Four Men-Part Three

God created the cosmos, thereby banishing the void and chaos that preceded it. For as long as God exists and reigns supreme, there can be no void, and nothing from the void can exist in or intrude upon the universe. All things are under God and there can be no horror emanating from anything in his Creation. All horrors must wait, lurking outside the circle of star-firelight that is the universe, like beasts from before time and history.

But "God is dead," or so proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in The Gay Science, published in 1882. So if God is dead, then there can be cosmic horror. He no longer stands as a bulwark against void and chaos. And like so many horrors, cosmic horror had to wait until the nineteenth century before it could emerge--or re-emerge--for God's position at the top of creation was forever secure and unassailable before then. His law was always supreme. Weird came back in the nineteenth century. (Weird is not a horror.) But maybe it is our little fit of foot-stamping--God is dead, we cry--that made horrors, both fictional and actual, possible in the twentieth. Remember that the most murderous regimes in human history have been atheistic.

It's useful, I think, to look at chronologies. Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead in 1882 (or recognized a belief among his fellows to that effect). That was very near the beginning of Guy de Maupassant's career as a published author. The first version of "The Horla" was published in October 1886. The second came along in 1887. Also in 1886, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Nietszche was published. (We would recognize the title as almost science-fictional.) In that book, Nietzsche wrote:

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 Chapter 4, No. 146)

If you think only in terms of genre fiction, then you might read that as predictive of stories of supernatural horror, weird fiction, and science fantasy of the coming century. We have Nietzsche's concept and stories of that type overtly in our own, in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023).

* * *

Nietzsche read Maupassant. In his autobiography, he wrote:

I do not see from what century of the past one could dredge up such inquisitive and at the same time such delicate psychologists as in contemporary Paris [. . .] to single out one of the strong race, a genuine Latin toward whom I am especially well disposed, Guy de Maupassant. (From Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Clever," Chapter 3, in my Vintage edition, pages 243-244; Ecce Homo written in 1888 and published posthumously.)

I don't have a biography of Maupassant. Surprisingly, such a thing is hard to come by. So I don't know whether he ever read Nietzsche.

* * *

Nietzsche had a mental breakdown on January 3, 1889. He was institutionalized, I believe, that same month. In the in-between time, he wrote a number of letters to his friends. Most of these were signed "Dionysius." (Remember that the Nietzschean title character in "The Last Bonneville," by F. Paul Wilson is named Dwight, a name derived from Dionysius.) Nietzsche hung on until 1900 and died in Maupassant's (and Lovecraft's) birth month, August, also the same month in which the Horla becomes known to his hapless victim. (Twenty and five make twenty-five.) As for Maupassant, he had his breakdown almost exactly three years later, on January 2, 1892, when he tried to kill himself. He was committed to an asylum and died there in 1893. What is it about January?

* * *

Guy de Maupassant died of syphilis. There was a time when people thought that Nietzsche had died of the same thing. I guess that idea has gone by the wayside. H.P. Lovecraft's father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, also died of syphilis. He had a psychotic breakdown in April 1893 and died in 1898. Lovecraft's mother, Sarah Susan (Phillips) Lovecraft, also suffered from mental illness and was also committed to an institution. She died in 1921. So all three authors--Nietzsche, Maupassant, and Lovecraft--had mental illness in their lives, and all three died while quite young. The same things are true of Edgar Allan Poe who preceded them.

* * *

Before moving on to Part Four of this series, I will point out that Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) studied art in France. I'm not sure that anyone knows the exact dates, but I believe he returned to the United States in the period 1893 to 1894 or 1895. I don't think there's any doubt that Chambers read Maupassant. How could he have avoided it? And there are some similarities in their respective works, even if Lovecraft observed in his consideration of The King in Yellow (1895) what he called "a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by [George] Du Maurier's Trilby [first published in 1894]."

* * *

I had hoped to get more into "The Horla" in this part, but that will have to wait until next time.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Two

I'll set aside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft before bringing them up again. The four men of the title are:

• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900);

• French author Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893);

• American author Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933); and

• American author and gadfly of science Charles H. Fort (1874-1932).

Some of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) allude to ideas from two of these men, Nietzsche and Fort. Now that I have read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, I can draw him into this discussion, too, along with Robert W. Chambers.

Robert W. Chambers is mentioned by name in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Guy de Maupassant is not, except very indirectly, for in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, one of the videos watched by the main character during his solitary holiday binge is Diary of a Madman (1963), starring Vincent Price. Although it bears the title of one of Maupassant's stories, Diary of a Madman is mostly based on another, namely, "The Horla." Both stories take the form of diaries, and so it was easy, I guess, to put them together. If the moviemakers had entitled their film The Horla, no one would have known what it was about. Besides that, it probably wouldn't have gotten by the censors.

The main character in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" thinks a little about Vincent Price but not at all about Maupassant. Thematically, "The Horla" is related to Quatermass (1979), a show in which Mr. Cornell and his TV watcher are much more interested. The illustration at the beginning of the story is of John Mills' image on a TV screen, Mills being the star of the show. I don't know whether Mr. Cornell was aware of the thematic connection when he wrote his story. The idea that we are property, or cattle, seems to have come from Charles Fort. No one writing for the Cosmic Horror Issue seems to have looked to "The Horla" for inspiration. I think, though, that "The Horla" must be considered seminal in the history of science fiction. I'll get into that a little more. Right now I'll just say that I can't believe I had never read it before a couple of weeks ago. But then you can't read everything all at once. Where would that leave you?

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant was published in two versions, the first in the October 26, 1886, edition of the French newspaper Gil Blas, the second in a hardbound collection called The Horla, published in 1887. I have the first version in Pierre and Jean and Selected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Bantam, 1994). I have the second and I guess definitive version in Selected Tales of Guy de Maupassant (Random House, 1945 and 1950), with illustrations by Adolf Dehn. Even so, this version is different from other translated versions. If you can, you should read these two versions together. I'll quote from them next time, or maybe the time after that if this brief series turns into a long one. By the way, "The Horla" was reprinted in Weird Tales in August 1926, in its author's birth month, as well as the same month that Maupassant's diarist first sees his previously invisible tormenter. 

Translator Charlotte Mandell has suggested that the portmanteau word horla is a combination of the French hors, meaning "outside," and là, meaning "there." The Horla, then, is "the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There," or "the 'what's out there'." (Quoted in Wikipedia.) That's an excellent interpretation, I think, and just another indication that we should always endeavor to look into the meanings of words. A simple English version of the word Horla might be alien, and I think that's what we are to believe about Maupassant's being, that it is an alien, probably an extraterrestrial alien.

H.P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Guy de Maupassant and Robert W. Chambers. Both are mentioned in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Lovecraft especially liked "The Horla." It's supposed to have been an influence upon him in his composition of "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). I can't say that that's true. It appears to be one of those things that people say so often that everyone just accepts it. We should have some evidence instead, and then we can believe it for sure. The influence of Chambers upon Lovecraft is more evident. In contrast, any connection to or awareness of Nietzsche in Lovecraft seems tenuous. As for Charles Fort, look no farther than "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931) for Fort's name in Lovecraft's fiction.

All four men of my title read Poe, for Poe, once he arrived upon this earth, became inescapable. Here is Nietzsche in a discussion of Poe, and others:

     Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol--I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them--are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps--what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for him who has guessed their true nature!

The quote is from Nietzsche contra Wagner: Out of the Files of a Psychologist (1888). A different version is in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886). So, like Maupassant, Nietzsche sometimes changed what he wrote.

To be continued . . .

An illustration for "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, source and artist unknown. This may be in an edition published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1910, although the almost unreadable words above appear to be in French.

Posted early and revised later in the morning on March 2, 2025. I have changed what I have written, too.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

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

More Strength, More Joy

I wanted to be done with this topic, but there is always more of everything, at the door and waiting to come in.

Today (Sept. 10, 2024), I read an article about Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), that notorious, mid-century, whacked-out, Freudian-Marxist, crackpot pseudoscientist and chaser after flying saucers. (1) I'll tell you, there aren't enough adjectives and epithets to describe this guy. Anyway, I came across a quote from him that leads to another quote that leads back to the topic of Strength Through Joy from the other day. I say "the other day" in the Midwestern sense, meaning any day between yesterday and several weeks ago.

Here is Reich on joy and strength:

This future order cannot and will not be other than, as Lenin put it, a full love-life yielding joy and strength. Little as we can say about the details of such a life, it is nevertheless certain that in the Communist society the sexual needs of human beings will once more come into their own. . . . Evidence that socialism alone can bring about sexual liberation is on our side. (2) [Boldface added; ellipses in Mr. Panero's original article. See the note below for the source.]

Ah, so Strength Through Joy came from Lenin. But where from Lenin? Well, here from Lenin:

"Besides, emancipation of love is neither a novel nor a communistic idea. You will recall that it was advanced in fine literature around the middle of the past century as 'emancipation of the heart'. In bourgeois practice it materialized into emancipation of the flesh. It was preached with greater talent than now, though I cannot judge how it was practiced. Not that I want my criticism to breed asceticism. That is farthest from my thoughts. Communism should not bring asceticism, but joy and strength, stemming, among other things, from a consummate love life. Whereas today, in my opinion, the obtaining plethora of sex life yields neither joy nor strength. On the contrary, it impairs them. This is bad, very bad, indeed, in the epoch of revolution.

     "Young people are particularly in need of joy and strength. Healthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description and a wide range of intellectual interests is what they need, as well as learning, study and research, and as far as possible collectively. This will be far more useful to young people than endless lectures and discussions on sex problems and the so-called living by one's nature. Mens sana in corpore sana. Be neither monk nor Don Juan, but not anything in between either, like a German Philistine." [Boldface added.]

That long quote is from "Lenin on the Women's Question," an interview conducted in 1920 by Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), a German Marxist and feminist. You can easily find it on the Internet.

Lenin was of course a socialist, but he was of the international variety. Nazis were socialists, too, but of the opposing national variety. These people couldn't stand each other. And yet the Nazis seem to have gone to Lenin for his concept of strength through joy, at least when it came to "[h]ealthy sports, such as gymnastics, swimming, hiking, physical exercises of every description." Activities like these were of course part the program under the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude, or KdF, established in 1933, thirteen years after Lenin gave his interview.

It seems to have been Reich and men like him, particularly of the Frankfurt School, who departed from Lenin's proscription against what he considered the bourgeois "emancipation of the flesh" and a "plethora of sex life." (3) In Lenin's analysis, these things impair rather than yield joy and strength. On top of that, they're "bad, very bad" for the Marxist revolution. Imagine: Lenin seems to have come out in favor of conventional and committed love-relationships between men and women, all the better, I guess, to keep the revolution going. The revolution, after all, was the thing.

Reich, a Marxist to be sure but a Freudian as well, went the other way. He and his followers, even unto today, would seem to be the Philistines in Lenin's formulation, although I'm not sure I understand the reference exactly. (Maybe it was to Rousseau, a Swiss, or to Goethe, a German, but I just can't say. See the note below.) In any case, it looks like Lenin has been kicked into the dustbin of history. After all, it is critical theory and other ideas of the Frankfurt School and the New Left--all pretty heavy on sex and what people call gender--that have taken over the minds of people in academia and the Western élite. In contrast, who today calls himself a Marxist-Leninist? Poor Lenin. He must be turning over on his bier.

* * *

By the way, Reich's followers included Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, a sure indication that even very intelligent people can be extremely stupid. As for the literature and cinema of science fiction and fantasy, Reichian ideas--rather, his gadgets--are in Barbarella (1968) and Sleeper (1973), as well as in the video of Kate Bush's song "Cloudbusting" (1985). One of those gadgets, the orgone accumulator, makes me think of L. Ron Hubbard's E-meter, a different kind of gadget that he swiped from Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965). Both are pseudoscientific instruments that would have found an easy place in the science fiction of their day. They may very well have been inspired by science fiction, just as flying saucers were. (Like Hubbard, Reich believed that aliens from outer space have come to Earth.) So the path seems to start in science fiction before moving into the real world, after which it goes back into science fiction. The problem is that people forget where it all started. They lose the origin story and see the beginnings of these things in the real world rather than in the imagined worlds of science fiction.

By the way, both Wilhelm Reich and L. Ron Hubbard were influenced by Freudian psychology, which you could also call a pseudoscience if you want.

Connections between real-world pseudosciences and the imaginary worlds of science fiction continue. For example: Reich's Maine estate, called Orgonon, recalls the Valley of the Pines, run by Joseph A. Sadony (1877-1960) close to the shores of Lake Michigan. In attendance there for many years was Meredith Beyers (1899-1996), who, like Volney Mathison, was a teller of weird tales.

Another example: science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard had his own real-world hideout. Sometimes it was on board a ship at sea. Towards the end of his life, Hubbard, depraved as always but then in extreme decay, retreated to a secluded ranch in California. Instead of being like Captain Nemo on his Mysterious Island, Hubbard put his ocean-going days behind him and died in his bed, in a motor home, his hair and nails grown long the way people used to say happened with corpses. Lenin died in bed, too. His corpse has remained static in the one hundred years since his death. Happy death anniversary, V.I. We don't miss you.

* * *

These men and men like them were and are like Bond villains or pulp-fiction or comic-book supervillains who live in great wealth in their secret lairs, secluded estates, hidden valleys, expensive vessels, and other hideouts peopled with anonymous but extremely loyal henchmen who, as it happens, always die in droves when the hero shows up. Unlike fictional villains, however, the real-world pseudoscientist, theorist, and experimenter usually lives with only few attendants, their numbers often dwindling as the years go by, and he often dies alone, in poverty and misery and maybe even suffering from insanity. This is what happens, I guess, when you separate yourself from nature, fact, truth, and reality, also from yourself and other people.

Marxists and Nazis of course have their own pseudosciences and their pseudoscientific processes and gadgets. Marxism is itself, in its whole, a pseudoscience, i.e., the pseudoscience of what Marxists calls History. And what else are the Marxist Workers' Paradise and the Nazi Thousand-Year Reich (a different Reich from Wilhelm) than just larger versions of those insular and closed-off places where Reich, Sadony, Hubbard, and men like them played with their pet theories and carried out their abstruse researches and pointless experiments? In contrast, Captain Nemo was only a fictional character. He was harmless. In contrast, too, Edgar Rice Burroughs was only a real-world author. All of his theorizing and experimentation happened only on paper. He was harmless, too. But maybe we can say that his Tarzana was the secular equivalent of those hidden and isolated places of pseudoscience and separation, a kind of Disneyland not open to the general public.

Marxism and the "science" of History, Nazism and the "science" of race, orgone energy, cloudbusting, Dianetics, Scientology, flying saucers, contact with aliens--including sexual contact with aliens--ancient aliens, alien abductions, alien invasions and infiltrations--on and on these ideas go. Some are mostly harmless. All are, at least in part, pseudoscientific. Among them are ideas, Marxism and Nazism being the chief examples, that are dangerous in the extreme, to the point of being lethal to countless millions of human beings. What does it say about us that we keep coming up with these things? That they keep coming back even though we chase them away over and over again? What does it say about us that we keep falling for them? Believing in them as keys to our understanding, of ourselves, our history, and the world in which we live? Believing them to be keys to making our lives better and happier? What do all of these things say about us?

Notes
(1) The article is "Marx of the Libido" by James Panero on the website of City Journal, Summer 2024, accessed by clicking here.
(2) From his essay "Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth" in Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934 (1972).
(3) I'm interested in the origins of the supposed bourgeois idea of the "emancipation of the heart." I found this phrase in an online abstract of a paper about the German authoress Marie Louise von François (1817-1893). I also found it in reference to both Rousseau and Goethe. I can't say whether I'm on the right track, though. Maybe if we could find a handsome prince to kiss the sleeping Lenin in his glass coffin, he would wake up and tell us what he meant.

Speaking of the Swiss and glass coffins, an American woman killed herself in Switzerland using a suicide coffin. This happened on September 23, 2024. See what I mean when I say that there are always more things waiting to come in the door? Anyway, last night (Sept. 24, 2024) I read "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut (1968). The story involves suicide parlors where people voluntarily go to their deaths. How prescient. There are also suicide chambers (pun possibly intended, given the author's surname) in "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers (1895) and in the film Soylent Green (1973), based on the 1966 novel by Harry Harrison. These ways of killing ourselves originated in science fiction. Now they have come into the real world. Is it possible for them to go back into science fiction again? Or is it too late for that?

Wilhelm Reich and son Peter, by the artist MacNeill, from High Times #9, May 1976. Note the flying saucers and the Vernian rocketship. Note also the two orbs as in Robert W. Chambers' illustration for his own King in Yellow (1895).

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The Fungi from Yuggoth

Here are the two poems by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) published in the February/March 1931 issue of Weird Tales and set to music (perhaps even performed) by Harold S. Farnese (1890-1945) (1):

XXIII. Mirage

I do not know if ever it existed--
That lost world floating dimly on Time's stream--
And yet I see it often, violet-misted,
And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.
There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers,
Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light,
And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night.

Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled,
Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill
There was a village, ancient and white-steepled,
With evening chimes for which I listen still.
I do not know what land it is--or dare
Ask when or why I was, or will be, there.

XXVII. The Elder Pharos [2]

From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare
Under cold stars obscure to human sight,
There shoots at dusk a single beam of light
Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.
They say (though none has been there) that it comes
Out of a pharos in a tower of stone,
Where the last Elder One lives on alone,
Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums. [3]

The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask
Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide
A face not of this earth, though none dares ask
Just what those features are, which bulge inside.
Many, in man’s first youth, sought out that glow,
But what they found, no one will ever know. [4]

From the URL H.P. Lovecraft.com at this link.

Notes

(1) I'm settling on 1890 as the year of Farnese's birth, as I think it's a more likely birth year for him than 1891.
(2) The word pharos refers to a lighthouse.

(3) Note the phrase "Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums." Is that an allusion to Azathoth, whom Lovecraft described as existing "outside the ordered universe" and as an "amorphous blight of nethermost confusion," also as one who "gnaws . . . amidst . . . [the] maddening beating of vile drums"? (From The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.) There are drums also backing Guy Bevier Williams' chant at the beginning of White Zombie. It seems to me that drums in Lovecraft, along with pipes and flutes, signify primitivism and/or decadence in music and, by extension, in a society or culture. Cultists in his stories invariably play these primitive or pagan instruments.
(3) Note here the reference to "The Thing [which] wears a silken mask/Of yellow . . . ." That makes me think immediately of Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow, from a generation before. Lovecraft made reference to the same figure in "Celephaïs" (1920) and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926, 1943).
(4) One of the newspaper items I cited previously in this series alluded to Farnese's performance (with Jascha Gegna, in late 1932) of two "oriental" pieces composed by Farnese. Although "Mirage" seems to describe a vision of a more Western or European landscape ("steepled" village), "The Elder Pharos" has a subtle, though not unambiguous, Oriental setting: the Plateau of Leng is placed, in one Lovecraft story at least, in Central Asia, while the color yellow, though also used to connote insanity, is associated with the Orient. (It's why pencils are yellow, but think of "the yellow peril" as well.)

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

True Detective

I guess I'm catching up on my viewing from 2015, the HBO TV series True Detective included.

Few people remember it today, but in its first incarnation, Weird Tales had a companion magazine called Detective Tales, later Real Detective Tales, which began publication in 1922. The publishers of these two magazines got into financial trouble about a year into their venture. One of the publishers, Jacob Clark Henneberger, gave up his interest in Detective Tales and held onto Weird Tales, which has had an on-and-off career in the nine decades since. Detective Tales carried on under a different publisher and became Real Detective Tales, then, in May 1931, simply Real Detective. The similarly titled True Detective, part of Bernarr Macfadden's True series of titles, began publication in 1924 and lasted until 1995. The point of all this is that the makers of the TV series True Detective seem to have intended to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery in their show. I think they succeeded. I would add that, despite the title, True Detective has much--maybe more--in common with weird fiction than with detective fiction.

I heard a lot about True Detective in 2015 when it first aired, and I can say after having seen it that the show is compelling. The co-stars, Woody Harrelson as Marty Hart and Matthew McConaughey as Rustin Cohle are excellent. (Note the symbolism in their names.) Matthew McConaughey is, as always, like a chameleon in portraying seemingly real people. A lot of the supporting actors are also good. I'll single out Brad Carter as Charlie Lange, the peckerwood ex-husband of the murdered woman, for his performance.

There is some clunky, inauthentic, and overly literate dialogue in True Detective, but over all, the characters speak in ways that are true to life. Rust is often sophomoric in his pseudo-philosophical musings. Hart registers proper skepticism and disgust at what he says. (I'm not sure that any actor is as good at disgust as is Woody Harrelson.) The main title sequence is very good, and the theme song is perfect for it, one of the best theme songs I've heard in a long time. The settings and scenery are great, as is the cinematography. There are some anachronisms, I think, and places where the screenwriter's politics show through. For instance, he takes unnecessary swipes at private schools, especially parochial schools, and at school choice. In reading about the show, I find that the screenwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, was raised Catholic. A lot of us were, but so what? Get over whatever it is that got your underwear in a knot and move on. To that end, the Rustin Cohle character is evidently an atheist, but at the end of the show he sees the light (literally). I imagine that was a bitter disappointment for any atheists watching and enjoying the show. Significantly, his penultimate vision--the one actually shown on screen rather than the one he describes from his wheelchair--enters the otherwise flat land of Louisiana (see Flatland below) in the form of a spiral (see The King in Yellow below) and through a circular opening in the spherical roof (see The Ring and Flatland below) of a decrepit building (see almost everything below).

I have to admit, the change in tone at the end of True Detective is a little jarring, but if being gored and hatcheted by the worst serial killer in history isn't enough to change your life, I don't know what is. The show also changes in its structure and viewpoint in later episodes. I'm not sure if those were good moves or not. There are also too many convenient developments (the owner of the green house is still living, still lucid, still available for questioning, and has an impeccable memory), too many things left hanging (who called the man who subsequently killed himself in his prison cell?), and too many missed opportunities on the part of the detectives (why didn't they talk to an anthropologist, a folklorist, and a botanist very early on in the case?), but over all, True Detective is a good show, I think, and well worth the viewing.

I said that True Detective seems to want to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery. Here are some possible sources of inspiration, or at least examples of creative minds arriving at the same points independently of each other:

From The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895): Carcosa (drawn from Ambrose Bierce); the King in Yellow; the viewing of the tape in True Detective vs. the reading of the play in "The Yellow Sign" as an experience that changes people's lives or damages their sanity; the secret symbol, in True Detective, a spiral, in "The Yellow Sign," the eponymous sign.

From H.P. Lovecraft (who drew from Chambers): the decadent and inbred family; the decrepit houses and other buildings; the backwoods setting; the circle or arrangement of stones in the woods at the the site of the cultist's rites; the super-secret and far-reaching cult; the secret and profane rites of the cult; the found object (in True Detective, the videotape).

From "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner (1974), The Blair Witch Project (1999) (both of which drew from Lovecraft), and the art of Lee Brown Coye: the found object in the videotape; sticks and stick lattices (there are sticks and lattices everywhere in True Detective; even the Cross can be seen as a stick lattice); drawings or murals on the walls of abandoned buildings; the old, decrepit, backwoods house; the murder of children; the super-secret cult.

From Twin Peaks (1990-1991): the opening sequence in which the body of a woman is found in some backwoods place; the otherwise eccentric storytelling, setting, and characters.

From The Silence of the Lambs (1991): the demented serial killer and his extensive house of horrors (if there is such a thing as the Gothic Baroque, the house and grounds of the serial killer in True Detective is it).

From The Ring (2002): the found object in the videotape; the viewing of the tape, which changes the lives of those who see it; the lone tree in the field; the repeated imagery of the circle or ring; the main title sequence in True Detective as a video montage like the contents of the tape in The Ring; the family with evil secrets; the decaying house of that family.

From Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot (1884): talk of multiple dimensions beyond our own; flatness, circles, spheres, and other geometric or topological concepts (is a spiral merely a track made by a one-dimensional point as it moves in a certain way through a two-dimensional area, or, alternatively, the shadow in a two-dimensional area of a gyre spinning in three-dimensional space?; also, mention is made in the show of a psychosphere; also, sphere is another word for the different levels of the heavens, as in "music of the spheres"); flatness itself in the topography of Louisiana.

and

From the true-to-life Black Dahlia murder case (1947): The murder scene as a tableau for artistic, aesthetic, or personal expression; the ritualization of murder and of the preparation of the murder victim's body; the unsolved nature of the case.

As for philosophizing of Matthew McConaughey's character: I'm not sure where that comes from except from the minds of those who have given up hope or who are angry at and disillusioned by life and the world. It's not especially deep or serious-minded thinking, and though I'm no philosopher, I don't know of any formal source for the character's ideas or words. I'm with Woody Harrelson's character, though: Shut the eff up and let this vehicle we're riding in be an area of silent reflection. (But then the show would be far less interesting.)

One more thing: there is talk among writers and artists of "subverting" this or that. Trying to subvert things is an attempt at rebellion or innovation, very often a childish attempt. I would just say that when people claim that such-and-such "subverts" conventional storytelling, what they are really describing is something far simpler: it's called a twist, and genre writers and pulp writers use twists all the time. If you have never seen a twist before, or if you mistake a twist for a "subverting" of conventions, you haven't read very many stories. Next, I'll say that everyone in art, literature, politics, and society should remember the words of Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. Nic Pizzolatto created a very fine piece of art, and he richly deserves the praise he has received, but I can't say that it subverts anything and I can't say that it's like nothing before it. (I don't know that he made those claims, only that viewers and critics tend to be carried away by hyperbole.) True Detective is just a really good piece of storytelling.

Updates, July 12, 2017
1. I see from another website that one of the books read by Rust is the collected poems of Theodore Roethke. Roethke was known for his recurring imagery of stones, bones, blood, sticks, and other natural objects. One of his most famous poems begins: "Sticks in a drowse droop over sugary loam." See "Sticks" and The Blair Witch Project above. Also, Roethke worked in greenhouses when he was young. Does green house (in True Detective) = greenhouse?
2. I see from that same website that flowers, especially in connection with sex, are part of the symbolism of True Detective. I hadn't thought much about that, but I'll add that flower parts--sepals, petals, etc.--are in whorls, a word similar in meaning to spirals.
3. Along those same lines, much of the imagery and many of the themes in True Detective have to do with sex, especially transgressive sex: pedophilia, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, transvestism, bondage, group sex, pornography, sexting, sexual snuff films (the videotape). Even the spiral symbol can be interpreted as being related to transgressive sex. It's worth noting that all of the sex acts depicted outside of marriage are in one way or another transgressive. If I remember right, only one scene, a loving scene between Hart and his wife, shows a man and a woman in the missionary position (vs. what might be seen as pagan or pre-Christian alternatives). In contrast, the sex scene between Hart's wife and Rust shows her from behind, like the body of the murder victim at the beginning of the show. (By having sex with Hart's wife, Rust cuckolds him, i.e., places horns upon him, also like the body of the murder victim. Hart by the way is another word for an adult male deer.) I take all of that to be symbolic of a supposed moral decay that would have taken place over the years covered by True Detective, 1995 to 2012. Remember, True Detective was written by a Catholic. Remember, too, that 1995 was before cell phones and the Internet really took off.
4. In the climactic (not related to sex) scene, the main characters are on the floor of a domed building with a circular opening at the top of the dome. The building can be seen as analogous to an eyeball--i.e., a hollow sphere with a hole, aperture, or pupil in it--gazing upwards into the heavens (or spheres). (No wonder Rust sees a black hole, i.e., a kind of star but also a kind of spiral, through the aperture.) If the building is an eyeball, then maybe the stick-lattice representation of the Yellow King is at the fovea, a place also occupied for an instant, perhaps, by Rust. Significantly, fovea is Latin for pit, which is another word for abyss (for the Yellow King and his cultists) and trap (for Rust, who says early in the series that he feels like he's in a trap; the spiral symbol can also be taken as a labyrinth or maze, another kind of trap). Remember, Rust continually looks at his own eyeball in a mirror.
5. There is a lot of pagan, pre-Christian, post-Christian, and satanic imagery in True Detective, but other websites have gone into all of that, so I'll leave the analysis to them.
6. Whew!

Copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Whip-poor-wills in Weird Fiction

I have been doing more research on Lee Brown Coye and have come upon something that might make a simple side note to the study of weird fiction. On the other hand, whip-poor-wills in weird fiction might have some significance. If they do, it might be one of the ways that Robert W. Chambers has had such an influence on the authors who came after him.

The whip-poor-will is a non-passerine bird, about the size of a robin or bluejay but with a slim body, long pointed wings, a long, fan-like tail, and a broad mouth used for catching insects on the wing. Whip-poor-wills are crepuscular, a nice word to add to your store. It means active at dawn and dusk. In the evenings of spring and summer, as light fades into a smoky haze, you might have heard the ceaseless repetition of the whip-poor-will's mad cry from the darkening woods. If so, you are unlikely to have forgotten it, for it is a haunting sound, the sound of a kind of wildness that is disappearing from the world. 

Along with the chuck-will's-widow, the poor-will, and the nighthawk, whip-poor-wills are of the family Caprimulgidae. In everyday speech, the members of this family were once called goatsuckers for the belief that they suck milk from goats. That belief carries over into the Spanish word chupacabra, which is also now used for a cryptozoological monster. Another and less colorful word is nightjar, which refers to the nocturnal habit of the bird and its chirring or jarring call. Modern ornithologists--being scientists--seem to be a little squeamish about the word goatsucker, I suppose because of the folkloric (hence non-scientific) connotation. They prefer the more neutral nightjar.

Although they are in trouble today, whip-poor-wills would have been common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We think of them as birds of the wilderness, but you're more likely to hear them close to human habitation, in old-field woods or in woods that have been heavily cut over. In the day or in the evening, when there is still enough light, you might see them gliding soundlessly among saplings and poletimber, like a kite or like a toy on the end of a string. Their calling, their silence in flight, and their pattern of flight only add to the whip-poor-wills' ghostly qualities.

According to Clifton Johnson in his book What They Say in New England (1896), "If a whippoorwill sings near the house, it is a sign of death. Some say this is simply a sign of trouble." That superstition passed into weird fiction by way of "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft, published in Weird Tales in April 1929. From "The Dunwich Horror":

It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

Whip-poor-wills figure prominently in the story, so much so that they made a reappearance in a story by one of Lovecraft's circle, August Derleth. The story is called "The Whippoorwills in the Hills," and it was published in Weird Tales in September 1948. Lee Brown Coye was the illustrator.

According to Wikipedia, "Lovecraft based this idea [that whippoorwills capture the souls of the just departed] on information of local legends given to him by Edith Miniter of North Wilbraham, Massachusetts when he visited her in 1928." I have assumed that August Derleth drew on "The Dunwich Horror" for his story of whip-poor-wills, but a discussion on the Internet proposes that Derleth's true inspiration was the work of Robert W. Chambers.

Robert W. Chambers is a tough case for fans and students of weird fiction. Although he made his name as the author of The King in Yellow in 1895, Chambers wrote scads of conventional and ultimately forgotten popular fiction. In doing an Internet search for "Robert W. Chambers" and "whip-poor-wills" (or "whippoorwills"), I came up with numerous results, but searching through those results, uncovering the original works, determining whether they are weird fiction or not, and trying to puzzle out the significance (or insignificance) of whip-poor-wills in Chambers' stories would take time and resources that I confess I don't have right now. I guess the question is: did whip-poor-wills arrive in weird fiction by way of Robert W. Chambers? Or did Derleth get his inspiration from Lovecraft, who in turn got it from Edith Miniter and the folklore of old New England? And what of Edith Miniter (1867-1934)? Did she read Chambers, or did she go back to the folklore itself for her tale of the soul-swallowing whip-poor-will? 

Note: Where else are there whip-poor-wills in weird fiction or genre fiction? In "The Whip-poor-will" by James Thurber, published in The New Yorker, August 9, 1941, and reprinted in Alarms and Diversions (Harper and Brothers, no date). From that story: "Down where she came from, she said, if you heard a whip-poor-will singing near the house, it meant there was going to be a death." ("She" is Margaret, wife of the protagonist's butler. The protagonist, a man named Kinstrey, is being driven crazy by the cry of a whip-poor-will outside his window. There are indeed deaths in store for the Kinstrey household.)

In 1948, Weird Tales published "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" by August Derleth and illustrated by Lee Brown Coye. Coye was a very productive artist who did thorough research on everything he drew, but he often worked under tight deadlines. That might explain his use of imagery from the work of John James Audubon, including pictures of:

The Whip-poor-will, and

The Chuck-will's widow. Audubon (1785-1851) was an artist inclined towards natural history, what would then have been called natural philosophy, but he was also a Romantic with a capital "R." If he had written fiction, he might have found himself sandwiched between Washington Irving (1783-1859) and James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). American Romanticism was partly Gothic and gave rise of course to weird fiction and stories of supernatural horror.

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

True Detective and Robert W. Chambers

It isn't often that an obscure collection of stories from the nineteenth century draws the attention of twenty-first century television viewers, but such a thing has happened. The collection is The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, from 1895. The television viewers are the people who watched the HBO series True Detective, which premiered on January 12, 2014, and ended its first run on March 9. I say "obscure," but fans of fantasy fiction and weird fiction are and have been well acquainted with The King in Yellow for a long, long time, since H.P. Lovecraft wrote about it in his seminal study, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), if not before. I regret to say that I haven't seen the show, but I would like to have a look.

The creator of True Detective is Nic Pizzolatto, a writer and teacher from New Orleans. I'm happy to say that Mr. Pizzolatto has a connection to my home state of Indiana, for he taught at DePauw University in Greencastle, only a few blocks away from where I used to live. DePauw also gave us John Jakes, creator of Brak the Barbarian and countless other genre characters.

Nic Pizzolatto seems to be pretty familiar with genre fiction himself. His TV show is named after a pulp magazine first published by Bernarr Macfadden in 1924--ninety years ago this year. He has drawn on The King in Yellow in his plotting and writing for his show, which is set in the author's native Louisiana, the same country haunted by the cult of Cthulhu in Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu." One of the characters in that story is--like Mr. Pizzolatto's protagonists--a Louisiana detective, John Raymond Lagrasse. Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, The Necronomicon, doesn't make an appearance in "The Call of Cthulhu," but Lovecraft may very well have based the idea of a book that drives men mad upon reading it on Robert W. Chambers' fictional drama "The King in Yellow." In any case, I wish Mr. Pizzolatto and the makers of his show further success.

Text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933)

Fine Artist, Illustrator, Short Story Writer, Novelist, Playwright, Children's Book Author

Born May 26, 1865, Brooklyn, New York

Died December 16, 1933, New York, New York

Robert W. Chambers lived the kind of life any aspiring writer might envy. Talented, popular, and prolific, he wrote nearly one hundred books and used the proceeds to fund a lavish estate, a sizable art collection, an active club life, frequent trips abroad, independent wealth, and plenty of leisure time. He was an outdoorsman, a lepidopterist, a collector, an expert on certain antiquities, and in his early years, a very successful artist and illustrator, counting Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) and other artists and writers among his friends. Many of Chambers' stories were adapted to film in his lifetime and after. Chambers' wife, French-born Elsa Vaughn Moller, called "Elsie" and daughter of a European diplomat, bore him one son, Robert Edward Stuart Chambers. The younger Chambers, who also went by the name Robert Husted Chambers (1899-1955), followed in his father's footsteps as a writer. The Chambers family also included Chambers' brother, the New York architect Walter Boughton Chambers (1866-1945), who designed landmarks in his native city and other northeastern states.

Wealth, talent, fame, family--it all added up to a great success, yet, as far as I know, there has never been a book-length biography of Robert W. Chambers. And in the minds of many, Chambers squandered his talent on popular novels produced at a rapid pace and settling somewhere below the ken of literature. "Stuff! Literature!" Robert W. Chambers scoffed in a 1912 interview. "The word makes me sick!" His disdain for literary endeavor may have been the fox talking about the grapes. Either way, it assured that his work would become dated and seldom read in later years. In his time, he was called "the Shopgirl Scheherazade" and "the Boudoir Balzac." Today, Chambers' reputation rests almost solely on a single book, his second, entitled The King in Yellow, published in 1895.

In his survey of the genre, H.P. Lovecraft wrote--in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1)--two long paragraphs on Chambers. I'll quote them in their entirety here:

     Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier’s Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is "The Yellow Sign," in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. "Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off in me 'and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. What he mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?" 

     A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up in the street by the sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur—from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seems to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night-shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor—two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, "That man must have been dead for months." It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.

That's a lot to digest in a single blog entry, but it's worth reading for a number of reasons. First, it's obvious that Lovecraft drew on The King in Yellow in general and on "The Yellow Sign" in particular for concepts and atmosphere for his own weird fiction. Second, it's illuminating to read of the lineage of Chambers' "names and allusions," which can be traced backward to Bierce and forward to Lovecraft and his acolyte, August Derleth. Third, it's very interesting to read Lovecraft's criticisms of the older man Chambers:

Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers . . . [emphasis added].

One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master [again, emphasis added].

Those two criticisms, which open and close Lovecraft's discussion of Chambers, can just as easily be leveled at Lovecraft himself. In fact they sometimes have been.

* * * * *

You can read about Robert W. Chambers elsewhere on line or at the library. (The New York Times wrote of him extensively in his time. You might start by reading his obituary, dated December 17, 1933, page 36.) I'll skip the biographical details and write just a little more. First, as Lovecraft wrote, Chambers authored several works of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. (2) Second, he also wrote a book called Police!!! (1915), which may very well have contained the first cryptozoological fiction ever set to print. (3)

Cryptozoology, founded in the nineteenth century but not named until the twentieth, is the science or semi-science of unknown creatures. Its recognized founder was Antoon Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943), a Dutch zoologist who attempted to describe and classify unknown creatures in his book The Great Sea Serpent (1892). Robert W. Chambers--Oudemans' junior by only seven years--was an enthusiastic entomologist and lepidopterist; his credentials as a science-minded author would appear firm. The point of this is that cryptozoological fiction would not have been likely before science was brought to bear on what would previously have been the stuff of legend or folklore. It's also unlikely that anyone would have written stories on a sensationalistic topic such as cryptozoology before there was a popular press on an industrial scale. I guess I should ask the question then: Can anyone offer another candidate for the first fiction in the young field of cryptozoology?

Notes

(1) Literature? "Stuff!" Chambers might say.

(2) A story called "The Repairer of Reputations" opens Chambers' 1895 collection, The King in Yellow. Set in 1920, the story alludes to recent events, including the administration of a President Winthrop and recent victory in a war with Germany. Winthrop is close enough to Wilson, and of course the United States and Germany were involved in a little tussle ending in 1918. You might say that science fiction blends into prophecy in Chambers' tale. Mostly, though, his projections are simply nonsense.

(3) There is also a hint of forensic entomology in one of the stories.

Robert W. Chambers' Stories in Weird Tales

"The Demoiselle d'Ys" (Aug. 1928)

"The Sign of Venus" (Summer 1973, originally in Harper's Magazine, Dec. 1903)

"The Splendid Apparition" (Winter 1973, originally in In Search of the Unknown, 1904)

A drawing of the King in Yellow, created by Robert W. Chambers himself, that rare combination of accomplished writer and accomplished artist.

Jack Gaughan, the cover artist for the Ace Books edition of 1965, followed Chambers' model closely.

This Spanish-language version features an Op Art background to Rowena Morrill's illustration.

Unintentionally or not, the color yellow became a motif in illustration for the works of Robert W. Chambers. Here's the cover for The Maker of Moons, an edition from--I think--the 1970s and a West Coast publisher. Can anyone offer any details?

I wish I had a better and larger version of this cover illustration for The Common Law, again, in yellow, and featuring one of the blondest of blonde starlets, Constance Bennett. Filmed twice as a silent picture, Chambers' novel stepped into the era of sound in 1931. By the way, Constance Bennett was a sister to Joan Bennett of Dark Shadows fame.

Another Chambers cover in yellow. As I have suggested before, many artists see yellow as the color of madness. I offer "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the paintings of Vincent van Gogh as evidence.

Here's a nice wraparound cover for the novel Athalie. Chambers started off his career with a bang with The King in Yellow. Thereafter, he wrote historical novels and novels of adventure and romance. Like his friend Charles Dana Gibson, he depicted the new, independent woman of the early twentieth century. (This cover looks suspiciously like a Gibson drawing and the setting is the same as in the illustration above.) Popular with shopgirls, Chambers lost the confidence of critics as the years went by. Today he is a literary footnote except among fans of weird fiction.

Postscript (Jan. 28, 2016): Here is just such a drawing by Charles Dana Gibson, "The Greatest Game in the World," from many years before. Gibson (1867-1944) and Chambers were friends and classmates at the Art Students League in New York City. Later they lent their names to the self-confident modern woman, sometimes called "the Chambers Girl," more often "the Gibson Girl."

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley