More Views of the Hudson River-Part Six

Frederick Exley was born in Watertown, New York, in 1929. His birthplace isn't anywhere near the Hudson River. Instead, Exley had views of the river and its valley and towns while being institutionalized for alcoholism and mental illness during the 1950s. His struggles and experiences gave him much of the material for A Fan's Notes, his "fictional memoir" published in 1968.

Exley was the fan of his title, for he was obsessed with the New York Giants, especially with Frank Gifford, who had been a student and star athlete at the University of Southern California during Exley's attendance there in 1950-1952. The Giants aren't having much of a season this year, but Gifford gave fans a lot to cheer about in the 1950s. Both men left USC in 1952. Gifford soared. Exley on the other hand crashed. It was only with the writing (and success) of his novel that Exley began coming back. Kurt Vonnegut and James Dickey praised A Fan's Notes. Newsday called it "the best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby." Maybe Newsday was primed to make the comparison by references and allusions to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel in Exley's own. These include the following passage:

     In the afternoons I lay face up on a water mattress and watched the compact white clouds run down the sky, or face down looking into the blue-green water--chlorinated and temulent to the smell--of the mail-order, children's swimming pool on which I floated. (Vintage Books, 1988, p. 368)

One difference is that Gatsby died afloat in his swimming pool, whereas Exley lived.

Exley mentioned other authors and books in A Fan's Notes. These include Washington Irving, George Orwell and 1984, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter. He didn't mention H.P. Lovecraft, but there are comparisons there, too. Like Lovecraft, Exley suffered from self-imposed malnutrition, his due to alcoholism. In describing his institutionalization, Exley wrote: "We had failed our families by our inability to function properly in society (as good a definition of insanity as any)." (p. 75; italics in the original) Although Lovecraft was never institutionalized, I think he also suffered from the same inability. And now I find in rereading page 75 of my Vintage edition that Exley used a phrase also used in Lovecraft: "they told us terrifying stories of the indignities that would be heaped upon us down there." Compare that to two uses of the same phrase in "The Call of Cthulhu":

When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith.

And

The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. 

Depths and descent are themes in both works. In A Fan's Notes, the descent is more psychological than physical, even if the quote from above refers to a descent into a lower part of the hospital.

There are horrors in Exley's fictionalized memoir. Many of these have to do with how psychiatric patients were treated in the 1950s and early '60s, including by insulin shock treatment. There is another type of horror, too . . .

Joseph Conrad isn't in A Fan's Notes, either. Earlier this year, I wrote about Conrad and his novella Heart of Darkness (1899). The most famous line from that story is of course Marlow's last words: "The horror! The horror!" In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. One bit of that person's marginalia reads:

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

And this is where my insight, if it is one, arrives.

In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the horror or terror is external to the person. Ichabod Crane is normal and stable. Although Irving's narrator leaves open the possibility that Ichabod was finally terrified by a supernatural occurrence, the more likely explanation is that Brom Bones is the one to have put a scare into him by masquerading, Scooby-Doo style, as the Headless Horseman.

In "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928), the horror is also external in the form of Cthulhu himself, and to a lesser extent in his worshippers and acolytes. But the horror is also internal for some people, including the artist Henry Anthony Wilcox of Providence, Rhode Island. In late March and early April, coinciding with the worldwide Cthulhu crisis, Wilcox is possessed as if he were overcome by a terrible hallucinatory fever. He isn't himself. Others in the story suffer from psychological torments and fears as well. They have in a sense internalized an external horror. It occurs to me now that maybe their author in his own life externalized internal horrors.

Thirty years or more after that, Exley, while in the hospital, encounters another psychiatric patient, who tells him "that there was a man within him, pestering him, allowing him no peace." The man asks him to listen at his diaphragm, "the exact location of the man." Exley listens, hearing nothing. Nonetheless, he asks his interlocutor what the man is saying. "'He say he the debbil,'" is the reply, "'an' he gwoan kill me.'" (p. 73)

There is more on the man with the devil inside him (on pages following page 73--these show Exley's far different view of race in America than what Lovecraft expressed) and a further explication of the black man's--and Exley's--problem. The point is that, in a novel of a No-Longer-Romantic America, one of the postwar period and the 1960s, "the horror, the horror," was already internalized. There were external horrors to be sure--insulin shock treatment was one--but in the time between 1819-1820 when Irving's story was published and 1968 when Exley's first saw print, horror became internalized. The human heart--a heart often of darkness--became the source of the world's horrors instead of some externality. Joseph Conrad must have recognized that (during Freud's first decade as a published author), and so the migration of horror from external to internal sources had already commenced by then. Lovecraft recognized it in his own writings of the 1910s to the 1930s. And in an episode of his own first novel, Frederick Exley seems to have confirmed it.

I have mentioned Freud here because Exley did, too. He writes: "In the modern and enlightened sunshine of Freud, in this Anacreontic milieu where we were all going to be absolved of guilt and its ensuing remorse, Hawthorne had seemed to me irrelevant and spurious." (p. 367) But Exley returned to Hawthorne, learned a new appreciation of him, and even "developed a crush" on him. Conrad may or may not have been a romantic author (or "Romantic Realist" as Ruth M. Stauffer put it in a study from 1922; he was certainly conservative), but maybe he followed an older example, disregarding science and "progress" in favor of a traditional understanding of the human heart. That confuses things a little, and maybe mine is no insight after all. Maybe a discovery that horrors are internal rather than external is simply a return to tradition. If that's true, then maybe external horrors are left as artifacts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our monsters and ghosts were and are from within.

* * *

Another of the authors mentioned in A Fan's Notes was Harlan Hatcher (1898-1998), with whom Exley had taken a course at USC. Exley mentioned him in relation to Ernest Hemingway and the days both men spent in Paris during the 1920s. (According to Exley, Hatcher did not know Hemingway. He only knew of him. See pp. 128-129.) I recognized Hatcher's name, for in late summer I had read from The Ohio Guide, compiled by Harlan Hatcher and published in 1940. Hatcher was born in Ironton, Ohio, and taught at Ohio State University but became president of football rival University of Michigan. I'm always fascinated by these nexi and coincidences, even when they don't signify anything greater than themselves or have any occult meaning. Anyway, this is the first of these final notes on my series on Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Hudson River, all of which are personal rather than external. They are in here rather than out there.

A Fan's Notes is not the kind of book you should read when you have slipped through the cracks of the world. I didn't know that when I began reading it during my five-weeks-and-a-day. I read it anyway. Sometimes it dragged and sometimes not. I got through it and I'm glad I read it, even if I don't have as high opinion of it as the writers of the cover blurbs. Chapter 6 is entitled "Who? Who? Who is Mr. Blue?" I was reading that chapter in my tent, by flashlight, when I heard a barred owl call, "Who? Who? Who?" Then it flew away, and I heard two owls exchanging their more recognizable call, "Who cooks for you?" Another thing you should know about barred owls: they sometimes begin their calling with the most terrible and ghastly of screams.

Finally, Frederick Exley married on October 31, 1959, exactly sixty-six years before my drive on Halloween night, 2025, which ended my five-weeks-and-a-day. I drove under a half moon that night, the same fraction that inspired the name of Henry Hudson's ship, Halve Maen, or Half Moon, on which he and his crew sailed up the Hudson River in 1609.

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. Second update (Dec. 15, 2025): Now according to the Internet, Miriam Charrière died in 2014 at the age of eighty-nine.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Two

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) can be read simply as an adventure story, even if there is more to it than that. Like much of the best literature, it can be read at more than one level. Good genre fiction works that way, too. Merely sensational things are soon forgotten. Things of substance and quality stick.

In Conrad's novella, a seaman named Marlow, beginning in England, sets off for the Continent to secure work, then journeys to the west coast of Africa to carry out his assignment. He soon finds that he is to repair a boat, then to take it upriver to a remote place where a mysterious and intriguing figure named Kurtz resides and appears to reign. Conrad spent nearly twenty years of his life as a seaman. Those years included a monthlong trip up the Congo River and other trips across the world. Many of his works are about men and ships at sea.

Again, not everyone can be Joseph Conrad, nor can everyone be Herman Melville or Jack London, who also went to sea, or Ernest Hemingway or James Jones, who went to war. But a writer ought to be able to draw from some other experience besides reading comic books, watching TV shows, and playing video games, which is how many of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales seem to have spent their lives. Their characters follow their lead. Too many of them seem wrapped up in themselves. The lead characters in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" and "Night Fishing" are prime examples. Kurtz is one wrapped up in himself, too--everything to which he refers is his--but Marlow recognizes him as a great man. And he is (possibly), though great in a terrible way. One difference between Kurtz and too many of the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue (their authors, too) is that he has gone somewhere and done something. They apparently have not. They have remained where they are, wrapped up in themselves, turned inward upon themselves like the worm uroboros. The old saying is that a man wrapped up in himself makes a small package. That is too evident in the pages of Weird Tales #367 and apparently, too, in the lives of its contributors. There are exceptions, but perhaps only barely. I will add that you don't have to look into your own navel and pick at your own little scabs--you don't have to examine your self-made inner voids when there is a whole world out there brimming with mystery and adventure. Even if you are bound to a place and a way of life, you might still turn loose your imagination and let it wander freely in the larger world. Good authors do that.

* * *

Another problem with the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is that it is shamelessly, perhaps thoughtlessly, commercial. Its authors place the names of commercial products in their stories as if they had been paid to do so. In contrast, there is only one brandname in Heart of Darkness, Martini-Henry, the name of a rifle. That's a concrete detail. It's not product placement. In general, I think using the names of weapons, cars, cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks is probably okay in a work of fiction. The list of acceptable brandnames used after that must be, I think, pretty short, especially in a short story.

Joseph Conrad was conservative in an old-fashioned sense, meaning that he was aristocratic, perhaps reactionary, certainly skeptical of progress, and suspicious of liberal values. People seem to have forgotten that what they call capitalism is a liberal rather than a conservative institution. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow shows his disdain for commercialism and the relentless chasing after money that he witnesses in Africa. Most of the commercial products in his tale are cheap and lousy, or useless, like the pieces of brass wire used to pay African natives. There is one exception: ivory.

"The word 'ivory' rang in the air [Marlow remembers], was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from a corpse." (Dell, 1960, p. 53)

That "imbecile rapacity" is seemingly everywhere in our world of today--even in the pages of fiction. That's just how it is, I guess. We are all human and so necessarily broken, warped, and twisted, at least in our worst moments and by our worst instincts. Art is supposed to rise above these things, though, and when an author of fiction uses a half-dozen or more brandnames in as many pages of his or her story, you can't help but smell the whiff of the commercial corpse. People have forgotten God, yet still they pray to the golden calf of money and material objects. And not just material objects but specific commercial objects, in other words products with brandnames. Many of those branded products have become not material at all--they are called services instead--yet still have the same taint and whiff of the commercial corpse. And now human beings seem to want to transform themselves into branded products, to make of themselves mere objects, to objectify and commodify themselves, a recipe, I should point out, for disquiet and unhappiness in the self-objectifying person. (As my philosophy professor, Mr. Pedtke, pointed out a long time ago, we are not things.) Anyway, I think that authors should cease with the product placement and the thoughtless and shameless deployment of brandnames. And editors should make sure that they do. Let fiction be art rather than advertisement.

To be continued . . .

The Heart of Darkness in a Signet edition, date and cover artist unknown. I have altered this low-resolution image from one I found on line. Whatever you do, don't take this as a true representation of the original book cover. (I wish people would scan their images instead of taking pictures of them.)

This cover illustration is misleading. It doesn't really represent a scene from inside, at least in Heart of Darkness. But when I saw it, I thought of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885), especially the character Foulata. Once I thought of Rider Haggard's book, I considered the possibility that Heart of Darkness is a kind of inversion of King Solomon's Mines, that it is a story set in a more nearly real world rather than in a fantasy world. Even if that's a worthwhile interpretation, we should remember that H. Rider Haggard lived in Africa, too, and would have had no illusions about the place or its peoples, including its European peoples.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part One

In thinking and writing about the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), my thoughts went pretty soon to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Published first as a three-part serial in Blackwood's Magazine (Feb.-Mar.-Apr., 1899), Heart of Darkness first appeared in a hardbound edition in November 1902. Even if you haven't read Conrad's novella of an upriver trip made in colonial Africa, you probably know its most famous line of dialogue, Kurtz's last words: "The horror! The horror!" That line and the greater theme of Heart of Darkness are what led me from cosmic horror to Kurtz's horror.

Not everyone can be Joseph Conrad. In fact, only Conrad was Conrad. But it would do for aspiring authors to read as widely as possible and to learn whatever lessons they can by doing so. One of the things lacking in the Cosmic Horror Issue is substance, or weight. As I wrote before, that issue is pretty thin in terms of its content. Some of its stories are very thin. But there is real substance in Heart of Darkness. Although it isn't heavy, it has weight. It's also very well written and stylistically polished. The opening, in which a cruising yawl called the Nellie, bearing five men, comes to rest in the sea-reach of the river Thames, is beautifully done and almost perfect in its depiction of a scene to which I have never been witness and probably never will be. But in reading I was almost there, and so might you be, too.

Heart of Darkness is a tale. It's very much like a weird tale in its structure, theme, plot, and atmosphere. Or maybe the weird tale is like this and other tales in that they are all told in a certain way. This tale is actually a tale within a tale. Marlow is one of the men aboard the Nellie. He tells his tale to the others, including the narrator. You could call this a framing device. It's also in the club-story format, even if the telling isn't done in a club setting. I have a yellowing copy of the Laurel Conrad edition published by Dell in 1960 (cover below). The cover art is by Richard Powers, who created so many science fiction and fantasy covers. On page 32 is the phrase "tellers of tales." The word weird appears four times, twice in describing incantations. There is presaging of weird fiction in the Heart of Darkness, especially of the tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. 

Many authors of dark fantasy and other dark sub-genres love their darkness. Marlow's first words are of darkness and of the depths of time. His tale begins in its telling on a river to the sea. The tale itself is about a trip in the opposite direction and on a different continent, from the ocean into the inner darkness of the title. But there was once darkness where the five men have come to in their boat, for this, too, was once the home of what Marlow calls savages. And civilized men--Romans--once came here in their ships, just as Europeans had done and were doing in Africa in his time. Marlow points out to the men hearing his tale, "But darkness was here yesterday." (p. 30) His awareness of time isn't quite cosmic, but it is at least historic, prehistoric, atavistic. Marlow speaks of that long-ago time and place:

"They [the Romans] were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he [a Roman] was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

Darkness--journeying away from civilization and into mystery, savagery, and isolation--fascination with what awaits and what lies along the way--the witnessing of abominations--encounters with the incomprehensible--these are some of the same subjects of weird fiction.

To be continued . . .

Note: I accidentally posted this and the following entry earlier this month. Now I will pick up with them and this series again. I hope you don't mind waiting for their return.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Why Weird Tales?

Weird Tales was in trouble during that first year. The magazine that never dies almost did in 1924. Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) stepped in to edit the triple-sized, first anniversary issue, May/June/July 1924. It would be the last issue of the magazine until November 1924, when Farnsworth Wright (1890-1940) took over. Coincidentally, that first-anniversary issue was whole number 13.

The first feature in Weird Tales for May/June/July 1924 was a kind of manifesto entitled "Why Weird Tales?" It was written, anonymously, by Kline. In it, he explained the purposes of publishing the magazine, first, to offer readers stories they wanted but were unlikely to find in other places; second, "to find and publish those stories that will make their writers immortal." H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was not yet known when Kline wrote. Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was only eighteen and just getting started as a writer. Dozens of now well-known authors had not yet been published in Weird Tales. Hundreds of still nearly unknown writers, the beginning subject of this blog, still awaited discovery.

According to the current Weird Tales website, the first issue of the magazine appeared on newsstands on February 18, 1923. In other words, in about seven weeks Weird Tales will enter its 100th year. "The Unique Magazine" hasn't been continuously in print for these one hundred years. But it still exists and is still known and read. There may be another issue coming in the not very distant future. Otis Adelbert Kline's vision still holds.

* * *

I have posted the complete text of "Why Weird Tales?" on a new page for this blog. See the list of pages at the right. I have transcribed this text from the original, which I found on the website Internet Archive at the following URL:

https://archive.org/details/WeirdTales1924050607ATLPM/page/n1/mode/2up

Any transcription errors are my own.

* * *

Otis Adelbert Kline mentioned many authors in his essay. Following is a list. Names in bold are of those whose work was published in Weird Tales in the period 1923-1974. Click on their names to see my biographies of these authors.

• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
• Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
• Homer
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
• John Milton (1608-1674)
• Dante (1265-1321)
• Washington Irving (1783-1859)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
• Jules Verne (1828-1905)
• Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
• Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
• Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
• H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
• Lord Byron (1788-1824)
• Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
• Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)
• Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
• The Brontës: Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848), and Anne (1820–1849)
• Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)
• Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
• Richard Marsh (1857-1915)
• Sax Rohmer (1883-1959)
• H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925)
• Robert Hitchens (1864-1950)
• Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)
• Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
• Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)
• Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)
• Dr. Frank Crane (1861-1928)

Kline devoted a good deal of his 2,100-word essay to Poe and Hawthorne, also a full paragraph to Charles Brockden Brown. Brown may have been more well known in the 1920s than he is today. He has been and may even still be a neglected author.

I almost overlooked H.G. Wells' name in "Why Weird Tales?" and was almost ready to make something of that. Even though his name is there, I might still make something of Kline's bare mention of it: Weird Tales does not seem to have followed in Wells' path, for his work was an innovation. Weird Tales came from older things. Even though the magazine published science fiction, especially in the 1940s and '50s under the supervision of Dorothy McIlwraith (1891-1976), its mainstay was the weird tale, a type of fiction that matured into its own subgenre, weird fiction, in the pages of "The Unique Magazine." That's my opinion.

* * *

There are many good points in "Why Weird Tales?" One passage jumped out at me, considering what I have written over the past year about Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales. That passage:

The ancient Hebrews used the element of fear in their writings to spur their heroes to superhuman power or to instill a moral truth. The sun stands still in the heavens that Joshua may prevail over his enemies.

I refer here to Jack Williamson's idea that Utopia is in the Greek tradition, while Dystopia is in an older Egyptian-Hebraic tradition. (See "Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Three: Dystopia Before Utopia," here.) I'll have more on that topic and wrap up that series after the new year arrives.

Until then, Happy New Year to everyone everywhere. If 2022 is going to be better than the previous two years, we will all have to make it better. It won't happen on its own.

The cover story of Weird Tales May/June/July 1924 was "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by Harry Houdini. I don't see a signature here, but this is almost certainly the work of William F. Heitman of Indianapolis. I wanted to show Heitman's work here because it reminds me of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood are thrown into the pit. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley