Weird Tales #364

There is a new issue of Weird Tales available. There isn't any date on the cover, but I think it came out in October 2020. Real print-on-paper magazines are supposed to have been sent out in December. That's according to the Weird Tales website.

For some reason, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database does not yet have a listing for this issue. I'm sure there will be one soon. Until that happens, here is a list of credits for Weird Tales #364:

• "Too Late Now" by Seanan McGuire, a California native and a very prolific author.
• "Ellende" by Gregory Frost, an instructor of English at Swarthmore College.
• "Hats" by Joe R. Lansdale, a well-known author from Texas.
• "Lightning Lizzie" by Marie Whittaker, who writes children's books and darker things
• "Last Days" by Dacre Stoker, a Canadian-American author, athlete, and conservationist, also great-grand nephew of Bram Stoker, and Leverett Butts, who teaches at the University of North Georgia.
• "The Beguiled Grave" by Marguerite Reed, a native Kansan.
• "The Last War" by Linda Addison (poem), a Philadelphian who writes verse, fiction, and non-fiction.
• "To the Marrow" by Rena Mason, a Thai-Chinese-American author.
• "Feathers" by Tim Waggoner, an author and teacher of writing at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio.
• "Trailer Park Nightmare" by Gabrielle Faust, a writer and artist.
• "No One Survives the Beach" by Weston Ochse, a Westerner and an author of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and comic book scripts.
• "The Good Wife" by Lee Murray, a New Zealander about whom I have written before.   
• "The Canal" by Alessandro Manzetti (poem), an Italian author and poet.

The cover art is by Lynne Hansen, an artist, writer, and filmmaker from Illinois. If I had to give a piece of advice to the editors and publishers of the new Weird Tales, it would be this: Don't make us hunt for the name of the cover artist! She's helping to sell your magazine. Give her some credit. Anyway, I don't know whether there is any interior art, but as an artist, all I can say is that there ought to be. Why else would anyone buy a print magazine?

Anyway again, congratulations to the new Weird Tales for a second issue.

The cover of Weird Tales #364 shows a woman turning into a crow. Her transformation reminds me of what happened to David Hedison's character in The Fly (1958) (same head, same left hand) and Sharlto Copley's in District 9 (2009). All suggest a body horror that must be, I think, deep-seated in us. By the way, there have been corvids on the cover of "The Unique Magazine" before. This one is from September 1939. The cover artist was Virgil Finlay.

Original text and caption copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Harold S. Farnese (1890 or 1891-1945)-Part Five

Farnese and the Living Lovecraft

The first that I ever read of Harold S. Farnese was in L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography (1975). (I have the Ballantine paperback edition of 1976, which lacks an index.) Here is part of what de Camp had to say about him:

Harold S. Farnese, dean of the Los Angeles Institute of Musical Art [sic], wrote to Lovecraft proposing a joint project: a Cthulhuvian operetta in one act, called Fen River and laid on the planet Yuggoth. As a starter, Farnese had already set two of Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets, Mirage and The Elder Pharos, to music. (p. 387)

Remember that in a letter to Weird Tales, published in August 1931, Farnese had praised Lovecraft's poems as "very fine," writing that they played "a good second to the author's inimitable stories." In the months before Farnese sent off his letter to Weird Tales, the magazine had published several of Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth cycle, including "Nyarlathotep" and "Azathoth" in January 1931, "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos" in February/March, and "Alienation" in April/May. They would be the last of Lovecraft's poems published in Weird Tales in his lifetime.

De Camp didn't give a date for the letter Farnese sent to Lovecraft in which he proposed this joint project. I suspect that it was in 1932, as there are at least two letters extant from Lovecraft to Farnese, dated September 22, 1932, and October 12, 1932. I presume these to be answers to letters written by Farnese. De Camp wrote that, after Lovecraft demurred, "Farnese kept urging," suggesting that there was further correspondence between the two. A source on the Internet says that Farnese wrote several letters to Lovecraft, beginning July 11, 1932, and ending January 9, 1933. That fits with my supposition. It also fits with the timeline of Farnese's summer of 1932 (see the bullet points below).

One of L. Sprague de Camp's themes in his biography of Lovecraft is the author's self-defeating (and ultimately self-destructive) ways. There are those who have their differences with de Camp, but in this at least, I think he was right: Lovecraft, almost certainly because of his upbringing (and especially because of his father's abandonment of him and his mother's unstable emotional state, which resulted in a kind of emotional abuse of her son), too often defeated himself, sabotaged his own efforts, and in the end more or less destroyed himself by long habits of malnourishment, undernourishment, and perhaps even self-starvation. In any event, Lovecraft, offering various excuses, backed away from a collaboration with Harold Farnese, and so a wonderful opportunity (and to us a fascinating possibility) was missed. None of that changes the fact that if Farnese did indeed set "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos" to music, then these were very likely the first adaptations of Lovecraft's work to a form other than poetry or prose.

Harold Farnese had been interested in weird fiction since at least 1925 when he wrote his first published letter to Weird Tales. There are some other interesting tidbits from his career, though, and I wonder about a couple of them: could Farnese actually have performed, sometime in 1932, his music based on Lovecraft's poems?

• On September 25, 1927, the Los Angeles Times published a classified advertisement under the heading "Church Notices--Liberal and Orthodox" that reads in part: "Ancient Spiritual Church [. . .] Mons. Harold Farnese M.A.B.B. of Dyon Un. France will speak on 'What Is Colour?' Piano & vocal solos." (p. 69) (1) That to me suggests that Farnese, like so many other figures in weird fiction, was interested in the occult and alternative spiritual and religious practices. Later correspondence suggests that he was interested at least in black magic.

• In January 1932, the Los Angeles Times mentioned a composition by Farnese as among those that were recently attracting attention in musical circles. The title of Farnese's composition, a piece for piano, was "Dance of the Moon Dwellers." (2, 3)

• In the latter part of July 1932, Farnese left on a trip with other instructors from the Institute of Musical Education. They traveled to Oakland, Portland, and Seattle to conduct normal classes in those cities and returned to Los Angeles in early September. If Farnese and Lovecraft carried on their correspondence from July 11, 1932, to early 1933 (see above), did Farnese then complete his settings for Lovecraft's poems prior to leaving on his trip? It would seem so.

• On the evening of November 21, 1932, violinist Jascha Gegna, recently arrived on the faculty at the institute, played a concert there. Farnese played piano. Included in the program were pieces by Senaillé and Corelli, as well as "two numbers by Harold Farnese" [emphasis added]. Could these have been his settings for "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos"? (4)

• About a week later, Gegna and Farnese performed once again at the institute. Senaillé was once again on the program, as were "two numbers of oriental atmosphere by Harold Farnese" [emphasis added]. Again, were these Farnese's adaptations of Lovecraft? (5)

The chance for an operetta based on Lovecraft's poetry, in which Lovecraft would write the libretto and Farnese the music, came and went in 1932-1933. Then, four years later, it disappeared forever, for on March 15, 1937, Lovecraft died in Providence, the city of his birth.  

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Coincidentally, "The Colour Out of Space"--same spelling--by H.P. Lovecraft was published in Amazing Stories, also in September 1927.

(2) "Southland Composers Versatile in Writings" by Helen Scott, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 3, 1932, p. 44.

(3) The film White Zombie was released on July 28, 1932. Guy Bevier Williams (1873-1955), musical director of the Institute of Musical Education, was the uncredited composer of the chant that plays over the main title sequence of the film. Presumably, Williams worked on that composition in late 1931 or early 1932, perhaps at the same time that Farnese was composing his two settings of Lovecraft's poems.

(4) [Item], Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 1932, p. 41.

(5) [Item], Los Angeles Times, Dec. 4, 1932, p. 48.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Harold S. Farnese (1890 or 1891-1945)-Part One

Aka Harold Sulzire (or Sulzer) Farnese, Harold Solcetto Farnese, H.S. Farnese
Bank Clerk, Bookkeeper, Musician, Composer, Conductor, Educator
Born March 11, 1890 (or 1891), Monaco
Died October 29, 1945, Los Angeles City or County, California

Origins

Harold S. Farnese didn't write any stories, poems, or articles for Weird Tales, nor was he a cover artist or illustrator. His eight letters published in "The Eyrie," the letters column of Weird Tales, failed to land him in the top twenty contributors in that category. You might say that he was a pretty minor figure in the history of the magazine and its contributors. Except for that part where he was so central to a certain understanding of what we call the Cthulhu Mythos. Beyond that, Farnese may have been the first person to adapt a work by H.P. Lovecraft to a form other than verse or prose.

Harold S. Farnese was born on March 11, 1890 (or 1891), in Monaco. His father, named James (or equivalent), was Italian. His mother was French. (Farnese's mother tongue was also French.) When I'm working on genealogical or biographical research, I tend to put more weight on earlier rather than later sources. I also like information written down by or directly provided by the person in question. That's why I have 1890 as Farnese's probable birth year and Sulzire as a probable middle name, for both are from Farnese's draft card from 1917. (1)

According to a later newspaper source, Farnese was a graduate of the Paris Conservatory of Music. Another newspaper source gives a fuller account of his education:

Harold Farnese, dean of the institute, studied piano under Martial Lecompte and Sapellnikoff, theory and composition under Racky, a pupil of Saint-Saens [sic], and graduated from the Dijon Conservatory. (2, 3)

The institute mentioned here was the Institute of Musical Education, established in Los Angeles in 1915. More on that in part two of this series.

In the U.S. census of 1920, Farnese gave information that he had immigrated to the United States in 1914 but that he was not yet a citizen. (4) I found another record for a border crossing he made in January 1916 from Canada to the United States in which he gave his occupation as bank clerk; his place of national origin ("Nationality") as Germany; his father's name as James; his father's address as Frankfurt am Main, Germany; and his last permanent residence as Montreal, Canada. Farnese's stated final destination was Los Angeles, California, and that's where he went after all. (5)

When he filled out his draft card in 1917, Farnese was still an alien (i.e., not yet a citizen), living at 2195 West 27th Street in Los Angeles, and working as a bank clerk at Hellman Bank. That name is new to me but is no doubt familiar to those who know the history of Los Angeles, as the Hellmans--two German-born brothers--helped to establish many of that city's institutions. Presumably, Farnese's employer was connected in one way or another to these men. It's worth noting here that Farnese seems to have worked in banks and with musicians and composers who had foreign ties. He may never have really cut his own ties to Europe.

In 1919-1921, Farnese lived in San Francisco at 610 Geary Street, site of a hotel, and worked as a bookkeeper and bank clerk. By 1922, he was with the Bank of Italy in San Francisco. Farnese turned thirty-two that year. Sometime during the decade that followed, his life seems to have taken a turn. Unbeknownst to himself and everybody else in the world besides Jacob Clark Henneberger, Farnese also arrived that year at the eve of Weird Tales.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) I haven't seen Farnese's surname as anything but Farnese, but there are indications that Sulzire and Solcetto are also surnames. Until we know something more, I'll assume that Sulzire and Solcetto were surnames in Farnese's family. If I figure this right, Sulzire is a Corsican name, while Solcetto is Italian. Farnese is also an Italian name and a pretty prominent one at that. All of this would match well with Farnese's mother as having been French and his father as having been Italian. Incidentally, Farnese used the middle name Sulzire in his World War I draft card and Solcetto in his World War II draft card.

(2) "Faculty Body at Music Institute Has Top Rating," Los Angeles Times, Jan. 26, 1936, p. 56.

(3) I don't know who Martial Lecompte or Racky were, but I presume that "Sapellnikoff" was the Russian pianist Wassily Sapellnikoff (1867-1941).
(4) In the census of 1920, there is a column for citizenship with choices of either "Naturalized or alien." The abbreviation for Harold Farnese was "Pa," denoting "Papers," i.e., Farnese had "take[n] out papers of declaration of intention to become a citizen." 
(5) About half of the information in this record is unclear; there seems to be a problem with the way the original pages were scanned or photographed and then fitted together again in a digital format.

Revised September 18, 2018. Be aware that previous versions of this article contained errors.
Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Roberto Quaglia (b. 1962)

Author, Photographer, Politician, Science Fiction Fan
Born 1962, Italy

Late last year, a reader named Simone Fazzi let me know that there was another Italian writer published in Weird Tales after Giovanni Magherini Graziani. I have stayed away from the Weird Tales issued after the Bellerophon issues of 1984-1985, but I'll make an exception here for an author from a paese meraviglioso. I would like to say grazie to Signor Fazzi for bringing him to my attention.

Roberto Quaglia was born in Italy in 1962. I don't know the particular date or place, but from 1995 to 1997, he was a councilor in Genova. His stories and other works are listed on The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, while a brief, incomplete, wholly inadequate, and typically Wikipedian biography is shown on Wikipedia. With British science fiction writer Ian Watson (b. 1943), Signor Quaglia contributed one story, "The Grave of My Beloved," to Weird Tales, to the March-April issue of 2006. That story is part of the "My Beloved" series, which were collected in The Beloved of My Beloved (2009, with Ian Watson). Signor Quaglia is also the author of the novel Paradoxine: The Adventures of James Vagabond (2009) and a number of works of non-fiction. He has been active in science fiction circles in Europe.

Roberto Quaglia's Story in Weird Tales

"The Grave of My Beloved" with Ian Watson (Mar.-Apr. 2006)

Further Reading
Roberto Quaglia's website: http://www.robertoquaglia.com/
And his biography on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Quaglia

Roberto Quaglia

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales from Italy

Giovanni Magherini Graziani

Farmer, Author, Scholar, Historian, Bibliophile, Philanthropist

Born 1852, Figline Valdarno, Toscana (Tuscany), Italy

Died 1924, Città di Castello, Umbria, Italy

As an author, Giovanni Magherini Graziani led two lives. In one, he wrote on the Italian Renaissance and the history of his ancient and adopted city. In another, he recounted folk tales of witches, healers, and exorcists; of haunted houses, cursed books, and magic mirrors; of evil spirits, avenging zombies, and the unquiet dead. Erudite, scholarly, aristocratic, and well to do, Magherini Graziani was also published--in his other writing life--in a lowly American pulp magazine, Weird Tales, the only Italian author so honored.

Giovanni Magherini was born in 1852 in Figline Valdarno, a small town near Firenze (Florence) in the picturesque region of Toscana (Tuscany). Outside Italy, little may be known of his early life, or, for that matter, any part of his life. A farmer and farm manager, he married the Contessa Maddalena Libri Graziani, a noble by birth and member of aristocratic families originating in Firenze and Città di Castello. Magherini purchased the name Graziani to show that he had moved up in his social status. (1) He also adopted the home city of his wife's family, Città di Castello, and divided his time between there and the Libri family manor house at Poggitazzi. (2)

A researcher, scholar, bibliophile, and man of culture, Giovanni Magherini Graziani studied and wrote about the history of Città di Castello and the Valdarno, the valley drained by the river Arno in north central Italy. His books include L'arte a Città di Castello (The Art of Città di Castello, 1897) and Storia di Città di Castello (The History of Città di Castello, 3 vols., 1890-1912). As a student of art history, Magherini Graziani also wrote a biography of Michelangelo (1871), a monograph on Masaccio (1904), and a book on the early life of Raffaello, the artist we call Raphael (1927). Finally, Magherini Graziani authored a play, Chi stuzzicha il can che giace (1894), now lost.

Magherini Graziani was best known for works on high culture, but in his other writing life, he recounted legends and tales from Italian folklore, tales of the macabre and the fantastic told by the common people of his beloved Valdarno, a genre known as fantastico rurale. His first collection was called Casentino: impressioni e ricordi (1884), written in collaboration with his friend Giuseppe Gatteschi. It was followed by his own Il Diavolo: novelle valdarnesi (The Devil: Stories of the Valdarno People, 1886) and In Valdarno (racconti toscani) (In Valdarno (Tales from Tuscany), 1910). I'll list the contents of Il Diavolo, perhaps for the first time on an English-language website:

• "Il Diavolo" ("The Devil")
• "Il Libro del Comando" ("The Book of Command")
• "Lo Specchietto" ("The Little Mirror")
• "La Strega" ("The Witch")
• "Fioraccio" ("Bad Flower," the nickname of the main character in the story)

Just four years after its initial publication, the story "Fioraccio" was reprinted in English in Modern Ghosts (1890). Writer and reformer George William Curtis provided the introduction to a book that collected seven tales from European authors. (3) I don't think it's any coincidence that all but one were eventually reprinted in Weird Tales. (4) "Fioraccio," a story of demonic possession and the restless dead (translated by Mary A. Craig), appeared in the October 1934 issue of "The Unique Magazine," nearly half a century after it first saw print.

Recently, an Italian publisher, Edizioni Hypnos, issued a new collection of Magherini Graziani's stories. Entitled All'ombra dell'Antico Nemico (In the Shadow of the Old Enemy), the book includes all the tales from Il Diavolo: novelle valdarnesi, plus two others, "San Cerbone" and "Leonzio." (5) Unfortunately for American readers, the book is in Italian. "Fioraccio" may be the only tale by Magherini Graziani available in translation.

A final note: In addition to being a writer and scholar, Giovanni Magherini Graziani was a philanthropist, contributing to civic organizations in Città di Castello, including the philharmonic society, a society of mutual aid, and a society for firefighters. On January 31, 1926, on the two-year anniversary of his death, a bank in his adopted hometown dedicated a bust and plaque in his honor. The plaque reads:

[This plaque,] sponsored by the Bank of Cassa dei Risparmi of

Città di Castello on this day, 31 January 1926,

the second anniversary of his death,

in the house where he fervently labored

to illustrate history

and to disseminate in the world the glory

of his second homeland,

commemorates to posterity

the honored and munificent name

of Giovanni Magherini Graziani

Giovanni Magherini Graziani's Story in Weird Tales

"Fioraccio" (Oct. 1934)

Further Reading

Giovanni Magherini Graziani's work is still available in Italian-language facsimile reprints and as print-on-demand books. Here's hoping for a translation into English sometime soon. Incidentally, this may be the only biography of Magherini Graziani in English.

Notes

(1) Weird Tales indexers Sheldon Jaffery and Fred Cook hyphenated Magherini Graziani's surnames, presumably because that's how his byline originally appeared in the magazine. I have not seen the names hyphenated anywhere else except in Modern Ghosts (1890), the presumed source of the translation used by Weird Tales in its reprinting of October 1934. Significantly, the plaque placed in honor of him in his hometown does not hyphenate his name. Also, it's interesting that a bibliophile would marry a woman with the family name Libri, i.e., "books." Lastly, some sources erroneously give Magherini Graziani’s birth year as 1892.

(2) Città di Castello is also the hometown of actress Monica Bellucci (b. 1964), who has appeared in genre films such as Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Brothers Grimm (2005), and The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010). "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and works by Bram Stoker also appeared of course in Weird Tales.

(3) By the way, George William Curtis (1824-1892) hailed from H.P. Lovecraft's home city of Providence. Curtis died in the same month Lovecraft turned two years old.

(4) I wrote about the book Modern Ghosts (1890) last week. Its contents: "Introduction" by George William Curtis; "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant [reprinted in Weird Tales, Aug. 1926]; "Siesta" by Alexander L. Kielland [WT, Nov. 1930]; "The Tall Woman" by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón [WT, Feb. 1929]; "On The River" by Guy de Maupassant [WT, Feb./Mar. 1931]; "Maese Pérez, the Organist" by Gustavo Adolfo Becquer [WT, June 1934]; "Fioraccio" by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani [WT, Oct. 1934]; and "The Silent Woman" by Leopold Kompert. I don't know why Weird Tales didn’t reprint the story by Leopold Kompert (1822-1886). An odd fact leads to a possible explanation: Weird Tales reprinted the stories from Modern Ghosts almost exactly in the order in which they appeared in the book. "Fioraccio" was the last to be reprinted. "The Silent Woman" may simply have been forgotten.

(5) "The Old Enemy" would appear to be a nickname or euphemism for the devil.

Lo Sposalizio, a painting by Raffaello completed in 1504 for a church in Città di Castello and now at the the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milano (Milan). This image is taken from one of the plates in Magherini Graziani's book La prima giovinezza di Raffaello (1927).

A bust and plaque commemorating Giovanni Magherini Graziani's life and work, located in Città di Castello.

Thanks to Contessa Francesca di Colloredo Mels di Montalbano for translations and background on Italian history, language, and culture. Any errors contained on this page are my own.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley