100 Years of R'lyeh!

I have overlooked the 100th anniversary of the real-life earthquake that brought the fictional (we hope) Cthulhu Island to the surface of the South Pacific Ocean. It happened this past weekend, February 28-March 1, 2025. The earthquake struck at 9:23:30 p.m. on February 28, 1925, off the coast of Maine. In the South Pacific, it was March 1, and at coordinates 47° 9′ South, 126° 43′ West, Cthulhu's undersea crypt, on the island known as R'lyeh, was thrust up from the ocean floor. If I have calculated correctly, it was a little before 1 o'clock in the morning local time that R'lyeh bubbled up from the depths.

The Cthulhu crisis culminated on March 23, 1925, when the crew of the Emma encountered--and were slaughtered by--the Great Green Fiend from another world. Second Mate Gustaf Johansen fled. Once on board ship again, he drove the Emma into Cthulhu, cleaving him like a sunfish. Johansen escaped, only to be murdered later on by some Cthulhu cultists. Johansen's act was one of desperation and survival. But maybe we can stretch things a little and say that he acted heroically, as did, we hope to say, other characters in "The Call of Cthulhu." That's more than can be said of weird-fictional characters of today, who are either unheroic or downright reprehensible in their actions. Anyway, Happy Anniversary, Earthquake and R'lyeh!

(By the way, singer and band member David Johansen died on February 28, 2025. We send condolences to his friends and family. It's sad, so sad, that so many people so prominent in the culture of the 1960s and '70s have died and that those times are so rapidly fading from memory.)

The location of R'lyeh (at the crosshairs), about halfway between New Zealand and Tierra del Fuego.

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

The Last of Colloids & Tentacles

A colloid is a suspension of one or more substances in another. Two thirds of the ingredients of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich are colloids. A long time ago, I knew a guy who liked banana and mayonnaise sandwiches. (They smelled like house paint.) Only one third of his ingredients--mayonnaise--is colloidal. Protoplasm is a colloid, too, so when John Corliss Cranmer's giant amoeba gulped down first his daughter-in-law, then his son, people were the meal and the colloid was the eater of the meal. But then the people were made of cells brimming with protoplasm, too, and so it was a case of one big colloidal mass eating lots of little ones--if you're a reductionist, that is.

The word colloid is from the French, originally from the Greek. It means "a substance in a gelatinous or gluey state," originally, simply, "glue." Colloid as a word and a scientific concept is from the mid-nineteenth century, as so many things in our daily lives and so many of the ideas in our busy little brains are. There are other gluey concepts in science, collagen, for example, also the subatomic particles called gluons. There are also gluey crafts and gluey art forms. The collage is the most obvious example of these.

People have made collages for a long, long time, but the collage as a work of art dates from the modern period, maybe from the eighteenth century, certainly no later than the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso made collages and coined the term papier collé. Those two artists, along with Juan Gris, were originators first of analytical cubism, then of synthetic cubism. In analytical cubism, the artist looks at his or her subject from many different points if view. That's why, in a work by Picasso for example, you can see both eyes in a portrait seemingly done in profile. So, no, Picasso's people are not part flounder. In synthetic cubism--I think a more playful and not so mathematically exacting variation--a work of cubistic art is synthesized by gluing together scraps and cuttings of paper, thus the collage or papier collé. I guess making collages would have been hard to do before there was a mass and popular press as a source of material.

In moving towards synthesis, or what we might call literary collage, modern authors followed modern artists, I think. The art seems to have come first--synthetic cubism was in flower, if you can call it that, in 1912-1914. Then came the literary works, "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, for example, in 1922, Show Girl by J.P. McEvoy in 1928, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy in 1930-1936. I think we can include "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928) in that list, too. Several stories in the first issue of Weird Tales (Mar. 1923) include notes, clippings, diary entries, and so forth, as if the story were a scrapbook or a collage. That kind of thing would continue in future issues.

"The Call of Cthulhu" also has an analytical approach, as do other works of weird fiction that refer or allude to weird geometries, outré mathematics, and multiple dimensions. Maybe pulp fiction wasn't very far behind mainstream literature in the 1910s-1930s in its move towards modernism. But maybe the pulp fiction genres--especially science fiction--were a little bit ahead because they were in such close contact with the scientific developments of their time. Mainstream authors of the early twentieth century could disregard science. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck didn't write science fiction. But then science and the future barged into the room and Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood did and have. How times change.

There will be more on Ms. Atwood in a minute.

Dr. Frankenstein made a kind of collage using parts from different bodies, plus an Abby Normal brain. His goal was the synthesis of life from non-life. "I had worked hard for nearly two years," he wrote, "for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body." Lightning was the literal spark of life by which he would do it. And so his monster lived. A long line of proto-scientists, semi-scientists, pseudoscientists, and maybe the rarest kind, real scientists, has proposed that early in the earth's history lightning infused life in what they have called the primordial soup or primordial ooze, ooze being a species of colloid. Anthony M. Rud seems to have alluded to the primordial ooze--or jelly in H.G. Wells' formulation--in his story "Ooze" (Weird Tales, March 1923). Since the early nineteenth century, real-life scientists seem to have followed the example of Victor Frankenstein. We, the world over, recently had a deadly encounter with their Frankensteinian brand of science in the form of a lowly virus raised to the top of a Chinese/U.S. government-built Tower of Babel. They'll do it again. We can be sure of that. Next time it's likely to be worse, but that will be good for them because they can take more of what is ours in the process.

Life arising from non-life, called spontaneous generation, was debunked a long time ago. But I guess debunked things don't always stay that way. For example, there are yet again people who believe that a person can change his or her bodily form by some magical process of mind or by a series of practices they call "care," practices that the rest of us can only consider criminal, immoral, and unethical mutilations of the human body, a kind of witch-doctory or pseudo-medical falling-back on superstition, ultimately a literal diabolism. People who can supposedly transform themselves used to be called shape-shifters or skin-walkers, and they did what they did by supernatural processes. Now they go by a different name and we're supposed to believe that there is science behind it.

From the moment we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have believed ourselves to be as gods and to hold in our hands godlike power, godlike authority, and godlike wisdom. Our punishment was expulsion from the Garden and a realization of death. The difference is that we once knew shame and walked in shame, out of the gates and into exile. Now there isn't any shame, only pride, or Pride as it is now capitalized. Now we walk in history every day, as the worst among us might say. Anyway, I guess if we're gods, we can create and mold bodies and parts of bodies, just as Dr. Frankenstein did. In creating our modern-day monster, we will fashion his/her whole body--his veins, his feet, his hands, his organs--everything, including a Frankenstein's schwanzstucker made from the flesh of her forearm--according to our own whims. It won't be real, but we will be required to call it real and her a man. It will in fact be grotesque, a monstrous simulacrum, at once a symbol and a manifestation of our reaching into hell in our efforts to reach into heaven, where we believe we are or shall be enthroned. And, no, she's not gonna be very popular because of it.

Margaret Atwood, who has been called a TERF because she knows what everybody in the whole history of the world knew until ten minutes ago, famously said, "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space." As we know, squids are cephalopods and the bearers of tentacles. So Ms. Atwood has offended not only people who don't know what a woman is, but she has probably also offended a lot of science fiction fans with her opinions on these things. If you're an offended Star Wars fan, though, you might want to just slink away, the reason being that in the Star Wars universe, there is a literal talking squid. His title is Admiral and his name is Ackbar, and though his tentacles are small (they're more like the barbels of a catfish), he is a member of a race called the Mon Calamari, meaning, in una bella lingua of a faraway planet spinning on its axis a long, long time in the future, squid. (The noun is Italian, the possessive pronoun French.)

There are other tentacled aliens in the Star Wars universe. Oola is one. Ahsoka is another. They have tentacles coming out of their heads. The Thermians in Galaxy Quest (1999) are, in their true form, tentacled. They are one form but take another. Call them trans, I guess. Cthulhu of course has tentacles. In Frank Frazetta's interior illustration for The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1922), there are tentacled heads, called Kaldanes in the story, that frighten and horrify Tara of Helium. In Gino d'Achille's  cover version, the Kaldanes are more spider-like. I believe the Kaldanes have both kinds of members, though, both tentacles and jointed legs. Maybe a Burroughs fan can let us know for sure. That reaching down through the neck to control a host body is also in The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951), the Star Trek Episode "Operation -- Annihilate!" (1967), and, if I remember right, a skit on SCTV in which cabbage leaves attach themselves to the backs of people's heads. In the Star Trek episode at least, the controlling aliens are colloidal, made by the prop master from bags of fake vomit. By the way, the ninth book in Burroughs' Mars series is The Synthetic Men of Mars, originally published in 1939, and so we have another example of Frankensteinian synthesis in genre fiction.

Colloids are sometimes fun. Give a child a bottle of Elmer's Glue-All along with some construction paper and glitter and see how she entertains herself. But in science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction, colloids are more often gross, nasty, disgusting, and revolting--when they are not creeping, crawling, encroaching, and deadly in the way shoggoths or the Blob is. We have a different reaction to tentacled creatures, owing, I think, to our hundred-thousand-year experience with them. They are real, discrete, recognizable, nameable, alive. They look back at us with the biggest eyes in nature. And the smartest of them are very smart. More than any of that, though, they seem alien in their star-shaped or radially symmetrical bodies. It's no wonder tentacled creatures became the aliens of science fiction, or more accurately, why science fiction authors, beginning with H.G. Wells, would have fashioned the tentacled creatures of earth into aliens from outer space. Maybe we have atavistic memories of when octopuses first came to our planet, raining down on us in their iron spaceships.

We were made in the image of our Creator, and so we wish to create, thus our art and literature, among so many other great and wonderful things, including most of all love, which allows us an escape into eternity. Where we make our mistake is in believing we can create or re-create the things that he first created. And so Frankensteinian scientists, engineers, and technicians are busy. They believe they can create life (or that life was created) from non-life. They believe they can alter unalterable facts about human nature, human anatomy, and human biology. They believe they can make of us something beyond human, better than human, other than human, transhuman. They're working on synthesizing new forms from fragments of previously existing ones. The coronavirus and a million dead are one result of that. The supposedly counteractive "vaccine" and a million more dead are another. They also believe they can transfer the human mind into a machine, thus surviving their own deaths.* In fact, they appear to see little difference between the ghost and the machine. One can be the other. One is the other. And so we will soon have machines taking the place of human beings. Soon after that, our machines will probably enslave or kill us. If you have never read "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison (1967), you probably should, like right now. It may give you a glimpse into our caliginous--not collagenous but caliginous--future. Anyway, thanks, scientists, but ultimately, thanks, all of us, for we have all done this. Scientists--others, too--are only at the vanguard of our limitless depravity in our fallen state. We fall. The asymptotic curve of our pursuit of perfection--of a perfect and limitless depravity--moves forever upwards.

-----

*Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they believe that the knowledge they have thereby gained will reopen the gates and allow them back into the Garden.

"To Tara's horror, the headless body moved, took the hideous head in its hands and set it on its shoulders." Illustration by Frank Frazetta from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, March 1923: Tentacles-Part Two

Before becoming the originator of so much of our science fiction, H.G. Wells trained as a zoologist and biologist. His first book was a textbook of biology called--what else?--Text-Book of Biology, published in 1893. Being in the public domain, every other book published in the nineteenth century is available to us on line. Text-Book of Biology seems to be an exception. Good luck in your search for its full text and illustrations, if there are any.

We recognize the strangeness or alienness of certain types of organisms. Viruses (if they are indeed alive), fungi, and cephalopods confound us. There are some who believe them to be from outer space. As a zoologist or biologist, Wells may have had similar apprehensions, although he may not have been aware of the existence of viruses, which weren't discovered, or at least indicated, until the 1890s. In any case, Wells got in on the nineteenth-century literary habit of writing about giant cephalopods in "The Sea Raiders," a short story from 1896. I'm more interested in his tentacled Martians from The War of the Worlds, serialized in Pearson's Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1897 and published in hardback the following year.

From Book One, Chapter IV: The Cylinder Opens:

     Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.

The Martians' machines also have tentacles:

Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket, and puffs of green smoke squirted out from the joints of the limbs as the monster swept by me. And in an instant it was gone.

A more thorough description of Martian anatomy and physiology--like that written by a biologist or zoologist, of which H.G. Wells was one--is in Book Two, Chapter II of The War of the Worlds.

* * *

I'll cut to the chase: I think that H.G. Wells' Martians from The War of the Worlds were the prototype of the tentacled or octopoid alien in science fiction, then called pseudo-scientific fiction or scientific romance. From there, tentacles wormed their way into other genres, including science fantasy and weird fiction. I think it was Wells' training as a zoologist and biologist that inspired his leap of imagination. I think he recognized and articulated the alienness of tentacled creatures, more broadly creatures with radial symmetry, and that's why we have such things in our fantasy fiction. It seems unlikely to me that the authors of weird fiction were alone responsible for that development or for initiating that development. I'm not sure that weird fiction as tentacled fiction really works as an idea.

* * *

Anthony M. Rud was the son of two medical doctors. He studied medicine, too, before settling on the writing life. In other words, he, like Wells, received an education in biology, anatomy, physiology, and so on. Writing a story about a giant amoeba would presumably have been within his area of expertise. In "Ooze," he even employed terms such as karyokinesis, protoplasm, nucleolous, and contractile vacuole.

"Ooze," the first cover story in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923), is a proto-science-fictional or science fantasy story. Rud used an older term in his own story. He wrote:

     As readers of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer's forte was the writing of what is called--among fellows in the craft--the pseudo-scientific story. In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.

     In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility. In a large way Jules Verne was one of these men in his day; Lee Cranmer bade fair to carry on the work in worthy fashion--work taken up for a period by an Englishman named Wells, but abandoned for stories of a different--and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing--type. [Emphasis added.]

Here, then, is direct evidence for the influence of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells on Anthony Rud, and perhaps partly through him, on weird fiction. By the way, Rud used the exact phrase "weird tales" early on in "Ooze," making him the first author in "The Unique Magazine" to include those words together in his or her story.

Despite its octopoid appearance on the cover of Weird Tales, Rud's monster is in fact a giant amoeba. Here's a brief description of the creature:

     Rori failed to explain in full, but something, a slimy, amorphous something, which glistened in the sunlight, already had engulfed the man to his shoulders! Breath was cut off. Joe's contorted face writhed with horror and beginning suffocation. One hand--all that was free of the rest of him!--beat feebly upon the rubbery, translucent thing that was engulfing his body!

Another description, from early on in the creature's development:

This amoeba, a rubbery, amorphous mass of protoplasm, was of the size then of a large beef liver.

Then, the scene apparently illustrated on that famous first cover arrives:

     Of a sudden her screams cut the still air! Without her knowledge, ten-foot pseudopods--those flowing tentacles of protoplasm sent forth by the sinister occupant of the pool--slid out and around her putteed ankles.

     For a moment she did not understand. Then, at first suspicion of the horrid truth, her cries rent the air. Lee, at that time struggling to lace a pair of high shoes, straightened, paled, and grabbed a revolver as he dashed out.

     In another room a scientist, absorbed in his notetaking, glanced up, frowned, and then--recognizing the voice--shed his white gown and came out. He was too late to do aught but gasp with horror.

     In the yard Peggy was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something which at first glance he could not analyze.

     Lee, his boy, was fighting with the sticky folds, and slowly, surely, losing his own grip upon the earth! 

* * *

Alien invaders came into Weird Tales in April 1925 with Nictzin Dyalhis' novelette "When the Green Star Waned." The author's description of his aliens owes a little to Wells' Martians, I think:

And here we found life, such as it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok's height, with a gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

Note the triangular mouth and the emphasis on the eyes. Note also that the alien is described as "a huge pulpy blob." Later in the story, the things are referred to as "blob-things." So maybe they have similarities not only to Wells' Martians but also to Rud's giant amoeba--and Joseph Payne Brennan's later great slime, inspiration for the Blob of movie fame.

Dyalhis' aliens don't have tentacles, even if the cover illustration shows tentacle-like appendages pointing upward. (That illustration appears to be based on the following passage.) Instead, they have arms:

They, the Things, slowly raised each an arm, pointed at one Aerthon in the group. He, back to them as he was, quivered, shook, writhed, then, despite himself, he slowly rose in the air, moved out into space, hung above the blobs that waited, avid-mouthed. The Aerthon turned over in the air, head down, still upheld by the concentrated wills of the things that pointed . . .

* * *

Science fiction still hadn't been adequately named when Dyalhis wrote "When the Green Star Waned." I'm not sure that the term "science fantasy" had appeared yet, either. Nonetheless, I think "When the Green Star Waned" might better be described as science fantasy than as science fiction. The same is true, I think, of "The Call of Cthulhu," from Weird Tales, February 1928. There are science-fictional elements in H.P. Lovecraft's seminal mythos story to be sure, but his purpose was more nearly weird-fictional. The what-ifs of science fiction don't really enter into his storytelling, and the emphasis is on the past, not on the future: "The Call of Cthulhu" is a story of decadence, not of scientific progress.

From "The Call of Cthulhu":

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.

Later, in the encounter with the monster himself:

There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

If you have read "Ooze," you will remember that there are fish smells and nastiness in that story, too.

* * *

Tentacles (and radial symmetry) are in lots of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I count them in "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929), At the Mountains of Madness (Astounding Stories, Feb.-Apr. 1931), and The Shadow Out of Time (Astounding Stories, June 1936). All involve scientists and scientific investigations of one kind or another, just as in "Ooze." There are tentacles in other stories written by Lovecraft alone and in collaboration with others, too.

* * *

"Shambleau" by C.L. Moore (Weird Tales, Nov. 1933) is a story of science fantasy. Set on Mars, it involves the title character, an alien creature with vampire appetites. She afflicts poor Northwest Smith of Earth with an awful and irresistible desire:

     The red folds loosened, and--he knew then that he had not dreamed--again a scarlet lock swung down against her cheek . . . a hair, was it? a lock of hair? . . . thick as a thick worm it fell, plumply, against that smooth cheek . . . more scarlet than blood and thick as a crawling worm . . . and like a worm it crawled. 

     Smith rose on an elbow, not realizing the motion, and fixed an unwinking stare, with a sort of sick, fascinated incredulity, on that--that lock of hair. He had not dreamed. Until now he had taken it for granted that it was the segir which had made it seem to move on that evening before. But now . . . it was lengthening, stretching, moving of itself. It must be hair, but it crawled; with a sickening life of its own it squirmed down against her cheek, caressingly, revoltingly, impossibly. . . . Wet, it was, and round and thick and shining . . . .

     She unfastened the last fold and whipped the turban off. From what he saw then Smith would have turned his eyes away--and he had looked on dreadful things before, without flinching--but he could not stir. He could only lie there on his elbow staring at the mass of scarlet, squirming--worms, hairs, what?--that writhed over her head in a dreadful mockery of ringlets. 

     And it was lengthening, falling, somehow growing before his eyes, down over her shoulders in a spilling cascade, a mass that even at the beginning could never have been hidden under the skull-tight turban she had worn. He was beyond wondering, but he realized that. And still it squirmed and lengthened and fell, and she shook it out in a horrible travesty of a woman shaking out her unbound hair--until the unspeakable tangle of it--twisting, writhing, obscenely scarlet--hung to her waist and beyond, and still lengthened, an endless mass of crawling horror that until now, somehow, impossibly, had been hidden under the tight-bound turban. It was like a nest of blind, restless red worms it was--it was like naked entrails endowed with an unnatural aliveness, terrible beyond words.

Some readers might find that passage repetitive. I don't see it that way. Instead, I see a building of effect, a characteristic of weird fiction. I think it's an extraordinary piece of writing for a woman in her early twenties.

Towards the end of "Shambleau," Smith tells his sidekick Yarol what he has experienced:

"I only know that when I felt--when those tentacles closed around my legs--I didn't want to pull loose, I felt sensations that--that--oh, I'm fouled and filthy to the very deepest part of me by that--pleasure--and yet . . . . "

By the way, Martians are the threat in The War of the Worlds and "Shambleau." Bacteria save us in The War of the Worlds. Venerians come to the rescue in "When the Green Star Waned" and again in "Shambleau."

* * *

From all of this, I think we can take a few things about tentacles in fantasy fiction:

First, tentacles seem to have come into fantasy fiction by way of science and the pseudoscience, semi-science, or quasi-science of cryptozoology, then by way of the pseudo-scientific fiction, science fantasy, scientific romances, and finally science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seems to me that an interest in tentacles is scientific and progressive, not folkloric or traditional.

Second, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, clearly a science fiction story, seems a very likely entry point for tentacles into fantasy fiction of all types, including weird fiction. There are tentacles in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, too, but they are the appendages of an earthly animal, not of a creature or being from the other side. Wells was a prototype of the scientist who becomes an author of science fiction, and when he became an author, he brought tentacles along with him.

Third, tentacles probably represent something that we don't easily apprehend, something strange, alien, otherworldly, terrifying, and dreadful, also, nasty, disgusting, nauseating, inhuman, and monstrous, and of course enfolding, enclosing, and engulfing. Tentacled aliens drink blood or energy or life-force in The War of the Worlds and "Shambleau." They are of course the threat in those two stories, plus in "The Call of Cthulhu." The aliens in "When the Green Star Waned" are not tentacled, but they are alien and a threat nonetheless. Only in "Ooze" is the threat something of this earth, even if it has been altered by Frankensteinian (my new word) science. Although it looks to be tentacled on the cover, Rud's giant amoeba sends out seeking and engulfing pseudopodia instead.

Fourth, tentacles don't stand alone--or creep and crawl alone. They are part of an organism that may also be gelatinous, amorphous, rubbery, pulpy, bloated, blobby, twisting, crawling, writhing, and so on, in short, not like us in any way. Significantly, tentacled creatures very often have radial rather than bilateral symmetry. That alone sets them apart from us and most of our fellow-creatures as something bizarre, alien, and otherworldly (Herman Melville's word from Moby Dick).

If weird fiction is about a crossing over of some kind, then the alienness of the creature with tentacles might be a perfect fit into the genre. Maybe that's why it was on the cover of the first issue of Weird Tales and why it appeared again and again in weird fiction and science fiction.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Buon compleanno, F.M.E.

Theosophical Writers in Weird Tales

I quoted the other day from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (1926, 1928). That quote is the entire first paragraph of Lovecraft's story. Here is the entire second:

     Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things--in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

(In other words, loosely, Had I But Known . . . )

I don't know how much Lovecraft knew about Theosophy or how much he might have believed in any of it. Maybe he just referred to Theosophy as a way of setting off echoes in the mind of the reader, who would have at least heard of that belief system, or as a way of beginning to build mood by referring to "the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle" necessary in his own story. I don't think I would call Lovecraft a Theosophical writer, though. Instead, he seems to have used the objects he found around him in his new assemblage, like a Modernist poet, novelist, or artist. Despite all of his influences, Lovecraft seems to have been mostly his own writer. That's one of the reasons, I think, that he still holds up and is still significant. Imitators, samplers, and creators of pastiches don't usually last very well. Original thinkers and writers more often do.

There were Theosophical writers in Weird Tales, though, and others who were associated in one way or another with the magazine. Without knowing it, I suspect, Weird Tales at its founding tapped into more than one vein of spiritualism, supernaturalism, occultism, esotericism, and so on in America. Some readers and writers were no doubt hardheaded--the typical, practical, down-to-earth American. Others seem to have been primed and ready for a magazine like Weird Tales. Here at last was a mainstream (if that's not too big of a word for it) publication that probed and treated and was seemingly sympathetic to their interests, in ghosts, demons, reincarnation, psychic phenomena, etc., including other worlds that touch our own. I'll have a little more to say about these things in the next part of what has turned into a series.

So who were the Theosophical writers in Weird Tales and associated with Weird Tales? Well, so far, I have these (click on their names for links):

• Bernice Banning (1885-1954)
• William Levington Comfort (1878-1932), mentor to and father-in-law of Paul Annixter (1894-1985)
• Guy Endore (1901-1970), author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933)
• Mrs. Edgar Saltus (1883-1960)
• Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea (1915-1995), aka Millen Cooke

These authors were not all quite of the same generation, but they're close. I suppose that there are still Theosophists in the world, but perhaps nothing like there were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Bellamyites and subscribers to Georgism, they seem to have fallen by the wayside. I suspect the same thing will happen one day to believers in Dianetics and Scientology. The fate of believers in Flying Saucers-as-like-angels-from-on-high seems less certain. I think, though, that if an author of today were to begin his story with a reference to Theosophy, he would not be taken very seriously by his readers. Any such reference would have to be intended as ironic or satirical or historical. Theosophy is, after all, a belief for another time not our own.

Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder and theorist of Theosophy. From the Scranton Republican, October 17, 1888, page 1. By coincidence to events of today, Madame Blavatsky was born in what is now Ukraine. I should add that the name Ukraine is supposed to mean "borderland." I guess that means that Theosophy is literally from the borderlands.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith (1892-1943)

Née Anita Blackmon
Aka Anita Blackmon, Anita Smith

Teacher, Author
Born December 1, 1892, Augusta, Arkansas
Died February 23, 1943, Little Rock, Arkansas

Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith was born Anita Blackmon on December 1, 1892, in Augusta, Arkansas. Her parents were Edwin E. Blackmon (1859-?), mayor and postmaster of Augusta, and Eva Hutchison Blackmon (1866-1939), a schoolteacher and principal. In emulating Beautiful Joe: A Dog's Own Story by Margaret Marshall Saunders (1892), Anita wrote her first line of fiction at age eight: "I am a black and white terror." Her family forever after teased her about the misspelling. Only later would she have an editor to catch such things.

Anita graduated high school at age fourteen, graduated from Ouachita College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and spent two years at the University of Chicago. She taught Latin, French, German, literature, and languages in Augusta and Little Rock for a number of years. On May 29, 1920, she married Harry Pugh Smith (1900-1942). In her first year of marriage, she wrote and wrote, collecting thirty-seven rejection slips for her efforts. She finally sold her seventh story to All-Story Magazine (possibly All-Story Love Stories). Hundreds more stories flowed from her pen over the next two decades. These appeared in All-Story Love Stories, Breezy Stories, Cupid's Diary, Detective Tales, Four Star Love Magazine, Love Story Magazine, Mystery Magazine, Sweetheart Stories, and other titles. Her byline appeared in Weird Tales just once, for "The Hook of Death," published in January 1924.

Anita Blackmon Smith also wrote novels. They include:

• Her Private Devil (1934)
• So Many Worlds (1935)
• Handmade Rainbows (1936)
• Hearts Walking (1936)
• Beau (1937)
• Peter Pan's Daughter (1937)
• Happy-Go-Lucky (1938)
• Murder à la Richelieu (1937)
• There Is No Return (1938)

The last two are mysteries written in the so-called Had I But Known mode. Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) is considered the founder of the Had I But Known school. Her life story is in fact entitled Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart, written by Charlotte MacLeod (1994). In his study Murder for Pleasure (1941), Howard Haycraft (1905-1991), a scholar and historian of the crime, detective, and mystery genres, listed the subscribers to the Had I But Known school:

• Margaret N. Armstrong (1867-1944)
• Anita Blackmon (aka Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith) (1892-1943)
• Clarissa Fairchild Cushman (1889-1980)
• Dorothy Cameron Disney (1903-1992)
• Mignon Eberhart (1899-1996)
• Medora Field (1892-1960)
• Leslie Ford (Zenith Jones Brown) (1898-1983)
• Constance (1899-1980) and Gwenyth Little (1903-1985)
• Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958)
• Charlotte Murray Russell (1899-1992)

The school was named after a line from Ogden Nash's poem "Don't Guess, Let Me Tell You," from The New Yorker, April 20, 1940:

Don't Guess, Let Me Tell You

By Ogden Nash

Personally I don't care whether a detective-story writer was educated in night school or day school

So long as they don't belong to the H.I.B.K. school.

The H.I.B.K. being a device to which too many detective-story writers are prone,

Namely the Had I But Known.

Sometimes it is the Had I But Known what grim secret lurked behind that smiling exterior I would never have set foot within the door,

Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor.

Had-I-But-Known narrators are the ones who hear a stealthy creak at midnight in the tower where the body lies, and, instead of locking their door or arousing the drowsy policeman posted outside their room, sneak off by themselves to the tower and suddenly they hear a breath exhaled behind them,

And they have no time to scream, they know nothing else till the men from the D.A.'s office come in next morning and find them.

Had I But Known-ers are quick to assume the prerogatives of the Deity,

For they will suppress evidence that doesn't suit their theories with appalling spontaneity,

And when the killer is finally trapped into a confession by some elaborate device of the Had I But Known-er some hundred pages later than if they hadn't held their knowledge aloof,

Why they say Why Inspector I knew all along it was he but I couldn't tell you, you would have laughed at me unless I had absolute proof.

Would you like a nice detective story for your library which I am sorry to say I didn't rent but owns?

I wouldn't have bought it had I but known it was impregnated with Had I But Knowns.

I'll note that if you want something thoroughly skewered, Ogden Nash is sure to come through for you. And it's remarkable that the theme of a simple satirical poem would be picked up so soon after its publication by a scholar, Howard Haycraft, who fixed it in the critical and analytical imagination so that it survives even to today.

Ogden Nash poked fun at the women who wrote Had I But Known-type stories of crime and suspense. Haycraft seems to have been more kindly towards them. I don't know what people think of this type of story now, but in reading about Had I But Known, I thought of another type of story, one in particular that begins with these words:

     The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

That story of course is "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (1926, 1928). Lovecraft's words don't exactly equal "Had I But Known." But is his opening really that much different in its theme than these words from Murder à la Richelieu by Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith (1937):

had I suspected the orgy of bloodshed upon which we were about to embark, I should then and there, in spite of my bulk and an arthritic knee, have taken shrieking to my heels.

Or:

there was nothing on this particular morning to indicate the reign of terror into which we were about to be precipitated. Coming events are supposed to cast their shadows before, yet I had no presentiment about the green spectacle case which was to play such a fateful part in the murders [. . .]. 

(And isn't Great Cthulhu also a kind of "green spectacle"?)

Anyway, I wouldn't put "The Call of Cthulhu" in the same category--thematically, structurally, or stylistically--as the Had I But Known-type story. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't have all of the strengths that we might think.

The Smiths moved to St. Louis in 1929. She wrote. He worked for the telephone company. Harry Pugh Smith died prematurely, on August 1, 1942, at age forty-one. Her health declined after that. She returned home to live with her widowed father in Arkansas. Soon she went into a nursing home. Anita Blackmon Smith died on February 23, 1943, at age fifty and lies buried at Augusta Memorial Park in the town of her birth.

Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith's Story in Weird Tales
"The Hook of Death" (Jan. 1924)

Further Reading

• "A St. Louis Author at Work" by Marguerite Martyn in St. Louis Post-Dispatch Daily Magazine, October 18, 1934, page 2D.
• French Wikipedia: "Anita Blackmon" at: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita Blackmon
• The website Mystery*File: "Had I But Known Authors #1: Anita Blackmon" by Curt J. Evans, Feb. 26, 2010 at: http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1863 
• The website The Passing Tramp: "Had I But Known Authors #1: Anita Blackmon, Crime Queen of Arkansas," Jan. 11, 2012, at: http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/01/had-i-but-known-authors-1-anita.html
• Wikipedia: "Had I But Known" at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Had I but known

"Outcast!" (not "The Outsider") by Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith in Sweetheart Stories, April 1938[?]. Cover artist unknown.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Miscellany No. 5

Also in The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, 1923-1924, author John Locke reprinted an essay called "Writing the Fantastic Story" by Otis Adelbert Kline, originally in The Writer in January 1931. Remembering his childhood talks with his father, Kline wrote:

There was the great mystery of man's advent on this earth, which religion explained in one manner and science in another. We discussed these, and a third possibility, an idea of my father's, that some of our ancient civilizations might have originated by people come here from other planets--the science of space-navigation forgotten by their descendants, but the tradition of their celestial advent persisting in their written and oral traditions.

Kline was born in 1891; he would have been twenty-eight years old when The Book of the Damned, Charles Fort's first, was published in late 1919. The concept of what we now call ancient astronauts was almost certainly in the works of Charles Fort (I'm not sure where exactly), but those would seem to have come too late for Otis Adelbert Kline's father to have been inspired by them, assuming father and son talked about these things when Kline was a child. So who originated the concept? I'm not sure. An older concept, panspermia, is ancient in its origins, but who first imagined an extraterrestrial intelligence coming to earth in the distant past? H.G. Wells touched upon the idea of a far older and more advanced civilization in his opening paragraphs of The War of the Worlds (1897). (There are echoes of Wells' opening in H.P. Lovecraft's opening of "The Call of Cthulhu.") Wells didn't exactly say that Martians had been here before, though. (Or at least I don't think he did.) Morris K. Jessup, about whom I wrote the other day, was one of the twentieth-century originators of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, but it's clear that others thought of it before he did. So when did it begin?

Original text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Miscellany No. 2

Here is a quote from The Lurker at the Threshold (Ballantine Books, 1971, 1976), which August Derleth wrote mostly on his own but tried to pass off as a collaboration with his master, the recently deceased H.P. Lovecraft. The character Dr. Lapham speaks:

I often think [. . .] how fortunate most men are in their inability to correlate all the knowledge at their disposal. [. . .] If the common man were even to suspect the cosmic grandeur of the universe, if he were to have a glimpse of the awesome depths of outer space, he would very likely either go mad or reject such knowledge in preference to superstation. (p. 152)

This passage very obviously echoes the opening paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu":

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. [. . .] but some day the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I guess Derleth loved Lovecraft's words so much that he wanted to make them his own. There are some problems with the thinking of both men, however. For one, we already "suspect the cosmic grandeur of the universe" and we already "have a glimpse of the awesome depths of outer space." After all, we have minds and imaginations. Moreover, we have eyes in which to look into the night sky, something we have done since the beginning of time. How little confidence Derleth, a man of faith, seems to have had in us. Likewise Lovecraft, a man of no faith, or, alternatively, of a faith in nothing. We don't actually go mad looking into the depths of space or contemplating the nature of reality or our place in the universe. We instead feel awe and wonder. We reach into the heavens and touch the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute. We come in contact with the great mystery. You could have seen that for yourself a few weeks back when the first photograph of a black hole came out. Here is a thing scarier than Cthulhu and bigger than our solar system, its accretion cloud like a fiery iris and the hole itself an immense pupil through which we might gaze into the essential facts of the physical universe. In contemplating this thing, nobody went insane. Instead we laughed and smiled and wondered and felt awe.

Conspiracy theorists think the same thing about humanity: that if we were to know the truth, we would go mad. And so the shadow government of their imaginations hides from us the truth about flying saucers. (I know of a Squatcher who believes the U.S. Army is hiding the truth about Bigfoot. Why would it? What would be the point?) I guess they imagine that we would react in the same way that listeners of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" or the people in Earle Bergey's cover illustration for Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully react, with fear and panic (the names of the moons of Mars). Again, I think these people underestimate us. After all, the one recorded signal that some people believe to have been evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization is called the "Wow! Signal," not the "Run For Your Lives! Signal."

Anyway, there have been so, so many articles lately about flying saucers, extraterrestrial life, and aliens zipping around the universe, but, alas, nobody has showed up yet. I suspect nobody will anytime soon. Believers in Nothing and the religion of Scientism seem ready to cry about it. If only there were some comfort for them. I also think that we should consider the possibility that we are completely alone in the universe. I know that idea bothers a lot of people. In fact, it may be the more likely thing that would drive them into madness, a madness of despair. But are we really alone? Or do we feel awe and wonder and contemplate mysteries because we are not?

Text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Miscellany No. 1

Here is an item from "The Bizarre Mystery of M.K. Jessup and the Allende Letters" by Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour in Flying Saucers Have Arrived!, edited by Jay David and published in 1970:

On June 11, 1958, the New York Herald Tribune carried a story that told of the results of a series of excavations conducted by archaeologists in Mongolia, Scandinavia, and Ceylon in which similar artifacts were discovered to those found among the Eskimos. The Smithsonian Institution, sponsors of the study, thereby concluded that ten thousand years ago the Eskimos inhabited Central Asia, especially the warm tropical paradise of Ceylon.

Why any people would want to leave a veritable Garden of Eden for the bleak northern wastes seems beyond comprehension. The Eskimos themselves, however, have had an answer for hundreds of years, which was always received a patronizing chuckle from anthropologists and missionaries. The Eskimo tradition says that they were "deported" to the frozen northland by a flock of giant metallic birds. Shall we continue to laugh at a "legend" of metallic birds today? (p. 175)

I'm not sure that the Smithsonian Institution ever concluded that Eskimos originated in Central Asia, and I'm really, really sure that Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka, isn't anywhere even close to that part of the continent. Reading that item, though, made me think of "The Call of Cthulhu" and the nineteenth-century expedition of William Channing Webb to West Greenland during which he "encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos" and looked upon their "fetish . . . . a very crude bas-relief of stone." This fetish bears a distinct resemblance to one recovered by Inspector John Raymond Legrasse in his later raid on a group of Cthulhu-worshippers in a swamp close-by New Orleans. It is here in the story that pieces of the Cthulhu puzzle are put together for the first time.

In the supposed nonfiction item above, the Eskimos are described as having been "deported" from their ancestral home. They would seem, then, to have been victims of a kind. And what were the giant metallic birds that did the deporting? Could they have been the Vimana of ancient Indian legend? (The Eskimos came from Ceylon, you know, which is slightly closer to India than to Central Asia.) Now in researching this posting, I find that eight American soldiers disappeared in a "Time Well" generated by a Vimana discovered in a cave in Afghanistan (which is in Central Asia) just like the men who got "stuck" after the unsuccessful Philadelphia Experiment, in which Morris K. Jessup was indirectly involved by his correspondence with Carlos Allende, aka Carl Allen. (1) This reminds me of the story of Fred L. Crisman, who claimed to have encountered Shaverian Deros in a cave in Burma (a cave which seems to have been by his description in Central Asia). Remember, too, that Lovecraft's Leng is also in Central Asia. I also find that Eskimo warriors wore laminar armor (pictured below) which seems to have had a delta-wing configuration, just like a Vimana. Could this configuration have been an evocation of a long-ago time when the Eskimo people were carried away on silver wings from their tropical paradise of a homeland in Sri Lanka into exile in the frozen north? I tell you, thinking about these things will wear out your brain.

Anyway, the Eskimo cultists in "The Call of Cthulhu" are obviously not victims, as they worship Cthulhu, who plans on stomping over the Earth like Godzilla on Tokyo. (Both are green and come from under the sea by the way.) But like the Eskimos who were deported, they have connections to faraway places, in this case to Louisiana and the South Pacific. And speaking of crude, H.P. Lovecraft once again demonstrated his crude racialism in casting brown-skinned non-northern Europeans as among his villains. I have written before about the idea that cultists, fanatics, and true believers tend to emanate not from the lower classes or peasantry as in Lovecraft's stories but from the middle class. Karl Marx came from the middle class and hated the middle class. Lenin and Mao were teachers. They hated the middle class, too. Hitler was an artist and the son of a minor government official. Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat were engineers. Writers, journalists, and pundits always seem surprised to learn these things. They were so surprised, I think, to find out that the Easter-worshipper bombers in Sri Lanka turned out to be middle-class businessmen and former university students. (The California Passover-worshipper shooter is very distinctly from the middle class.) I'll say it again: they are generally people from the middle class who become the terrorists and the political murderers, the tyrants and the totalitarians, I suspect because they despise what they have come from and wish to see it destroyed. (I feel certain that they also very often despise themselves and wish to see themselves destroyed.) Fancying himself an aristocrat, Lovecraft seems to have missed that insight. Today, fancying themselves aristocrats, too, journalists, pundits, politicians, and academics also miss it. It seems to be a simple thing, yet they miss it. But then they live by lies and are purveyors of lies, so why should they see the truth in anything? All I can say is that the Eskimos should be glad that they were carried away from Central Asia and Ceylon all those years ago because now they can live in peace way up above the murderousness, chaos, and destruction of our current culture.

Note
(1) Here's a link to the article in which these things are discussed, "A five thousand year old ancient Indian VIMANA found in Afghanistan cave, eight American soldiers stuck in TIME WELL disappeared in attempt to remove it" by Sathish Ramyen.

The laminar armor of an Eskimo warrior in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, Russia.

Original text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Little (or a Lot) on Algernon Blackwood

About once a month, I meet with a weird fiction book club to discuss some short works by a given author. In our past two meetings, we have talked about the works of Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). For our first meeting on Blackwood, we read "The Willows" and "The Wendigo." In our second, we talked about the short stories "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House," "May Day Eve," and "The Listener." A theme runs through all of these stories, namely, an encounter with the invisible or previously unseen, usually by way of a kind of crossing over into or contact with worlds beyond on our own.

Algernon Blackwood was a mystic and an occultist. Again and again in his stories, he wrote of encounters with the non-material. I hesitate to use the word supernatural, as the weird forces and entities he described in his stories seem less supernatural than simply not of our world: they may obey laws of nature, but those laws are not necessarily the same laws that govern us in our earthly realm. Supernatural also suggests a hierarchy of some kind, with some things in nature and others above it. In Blackwood's stories, there seems to be a unity among all things. He was interested in Buddhism. His stories seem to reach towards an Oriental oneness, of body and spirit, of the material, physical, or earthly realm with the non-material or spiritual realms that actually lie all about us and perhaps also within us.

H.P. Lovecraft was or claimed to be a hard materialist. Here is a quote, admittedly from an unknown source:

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism--religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

Algernon Blackwood was obviously not a materialist. He seems to have believed wholeheartedly in the spiritual or non-material. In reading his stories, I am reminded of the title of a wholly unrelated book, Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather, for Blackwood seems to have been an explorer of the invisible worlds that adjoin our own or that are, to use a Lovecraftian word, coterminous with it. If only we could expand our consciousness or awareness, we might commune with these worlds. That reaching towards greater consciousness or awareness seems to have been Blackwood's purpose in his stories.

Lovecraft admired Blackwood. In a letter to Vincent Starrett, from 1927, he wrote: "Aside from Poe, I think Algernon Blackwood touches me most closely . . . ." He considered "The Willows" "the finest weird story" he had ever read. This admiration came "in spite of the oceans of unrelieved puerility which he [Blackwood] so frequently pours forth." (1) I can't say what exactly was Lovecraft's objection to Blackwood's writing. (2, 3) I assume his accusation of "puerility" to have been directed at Blackwood's mysticism or non-materialism, perhaps more specifically at Blackwood's occultism.

Blackwood is supposed to have had a less kindly opinion of Lovecraft's work. In a search of the Internet, I found only a reference to Blackwood's claim that he found "spiritual terror" lacking in stories by his younger admirer. And that brings up another difference between Blackwood and Lovecraft, namely, that Lovecraft was more direct and the threats about which he wrote are more physical than in Blackwood's work. Cthulhu is a monster with height, breadth, and depth. He is a certain color, has a certain anatomical structure, and so on. Yes, he has come to earth from deep space. He has lived countless eons and will go on living for countless more. And he affects the dreams of sensitive people. But he is still a physical being. His body can be cloven by the prow of a fast-moving ship, thus sending him back to slumber in his submarine city. Blackwood's monsters, on the other hand, can't be seen clearly or directly. For example, the entities haunting the willows in the story of the same name are indistinct; they are not clearly defined or delineated. (4) They may leave footprints (or hoof prints) in the sand, they may leave their mark on the poor Hungarian peasant, but they are nonetheless non-material, or at most only partly material. Peter Penzoldt said it best when, in The Supernatural in Fiction (1965), he described Algernon Blackwood's entities as "apparitions." In any case, Blackwood, being a non-materialist, was not bound by the mere physical. The terrors he described extend into the spiritual realm. Lovecraft, more or less his opposite, may have been bound by his materialism, thus his terrors are, on their face at least, only physical. That might be a narrow reading of Lovecraft, though. He may have believed more than he let on.

* * *

I began writing today with a few notes in mind on the stories of Algernon Blackwood. The first has to do with materialism vs. non-materialism. It's clear from reading Blackwood where he stood. But rather than come from the direction of the non-materialist in his attempts to sway the materialist, Blackwood tried the opposite strategy. His narrators in "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House" and "May Day Eve" are materialists. More specifically, they are medical doctors. And, boy, do they get their comeuppance. In fact, the narrator in "May Day Eve" has a conversion like that of Saul on the road to Damascus. Whole new worlds open up to him because of his experiences on the night of May 1 in some long-ago year. I would like to quote from "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House," though, because it gets at something I have written about before, i.e., the arrogance and sense of superiority of the medical doctor, feelings that often border on or cross over into the country of the murderer and psychopath:

"I was at the time, moreover, in the heavy, unquestioning state of materialism which is common to medical students when they begin to understand something of the human anatomy and nervous system, and jump at once to the conclusion that they control the universe and hold in their forceps the last word of life and death. I 'knew it all,' and regarded a belief in anything beyond matter as the wanderings of weak, or at best, untrained minds."

Rest assured that the narrator is relieved pretty quickly of those feelings in his encounters with things from beyond.

My second note concerns a passage from near the end of "May Day Eve." The narrator has undergone an extraordinary experience on the path to the country house of his friend, a folklorist to whom he had planned to present what he considered powerful evidence in favor of materialism. First the folklorist speaks. He is then questioned by the narrator:

"I meant [. . .] that you were a very brave man to walk to-night over the enchanted hills, because this is May Day eve, and on May Day eve, you know, They have power over the minds of men, and can put glamour upon the imagination--"

"Who--'they'? What do you mean?"

 [. . .]

"The elemental beings you have always scoffed at, of course; they who operate ceaselessly behind the screen of appearances, and who fashion and mould the moods of the mind. And an extremist like you--for extremes are always dangerously weak--is their legitimate prey."

I would like to emphasize those words: Extremes are always dangerously weak. Extremists themselves recognize that fact and always seek to recruit into their ranks their fellow extremists, knowing the weakness and vulnerability of the person who has extremist views and is driven by them. Eric Hoffer recognized it, too, in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). From Section 61:

The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted.

And from Section 62:

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet. The fanatics of various hues eye each other with suspicion and are ready to fly at each other's throats. But they are neighbors and almost of one family. They hate each other with the hatred of brothers. They are as far apart and as close together as Saul and Paul. And it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal. (5)

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist [. . . .] The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. He is an atheist with devoutness and unction.

I have that sense, too, that an atheist is a person who very desperately wants to believe in something yet can't bring himself to believe simply in God. In getting back to "May Day Eve," a believer in God would not be so disturbed by his experiences as is the narrator--the believer is already aware of and is in touch with the invisible world. On the other hand, a materialist like the narrator of "May Day Eve" has his whole worldview shaken in any encounter with the spiritual, invisible, or non-material.

My third note is in the story type used in "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House." It is, in its opening paragraphs, clearly a club story, that is, one told in a club setting, usually by a narrator in repose. Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke is an example of a series of club stories. I like the club-story type and have written one myself, set in the far future and on another planet. "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House" is another type of story, too, though, one I have never heard described before. So maybe I will be first, at least in my own mind, for inside Blackwood's club story is a rooming-house story. The rooming-house story is one in which someone who lives in a rooming house (or apartment house) encounters another, stranger denizen of the same place. In Blackwood's story, it is the narrator who meets Smith, a strange man up to something behind closed doors. Other examples include:

• "The Music of Erich Zann" by H.P. Lovecraft (1922)
• "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1945)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• Rear Window (1954)

Even stories like Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (1944) and "Mr. Tripp and Skobol" by Jack Matthews (Chicago Review, Autumn 1959) can be considered rooming-house stories. I am also reminded of Tom Waits' spoken-word recording "What's He Building?" from 1999. I welcome other additions to this list.

I'll close by saying that a few years back I wrote a rooming-house story, before I even realized there was such a thing. I encourage everyone to try your hands at the club story and the rooming-house story, and failing that, to write stories of every kind.

Notes

(1) Quotes are from that same letter to Vincent Starrett.

(2) In another letter to Willis Conover, from 1937, Lovecraft called Blackwood's prose style "poor." This comes from a writer who too often alternated between self-conscious faux-archaism and the purplest and pulpiest of prose. I find problems with Blackwood's prose, too, but I think Lovecraft's objection was about something far more serious, to him, than style. See the following note.

(3) In a letter to Farnsworth Wright, from July 5, 1927, H.P. Lovecraft wrote: 

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form--and the local human passions and conditions and standards--are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown--the shadow-haunted Outside--we must remember to leave our humanity--and terrestrialism at the threshold. [Emphasis added.]

Note the use of the word puerility again. Did Lovecraft consider belief, faith, feeling, love, emotion--in short anything at all that is at once human and spiritual--to be unacceptably sentimental? Was that his complaint against Algernon Blackwood?

(4) Lovecraft may have admired "The Willows" so much because it is so close to his own conception of beings from beyond time and space that are attempting to break into our own world. The difference is in their nature and motivation, which aren't made entirely clear in "The Willows." Although Blackwood's story isn't quite science fiction, I think it is an early example of science fantasy, a sub-genre in which Lovecraft worked pretty easily. (I would consider "The Call of Cthulhu" science fantasy, although it can be described more easily--and with less precision--as weird fiction. Alternatively, "The Call of Cthulhu" can be considered a story that crosses genres or even defies categorization by genre.) "The Willows" has, without a doubt, an air of the mythological, folkloric, and supernatural. At first glance, it is a fantasy and about things of the past. But I think "The Willows" is more remarkable for its suggestion of contact between different physical dimensions, a scientific idea, an idea of the future, and one for science fiction writers to treat. I feel certain that Blackwood read and understood at some level Edwin A. Abbott's novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published in 1884. But did he also know of Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, postulated in book form in 1905, only two years before "The Willows" was published? Or did he simply have an intuition that allowed him to envision the existence of other dimensions beyond our own? (We have seen the artist's intuition at work before in Eleanor Cameron's books about the Mushroom Planet.) Setting all of that aside, there have been, more recently, theorists of a so-called genre or sub-genre "dark fantasy." Academic Gary Hoppenstand believes that dark fantasy was invented by Francis Stevens. I have a different opinion. If there is such a thing as dark fantasy--a big if--then it seems more likely to me that H.P. Lovecraft was a pioneer in that genre or sub-genre. But I think "The Willows" may push the origins of dark fantasy back even farther, at least to 1907. More likely still, dark fantasy grew out of fantasy, folklore, mythology, and organized religion, all much older forms.

(5) Don't be confused by Hoffer's use of the word liberal. He meant liberal in the classical sense, i.e., a person who believes and understands that human beings are and by rights free. In current usage, liberal usually means the opposite, i.e., a progressive, leftist, socialist, or statist who wants to grind humanity and human freedom under his boot.

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)

Put a mustache on Blackwood and he could have passed for Commander McBragg, that animated raconteur who told club stories in a time-honored way. In actuality, Commander McBragg was based on C. Aubrey Smith (1863-1948), a countryman and near contemporary of Algernon Blackwood.

Original text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley