Will Mars Be A Perfect World?

You know we're in trouble when you can't tell the difference between a real headline and something you would read in The Onion. Here's an example:

How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?

So is this from The Onion? Or from The Guardian, "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2014"? If you think that there are still some things too ridiculous for people to believe, you probably failed this quiz. Yes, it's a real headline and a real story in The Guardian. I won't go into it. You can be transported into another realm by clicking here.

The writer of the article, Martin Robbins, sounds like the marketing girl from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams:

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "what about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."

"Ah," said the marketing girl, "well, we're having a little difficulty there."

"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"

The marketing girl soured him with a look.

"All right, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be."

So the most important question involving the colonization of Mars is not how to get there or how people will survive there but how to make it a proper exercise in diversity. Those poor, benighted astronauts. They have hopelessly outdated ideas of what constitutes a safe place, you know, a place where you're not being pelted by cosmic rays or micrometeoroids, or scalded or frozen, or strangled or your blood boiled by an inhospitable atmosphere. No, a safe place is where your little feelings are protected from an oppressive overclass of fellow colonists.

The question is moot of course. It takes a vigorous and self-confident people to go into outer space. We are not that people. Or at least most of us aren't. Further, people like Mr. Robbins are too distracted by political considerations to accomplish anything as complex as establishing a colony on Mars, as he demonstrates in his article. They are Douglas Adams' marketing girl, more interested in the color (and sex) of the colony's people than its functionality. (I don't know about you, but I would not want to go to Mars with anyone other than a crew chosen only for their individual merits.) Further still, they are not especially interested in space exploration. Why should we turn outward when we can stay here and more closely examine our own navels? Why spend money out there when there are so many horrible, gaping problems here into which we can throw it like an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling into a black hole? If science fiction is dying, this is why.

My real point in writing today is this: In his article, Mr. Robbins refers to what he calls "the most pernicious space myth in existence . . . .

You can sum it up like this: "When we go into space, we will all magically become nice."

I agree with him that there is such a myth. It's one of the reasons why I never liked Star Trek: The Next Generation, for it seemed that the people in that show were scrubbed of their humanity, that in the future everyone would be nice to the point of blandness. But Mr. Robbins, evidently leftist in his orientation, is, like his fellow travelers, apparently lacking in irony or self-reflection. All you have to do is to take the Spacist (my new word) myth:

"When we go into space, we will all magically become nice."

Reduce it:

"When we __________, we will all magically become nice."

Then replace it with any number of progressive, leftist, or statist clichés:

"When we destroy the past and then progress into the glorious future, we will all magically become nice."

"When we create a perfect society, we will all magically become nice."

"When we eliminate religion, we will all magically become nice."

"When we are all made equal by an equality enforced by limitless government, we will all magically become nice."

"When we band together as a homogenized mass of humanity ruled over by an all-powerful state with all things separating the individual from the state removed, we will all magically become nice."

See how easy that is? If the first statement is a myth, why would not all other statements taking that form be myths? If you think I'm exaggerating, here are Mr. Robbins' exact words:

It’s early days, but if we really want to create a progressive new world then issues like these should be at the heart of our efforts from the very start.

No, this really isn't The Onion. (At least I don't think it is). This is a real person completely oblivious to human history and human nature. His words remind me of the mission assigned to the spaceship Integral in We by Yevgeny Zamyatin:

You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason.

Time will tell if we choose the yoke or not--if we throw off the yoke or not.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Francis Stevens at The Skulls in the Stars

I'm not the first blogger to write about Francis Stevens. A writer (who seems to be unnamed) on the blog Skulls in the Stars wrote about her as well, several years ago. You can see his blog entry by clicking here. The blogger makes some comparisons between the stories of Francis Stevens and other works, such as stories by H.P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt and the television show Lost. He also posits that Stevens was "a 'transitional' author between the 'lawful universe' authors that came before her and the 'nihilistic universe' authors such as Lovecraft which found inspiration in her work." That may be true and a useful insight. I would differ with him however that the stories of Francis Stevens "present a truly dark vision of the world." That's not the case at all, for Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--did not have a dark view of the world or humanity or our place in the universe, at least not one that showed in her work. I'll quote again from Skulls in the Stars:

Stevens often seems to feel that the audience needs to be let "off the hook" by the end of stories [sic], with some sort of deus ex machina intended to allow the reader to breathe a sigh of relief.  To a modern reader, the sigh is usually more a sigh of disappointment, but Stevens is “transitional” in that she usually does not let the reader entirely off the hook: the horror is ratcheted back, but never completely to zero. [Emphasis added.]

I don't really consider the resolution to Stevens stories to be an act of deus ex machina, nor do I detect any desire to let her readers "off the hook." It's clear to me that Gertrude planned her stories very carefully. They are in no way slipshod. The endings are as she planned them to be. (She is said to have shut herself into a room, free of distraction, while she wrote and to labor away for months on each of her novels.) The Citadel of Fear and "Unseen-Unfeared" are the two stories that I think are most horrific (to date), yet both end in very life-affirming and positive ways. The very last event in The Citadel of Fear is literally uplifting.

Those things are beside the point. You will notice the words in bold above. There's the point. My contention is that dark fantasy is a sub-sub-genre of our own time, and because of that, neither Francis Stevens nor any of her contemporaries could have invented it. Dark fantasy suits the readers of today precisely because it is dark. The unnamed blogger on The Skull in the Stars is onto something, seemingly without knowing it, for the modern reader is disappointed with happy endings and seemingly with any affirmation of life, love, or humanity. Why? Good question. It may be that the modern reader is a child of a society that--having thrown off its moorings to the past, to tradition and custom, to family, nation, and God Himself--loathes itself and wishes to see itself destroyed. In other words, the modern reader is a desperately unhappy person and wishes to read what will only confirm his very dark view of the world. During the years of the Great War, Francis Stevens and everybody else in the whole crazy world had reason to believe that this was the end. But rather than plunge into darkness, she and many of them turned towards the light. Why shouldn't we do the same in our far less difficult times?

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Avalon

"Avalon" was a four-part serial published in Argosy from August 16 to September 6, 1919, concurrent with the publication of "The Heads of Cerberus" in The Thrill Book (Aug. 15-Oct. 15, 1919). According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Avalon" has never been reprinted. In his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, Gary Hoppenstand called it "undeniably Steven's weakest novel." (p. xv) If that's the case, it's no wonder that "Avalon" has not been reprinted. On the other hand, if Francis Stevens was "the most gifted woman writer of science fiction and science-fantasy between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C.L. Moore," as Sam Moskowitz claimed, or if she was "the woman who invented dark fantasy," as Dr. Hoppenstand claimed, shouldn't all of her known works be in print? Everything H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote practically down to his shopping lists ("beans") has been reprinted. How about a little ink for his supposed female counterpart?

Anyway, I have not read "Avalon," but judging from a blog entry by James Reasoner (1), the story is a melodrama, part adventure, part thriller, part fantasy, and part gothic romance. (There is even a old manor called Cliff House.) I suspect that Francis Stevens' themes of love over hatred and spirit over science are in the book. And I'm pretty sure it was not a work of dark fantasy. (Lloyd Arthur Eshbach did not consider it to be a fantasy at all.) Here's hoping that "Avalon" is reprinted sometime soon.

Note

(1) "Avalon-Francis Stevens" on Mr. Reasoner's blog Rough Edges, May 11, 2008.

Text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Heads of Cerberus-Part Two

The Heads of Cerberus is a book rich in insight. I have already written much about Francis Stevens--maybe too much--so other than the following miscellany, I would simply urge you to read the book, for it might tell us something about where we're going.

One of the heroes of The Heads of Cerberus is Terence "Terry" Trenmore, a big, brawling Irish Catholic like Colin O'Hara before him. I wonder now if Gertrude Barrows was from an Irish Catholic family and if she based her heroes on her father. (Or her brother. Both Colin and Terry have spirited sisters who are along for the adventure. Maybe that was Gertrude putting herself into her stories.)

The story takes place in the Philadelphia of 1918 and in the Philadelphia of 2118. In going from the present to the future, the main characters pass through a strange, dreamlike landscape called Ulithia. During World War II, the U.S. Navy built an enormous base at an atoll it called Ulithi. There is almost certainly no connection between these two names, but what are we supposed to make of something like this? (1)

In going from Ulithia to the world of 2118, the main characters pass through a "moon gate." Upon arriving in the future Philadelphia, they look back to see a blank brick wall behind them. That reminds me of the Star Trek episode "All Our Yesterdays" in which Kirk is accused of witchcraft in an Earth-like past, while Spock and McCoy freeze to death in a prehistoric ice age.

In 1952, the same year in which Polaris reprinted The Heads of Cerberus, Taylor Caldwell published her own dystopian novel, The Devil's Advocate. Like Stevens' book, this one is set in Philadelphia. It is satirical to a point but also far more serious--and far longer--than The Heads of Cerberus. Note that both titles refer to the underworld.

Shortly after I read The Heads of Cerberus, I also read a comic book story called "The Medallion" from The Twilight Zone #57, July 1974. There is more than a passing resemblance between the two tales. Both are set in Philadelphia and both involve an artifact from the estate of a deceased man that allows the owner to travel through time. Both artifacts were also previously owned by statesmen of Florence.

In The Heads of Cerberus, the people of the future don't have names but are numbered instead, just as in We, The Prisoner, THX-1138, and Logan's Run.

Also, as in those four works, the people of the future Philadelphia know nothing of the outside world. Their world is a city. We of course recognize that ignorance among the populace is essential for the proper functioning of a statist regime. Today you can see that in North Korea, Iran, and certain political parties here in the United States.

The government of the future Philadelphia--oppressive, arbitrary, dictatorial--describes itself to its underclasses as "this blessed and democratic institution, the bulwark of your liberties!" (p. 129) Times have not changed: politicians still tell the same lies.

The other hero, Robert Drayton, explains the historical events leading up to the current state of affairs: "After the close of the World Wars . . . . communism had its way of Europe. Class war, which spells chaos, ensued." (p. 153) This was written in 1918 mind you.

Another character, a servant of the state, suggests that the current order is based on complete stasis and describes "the City of Philadelphia as having reached a state of perfection." (p. 115). Just this week, I spoke to a Venezuelan lawyer and a refugee from her own country. She warned me never to vote for a socialist. (Don't worry, I thought, I won't.) She went on to say that socialists want to make everything perfect, but it's never perfect. (I know that, too, but it's good to know I'm not the only one who knows it.)

Finally, Robert Drayton wonders: "Had the backbone of this people been entirely softened in the vinegar of even two centuries of oppression? And these were his own people, or their descendants--his fellow Americans! That hurt." (p. 119) Yeah, it hurts. What hurts more is that it has taken only half that time to get to a spineless and fearful American people, ripe to impose tyranny upon itself.

Notes
(1) Postscript (May 7, 2015): It may be that the name Ulithia was meant to play off the name Utopia, from Thomas More's book of 1516. I'm no expert in Greek and Latin roots, but utopia supposedly means no place. The Greek root eu- mean well or good, hence eugenics or well-born. So utopia could also be eutopia. In any case, if u- means no or not and lith means stone, then Ulithia could be a place of no stones. In the book, Ulithia is a ruined place, but "no stones" doesn't really make sense to me. Likewise, Eulithia--good stones--doesn't make any sense, either. But I wonder if it could be--by substitution of rock for stone--a Christian reference. Even then, I don't know what it could mean.

Text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Heads of Cerberus-Part One

"The Heads of Cerberus" by Francis Stevens was first published as a five-part serial in the short-lived magazine The Thrill Book, from August 15 to October 15, 1919. It was reprinted in book form by Polaris Press in 1952 and in a facsimile edition by Dover Publications in 2014. The Dover edition has preserved the original four-page introduction by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and the original illustrations by Ric Binkley. It's a slim book of 190 numbered pages, but because the story is novel-length, I will italicize the title from here on out.

One of the most interesting things to come out of Eshbach's introduction is that there were at least three stories by Francis Stevens that went unpublished: The Bronze Chest, "a sheer fantasy of novel length"; "Beyond the Pallid Wall," a short story that may have been published under another title, "though this doesn't seem too likely"; and "Impulse," another short story announced by The Thrill Book in its last issue, October 15, 1919. (1, 2) I would like to think that Francis Stevens' manuscripts are out there somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered. More likely they are gone forever.

The Heads of Cerberus was an innovation when it was published in 1919, and may still have been unmatched in 1952 when Polaris Press reprinted it. In explaining the innovation, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach quoted P. Schuyler Miller:

"The Heads of Cerberus can be read as perhaps the first work of fantasy to envisage the parallel-time-track concept, with an added variation that so far as I know has not been reused since." (p. 15)

The variation of which Miller wrote is that those parallel time tracks seem to be moving at different rates, in which case the interlude (a weird episode in an otherwise straightforward tale) between the current time track (set in 1918) and the future time track (set in 2118) makes some kind of sense. Whatever the case may be, The Heads of Cerberus is a story of real complexity and sophistication. In the mere two and a half years since "The Nightmare" was published, Francis Stevens had come a long way. As in previous stories, the explanation behind the events in The Heads of Cerberus is balanced between science and the non-material (whether psychological, supernatural, or spiritual). A deep question arises as a result, namely: Just what is real and what exists solely in the minds of the protagonists? Neither Lloyd Arthur Eshbach nor P. Schuyler Miller had an answer. Miller considered The Heads of Cerberus a riddle.

Expecting a parallel-time-track story, you follow The Heads of Cerberus wondering when it will get there, for it seems to be a straight-ahead tale of time travel. In that, Francis Stevens was probably inspired by H.G. Wells. The Heads of Cerberus also has a good deal in common with Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888). Some people have read The Time Machine as a satire, while Looking Backward seems to have been written in earnest. The Heads of Cerberus may have been written as a satire as well, not only of the then-current society, but also of Looking Backward. In any case, Looking Backward is famously utopian, while The Heads of Cerberus is distinctly dystopian, and in that, the unsung author Gertrude Barrows Bennett seems to have outdone her competition. After all, she lived in the Progressive Era when everything was going to be wonderful, yet she envisioned the perfect future not as a paradise but as a nightmare of human stupidity and lust for power.

Anyway, the explanation of the parallel-time-track concept, such as it is, comes very near the end of the story. Otherwise the reader is left to follow the exploits of the four characters from today in the nightmarish and somewhat comical world of tomorrow. But here's another innovation: Awhile back, I was looking for the first totalitarian in literature. I found two candidates, the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1879–1880), and the Benefactor or Well-Doer from We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921). The problem with the Grand Inquisitor is that he is not actually a character in a book but a character created by a character in a book. In my little survey, that leaves Zamyatin's Benefactor. Well, The Heads of Cerberus was published in 1919, and in it the author described a revolting creature called "Justice Supreme" or the "Supreme Servant," in his person a totalitarian ruler and very probably the first of his kind in American literature--maybe in all of literature. So the search for the first totalitarian is pushed back two years, from 1921 to 1919, and from a Russian author with firsthand knowledge of totalitarianism to an American pulp writer who seems to have relied mostly on her own intuition in predicting the world of tomorrow.

To be concluded . . . 

Notes

(1) The titles and quotes are on page 15 of the Dover edition.

(2) "Beyond the Pallid Wall" reminds me of the title of one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919).

The Thrill Book, August 15, 1919, with Francis Stevens' serial "The Heads of Cerberus" as the cover story. The man in the picture is holding a small vial with the Heads of Cerberus as the design on the stopper. Inside is the mysterious gray powder that, when inhaled, transports the main characters to the world of the future. I guess I should point out that drugs and altered states of consciousness are a recurring theme in Francis Stevens' work. That may or may not be significant.

The man's getup here isn't exactly true to the story, but you've got to grab the reader's attention somehow or other. The cover artist was Sidney H. Riesenberg (1885-1971).

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Elf Trap

In The Citadel of Fear (1918) and "Unseen-Unfeared" (1919), Francis Stevens made what may have been her closest approach to what is now called dark fantasy. It's probably no mere coincidence that both stories were published in late 1918 as the Great War was coming to an end and early 1919 as peace was being made. The war was of course a nightmare and a disaster. You could not have blamed a sensitive artist for reflecting horrors upon her world. But Stevens chose a different way: love over hate, goodness over corruption, light over darkness. There can be little doubt that Francis Stevens was not the creator of dark fantasy. To say that she was seems to me a twenty-first century and very academic conceit.

"The Elf Trap" is only further evidence that Francis Stevens was a teller of bright rather than dark tales. It was first published in Argosy, July 5, 1919, and reprinted in Fantastic Novels Magazine for November 1949. It's a long short story of twenty-one pages in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004) but one of the simplest of Stevens' stories to date. The structure of the story is somewhat complex however. In reading her work, I have come to expect that. Built like a puzzle box or assembled like a set of nesting wooden dolls, it includes a double framing device and the voices of two narrators. Relativity was in the news in 1919. Analytic cubism was a leading movement in art. It's no wonder that stories told from multiple viewpoints would make their way into modern literature. One of John Dos Passos' trilogy U.S.A., a modernist work to be sure, was in fact called 1919. That was no coincidence, either. Anyway, as you read "The Elf Trap," you wonder how this story will work itself out, where lies reality, and how a man's death can make for a happy ending. That ending is a mild surprise, and the story itself is a pleasant reading experience. I might add that it could have been written only by a woman.

"The Elf Trap" takes place mostly in the mountains of North Carolina, where the main character, Theron Tademus, has gone for some much needed rest. Francis Stevens had a way with proper nouns, and there seems to be some deeper meaning in the man's name. If there is, it remains hidden to me. Nearby Tademus' mountain cabin is an artist's colony called Carcassonne, another name that seems meaningful, maybe by association with the city Carcosa, from the works of Robert W. Chambers. (The King in Yellow was published in 1895, the year of Gertrude Barrows' golden age of twelve.) Unlike most of Francis Stevens' other stories, "The Elf Trap" is a simple fantasy. On the other hand, it involves a kind of dream-vision or altered state of consciousness or reality, and so keeps with that recurring theme in her work.

"The Elf Trap" reminds me of Brigadoon in that an ordinary man undergoes an extraordinary experience upon encountering a magical village and its magical people. The man, Tademus, is a scientist and so rational, materialist, and disengaged from living among humanity, whom he finds ugly and repellant. He has no appreciation for or understanding of art. He has never danced nor loved. Theron Tademus doesn't know what Francis Stevens has in store for him.

In "The Elf Trap," Tademus travels beyond the veil of hard reality into the deeper reality of the spirit. It is a love story in which love and art triumph over science and materialism. Love comes in the form of Elva, a young woman who wears a scarf of sky blue and adorns herself with yellow honeysuckle. For a week, Tademus escapes from his mundane life into her magic. He is called back by his love of science. (He is a microbiologist studying the local protista.) Elva responds:

"You are all alike!" she cried. "All! You talk of love, but your love is for gold, or freedom, or some pitiful, foolish nothingness like that speck of life you call by a long name--and leave me for!"

Tademus returns to his life in science. What he doesn't know is that Elva and her people have fashioned an elf trap for him. He can escape from it once, but he will be caught again, and so Theron Tademus is saved from science and for love and art.

Hardly the stuff of dark fantasy.

Text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Franz Nabl and the Austrian P.E.N. Club

I would like to take a break from my series on Francis Stevens and write a little on Franz Nabl and the Austrian P.E.N. Club. There are actually two tellers of weird tales in this story, one at the beginning and one near the end. Franz Nabl comes at the beginning.

I have written about Franz Nabl before, on October 24, 2013. You can read that article by clicking here. Lars Dangel provided the information that linked Franz Habl, the name listed in Jaffery and Cook's index to the writers and artists in Weird Tales, to Franz Nabl, the real Austrian author. Once you know his real name, it's easy to find information on him.

According to Herbert Herzmann in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938 (1995), Franz Nabl was born on July 16, 1883, in Litschau, Bohemia, now in Austria. (In my earlier article, I had his birthplace as Lautschin, Austria-Hungary, now Loučeň, a city in the Czech Republic. That information came from the German version of Wikipedia.) Nabl's father, also named Franz, was the manager of an estate owned by the German Princely House of Thurn und Taxis. The elder Franz retired early and acquired his own estate, Gstettenhof, in Lower Austria. That's where Franz Nabl the son spent most of his childhood.

Franz Nabl studied law at Vienna University but left before attaining his degree. In 1905 (according to Mr. Hertzmann), he married Hermengild Lampa and about that time became a freelance writer. Nabl suffered from poor health, thus avoiding military service during the Great War. He was editor of Grazer Tagblatt from 1924 to 1927, but the success of a play freed him from the need for regular work and he returned to freelance writing. Mr. Herzmann describes the main theme and thrust of Nabl's work:

Most of his narratives tell of the attempt of an individual to free himself or herself from the restrictions of the environment in order to achieve something like autonomy, autarky, self-sufficiency, or freedom . . . . The notion of "Wiedergeburt" (rebirth) plays a decisive role in [his work]. [One of his characters explains that] each one of us . . . is sooner or later faced with the decision of whether to undergo rebirth. If we decide for it, we must annihilate ("vernichten") all remains of our former self. (1)

Franz Nabl wrote nineteen plays and books published from 1905 to 1990. He died on January 19, 1974, in Graz, at age ninety.

I am revisiting the biography of Franz Nabl, whose main body of work was published before World War II, because of a controversy of today, in fact, of this week. Nabl was a member of the Austrian P.E.N. Club, a branch of the international organization of poets, essayists, and novelists. In May 1933--eighty-two years ago this month--the International P.E.N. Club held its 11th annual congress in Ragusa, Italy, now Dubrovnik, Croatia. Earlier that month, the German Student Union had burned thousands of books in Berlin.

When the Austrian PEN delegation introduced a resolution condemning the students' action [wrote Donald G. Daviau], the German representatives walked out of the meeting in protest, accompanied by the Austrians Grete von Urbanitzky, head of the Austrian group, Felix Salten, the publisher Paul Zsolnay, Egon Caesar Corti[,] who even at this early juncture was a convinced National Socialist, and others. (2)

The split became permanent the following month when a number of pro-Austrian members of the Austrian P.E.N. Club passed a resolution "defending intellectual freedom and condemning the abolition of human rights and the persecution of writers in Nazi Germany." (3) A dozen and a half (or more) writers resigned from the club in protest. Franz Nabl was among them. Although Nabl never joined the Nazi party,

there is no doubt that he allowed the new regime [after the Anschluss in 1938] to support and use him, at least partly because of the views he held at the time. (4)

Mr. Herzmann described those views as "increasingly authoritarian and even reactionary" as the 1930s progressed. Although Nabl's reputation was restored somewhat after the war, it will probably always exist under the shadow of Nazism.

This week, on May 5, 2015, at the PEN Literary Gala in New York City, PEN America will bestow upon the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. You would think that would not be a controversial award, but we now live in an age in which all things are politicized. One hundred forty-five members of PEN have signed a letter objecting to the award, believing, I suppose, that continuing to exercise one's freedom of expression under very serious threats of violence that prove to be more than mere threats does not constitute sufficient courage. Novelist Peter Carey specifically objects to "PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population." (5) Just as the pro-German writers of the Austrian P.E.N. Club decided in favor of the suppression of free thought and free expression in 1933, so, too, do 145 members of PEN International today. Incredibly, Joyce Carol Oates is among them.

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1937, in Lockport, New York, and received her bachelor's degree from Syracuse University (1960) and her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1961). Her first book was a collection of short stories entitled By the North Gate, published in 1963. Ms. Oates is considered a mainstream writer, but like innumerable writers in the American mainstream, she has delved into the Gothic tradition. (I'm not sure that American literature is separable from Gothicism.) The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists her stories and essays in the fields of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. They go back to her first published work. In 1997, Ecco Press published Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and introduced by Ms. Oates. Her connections to Weird Tales go deeper than that, with works of fiction and non-fiction appearing in the newer incarnations of the magazine.

Peter Carey it seems has succumbed to politically correct idiocy. Joyce Carol Oates' comments on the PEN controversy are pretty mild in comparison, but I think they also represent a misunderstanding that people have about cartoonists and humorists in general. (6) I won't go into any great length. I will just say that it's obvious to me that Charlie Hebdo is not racist (the leftist's favorite cry), that in fact it is an equal-opportunity offender, and that everybody ought to just calm down and get a sense of humor. The next thing you know, people will start calling Blazing Saddles racist and want to shoot holes into Mel Brooks, one of our great national treasures. But then there have always been people who have wanted to shoot holes into people like Mel Brooks (and Felix Salten and Paul Zsolnay and Joyce Carol Oates' grandmother). In 1933, they were called Nazis. Today they go by a different name. Then and now, they had supporters, defenders, and apologists. It's just too bad that writers--supposedly thoughtful, well-educated, intelligent people--are among them.

Notes

(1) "Franz Nabl" by Herbert Herzmann in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938, edited by Donald G. Daviau (Ariadne Press, 1995), p. 299.

(2) From "Introduction" by Donald G. Daviau in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938 (Ariadne Press, 1995), p. 62.

(3) Ditto, p. 63.

(4) Herzmann, p. 318.

(5) From "Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo" by Jennifer Schuessler on the website of PEN America, here.
(6) You can read her little tweets about the whole PEN/Charlie Hebdo affair in an article called "Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie Speak Out about Charlie Hebdo PEN Award" by Isabella Biedenharn on the website of Entertainment (Apr. 30, 2015), here.

You can read more about the controversy on my blog, Indiana Illustrators and Hoosier Cartoonists, here.

Franz Nabl (1883-1974)

Copyright 2015, 2o23 Terence E. Hanley