb. 1925)

Further Reading
None known.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robinson H. Harsh (1894-1968)

Aka Harold Harsh

Author, Inventor, Genealogist, Philatelist, Government Worker, Railroad Worker, Salesman, Newsboy

Born October 9, 1894, Dayton, Texas

Died October 9, 1968, Leonardtown, Maryland

Authors Robinson H. Harsh and Robert G. Bowie collaborated on a story called "Crossed Lines," published in Weird Tales in February 1925. It is the only work for either one of these men listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Bowie has one other work, an article called "Columbus, Ohio," published in National Magazine in August 1903, listed in The FictionMags Index. I can't be absolutely sure that either one of the men I will write about is the co-author of this story, but there are things between them that match up pretty well, and so I'll go with them for now.

Robinson Harold Harsh, Jr., was born on October 9, 1894, in Dayton, Texas. His father, Robinson H. Harsh, Sr., was a grain dealer, while his mother, Mary E. Harsh, was  a housewife. In 1900, the Harsh family was in Canadian, Oklahoma. In 1910 and 1920, they were in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Young Harsh was a newsboy for the Hot Springs New Era newspaper in 1913. In 1918, Harsh worked for the Interstate Commerce Commission, and in 1920 as a salesman. By 1930, he was living on his own in Washington, D.C., and working as a civil engineer on a railroad. That same year, he married Leslie Malcolm Miller (1897-1984) in West Virginia. In 1940, 1942, and 1950, Harsh, his wife, and their two daughters lived in the nation's capital, where he worked for the Internal Revenue Service. These are some of the things that public records and newspaper items tell us. There's another newspaper item that places Harsh in Chicago. This one is from the Brooklyn Eagle, November 16, 1919, and it tells about Harsh and his invention of a "glad-hand" door handle. Clad in a cuff and coat sleeve, Harsh's open-handed handle reached out to welcome store customers. Shaking the hand opened the door. I can't imagine why these never caught on.

Robinson H. Harsh collaborated with Robert G. Bowie on the story "Crossed Lines." Their story can be categorized as a switched-body or body-swap kind of story, like Freaky Friday (1976) or the Star Trek episode "Turnabout Intruder" (1969). There is also a mad-doctor angle and, not surprisingly, a Charles Fort kind-of angle. The mad doctor is Dr. Theophilus Cameroon. We're led to believe that he is the one responsible for switching the bodies of the Mutt-and-Jeff pair of men who are the main characters in "Crossed Lines." There is a framing device or tale-within-a-tale aspect of the story, too. The two men who hear the tale of the body-swap return to the apartment of one of them. This man has "a vast collection of newspaper and magazine clippings," à la Charles Fort. It is by reading these clippings that they figure out what Dr. Cameroon was up to in his experiments. So, like so many weird tales, a look at documentary evidence--letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, and so on--usually found at or near the end of the story, reveals the secret or solves the mystery. By the way, "Crossed Lines" is set in the Chicago area. And the telling of the tale-within-a-tale takes place on a train.

"Crossed Lines" has a heavy, stuffy, and old-fashioned style. It reads like newspaper stories of the late 1800s and early 1900s. There is some light content, despite the predicament of the teller of the tale. A generation or two later, a concept like this one would have been handled more deftly, using lighter and more nimble prose, also with more dialogue and less narration. But we had to start somewhere in our telling and reading of weird tales.

In the next entry, I'll write about Robert G. Bowie, and I'll try to make a connection between the two candidates I have as authors of "Crossed Lines." It's appropriate that two men would collaborate on a story in which two men swap bodies. As for Robinson H. Harsh, he died on his seventy-fourth birthday, on October 9, 1968, in Leonardtown, Maryland, and was buried at Joy Chapel Cemetery in nearby Hollywood.

Robinson H. Harsh's Story in Weird Tales
"Crossed Lines" with Robert G. Bowie (Feb. 1925)

Further Reading
See an obituary and photograph of Harsh on the website Find A Grave, here. The obituary includes some facts on Harsh's careers as a genealogist of the Harsh family and as a philatelist.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Stephen Bagby (1894-1969)

Pseudonym of Charles Meriwether Stephens
Author, Newspaper Editor, Advertising Man
Born August 28, 1890, Atlanta, Georgia
Died December 11, 1969, Little Creek Hospital, Knoxville, Tennessee

In February 1925, one hundred years ago this month, Weird Tales had its fourth issue after the revival of November 1924 and its second of the new year. That year would be full, with twelve issues in all, the first full year of "The Unique Magazine."

The cover story of that February issue is "Whispering Tunnels" by Stephen Bagby. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index, Stephen Bagby was a pseudonym of Charles M. Stephens. Bagby, of New York City, wrote a letter to "The Eyrie" published in May 1927. Knowing that leads to a Charles M. Stephens who was born on August 28, 1890, in Atlanta, Georgia, and who worked, in 1942, in Manhattan in the publication division of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. This Charles M. Stephens' parents were James McConnell Stephens (1849-1924) and Zipporah Bagby Stephens (1860-1907), and so I think we have our man.

The Stephens family was a large one. The children included Alice, Nannie B. (B for Bagby), James M., Charles M., Robert G., Grace, and Francis Stephens. In 1933, Francis Stephens (1901-1963), the youngest, married Louis Hasselmans (1878-1957), conductor of the New York Metropolitan Opera orchestra from 1921 to 1936. Nannie Bagby "Nan" Stephens (1883-1946) was a songwriter, playwright, and librettist. She wrote songs and plays based on black music and black southern dialect. Her play Roseanne (1923-1924) was first performed by white actors in blackface, then by black actors, including Paul Robeson. She also wrote the libretto for the opera Cabildo (1932), with music by Amy Beach.

Charles Meriwether Stephens was born on August 28, 1890, in Atlanta, Georgia, making him just eight days younger than H.P. Lovecraft. Presumably he had some college: although he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private, he was appointed as a second lieutenant on June 30, 1917. On September 20, 1917, he was promoted to first lieutenant and afterwards received a temporary promotion to captain. Stephens served in the Panama Canal Zone; at Fort Meyer, Virginia and Camp Merritt, New Jersey; and in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France, from December 30, 1917, to October 20, 1919. His story, "Whispering Tunnels," is about what was then called the Great War. In it, the main character, Miles Cresson of New Orleans, returns to France in August 1923 to search for a vanished comrade-in-arms. Those fictional events took place in the first year of Weird Tales and in the month that Stephens turned thirty-three years old. On June 17, 1925, four months after his first story appeared in "The Unique Magazine," he married Lillian C. Luther in Port Washington, New York.

Writing as Stephen Bagby, Charles M. Stephens had three stories in Weird Tales: "Whispering Tunnels" (Feb. 1925), "The Witches' Sabbath" (two-part serial; July-Aug. 1928), and "The Rosicrucian Lamp" (June, 1929). The letter that has led me to find him in his true identity was in the May 1927 issue. Writing as Charles M. Stephens, he had two more letters in "The Eyrie," in November 1927 and November 1928. He also had one letter in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in June 1932. According to a list in The FictionMags Index, that was the sum total of his output published in fiction magazines.

In addition to writing stories and letters published in pulp magazines, Charles M. Stephens was apparently a newspaper editor, for a man of that name was in the right place and at the right time to be managing editor of The Huntington (Long Island) Times, launched on October 13, 1928. He later worked in advertising and the publication division for the Metropolitan Life Company. Maybe those were just one job. Charles M. Stephens, aka Stephen Bagby, died on December 11, 1969, at Little Creek Hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee. His body was returned to New York for burial. His wife survived him, and apparently he died without issue.

Stephen Bagby & Charles M. Stephens' Stories & Letters in Weird Tales
plus one letter in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror
"Whispering Tunnels" (Feb. 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (May 1927)
Letter to "The Eyrie" as by Charles M. Stephens (Nov. 1927)
Letter to "The Eyrie" as by Charles M. Stephens (Nov. 1928)
"The Witches' Sabbath" (two-part serial; July-Aug. 1928)
"The Rosicrucian Lamp" (June, 1929)
Letter in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror as by Charles M. Stephens (June 1932)

Further Reading
"Stephens Brothers, of Atlanta, Do Effective Work Against Huns," Atlanta Constitution, September 10, 1918, page 12 (below)

"A black cloud seemed to fill the center of the red circle. Suddenly, both men saw it. A great, shapeless creature was taking the form of a man, so tall that the head was bent against the ceiling. Two burning, baleful eyes were fixed on the pair, as a snarling issued from its great black mouth, lined with long, jagged teeth. The creature's body was covered with scales; its powerful arms and toes were armed with long, razorlike claws. Littlejohn steeled his will, to prevent the thing's efforts to overcome him with the noxious stench it emitted. It was the beginning of a deadlock of wills, which lasted for minutes in that room of damp stone."

From: "Whispering Tunnels" by Stephen Bagby, Weird Tales, February 1925. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch.

"Whispering Tunnels" is a story of an occult detective, Dr. Arthur Littlejohn of New York, but it is also a story of an exorcism of a demonic spirit, also carried out by Dr. Littlejohn. The scene above happens in tunnels under Fort Vaux, at Verdun. It's a somewhat long story and maybe a little melodramatic, but you might want to have a look.

From the Atlanta Constitution, September 10, 1918, page 12.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ooze & Abysses

I have been writing for a long time now about Weird Tales in its first year and in its 100th. Weird Tales began in March 1923 with a story called "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. In its current incarnation, the magazine observed its 100th anniversary in 2023. In a series called "Origins of Ooze," from March 2023, I wrote about the concepts of primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup. These are supposed to be scientific concepts, but they're actually closer to pseudoscience, hoaxes, and frauds. Like overpopulation, though, ooze and slime escaped from the confines of genre literature and got into the general consciousness. And like overpopulation, people in the general public accepted it and internalized it.

Not long ago, I reread Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984; Vintage Books, 1987). One of the interesting things about this book is that it was written in the second person. The only other fictional work I can think of written in the second person is Ralph Milne Farley's short story "The House of Ecstasy," originally in Weird Tales in April 1938. Bright Lights, Big City is also written in the present tense, so it's close to unique in two ways. (Two-nique?) Getting back to ooze and slime, here's a brief quote: "The woman looks at you as if you were something that had just crawled out of the ocean trailing ooze and slime." (p. 13) It doesn't seem to me that that was a random choice of words: writers seem to have heard of ooze and slime and it has stuck in their brains.

The imagery in the 100th anniversary issue of Weird Tales has to do with voids and abysses. I have tried to bring into my discussion of that issue, its authors, and its lead characters the image of the worm that swallows its own tail. The other evening I finished reading The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald (1958; Knopf, 1979). That book doesn't start off very well, but it finishes with some power. Here is a passage regarding a human inner darkness or void:

     His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland's central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness. (p. 163)

I guess you could say that Dr. Grantland has a heart of darkness. (And again we have a medical doctor who is dark or empty inside.) On its last page, the image of the worm ouroboros shows up: "The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tale in its mouth, consuming itself." (p. 200) The title, by the way, is from Thomas Hardy's poem "To an Unborn Pauper Child" and these lines:

Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here . . . ,

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Six

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale, an old form of which the weird tale is also an example. Heart of Darkness and weird tales have things in common, one of which is the use of intelligible speech as a way of separating men from beasts, civilized men from savages or degenerate men, and men from beings or entities that come from voids before creation or beyond our own normal experiences of space and time. We speak words. They speak gibberish. Kurtz is a man of words, and yet he presided "at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites." (Dell, p. 88) And as Kurtz is carried to the boat that will take him away from his jungle realm, the people over whom he has ruled gather to protest:

"[T]hey shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany." (p. 111)

Here are some passages from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft on gibberish, unintelligible words, ancient and cryptic rites, and things difficult, if not impossible, to inscribe, copy, or render into any modern tongue:

This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."

* * *

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles.

* * *

Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how.

* * *

Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

* * *

I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs.

* * * 

Lovecraft read and admired Conrad. I wonder if he could have drawn some of his own imagery and themes from Conrad's novels and stories. Lovecraft supposedly didn't read H. Rider Haggard until 1926, and then, perhaps, only Haggard's most well-known romance, She. I wonder who could have described in fiction the interior of Africa before Conrad and Haggard. And I wonder what influence there might have been on later tellers of weird tales other than those two men.

* * *

There is an old thread of messages and comments on the website SF Chronicles (here) regarding Lovecraft and Conrad. In a letter, Lovecraft wrote:

He [Conrad] feels and expresses as few authors can the prodigious and inhuman tides of a blind, bland universe; at heart indifferent to mankind, but purposefully malignant if measured by the narrow and empirical standard of human teleology. 

That sounds like cosmic horror to me. But I'm not sure that the horror in Heart of Darkness is cosmic. I could be wrong. I invite opinions and comments. In any case, it seems to me that the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) have conflated their own interior psychological, existential, and spiritual horrors with outer, cosmic horrors. They seem to be saying that the source of their feelings of horror is the immense cosmos rather than their own shrunken, misshapen, neglected, or abused hearts, minds, and souls. In the quote above, Lovecraft referred to a blind universe. I think the blindness is actually in the person who believes the universe to be a cause for horror rather than of feelings of awe and wonder. The authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to be inviting us to join them in their feelings, thereby affirming and validating them. I will say no thank you.

* * *

I have one more quote from Heart of Darkness. At the end, Marlow goes to visit Kurtz's fiancée. He lies to her, a lie to comfort her. He remembers that as he departed her company, "It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head." (Dell, p. 124) When I read that, I was reminded of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe, the conclusion of which reads:

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind-- the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Five

Kurtz is mysterious, just as Africa is mysterious. Marlow penetrates into both mysteries. The title of Joseph Conrad's novella first appears in Marlow's description of his journey upriver: "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness." (Dell, p. 69) In addition to traveling into the interior of tropical Africa, Marlow and his men travel back in time, thereby encountering, perhaps, something of what Kurtz refers to when he cries, "The horror! The horror!":

"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories." (pp. 69-70)

Nietzsche warned us not to peer into the abyss. Characters (and presumably authors) in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023) fail to heed that warning. But their abysses are within themselves rather than outward in the cosmos. They are empty inside. Inside themselves they have created and nursed and cultivated voids. Kurtz is empty inside, too, and comes from a kind of void. Marlow calls him a "wraith from the back of Nowhere." (p. 88) Referring to human heads on posts outside his abode, Marlow says:

"They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core . . . ." (p. 99; emphasis added, ellipses in the original)

Marlow's assessment is echoed in Caitlín R. Kiernan's short story "Night Fishing," when the narrator says: "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." So is that an allusion or reference to Heart of Darkness? Or is it a case of one author arriving independently at the same kind of conclusion as another?

In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. This person's marginalia on the passage above reads:

". . . is horror, horror out there or in here?"

A perceptive question and one that gets to an issue with Weird Tales #367, namely that the horror that many of its characters experience is not actually cosmic because it isn't "out there" but "in here." Their horror is about themselves and their own self-made voids. I would add that their inner voids are not very interesting. Kurtz's problems are more so. Kurtz is obviously the greater man. But in the end, maybe Kurtz, to match his small stature, is also a small man. He need not have descended into Nowhere or dived into his inner emptiness.

(Remember that the meaning of the word utopia is "nowhere" and that Samuel Butler had written a book called Erewhon, its title an anagram for nowhere, published in 1872. Remember the Beatles song "Nowhere Man," too.)

Later on Marlow says of Kurtz:

"But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it--I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself." (p. 111)

Like the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue--or they are like he is--Kurtz is a man without faith.

I have one more image of Kurtz, who now lies on his deathbed. Marlow remembers:

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines." (p. 114)

Kurtz has fallen into an abyss--is it a Nietzschean abyss?--and Marlow peers in after him. Marlow backs away from the abyss, but for Kurtz it's too late. And then Kurtz cries his last words: "'The horror! The horror!'" (p. 114)

To be concluded . . . 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was first in Blackwood's Magazine No. 1000, a "Special Double Number" published one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, in February 1899, the last February of the nineteenth century. The magazine is also called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Four

Kurtz would seem an enigma. Despite all of his words--the great flow of his words, written and spoken, issuing from his heart of darkness--he remains a mystery. His last words--"The horror! The horror!"--are ambiguous. Just what is it that he finds horrific? He would seem a psychopathic god, a forerunner to and prediction of the totalitarian rulers of the twentieth century, set to commence less than a year after part one of Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899.

Like those future rulers, Kurtz writes and speaks at great length and with great eloquence. Marlow reads from his writings, remembering:

"But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. [. . .] 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbound eloquence--of words--of burning noble words." (Dell, pp. 88-89)

And like the eloquence and burning intensity and power of twentieth-century totalitarian oratory, Kurtz's "pamphlet" ends with a call to action: "'Exterminate all the brutes!'" As Eric Hoffer observed in his book The True Believer, in every mass-movement revolution the man of words or ideas is succeeded by the man of action--and that's where the mass murder and mass extermination begin. Kurtz, sickly, weak, small in stature, a big fish inhabiting a small pond, is here the man of words but he is unable to carry out fully his prescribed actions. Instead death carries him away.

Kurtz's resorting to "will" made me think of another nineteenth-century author, one who may also have had Polish blood. Before Joseph Conrad wrote, so did Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically on what he called the "will to power." Conrad would seem to have been aware of the writings of Nietzsche. Maybe Kurtz is a kind of Nietzschean hero. Maybe his dissolution replays that of Nietzsche before him.

Nietzsche rears his head in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) in the form of his warning not to peer into the abyss. So are there abysses--and cosmic horror--in Heart of Darkness? That question comes next in this series.

To be continued . . .

Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer in a Signet edition. This is the edition that we read a long, long time ago in one of my English classes. I wish I still had it. Anyway, that's a representation of Kurtz on the cover. He looks harmless enough and not at all diabolical, unlike a real-life bearded and baldheaded totalitarian from the century following his. 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Three

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale within a tale. It reads like a weird tale, with feelings of foreboding and menace and atmospheres of darkness and the unknown. It has deeper meaning, but it can also be read as a simple adventure story. Heart of Darkness could easily have been in a pulp magazine or a men's magazine of the 1910s through the 1960s. Originally published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899, one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, Conrad's novella may have made just one more magazine appearance, in The Golden Book Magazine of January through April 1933. (Thanks to The FictionMags Index.)

The teller of the tale within a tale is the seaman Marlow. He journeys first to the Continent to secure his position with a company doing business in Africa. In the company offices, he has an eerie encounter with two silent women. There are only two of them and they are knitters rather than weavers, but they remind me of the Fates, or of their Norse counterparts, one of whom is Wyrd.

I have a collection of books now from a neighbor who died. I'll have more to tell on that shortly. One of these books, which I received just this week, after I had begun writing about Conrad, is Jeffrey Meyers' biography of the writer from 1991. In reading Heart of Darkness, I detected in its pages a possible awareness of what we now call science fiction. On page 28 of Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Mr. Meyers described some of his subject's early reading: "books on distant voyages and exotic exploration," adding, "Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, and adventure novels by Captain Marryat and Fenimore Cooper inspired him to become a sailor." (Boldface added.) There isn't an entry on Jules Verne in the index, but in Heart of Darkness, Marlow recounts that at the outset of his journey to Africa "I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth." (Dell, p. 39) Later in his career, while on shore, Conrad "read extensively in English and French literature." (Meyers, p. 53). It seems almost certain that he would have read Verne. I can only assume that in using the phrase "the centre of the earth," Conrad was referring to Verne's romance of 1864 and 1867.

Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells were acquaintances, though not friends. Conrad first encountered Wells through Wells' early science fiction novels. Ford Madox Ford introduced them in 1899. Conrad called Wells "a very original writer, romancier du fantastique, with [. . .] an astonishing imagination." (Meyers, p. 151) In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, in thinking about the dark heart of Africa, remembers "a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure there were people in Mars." (Dell, p. 58) He goes on. Again, Conrad seems to have been alluding to the science fiction of his time, specifically to Wells. There is one more possible allusion, or maybe this is an example of Conrad's own science-fictional imagination at work, for in remembering his upriver trip, Marlow says: "We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet." (Dell, p. 69)

Less than a century before, Americans had begun their own explorations into the heart of a continent. But the literature of American exploration and journeying westward is romantic rather than science-fictional: our explorations predated fiction based in science and technology and instead rested within the romantic period of the early to mid nineteenth century. The only science-fictional Western that springs to mind is The Valley of Gwangi, from 1969, which came well after the fact. It's interesting, though, to find what sound like metafictional allusions to science fiction within a literary work of the late 1800s, a work that has such affinities to adventure fiction and weird fiction, two genres older than science fiction. Remember, too, that there were pulp genres drawn from works of this type, including jungle adventures and South Seas adventures.

To be continued . . .

Here is an interesting juxtaposition of images related to Joseph Conrad and his South Seas fiction, above, a paperback cover of An Outcast of the Islands, and below, a movie poster or lobby card of the movie version. In any relationship, sometimes the man is in the superior position and sometimes the woman.

Update (Feb. 2, 2025): The actress who played the native girl in Outcast of the Islands is Kerima, née Miriam Charrière. She was born on February 10, 1925, in Toulouse, France. According to the Internet, she is still living. In a week and a day she will be one hundred years old.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley