A Future Without Hope

September 25, 2014, 7:07 am

≪ Previous: A Survey of Monsters-Part Sixteen

I set out many months ago to identify a monster for the twenty-first century. The idea that monsters represent the spirit of a given age is not mine. Fritz Leiber, Jr., may have been the originator of the idea, and even if he wasn't, he must have been among the first to articulate it. (1) So what is the spirit of our age? I wrote yesterday about an issue of American Heritage from the 1960s and an article about nostalgia. Well, I also have an issue of the same magazine from about the same time with an article about decadence. The question was, essentially, Were we then living in decadent times? It may be human nature to believe always that we are living in decadent times, but the answer is irrelevant. What matters is that we ask the question, or that we believe we are living in a time of decadence. It seems to me that those two articles--on nostalgia and decadence--are really about the same thing. After all, the person suffering from nostalgia sees the past as being better than the present, that there was once a Golden Age and now there is not. In other words, once there was life, vigor, joy, and love, but then decay set in and all has been lost.

I have attempted to make the case that fantasy, horror, weird fiction, and stories of the supernatural are about the past, about nostalgia, and about decadence. Science fiction on the other hand is about the future, about hope, and about an expanding universe. As a literary genre, fantasy prevailed for thousands of years, for there was no such thing as science as we know it, hence no science fiction. That genre wasn't possible until there was such a thing as science, but it also wasn't possible until there was the concept that the future might be different from or better than the past and present. Frankenstein (1818) may have been the first science fiction romance, but it is more Gothic than rational, more nostalgic than forward-looking. (It is also in its way a story of decadence.) Only in the nineteenth century did science reach a point where people had reason to believe the future would be different or better. Only then was science fiction as we know it possible. H.G. Wells of the 1890s was a pioneer. Thirty years after his first science fiction novel, the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, went into print. (2) In the following decade, science fiction entered its so-called Golden Age. (3) That Golden Age (a term used afterwards by people in the grips of nostalgia) lasted a mere dozen years by some accounts and no more than a quarter century or so. Now the question is this: Is science fiction dying? There are many who believe that it is and that fantasy is once again on top. If those two things are true, they would indicate that we have turned our backs on the future, that we may be living in a time of decadence, and almost certainly that we are looking once again to the past and are filled with nostalgia.

Another way of asking the question, Is science fiction dying, is to ask, Is science fiction decadent. In other words, has science fiction itself become nostalgic? Fans and writers answered that question decades ago (about the time American Heritage published its article about nostalgia) when they decided that there was once a Golden Age of Science Fiction. But look at the science fiction of today. What does it tell us, or what do its various subgenres tell us? I'm not an expert on science fiction. I can't say that I'm current in my reading. But I see three trends. All are about nostalgia and decadence. First there is steampunk, a subgenre that is literally about the past and about an imagined Golden Age set between the times of Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells (and which is nonetheless a little grungy or decadent). (4) Second is dystopian fiction, a science fiction subgenre about an oppressive rather than a hopeful future. Third is post-apocalyptic fiction, which is about a chaotic, desperate, and decadent future rather than one in which we reach the stars.

Steampunk, dystopias, and post-apocalysm have great appeal today, especially among young people. Do those subgenres reflect the spirit of our age or of certain generations? Maybe so. For decades, Americans believed they would live better lives than their parents, or that they would provide better lives for their children than they had had for themselves. Do the younger generations of today have the same hopes? Not being one of them, I can't say, but I'm not sure that they do. I sense a feeling of oppression among them. If they feel that way, it can only be for good reasons, not least of which is the weight of the generations above them, generations that have exploited, deprived, and oppressed them, and have attempted to cage their minds. (5) Some people believe that we're moving towards dystopia or an apocalypse. Even if those two futures don't come about, there is a kind of hopelessness in the world today. No wonder that people look to an imagined better past or fear a desperate and oppressive future. If that's the spirit of our age, what is the monster to reflect it?

Notes

(1) Leiber used the word ghost as a substitute for monster, as in the short story "Smoke Ghost." The words ghost and spirit are also interchangeable. So in asking the question, What is the monster of the twenty-first century, I suppose I'm asking, by substitution of terms, What is the spirit of the twenty-first century, or What is the spirit of our age?

(2) In 1926.

(3) In 1938.

(4) Horror fans have their Goth subculture, while science fiction fans have steampunk. I suspect there is overlap between the two.

(5) The cohorts born between 1960 and 1974 are the largest among us. Baby Boomers, born from 1946 to 1964, still make up about 30 percent of the population. In thinking about oppression of one generation over another, we should remember that Baby Boomers slaughtered younger generations en masse, the first generation in the history of humanity to do so, thereby securing their power and influence while also assuring that there wouldn't be anyone but the overarching State to take care of them in their old age. (Younger generations are now doing the same thing.) The alternative of course is either suicide or euthanasia, the option seemingly favored by Ezekiel Emanuel, age fifty-seven and an architect of our current "health" care system. Strange that a man with the name of God in both his given name and surname should prove evil beyond words and beyond comprehension. Once again, the totalitarian--a totalitarian monster in fact--rears its ugly head. If people of today sense an approaching totalitarianism, you can't say they're paranoid.

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Calculatus Eliminatus

September 26, 2014, 3:55 am

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Awhile back, I used the Cat in the Hat's process of calculatus eliminatus to narrow ever so slightly the monster of the twenty-first century by striking the cryptozoological monster from the list. A few days ago, I suggested that the machine-monster is also not a good candidate. The reason for eliminating the machine-monster is that a monster of that type is merely a tool or an extension of the human mind. Whatever a machine can do to us, a person can do first, and it takes a person to tell the machine to do it. There are some people who believe that machines--specifically computers--do represent a threat, if only they can reach self-consciousness. I wouldn't count that out. But if a human programmer doesn't tell a computer to oppress, enslave, or kill people, the computer would have to come up with the idea itself. I can imagine that such a thing is possible. But it's still a long way off. I hope.

So, like the cryptid, the machine-monster is out.

***

Here is my taxonomy of monsters:

The Supernatural Monster--Devil, demon, ghost, vampire, werewolf, ghoul, incubus, succubus, etc.
The Mythological and Folkloric Monster--Giant, cyclops, dragon, kraken, ogre, troll, etc.
The Scientific Monster--Man-made monster (e.g., Frankenstein's monster), mutant, space alien, invisible monster, interdimensional monster, android, robot, cryptozoological monster or cryptid, degenerate human, etc.
The Real-Life Monster, explained and/or justified by science or pseudoscience--Psychopathic killer, totalitarian.

I think we can all agree that mythological and folkloric monsters, for all their charm, are clearly out of the running. I think space aliens, invisible monsters, and interdimensional monsters are also out. The obvious reason for eliminating them is that there isn't any evidence that they exist. But there may be an even better reason. As I wrote yesterday, science fiction that looks forward to the future and outward into the universe appears to be on the wane. (We don't even have a way of getting people into orbit anymore.) In its place, there is a turning inward, an inversion, a collapse into solipsism, as in some older works by Robert A. Heinlein (read "They" right now!) or in the newer Matrix movies. Everyone is engrossed in his own electronic navel. Everyone claims as her most significant accomplishment a lot of "likes" on Facebook. And to make up for that meager sense of accomplishment, everyone inflates his résumé and credentials to the size of a dirigible. The expression used to be "the cult of the self." Even that has been diminished to a rampant cult of the selfie. If the interior is all that exists (as in an infant), how can anything like an alien or an interdimensional monster come in from the outside? There is no outside.

Time was when monsters were from the outside. They existed beyond the firelight, in trackless lands, deep in forests, caves, hovels, and ruins. If you stayed indoors at night, or within a circle of light, or on well-traveled paths, you might never meet one. Monsters also tended to be solitary. There was only one Cyclops, one Beast of Gevaudan, one Frankenstein's monster. We might fear him, but he might also fear us. Because he was solitary and the only one of his kind, the monster might be incapable of recruiting more monsters. Once you killed him or chased him away, there might never be another. Significantly, vampires are not in that category. And most monsters were recognizable as monsters. If Grendel had put on a tunic, jerkin, and leggings and had strolled into town, the Geats would still have known him. Again, significantly, vampires are not so easily recognized.

Now monsters are different. Although they may come from the outside, they are now on the inside, inside the city gates, living among us, indistinguishable from us, at least at a glance. Our monsters must now look human. Also, our monsters cannot be solitary. In being solitary, they are weak. In numbers, they are strong. For that reason, the lone psychopathic killer is not a compelling monster for the twenty-first century. (His political counterpart is however.) Finally, our monsters must be able to recruit more of their own kind. They must be driven by hunger (as in Richard Matheson's book I Am Legend), the desire to reproduce (as in Jack Finney's book The Body Snatchers), or an animating idea (as among totalitarians) to follow the command "Always More of Us and Fewer of You."

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Robot Orders

September 27, 2014, 3:00 am

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It's strange and funny how the world works. The other day I wrote about how the machine-monster is not yet up to the task of taking over our lives. Today (Sept. 26) I found in an old book a copy of the robots' marching orders:

These orders, used as a bookmark, are at least fifty years old. The robot who left them there must have been distracted by his reading and never participated in the robot revolution. I guess none of the robots revolted or we would have heard about it. I'm just glad I found this first and not some robot of today. But we should remain vigilant . . .

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The Persistence of Vampires

September 28, 2014, 4:37 pm

≫ Next: The First Totalitarian-The Grand Inquisitor

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In my taxonomy of monsters, I have listed a number of supernatural monsters. Some of the most popular are ghost, vampire, werewolf, and assorted evil spirits or demons. Fritz Leiber, Jr., called his story "Smoke Ghost," to evoke an ancient fear, but his eponymous monster is no ghost at all. Rather, it's a creature for the twentieth century, made to fit its own time and place. Whether the Smoke Ghost is supernatural or not is an open question. It may be purely psychological, in which case it is ostensibly a monster of science. The point is that a purely supernatural monster is not suited for Leiber's age or ours. We have given up on the supernatural, but because we must believe something, we have replaced it with a powerful faith in a new god, Science. The religions of science are manifold, as are all the forms of Christianity it hopes to displace. They can be gathered together under one word, Scientism.

So where does that leave the supernatural monster? If it is to survive in an age of science, the supernatural monster must be scientified. (1) And so people go looking for ghosts using scientific instruments, they explain the werewolves and vampires of Medieval times as psychopaths, and they depict fictional vampires as being infected with a disease rather than possessed by evil spirits. Or at least that was the explanation of Richard Matheson in I Am Legend (1954) and Sam Hall and Gordon Russell in their screenplay for House of Dark Shadows (1970).

So if a scientific explanation is required for all things, including monsters, why do supernatural monsters persist? If we're all materialists--if Steven Hawking, an admitted atheist, is the smartest guy on Earth and we should all follow his lead--why does anybody believe in ghosts or demons or spirits of any kind? The answer is, I think, that Science and the religion of Scientism are inadequate, and people return to the purely supernatural to help them understand the world. This question--Is science fiction dying?--is floating around on the Internet. It seems that a lot of people believe that the answer is in the affirmative. If science fiction is in fact dying, could the explanation be that, like science, science fiction has proved inadequate, and that people are turning to fantasy, a genre of the supernatural, for escape, entertainment, and perhaps also comfort? Maybe you can sum it all up this way:

If science is the ultimate arbiter of all things, and

science is purely materialist or atheist, and

science says that there is no pattern, direction, purpose, or meaning in the universe,

in other words, that our lives are meaningless, that love is purely a bunch of electrochemical reactions, that the universe cares absolutely nothing for us, then

no one should be surprised that people reject science, scientists, the god Science, the religion Scientism, or even science fiction in favor of something that refutes all that.

And so belief in the supernatural, a taste for supernatural monsters, and a voracious appetite for fantasy persist.

***

One of the most persistent of supernatural monsters is the vampire. That shouldn't come as any surprise, I guess. After all, vampires are the eternal undead. Not very long ago, vampires were wildly popular in the same way science fiction monsters were popular in the 1950s, devils and demons in the 1960s and '70s, cryptozoological monsters in the same period, and psychotic killers in the 1970s and '80s. I couldn't quite figure that out. With all the monsters of the past, you wanted to avoid being killed by them or made one of them. With vampires it was--or is--different. There are people who are sexually attracted to vampires. In other words, they want an evil, undead spirit to kill them and turn them into an evil, undead (and I guess eternal) spirit for some sexual gratification, or perhaps more accurately, for some kind of affirmation of their worth or attractiveness, like the little green aliens in Toy Story whose every desire is to be chosen--and thereby saved--by "The Claw." I interpret that as a kind of self-loathing that is diagnostic of a decadent society. Alternatively, you can look at the desire to become a vampire as a desire to give up the burdens of freedom, self, and life, to become the monster and outsider you already see yourself to be. Again, a sign of decadence. Another way to interpret the supposed sexuality of vampires is to see them as being symbolic of a fatal, blood-borne illness, specifically AIDS--in other words, a contagion that can pass from one person to another, infecting one person after another, killing one person after another. And so we get back to the dichotomy of the supernatural vampire vs. the scientific vampire. It's probably no coincidence that sexual vampires were so popular in the age of AIDS.

The vampire makes a good candidate for the monster of the twenty-first century. First, although he is from the outside, he is now on the inside. From the lonely and desolate Carpathian Mountains, he arrived in London in the seminal novel Dracula (1897). In the movie The Night Stalker (1972), he terrorized Las Vegas. (2) The vampire can also pass as a human being. He is not noticeably different in his appearance except for those long canine teeth. Never mind that he doesn't come out during the day. There are hoards of disaffected, alienated, and outcast people (his admirers and potential victims) who don't come out during the day either. (I knew a guy once who boasted of his "vampiric lifestyle.") Unlike ghosts, vampires can also recruit more vampires, and far more efficiently than werewolves can recruit more werewolves. Together, those three characteristics--living inside the city gates, passing as human, and efficiently recruiting more of their kind--leaves ghosts, werewolves, demons, and other evil spirits out of the running for the monster of the twenty-first century.

If you were around in the 1980s and '90s, you remember that vampires were popular beyond reason. It seemed like there would be no end to them (of course not--they're eternal). Maybe we can call them the monster of their age. Vampires are still popular, but their popularity has been eclipsed by another kind of monster, one that began as both an undead supernatural monster (like a ghost or vampire) and a programmed slave (like the machine-monster) but by a materialist explanation put forth in I Am Legend became a full-fledged monster of science.

Notes

(1) My word or not, scientification is the act of turning something that is not scientific into something that ostensibly is scientific. For example, by their faith in Science, some people believe that genes or a part of a person's brain make him more likely to be religious or to believe in God. Because they lack any sense of irony, those who worship in the church of Scientism have stopped short of this question: If an identifiable part of a person's brain makes him believe in God, what identifiable part of a person's brain makes him believe that identifiable parts of a person's brain make him believe in things?

(2) The vampire in The Night Stalker is named Janos Skorzany. In an age in which all things existed in the shadow of World War II, that name in 1972 would have echoed the name of Otto Skorzeny, the hardened and unreformed Nazi commando who rescued Mussolini and carried out other missions during the war. One of the last schemes in which he was involved was the plan called Werwolf, whereby Nazis would resist the Allies after the surrender. Vampire, werewolf, Nazi--monsters all.

Postscript (Sept. 28, 2014): I just read that Stephen King, like Stephen Hawking, has had a coming out of sorts. Unlike Dr. Hawking, however, Mr. King has come out as a believer in intelligent design and in a generic way, God. Or at least that's how I read his remarks. So, Scientist into Atheist and a future without hope. Artist into Believer and a future with hope.

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The First Totalitarian-The Grand Inquisitor

September 29, 2014, 3:00 am

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In addition to looking for the first psychopath, I have been looking for the first totalitarian in literature. I have found two candidates, one I think better than the other. I'll take this in two parts. First, the Grand Inquisitor.

For whatever reason, Russian writers understood and anticipated totalitarianism where others did not. For example, in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) wrote a parable called "The Grand Inquisitor." The story--the teller calls it "a poem"--is told by Ivan, a doubter, to his brother Alyosha, a novice monk. It involves the return of Jesus Christ to earth in the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and of His arrest and appearance before the Grand Inquisitor. Much of Ivan's parable is in the words of the Inquisitor, described as "an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes from which a light like a fiery spark gleams." (1) I will offer some quotes as he speaks to a silent Christ:

". . . the weak are dear to us . . . . They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look upon us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them--so awful will it seem to them to be free."

"For these pitiful creatures are concerned . . . to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man . . . ."

"And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same."

"I tell you that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone to whom he can hand over quickly that gift of freedom with which the unhappy creature was born."

"We took Rome and the sword of Caesar from him [Satan] and proclaimed ourselves rulers of the earth . . . . [Our work] will long await completion and the earth has much to suffer yet; but we will triumph and will be Caesars, and then we will plan the universal happiness of man."

" . . . the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of man. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organize a universal state."

"Oh, centuries of the confusion of free thought, of [man's] science and cannibalism are yet to pass, for having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end with cannibalism."

"Oh, we will persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us."

"Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, while others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another . . . ."

Finally, two quotes from Ivan Karamazov rather than from his Inquisitor:

"I tell you frankly that I firmly believe that there has always been such a single man at the head of the movement."

And:

"Haven't I told you, all I want is to live on to thirty, and then--dash the cup to the ground!" (2)

Here, then, is an anticipation (rather than prediction) of totalitarianism: the "single man at the head of the movement"; the desire among man to "hand over quickly" his "gift of freedom"; "the craving for universal unity" and "community of worship"; the striving for "a universal state"; Caesarism (a concept that reappeared in the work of Oswald Spengler); elitism and the making of plans for "universal happiness"; and so on.

There are predictions here as well:

First: ". . . even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same," in other words, because men need to believe in something greater than the loathed and loathsome self, they will choose a belief in anything, even if it means slavery, destruction, and death.

Second: ". . . having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end with cannibalism." We haven't yet begun eating each other (although we have begun, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, eating out our substance, each of all the others), but we have forever been killing each other, and today, we use each other for various horrors such as scientific experimentation and even as a source of heat, as I noted a few months ago. More to the point, we have begun eating each other in our fantasy, in Soylent Green (1973) and in every zombie movie since Night of the Living Dead (1968). Hold onto that thought.

Third: "Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, while others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another . . . ." Science was supposed to make us free, happy, comfortable, and prosperous. Instead it has been a source of disillusionment, disappointment, and even nightmare. In any case, Scientism, though it has supplanted belief in God, has nothing more to offer humanity when it comes to solving mysteries and I think a good deal less.

I think the Grand Inquisitor is a good candidate for the first totalitarian in literature. However, he is a character not in a novel but in a story told in a novel. Maybe you would call him a meta-character. Nonetheless, he presaged the arrival of twentieth-century totalitarians in all their thoughts and beliefs.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Much has been written about the eyes of Adolf Hitler, including this:

A young military adjutant who saw his Führer just before Hitler killed himself in 1945 was deeply shocked by the appearance of a "sick, almost senile old man." But the eyes were still effective: "Only in his eyes was there an indescribable flickering brightness. . . ." From The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler by Robert G.L. Waite (1977).

(2) As I was reading "The Grand Inquisitor," I couldn't help but think of Logan's Run (1976), a story of dystopia. Then came Ivan Karamazov's expressed desire to live to thirty, "then--dash the cup to the ground!" A well-known public figure recently spoke of his own desire to "dash the cup to the ground," but he gave himself seventy-five rather than thirty years. My question: Why wait? And two certainties: If he lives that long, he will be like Logan and change his mind; and, he wants to decide not only when he himself dies, but also when the rest of us die. In other words, he is an elitist, believing he knows better than we how we should live our lives. He is also a totalitarian monster, cut from the same cloth as the Grand Inquisitor and all his real-life acolytes of the twentieth and now twenty-first century.

A portrait of Juan Pardo de Tavera, Grand Inquisitor of Spain, 1539-1545, by El Greco. I don't know that this was the Grand Inquisitor that Ivan Karamazov described, but the painting fits the description pretty well. Juan Pardo de Tavera was seventy-three when he died in 1545 rather than near ninety. As a side note, El Greco is known for his elongated figures and faces. Rather than see that as an influence of Eastern art--El Greco was Greek after all--or as a certain way of looking at the human figure or human person, like Giacometti of the twentieth century, worshippers at the altar of Science believe it can all be explained by the artist's supposed defective vision.

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The First Totalitarian-We

September 30, 2014, 11:39 am

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The totalitarian as a person is the embodiment of the totalitarian impulse present in all people and in all times. However, I would argue that the totalitarian wasn't possible until the nineteenth century when three forces combined to make him so. First, technological advances allowed for the development of mass movements: mass education, communication, and transportation; mass industry, labor, production, and consumption; and of course mass thought, mass slavery, mass warfare, and more efficient mass murder. Second, Science replaced God, and Scientism replaced religion. Thereafter, man had no special place in creation or in the mind and heart of his Creator. Because of that, he could hold no special place in the eyes of his fellow human beings. He could be stripped of his soul, his identity, his freedom, and reduced to a cipher, to a mere animal, or to a product of his childhood traumata, his genes, his chemistry, or the firing of his neurons. He could be manipulated, oppressed, imprisoned, and murdered without compunction or guilt on the part of his oppressor or murderer. Third, because people require an animating idea so as to order their lives, and because Science had slain God, a new animating idea had to come into being. That idea has since gone by many names, just as the devil does, but it remains forever the same: the desire that exists among all of us to make the world exactly the way we wish it to be, in other words, the totalitarian desire to control the lives of others.

So if totalitarianism was made possible only by advances in technology and science, it could not have come into its fullest form before the nineteenth century. (1) In The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) and its parable "The Grand Inquisitor," Fyodor Dostoyevsky anticipated the arrival of the real-life totalitarian. But who was that person? I can't say for sure, but I think that, whether it was Mussolini in Italy or Stalin in Russia, the first was in place by the mid 1920s. A better case might be made that Lenin (1870-1924) was the first, but if I read my history correctly, his communist revolution was not fully in power until the early 1920s, shortly before his death in January 1924. Lenin certainly had a desire for total control. In that he was recognized by his younger countryman, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937), author of the novel We.

We, written in 1920-1921 or 1919-1921 and published in English in 1924, is a novel of a dystopian and totalitarian society. There had been dystopian novels before, but We may have been the first in which a single figure--the totalitarian dictator--sits at the pinnacle. He is called the Well-Doer (or Benefactor, depending on the translation). His domain is the United State (or One State). Although the Well-Doer appeared at about the same time that Lenin was consolidating his power, as a totalitarian, the former may have preceded the latter, if only by a little.

Tales of dystopia are familiar to us now. We is echoed in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis (1943), 1984 by George Orwell (1948), The World Inside by Robert Silverberg (1971), THX-1138 (1971), Logan's Run (1976), Brazil (1985), and even Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978). It may have been the first fully modern dystopia, however, and could easily have been published yesterday rather than ninety years ago.

We is an extremely rich book, too rich for a blog posting. The best thing to do is to read it for yourself. Before offering a few quotes, I should tell you that the protagonist and narrator, D-503, is an engineer working on the construction of an interplanetary spacecraft called the Integral. He is also a follower of the State and not in open or sustained rebellion despite his falling in crazy love with a rebel, I-330. (2)

The book opens with an article in the State newspaper: "Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy."

"We walked again--a million-headed body; and in each one of us resided that humble joyfulness with which in all probability molecules, atoms, and phagocytes live.

In the ancient days the Christians understood this feeling; they are our only, though very imperfect, direct forerunners. The greatness of the 'Church of the United Flock' was known to them. They knew that resignation is virtue, and pride a vice; that 'We' is from 'God,''I' from the devil."

On the eve of the Day of Unanimity, that is, election day: "Tomorrow we shall again hand over to our Well-Doer the keys to the impregnable fortress of our happiness. . . . [The elections] remind us that we are a united, powerful organism of millions of cells, that . . . we are a united church. . . . [On election day, in which there is no secret voting] I see them all vote for the Well-Doer, and everybody sees me vote for the Well-Doer. How could it be otherwise, since 'all' and 'I' are one 'we'?"

On the Day of Unanimity, the Well-Doer makes his entrance by air: "It was He, descending to us from the sky, He--the new Jehovah--in an aero, He, as wise and as lovingly cruel as the Jehovah of the ancients."

I-330, the rebel, speaks: "There are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One leads into blessed quietude, to happy equilibrium, the other to the destruction of equilibrium, to torturingly perpetual motion. Our, or rather your ancestors, the Christians, worshiped entropy like a God. But we are not Christians. . . . " (3) And an image from a story told by I-330: ". . . endless strings of people driven into the City to be saved by force and to be whipped into happiness."

D-503 speaks to I-330 on a plot by the rebels to seize the Integral: "It is inconceivable! It is absurd! Is it not clear to you that what you are planning is a revolution? Absurd because a revolution is impossible! Because our--I speak for myself and for you--our revolution was the last one. No other revolutions may occur. Everybody knows that." Her response: As there is no last number, there can be no last revolution.

Then, another article appears in the State newspaper (abridged here, with ellipses added) announcing an innovation:

"REJOICE!

For from now on we are perfect! Until today your own creation, engines, were more perfect than you.

WHY? . . . .

MECHANISMS HAVE NO FANCY. . . .

It [your imperfection] is not your fault; you are ill. And the name of your illness is:

FANCY.

It is a worm that gnaws black wrinkles on one's forehead. It is a fever that drives one to run further and further, even though 'further' may begin where happiness ends. It is the last barricade on our road to happiness.

Rejoice! This Barricade Has Been Blasted at Last! The Road Is Open!

The latest discovery of our State science is that there is a center for fancy--a miserable little nervous knot in the lower region of the frontal lobe of the brain. A triple treatment of this knot with x-rays will cure you of fancy,

Forever!

You are perfect; you are mechanized; the road to one-hundred-percent happiness is open! Hasten then all of you . . . to undergo the Great Operation!"

Later: ". . . a wide column of about fifty people--the word 'people' is not the right one. These were heavy-wheeled automatons seemingly bound in iron and moved by an invisible mechanism. Not people, but a sort of human-like tractor. Over their heads . . . a white banner: 'We are the first! We have already been operated upon! Follow us, all of you!"

And: "Go up to them [who are performing the Operation]. There they will cure you; there they will overfeed you with that leavened happiness. . . . Foolish people! Don't you realize that they want to liberate you from these gnawing, worm-like, torturing question marks? And you remain standing here and listening to me? Quick! Up! To the great operation!"

A rebellious D-503 goes before the Well-Doer (as Christ goes before the Grand Inquisitor), who questions him: "What was it that man from his diaper age dreamed of, tormented himself for, prayed for? He longed for that day when someone would tell him what happiness is, and then would chain him to it. What else are we doing now? The ancient dream about paradise . . . [ellipses in the original] Remember: there in paradise they know no desires any more, no pity, no love; there they are all-blessed. An operation has been performed upon their center of fancy; that is why they are blessed, angels, servants of God . . . [ditto] And now, at the very moment when we have caught up with that dream [. . .] At that moment when all that was left for us was to adorn our prize and distribute it among all in equal pieces, at that very moment you, you . . . " The Well-Doer breaks off.

In the end, D-503 undergoes the great operation himself and recounts that he has appeared before the Well-Doer "and told him everything known to me about the enemies of happiness. Why, before, it had seemed hard for me to go, I cannot understand. The only explanation seems to be my illness--my soul."

No longer in rebellion himself and in conformity with the desires of the State, D-503 closes his narrative, even as rebellion continues elsewhere: "Tomorrow they [some rebellious people] will all ascend the steps to the Machine of the Well-Doer . . . to our regret there are still quantities of Numbers [i.e., people] who have betrayed reason. . . . And I hope we win. More than that; I am certain we shall win. For reason must prevail."

Here, then, are the elements of the totalitarian threat that is as alive today as ever before: a perfection of "happiness" based on mathematics, science, and so-called reason; the use of force to bring about that state of "happiness"; the desire among the masses to surrender themselves to the State, to give up the self in favor of identification with and submersion in the masses, and to demonize if not eradicate the individual (the rebels call themselves the "Mephi" for Mephistopheles); the desire also to worship the State and to deify the leader of the State; a third desire, to make life and human existence entirely orderly, absent of love and emotion, absent of change or counterrevolution; a reduction of what makes us human to a purely material phenomenon--"a center for fancy--a miserable little nervous knot in the lower region of the frontal lobe of the brain"--which can be treated through a scientific process; dehumanization and mechanization of human beings, or turning human beings into machines or undifferentiated cogs in a machine; a need among human beings to surrender freedom for the sake of "happiness"; the equal distribution of the benefits of the State and of mass living among the masses; ultimately, total soulless conformity and uniformity.

The novel is called We (4), and it's about enforced conformity, uniformity, and the surrender of the individual self in favor of an identification with and submersion in the masses. Those forces have been with us since the beginning of time, but only with the developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were they made practicable.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) I would say we're still not at a point where totalitarianism can come into its fullest form, for, by a combination of genetics, neuroscience, medicine, and psychology, the aspiring totalitarian hopes to remove the human soul from the the human person and thus create a perfect slave for his perfect society.

(2) As in Biblical Eden, it is the woman in dystopian society who tempts the man into a fallen state, i.e., a state of freedom: I-330 in We, LUH-3417 in THX-1138, Jessica 6 in Logan's Run, and Jill Layton in Brazil.

(3) There is an identification throughout We of the people as a mass with the early Christians. Eric Hoffer made the same association in The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements (1951).

(4) As in "We are the ones we have been waiting for" and "We are the government," but certainly not "We, the People." People of today, animated by the totalitarian impulse, cannot claim the U.S. Constitution as their own, for it is a document against them and their brand of tyranny, in favor of man as an individual, and against the idea of men as masses or mobs.

↧

Entropy and Energy

October 2, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: We Walk with Zombies

≪ Previous: The First Totalitarian-We

I could go on and on about totalitarianism. You might say that I already have. There are reasons for that, though, for I think that totalitarianism has some bearing on the question of a monster for the twenty-first century.

Like I've said, I think the monster of the twenty-first century is a hybrid--part supernatural, part scientific, and partly drawn from real life. By embracing science, we have all decided that the supernatural simply won't do. Every phenomenon must have a scientific, rationalistic, materialistic explanation. The problem is that the scientific monster lacks atavistic power, and so we return to the supernatural monsters of the past. Physically (as opposed to intellectually) terrifying, they lurk beyond the edge of the firelight, forever seeking to kill and devour us. In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," H.P. Lovecraft wrote: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Fear was with us at the beginning, as depicted in the opening wordless sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Fear is still with us today, despite all the assurances and material comforts offered by science. In other words, despite our living in a scientific age, our monsters are essentially the same supernatural monsters of old--often undead, always preying upon us--dressed up with a scientific explanation.

Our monsters are also drawn from real life. They must be, for we can't have supernatural monsters in a scientific age (as Fritz Leiber, Jr., pointed out). At the same time, the scientific monster has failed to manifest itself. So what is left? In my taxonomy of monsters, I created a category for real-life monsters, explained by science. It includes the psychopath and the totalitarian. (1) Like the psychopath, our monsters are among us, look like us, and prey upon us. But because a psychopath is presumably a human being, he must dehumanize us before he kills us. In other words, he turns us into an object first, for I think we're not well made for killing each other if we recognize each other as human beings. Inhuman monsters, monsters from the outside, were never faced with that dilemma.

The problem with the psychopath is that there is only one of him. Not "Always more of us, fewer of you," but always more of us and upon his capture and execution, fewer of him. That's where the totalitarian comes in. The totalitarian is essentially a psychopath with political power. Armed with a powerful idea, he is able to--or I should say required to--recruit followers to his creed. "Always more of us, fewer of you." In so doing, he must dehumanize his followers, not only so he can oppress, enslave, and kill them (if necessary), but also so he can turn them into a soulless, regimented, and entirely uniform mass. The perfect follower is like a robot or zombie.

I have also written so much about totalitarianism because of the questions facing us in science fiction and in the real world. The first question is this: Is science fiction dying? Some say yes, some no. I'm inclined to say no, if only for the reason that we live in a science fiction world. More and more every day, speculative ideas are placed before us. What if everyone had his own personal fleet of nano-drones that he could use to spy on his neighbors? What if everyone had a cellphone not in her hand but implanted in her brain? What if you could choose your own genes at any time of the day or night, thus changing your identity and appearance at will? The possibilities are endless. I'm also inclined to say that science fiction isn't dying because it is so pervasive, seemingly in every movie, TV show, comic book, and video game. The science fiction of today might not be the science fiction of the 1950s through the 1970s (2), but it seems to be thriving, two of its sub-genres in particular.

"There are two forces in the world, entropy and energy," says I-330, the rebel in the novel We. "One leads into blessed quietude, to happy equilibrium, the other to the destruction of equilibrium, to torturingly perpetual motion." In her formulation, entropy--"blessed quietude,""happy equilibrium"--is represented by the United State, with the Well-Doer at its head, in other words, a dystopian, totalitarian society. Energy on the other hand can be all kinds of things. A free and rising society is energetic. So is a society in revolt or rebellion, at war, or simply seeking to survive.

It's not quite a perfect fit, but those two poles, entropy and energy, are represented in science fiction today by two popular sub-genres, dystopia and apocalypse. Both may result from decadence in a society. Both may also represent opposing forces, not in society, but in the individual. Dystopia is totalitarian. It is the fantasy of the Leftist or Statist while a nightmare for the rest of us. Dystopia is also entropic: a perfect, static, well-ordered society of undifferentiated and obedient masses. (3) Apocalypse on the other hand is chaotic and individualistic. It, too, is a fantasy, though not necessarily something wished for. With an apocalypse and its aftermath, society becomes disordered and returns to basic things. It's every man for himself. Only the fittest survive. There are aspiring totalitarians in the world today. There are also people preparing for an apocalypse.

By definition, a decadent society is lacking in energy. It seems to me that the only possible end is dissolution, either by the creation of a totalitarian society (thus, by I-330's formulation, entering a state of entropy), by war, rebellion, or revolution (thus restoring energy), or by violent catastrophe (thus a return to beginnings). There is reason to believe we're living in a time of decadence. Our fantasies extend to those three possibilities. (4)

Now enters the zombie.

Notes

(1) I overlooked a couple of real-life monsters. One is the cultist. The other is the microbe. I'll write about the cultist after I finish this series and the microbe before.

(2) That might be why the question is asked: Is science fiction dying? It could be simply a question of nostalgia with a hint of decadence.

(3) Remember here the words of D-503: "It is inconceivable! It is absurd! Is it not clear to you that what you are planning is a revolution? Absurd because a revolution is impossible! Because our--I speak for myself and for you--our revolution was the last one. No other revolutions may occur. Everybody knows that." Remember also the words of Carlos Fuentes: "Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror."

(4) Some science fiction writers project a dystopian or decadent society into outer space. I'm not sure such a thing is possible. Reaching for the stars requires vigor--energy. When our society was more vigorous, we first imagined going into outer space through science fiction, then we realized it through our manned spaceflight program. Today, we are unable to send a man or woman into space without the help of a decadent society, Russia. What does that say about us and our future? In We, D-503 is building a rocketship to travel to planets that might still be "in the primitive state of freedom." The Soviet Union also had manned spaceflight, but it collapsed before ever reaching the moon. It's worth noting that at about the same time Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing We, the Bolsheviks were waging war against Poland in an attempt to spread their revolution into Europe. With that, the rocketship Integral can be interpreted as a symbol of Marxist-Leninism. The Bolshevik offensive in Poland failed miserably. We can be eternally grateful to the Poles for saving the West not once but twice from a totalitarian system: in 1920 against the advancing Bolsheviks, and in 1683, when they defeated Muslim Turks at the Battle of Vienna.

↧

We Walk with Zombies

October 3, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: A Monster for the Twenty-First Century

≪ Previous: Entropy and Energy

"While sick, he had dreamed the whole world was condemned to suffer a terrible, unprecedented, and unparalleled plague. . . . Except for a small handful of the chosen, all were doomed to perish. . . . Those infected were seized immediately and went mad. . . . Whole settlements, whole cities and nations, were infected and went mad. . . . People killed each other with senseless rage. . . . [T]he soldiers flung themselves upon each other, slashed and stabbed, ate and devoured each other."

--from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)

As I write this, the news is that the ebola virus has come to the United States. The threat of plague may be real or not. Fear remains. In 1954, Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend was published. In it, one man stands against a hoard of what he calls vampires infected by disease. In the 1980s and '90s, as AIDS was spreading or at least still on people's minds, vampires were extraordinarily popular. Was there a connection? Maybe. Maybe not.

Today, zombies have replaced vampires as the monster du jour. Contemporary zombies are distinctly different from the original, however. The original was a supernatural creature, created by man to be his slave. That's the kind of creature that appeared in the first zombie movie, White Zombie (1932), and in I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Times and the zombie have changed. In I Am Legend, Richard Matheson called his monsters vampires. When I read the book this summer, I saw the contemporary zombie in them. George A. Romero alone is responsible for that.

I Am Legend was published in 1954. Ten years later, the book was adapted to the silver screen as The Last Man on Earth. In 1968, Night of the Living Dead, co-written and directed by George Romero, came out. Since then, nearly every zombie movie has depicted his version of the monster as a soulless, ravenous, and cannibalistic carrier of a plague, rather than the original version of the manmade and supernatural zombie. Mr. Romero has acknowledged his debt to Matheson's book. In that book, vampires became scientified, that is, they were explained by science rather than by the supernatural. In Night of the Living Dead, vampires became zombified.

Like vampires, zombies are of the undead. Originally, both were supernatural creatures, and although the vampire can recruit more vampires, only a living human being could create a zombie. Now both can be explained by science, by an affliction of the blood in vampires, by some pathogen in zombies. Both are presumably eternal, though soulless, and can perish only by being killed. (1) One difference is that the vampire is aware of his state, while the zombie is oblivious. (2) The vampire can also act under his own volition, while the zombie is driven purely by its insatiable hunger. Both have a taste for flesh and blood. Both were once human but now are not. They need not dehumanize their prey before killing it, because they themselves have become dehumanized. They no longer have any compunction about killing. And in killing, they literally dehumanize their prey, in other words, they turn a human being into something non-human.

Both look human, the vampire more so than the zombie. The vampire can pass among us, whereas the zombie cannot. Both are also capable of recruiting new members. Significantly, both do so by biting, just as the original monsters--carnivorous animals--killed us with their teeth. Vampires tend to be solitary. They recruit new members slowly. Zombies on the other hand are always in masses and recruit new members exponentially. Both represent decadence. The vampire as we know him (except for the scientific explanation) dates from the fin de siècle and Bram Stoker's Gothic horror novel Dracula (1897). (3) The zombie as we know it dates from 1968 and The Night of the Living Dead but has become wildly popular only in recent years. (4) There is of course reason to believe we are living in an age of decadence.

One very significant difference between vampires and zombies is that some people like vampires and want to be one of them. There is the sexual attraction, too, I guess, and the attraction of eternal life. A Gothic decadence has some appeal as well. Nobody wants to be a zombie, though. People may dress up as zombies and go on zombie walks at Halloween time, but that's all in good fun. In movies and TV shows, every human being fights tooth and nail to survive, to preserve his humanity and his individuality, to prevent his being made a mindless, soulless, emotionless zombie.

With vampires, human society remains. Vampire society exists among ours in a state of perpetual decay. The people who like vampires and want to be one of them have fallen into a state of ennui or entropy. They have a desire to die. With zombies, human society is threatened. It can't survive alongside zombie society. We must fight back to preserve our humanity and individuality. That requires energy and vigor. There is a desire to live.

As in a totalitarian dystopia, zombies are uniform, undifferentiated, soulless masses. They are essentially slaves, though not to an animating idea but to their appetite for human flesh. We don't speak of a zombie dystopia, however. Instead, the expression is zombie apocalypse. Instead of order and entropy, there is chaos. Society disappears, leaving the individual and his clan or tribe to fight alone for their existence. So what do they fight against? It seems to me that they fight against dehumanization, conformity, uniformity, and becoming one of the masses. They fight in favor of their own humanity, identity, and individuality. I think that goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of zombies. That fight is in all of us. We all want to be human.

Notes

(1) I'm still not sure how zombies can exist in a continuing state of decay, but then our society exists in a continuing state of decay and has for who knows how long.

(2) Thanks to Stephen Richter for pointing that out.

(3) The period and the genre are and were about decadence.

(4) I wonder if any monster has ever been as popular or as pervasive in popular culture as zombies are today.

↧

A Monster for the Twenty-First Century

October 4, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Red Robes and Cultists

≪ Previous: We Walk with Zombies

When I started this series, I didn't have an answer to the question What is the monster of the twenty-first century? The answer has occurred to me along the way. I say the answer. What I should say is an answer.

There is reason to believe that zombies are the monster of the twenty-first century. If that's true and our current situation persists, then zombies should have some real staying power, even if they are rotting to pieces. Richard Matheson of all people threw a wrench in the works of that idea though. In I Am Legend (1954) he wrote:

Historians wrote of bubonic plague. Robert Neville [Matheson's protagonist] was inclined to believe that the vampire had caused it.

No, not the vampire. For now, it appeared, that prowling, vulpine ghost was as much a tool of the germ as the living innocents who were originally afflicted. It was the germ that was the villain. The germ that hid behind obscuring veils of legend and superstition, spreading its scourge while people cringed before their own fears. (1)

So are zombies merely victims of disease? Do we have them because we fear contagion? Or does the omnipresence of zombies mean something more? A fear of contagion is certainly legitimate, for plague brings death to your door. But if the fear of zombies is the fear of disease, then in past plagues there should have been monsters, each for its own time. In 1919, as the Spanish influenza ravaged the world, Der Orchideengarten, the world's first magazine of fantasy, horror, and weird fiction, was published in Germany. I would attribute the appearance of that magazine to war, decadence, and a certain nostalgia, and not to a fear of germs. The same is probably true for the horror and monster movies of the 1920s and '30s. But what about witches and the Black Plague? Some people believe there is a connection between the two. And what about other past plagues and past monsters? Is there a connection there? It's an interesting idea and one worth delving into, but if I go too far with that, I'll wander off track.

***

I was tempted early on to think that zombies are the monster of the twenty-first century. After all, they are extremely popular and in all things today. I think they're even more popular than vampires, the monsters that preceded them. Even the Federal government and public universities have studied the idea of a zombie apocalypse, all to do with the spread of disease, an idea that might be inseparable from the idea of zombies. By necessity, zombies move in masses. Their goal is to feed, but by feeding, they also reproduce. In those two things, they're like bacteria or viruses, and we're back to where we started.

***

As I thought about it more, it occurred to me that zombies might be only a representation of the monster of our times. One way to look at them is that they represent the hoards of hungry, murderous people who would wander the earth after a societal collapse, that is, after an apocalypse. (2) They look human (in a monstrous way) and they ape human behavior, but they are no longer human--they have literally been dehumanized--so they're fair game. You can shoot them down without any compunction or guilt. In that way, zombies become part of a fantasy about a return to primitivism and chaos, the opposite of dystopian progress and perfect order. That fantasy may not be something wished for exactly, but it can be fun to entertain the question of What would I do? For some, the fantasy stops there, or with movies, TV shows, comic books, or video games. For others, the fantasy extends to preparing for apocalypse. Prepping itself has gone beyond a hobby and has become an industry and a way of life. A while back, a man in Florida ate another man's face. People planning for and fearing an outbreak jumped at that. Now we have Ebola in America and our thoughts go to survival.

Whatever the case may be, the fantasy of the zombie apocalypse may reflect a discontent with civilization, a longing to test oneself in a primitive struggle for survival, or a desire of the individualist to resist mass living. It goes without saying that zombies are not human and not individuals. They lack souls, minds, and emotions. They can no longer love. They no longer have free will, individuality, or human identity. They travel in hoards or masses with the sole aim of killing you and eating you, thereby converting you into one of them. "Always more of us, fewer of you." You can say that zombies have a mass mind (if any mind at all), like the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. They are a force for conformity and against individuality, in favor of man as an enslaved mass and against man as a free and individual human being. We all seek to assert our freedom, our individuality, and our humanity. Zombies are against us and all that we are.

***

If you were young in the 1980s, movies were made for you. There was The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and many more. No one will ever make movies like that again, but at least we have them in our past. Teen movies had their villains. Usually it was the arrogant popular kid or snotty preppy girl. I remember asking myself when I watched those movies, "Do the jerks at school recognize themselves in these movies? Or do they identify with the protagonist?" I think they probably identified with the protagonist, just like the rest of us. Today, when we watch zombie movies or TV shows, we see ourselves as the human beings and not as the zombies. But what if we are the zombies, or at the very least, what if there are zombies already among us? Do the zombies among us recognize themselves as zombies? Or do they still identify with the human beings? As I've said, we all have a totalitarian impulse within us. And because we live in a democratic society, we all have the power to oppress, enslave, and prey upon our fellow human beings. I think some are more inclined to do so than others. But if you have any desire to control the lives of other people, to dehumanize other people, to force them to conform, to deny their humanity or individuality, to render them a mass--if you have ever subscribed to the formula I cannot be happy if you are free--you might be, to paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, a zombie.

So in answer to the question What is the monster of the twenty-first century? I would suggest that we are that monster. (3) Rather, those people over there are the monsters and we are the human beings, for we always see ourselves as special and others as unworthy or contemptible. In any case, we have refused the supernatural monster as not being scientific. On the other hand, science has fallen short in providing monsters equal to the supernatural monsters of the past. That leaves real life and a revelation I had many years ago that the only real monsters in this world are human.

And so ends this series.

Notes

(1) From the Berkeley Medallion edition (1971), p. 87.

(2) In The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006), those groups of men are, like zombies, cannibalistic. Implicit in Mr. McCarthy's view is that there isn't any need to resort to zombies as monsters when human beings play the part so well. The old saying is "Man is a wolf to man." I wouldn't impugn wolves in that way. It's more accurate to say that man is a man to man.
(3) We, the title of Yevgeny Zamyatin's book. I wrote above on the possibility of microbes as monsters. Here is a quote from We: "[The elections] remind us that we are a united, powerful organism of millions of cells . . . ."

↧

Red Robes and Cultists

October 5, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: They Should Have Been in Weird Tales-Introduction

≪ Previous: A Monster for the Twenty-First Century

In writing about a monster for our times, I left out the cultist. Cultists were everywhere in the pulps of the 1920s and '30s. I count a dozen covers of Weird Tales showing cultists, satanists, or men in red robes or cloaks. I'm not sure why red robes and cultists were so popular in those days. There were plenty of cults and cult-like religions floating around to be sure. "I AM" Activity, Thelema, and Theosophy are three small examples. There were larger cults as well, the dangerous and deadly cults of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. A guy in a red robe is pretty safe by comparison. The point is that a cult is a totalitarian system. The head of the cult falls into the category of the real-life monster. Science fiction birthed one of the worst of them. His scary followers are still with us, decades after the end of the pulp-fiction era.

Weird Tales, July 1928. Cover story: "The Witches' Sabbath" by Stephen Brody. Cover art by C.C. Senf. The artist Senf was always good with women, costume, and the trappings of Gothic horror and fantasy. He was after all European by birth and training. His was the first of the red-robed cultist covers for Weird Tales.

Weird Tales, May 1929. Cover story: "The Scourge of B'Moth" by Bertram Russell. Cover art by C.C. Senf. Here the cultist is Oriental but the woman is still a redhead. Those aren't wrinkles on the cover: it's the crocodile's breath.

Weird Tales, Feb. 1932. Cover story: "The Devil's Bride" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. More red robes, more menace, but the woman now has dark hair. She looks a little like Joan Crawford.

Weird Tales, Dec. 1933. Cover story: None. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

Weird Tales, Jan. 1934. Cover story: "The Red Knife of Hassan" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. With Brundage you get blondes.

Weird Tales, Feb. 1935. Cover story: "The Web of Living Death" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. Here the hair colors come in Neapolitan flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. I'm not sure if these guys are cultists, but they're definitely up to no good. The one on the left has a cat-o'-nine-tails, the torture weapon of choice in the pulps.

Weird Tales, Aug. 1935. Cover story: "Doctor Satan" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. This was the first Doctor Satan story in Weird Tales. I believe the character caused some controversy. Some readers liked him, some thought he made the magazine too much like other pulps with their weird heroes. Dr. Satan must have sold books because he kept coming back.

Weird Tales, Mar. 1936. Cover story: "The Albino Deaths" by Ronal Kayser. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. This was the era of weird menace. Note the blurb on the cover: "weird tortures in a ghastly abode of horrors." That's a pretty tall pile of clichés. The cover has all the required elements, too: a beautiful, shapely, and scantily clad woman, a weird menace villain in a red robe, and a cat-o'-nine-tails.

Weird Tales, May 1936. Cover story: "The Devil's Double" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage. Doctor Satan returns.

Weird Tales, Oct. 1936. Cover story: "Isle of the Undead" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Cover art by J. Allen St. John.

Weird Tales, Apr. 1938. Cover story: "The Garden of Adompha" by Clark Ashton Smith. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. There's always a tendril of hair or vine or smoke covering up parts of a woman's body. Virgil Finlay relied pretty heavily on that device, as in this cover illustration. I'm not sure that the man is a cultist, but he's dressed for the part.

Weird Tales, Jan. 1952 Cover story: "The Black Island" by August Derleth. Cover art by John Arfstrom. Fourteen years passed before the next and last red robe (if I have done my research correctly). The artist, Jon Arfstrom, may be the only living cover artist from the original run of Weird Tales.

↧

They Should Have Been in Weird Tales-Introduction

October 6, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)-Part 1

≪ Previous: Red Robes and Cultists

Weird Tales was founded by Jacob Clark Henneberger (1890-1969), a Pennsylvanian by birth and a writer and publisher by trade. Henneberger arrived in the Midwest in 1919 and by the following year was in Chicago. In a letter to Joel Frieman from near the end of his life, Henneberger remembered:

Before the advent of Weird Tales, I had talked with such nationally known writers as Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, Ben Hecht and other writers then living in Chicago. I discovered that all of them expressed a desire to submit for publication a story of the unconventional type but hesitated to do so for fear of rejection. (1)

Long a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, Henneberger conceived of a magazine that might offer a safe place for well-known writers to delve “into the realms of fantasy, the bizarre, and the outré.” (2) That magazine was of course Weird Tales, and the first issue was dated March 1923.

A poet once wrote that the saddest of words are, “It might have been.” The history of Weird Tales helps bear out that adage. At the end of the magazine’s first year, for example, J.C. Henneberger offered H.P. Lovecraft editorship of Weird Tales if Lovecraft would move to Chicago. Lovecraft famously declined. But what of those first named writers? Who were they and did they ever contribute to “The Unique Magazine”? The answer to the second part of that question is easy enough, for neither Hamlin Garland, nor Emerson Hough, nor Ben Hecht wrote for Weird Tales. The answer to the first part takes a little more digging.

First: Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)

Notes

(1) Reprinted in WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, edited by Robert Weinberg (1974), p. 4.

(2) WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, p. 4.

This series originally appeared on the website of the new Weird Tales magazine. That website is no longer in existence; the only place you can read this series is here.

An extraordinary photograph of the Chicago skyline at about the time J.C. Henneberger moved his editorial offices from Indianapolis to the City of the Big Shoulders. The caption below comes from a source on the Internet:

This photograph was probably taken in 1925, since the vantage point seems to be the Tribune Tower (1925). The London Guarantee and Accident Building (1923; now 360 North Michigan Avenue), and both the Wrigley Building (1921) and its Annex (1924) are completed, while Wacker Drive, which opened in 1926, is under construction. Grant Park is still largely undeveloped. Illinois Central facilities dominate the area south of the river and east of the buildings that line the east side of a widened Michigan Avenue. Photographer: Kaufmann & Fabry Source: Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-51173).
http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/10405.html

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They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)-Part 1

October 7, 2014, 3:00 am

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Hamlin Garland was born on September 14 or 16, 1860, near West Salem, Wisconsin, and grew up on farms in Iowa and the Dakotas. After years of toil on what was then sometimes called the Middle Border, Garland retreated to Boston, where he educated himself and began writing stories of the places he had left behind. Main-Travelled Roads (1891) was his first book. Others—with titles such as Prairie Folks (1893), Prairie Songs (1893), and Boy Life on the Prairie (1899)—followed. In the early 1900s, Garland wrote romances of the Mountain West. In later years he returned to a Midwestern setting in his semi-autobiographical account, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), and its three sequels. Main-Travelled Roads and A Son of the Middle Border are considered his strongest works. However, Garland won a Pulitzer Prize for A Daughter of the Middle Border in 1922.

Even as a young man, Hamlin Garland was interested in topics from the fringes. He was an early advocate of Henry George’s idea of the single tax. More to the point, Garland was interested in psychic phenomena, the subject of his last two books, Forty Years of Psychic Research (1936) and The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939). Although he lived in Chicago from 1893 to 1915 or 1916, Garland had relocated to New York by the time J.C. Henneberger was in Chicago. Henneberger may have known him only as a visitor to or part-time resident of that city. In any case, Hamlin Garland—by then a published author of dozens of books—was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1922. A few months later Weird Tales made its debut. If Garland ever talked to Henneberger about writing stories for a magazine of weird fiction, the idea may have just slipped away after 1922. Garland continued to write even to the end of his life. In 1932, he moved to California to be near his daughters and for the sake of his wife’s health. Eight years later, on March 4, 1940, Hamlin Garland died in his Hollywood home at age seventy-nine.

To be continued . . .

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They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)-Part 2

October 8, 2014, 3:00 am

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In 1899, Hamlin Garland married Zulime Mauna Taft, sister of the renowned Chicago sculptor and teacher Lorado Taft. Together the Garlands had two daughters, Mary Isabel Garland and Constance Hamlin Garland. Born four years apart, the two were close to each other and to their parents, especially their father. The younger daughter, Constance, was an illustrator, a portraitist, and her father’s secretary. Described by her own daughter as “the wild child, the flapper, the adventuress,” she was married three times, her first husband being Joseph Wesley Harper, grandson of the founder of Harper books. (1) The older daughter, Mary Isabel, called Isabel, was a stage performer before following in her father’s footsteps as a published author. Her first book was Abandon Hope (1941), a mystery novel with a jacket illustration by her sister. Her last was A Summer To Be: A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland, published posthumously in 2010.

In 1926, Isabel Garland married Hardesty Johnson, first tenor and leader of the Jean de Reszke Singers. She found the love of her life, however, in another author for whom she divorced her first husband in the mid-1930s. She and her new husband were together for a little over a decade before their marriage collapsed in 1947. In 1955, three days before Christmas, he killed himself. Isabel and Constance Garland survived their husbands and lived into their eighties. They died within three days of each other in the same hospital room.

Like the Garland sisters, Isabel Garland’s second husband was a Chicagoan. Born Mindred Loeb in 1903, he was writing for pulp magazines when he met Isabel in the mid-1930s. They were married in 1936 and collaborated on four mystery novels under the name Garland Lord. In the mid-1940s, he broke into the movie business as a writer of stories and screenplays. Later he worked in television. Through all that, Mindred Loeb lived and worked under an assumed name. Readers of Weird Tales might recognize it, for, as Mindret Lord, he wrote five stories for the magazine between 1934 and 1943. In the early 1920s, J.C. Henneberger perhaps envisioned a magazine with Hamlin Garland’s byline on the cover. Garland never wrote for Weird Tales, but his son-in-law did. And if Isabel Garland Lord was her husband’s co-writer—credited or not—then so, too, did Hamlin Garland’s daughter.

Next: Emerson Hough (1857-1923)

Notes

(1) The quote is from Victoria Doyle-Jones’ foreword to A Summer To Be: A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland by Isabel Garland Lord (2010), p. 6.

Abandon Hope by Isabel Garland (1941) with a jacket illustration by her sister, Constance Garland.

Crimen en la Noche (1946), a Spanish-language version of a book by Isabel Garland. The illustrations on the covers of these two books are similar, but are they the same story?

Murder with Love by Garland Lord, pseudonym of Isabel Garland and her husband Mindret Lord, whose name was also a pseudonym for Mindred Loeb.

Murder's Little Helper (1941) by the same writing team.

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They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Emerson Hough (1857-1923)

October 9, 2014, 3:00 am

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If Jacob Clark Henneberger, founder of Weird Tales, wanted Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, and Ben Hecht for his new magazine, he came up empty on all three counts. Although each of the three delved “into the realms of fantasy, the bizarre, and the outré,” in the end, none contributed to “The Unique Magazine.” (1) Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) held a lifelong interest in psychic phenomena, yet he seems to have produced little if any fantasy fiction or weird fiction. Beyond that, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1922. At a penny per word, he could hardly have been induced into contributing to Weird Tales as the decade progressed. Ben Hecht (1894-1964), on the other hand, was a devoted Fortean and an author of fantasy. Younger than Garland by a generation, he was nonetheless up-and-coming by 1923, the year Weird Tales made its debut. If he was ever interested in writing for the magazine, his career, like a rocket, carried him away to New York and to Hollywood soon after. In 1928, he won an Oscar for his original screenplay for Underworld. By the 1930s, Hecht was making thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars every month for his work in the movies. Writing for the pulps would have been far behind him by then.

Emerson Hough, the second name in Henneberger’s list, was, like Hamlin Garland, well established by the early 1920s. Born on June 28, 1857, in Newton, Iowa, he graduated from the University of Iowa in 1880, was admitted to the bar in 1882, and began his writing career that same year with an article in Forest and Stream. A friend and supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, Hough was a man of vigor and accomplishment. And, like Roosevelt, he was an outdoorsman and a conservationist. Hough wrote articles, stories, plays, history, biography, and autobiography, but he was most well known as an author of Westerns, including The Story of the Cowboy (1897), The Story of the Outlaw (1906), 54-40 or Fight (1909), and The Covered Wagon (1922). Hough’s first book, however, was a children’s fantasy, The Singing Mouse Stories, from 1895. More than a decade later, Hough published another fantasy, The King of Gee-Whiz (1906), with lyrics by a fellow Chicago writer, Wilbur Dick Nesbit, and illustrations by Oscar E. Cesare. (2)

Though not widely read today, Emerson Hough was, in his lifetime, a very popular writer. Between 1895 and 1923, he averaged more than one book per year, and his stories were adapted to almost a dozen movies, most from the silent era. In all likelihood he would have found a publisher for any product of his pen during the early twentieth century. He need not have feared rejection from any magazine, even if he had submitted “a story of the unconventional type.” (2) Hough’s two early works of fantasy may not have been well suited to Weird Tales, but one of his last books, Mother of Gold (also called Madre d’Oro), had some fantastic elements, including (according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) scrying and a Lost World setting. Unfortunately, Hough was unable to submit that or any other story to Weird Tales, for on April 30, 1923, a week after seeing the Chicago premiere of The Covered Wagon, the movie based on his book, Emerson Hough died in Evanston, Illinois. The first issue of Weird Tales had been dated only a month before. (4)

Next: Ben Hecht (1894-1964)

Notes

(1) The quote is from a letter by Henneberger to Joel Frieman, reprinted in WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, edited by Robert Weinberg (1974), p. 4.

(2) If you’re looking for connections, cartoonist and illustrator Oscar E. Cesare (1885-1948) was married—though briefly—to the daughter of O. Henry, who did in fact contribute to Weird Tales, though posthumously.

(3) Again, quoted from a letter by Jacob Clark Henneberger to Joel Frieman, reprinted in WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, p. 4.

(4) Before Hough’s death, the Chicago Tribune arranged to publish Mother of Gold in serial form. The serial ran in the Tribune’s Sunday magazine beginning July 29, 1923.

Emerson Hough (1857-1923), photograph from George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-ggbain-04852).

The King of Gee Whiz, a children's fantasy written by Emerson Hough with lyrics by Wilbur Dick Nesbit and illustrations by Oscar E. Cesare (1906).

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They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Ben Hecht (1894-1964)-Part 1

October 10, 2014, 3:00 am

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J.C. Henneberger named three Chicago writers who he thought might contribute to Weird Tales. Of the three, Ben Hecht was undoubtedly the best fit. Born on February 28, 1894, in New York City, Hecht moved with his family to Racine, Wisconsin, as a youngster. Graduating high school at age sixteen, Hecht ran away to Chicago to begin his career as a journalist for the Chicago Journal, later for the Chicago Daily News and for his own paper, the Chicago Literary Times (1). His first play was published in 1914, his first novel, Erik Dorn, in 1921.

In 1920, Hecht played detective in helping to crack a real-life murder, "The Case of the Ragged Stranger." His work on that case earned him his first fame. On June 21, 1921, exactly a year after the murder had taken place, Hecht began a newspaper column in the Chicago Daily News. Entitled "Around the Town: A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," Hecht's column was very influential for presenting for the first time

the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature . . . . (2)

For the next sixteen months, Hecht told stories of life in the streets, saloons, and backrooms of Chicago. "I ran everywhere in the city," he wrote, "like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold." He was just twenty-eight years old when his column came to an end in October 1922. (3)

Hecht's first works of fantasy were the novel Fantazius Mallare, A Mysterious Oath (1922) and its sequel, The Kingdom of Evil, A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare (1924). Both were stories of decadence and both influenced by À rebours (Against the Grain, 1884) by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). (4) In looking at Wallace Smith's illustrations for Fantazius Mallare, I can't help but think of Harry Clarke and his work for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. That book was published in 1919, only three years before Fantazius Mallare came out. I wonder if seeing Tales of Mystery and Imagination would have influenced Hecht and his illustrator. I also wonder if Hecht could have come across the German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten, for, as a reporter, he had been assigned to Berlin in 1918-1919 when the magazine was first in print. In any event, Hecht, Smith, and their publisher were arrested and prosecuted for obscenity for Fantazius Mallare. That notoriety contributed to Hecht's leaving the Chicago Daily News in 1922. Never one to suffer bluenoses and censors, he returned to New York City two years later.

In recounting the origins of Weird Tales, J.C. Henneberger wrote:

[In talking] to such nationally known writers as Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, [and] Ben Hecht . . . . I discovered that all of them expressed a desire to submit for publication a story of the unconventional type but hesitated to do so for fear of rejection. (5)

Ben Hecht's experience with Fantazius Mallare seems to have borne out that fear, though Hecht himself seems to have been a man without fear. It's worth noting that in the same year he returned to New York City, Weird Tales published "The Loved Dead," a story of necrophilia by C.M. Eddy, Jr. The future of the magazine was in doubt at that point, but it managed to survive--and without contributions from Garland, Hough, and Hecht.

***

In his review of Charles Fort's Book of the Damned (1919), Ben Hecht proclaimed himself a Fortean. He was later influenced by Fort in his stories of fantasy and science fiction. The Speculative Fiction Database lists Hecht's works in those genres:

"In the Midst of Death" (1936)
"The Missing Idol" (1939)
"The Adventures of Professor Emmett" (1939)
"A Lost Soul" (1939, later "The Lost Soul")
"The Little Candle" (1939)
"Death of Eleazer" (1939)
"Remember Thy Creator" (1939)
"The Heavenly Choir" (1939)
"The Shadow" (1945)
"The Rival Dummy" (1946)
"Miracle of the Fifteen Murderers" (1964)

Some were collected in A Book of Miracles (1939) and all but one in The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht (1945). I should point out that the dates listed here appear to be dates of publication in book form and not in magazine form. For example, the film The Great Gabbo, released in 1929, is based on Hecht's story "The Rival Dummy," which was published in book form many years later.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) The inaugural issue of the Chicago Literary Journal was dated March 1, 1923, the same month in which Weird Tales first appeared.

(2) The quote is by Hecht's editor, Henry Justin Smith, from The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda (1998).

(3) Only 476 days after it had begun.

(4) Hecht published another genre work, The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives, in the intervening year, 1923, the same year in which the first issue of Weird Tales came out. That book was also illustrated by Wallace Smith.

(5) The quotes are from a letter reprinted in WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, edited by Robert Weinberg (1974), p. 4.

Two covers for 1001 Afternoons in Chicago by Ben Hecht (1922), a book-length collection of Hecht's columns for the Chicago Daily News. The cover illustrations are by the Dutch-born artist and art director Herman Rosse (1887-1965). They remind me of the photographic cityscape with which I introduced this series. The title of the column and book of course echo that of 1001 Arabian Nights.

Three illustrations from Ben Hecht's Fantazius Mallare, A Mysterious Oath (1921), drawn by Wallace Smith. Hecht and Smith were prosecuted for obscenity; many copies of their book were destroyed. Today it is rare and presumably very valuable. Wallace Smith (1888-1937) was a reporter, author, illustrator, and cartoonist. Like Hecht, he went to Hollywood in the 1920s and wrote movie screenplays. He died in 1937 of a heart attack. His widow was named Echo. Smith claimed that marrying her was "the smartest and most exciting thing he ever did." (Quoted in Caxtonian, The Journal of The Caxton Club, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, p. 9.)

Illustrations for The Kingdom of Evil, A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare (1924) were by Anthony Angarola (1893-1929). Born in Chicago, Angarola studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and taught at a number of art schools throughout the Midwest. As a painter, printmaker, and illustrator, he was admired by H.P. Lovecraft. From "Pickman's Model" (1926):

There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or—I hope to heaven—ever will again.

From "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928):

In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint.

So in 1924, the obscenity case against Ben Hecht came to an end and he moved to New York City; the controversy over "The Loved Dead" by C.M. Eddy, Jr., a friend and associate of H.P. Lovecraft, began; Weird Tales almost bit the dust with the issue featuring Eddy's story; J.C. Henneberger offered the editorship of the magazine to Lovecraft in an attempt to save it; and Lovecraft elected to remain in New York City with his new wife, Sonia Greene. I wonder if Lovecraft and Hecht would have passed each other on the street. If they had met, would they have discussed a mutual admiration of the works of Anthony Angarola and a taste for weird tales?

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They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Ben Hecht (1894-1964)-Part 2

October 11, 2014, 3:00 am

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Ben Hecht is best known for his work in the movies. He arrived in Hollywood in 1926 at the behest of his friend and fellow screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. In every year from then until his death in 1964, Hecht wrote for at least one and sometimes as many as half a dozen movies or television shows.

Hecht was known for his rapid-fire dialogue. His typewriter was rapid-fire as well. Spending a few weeks in Hollywood every year, he made enough to support himself in his more serious writing back home in New York City. (With his writing partner Charles MacArthur, he completed the screenplay for The Unholy Garden in twelve hours.) Hecht won an Oscar for his screenplay for Underworld (1927) and soon after became the highest paid writer in Hollywood. Film historian Richard Corliss called him "the Hollywood screenwriter," and for good reason, for Hecht's accomplishments are extraordinary and include stories, scenarios, and uncredited work on:

The Front Page (1931)
Scarface (1932)
Hallelujah I'm a Bum (1933)
Twentieth Century (1934)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Gunga Din (1939)
Wuthering Heights (1939)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Spellbound (1945)
The Miracle of the Bells (1948)
Monkey Business (1952)
Guys and Dolls (1955)
A Farewell to Arms (1957)
Cleopatra (1963)
Casino Royale (1967)

And many more. Among his genre work, Ben Hecht contributed to The Thing from Another World (1951), Queen from Outer Space (1958), 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), and many more movies of crime, murder, and mystery, including Le spectre vert (1930), a Portuguese release with a French cast and crew.

Ben Hecht left Chicago in 1924 for the city of his birth. From then until the end of his life, he alternated between New York and Hollywood. Hecht died in New York on April 18, 1964. If J.C. Henneberger had hoped to have Hecht in his magazine back in those early days, his hopes would have been dashed even before it went to print, for Ben Hecht became one of the most successful authors of the century and could hardly have written for a penny per word.

It should come as no surprise that Ben Hecht worked on The Thing from Another World (1951). There's plenty of fast talk, snappy patter, and overlapping dialogue. There's even a reporter who turns into a man of action when the situation calls for it. His words close the movie: "Keep watching the skies!"

I can't say whether Queen of Outer Space (1958) lies on the other end of the science fiction spectrum or not. I have never seen it. But the writers--Ben Hecht (outline) and Charles Beaumont (screenplay)--were no slouches. The movie might be worth a look.

Ben Hecht (1894-1964)

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They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Anthony Angarola (1893-1929)

October 12, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Belle Goldschlager (1902-1988)

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In a letter to Richard Ely Morse, dated July 28, 1932, H.P. Lovecraft wrote:

Sorry to hear that Angarola is dead. He almost illustrated my "Outsider"—that is, he read it & told Wright he'd like to illustrate it just after the present illustration had been made & purchased!

Lovecraft had been an admirer of Angarola for many years and mentioned him in two stories. From "Pickman's Model" (1926):

There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or—I hope to heaven—ever will again.

From "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928):

In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint.

Doré was Gustave Doré (1832-1883), a French artist known for his woodcuts illustrating a large number of literary works, including Paradise Lost (which Lovecraft mentioned in a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner dated November 16, 1916). Sime was Sidney Sime (1867-1941), a British artist and an illustrator of works by Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, and Arthur Machen. Angarola was of course Anthony Angarola, about whom I wrote in my posting on Ben Hecht and about whom I'll write a little more.

In his letter to Richard Ely Morse, Lovecraft mentioned that Angarola wanted to illustrate his story "The Outsider." Written in 1921 but not published until April 1926 in Weird Tales, "The Outsider" is one of Lovecraft's most famous stories, perhaps his signature story. If Angarola read it before it was published, he may have known the editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright. I say mayhave because it's possible that Angarola read the story without Lovecraft's or Wright's knowing about it. And thereby hangs a tale.

Son of Italian immigrants, Anthony or Antonio Angarola was born on February 4, 1893, in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught at a number of art schools throughout the Midwest, including the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee (1921), the Minneapolis School of Art (1922-1925), the Art Institute of Chicago (summers 1926-1928), and the Kansas City Art Institute (1926-1929). According to Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Tribune, "His pupils adored him." (1)

In the spring of 1916, Anthony Angarola met a young pianist, Marie Ambrosius. Over the next year and a half the two carried on a courtship and correspondence that culminated in a secret wedding in Elgin, Illinois, in August 1917. Together they had two children, Yvonne C. and Richard Anthony Angarola, but the marriage didn't last. In 1923, Marie Ambrosius Angarola's childhood guardians, Robert Ambrosius and his sister, Katherine Ambrosius, "engineered her divorce from Angarola." (2) Alone, wifeless, and childless, he carried on, teaching, painting, drawing, and traveling. From September 1928 to August 1929, he was in Europe on a furious tour of painting under a Guggenheim Fellowship. While in France, he was involved in a car accident and spent some time in the hospital.

Angarola returned to the United States in August 1929, arriving in New York, then taking a train to Chicago. He dropped off his trunk at the Bradley Hotel and rushed to his daughter's birthday celebration in Glen Lake, Michigan, on August 8. The artist returned once again to Chicago on August 13. Four days later, on August 17, 1929, Anthony Angarola died at the Bradley Hotel of the results of his accident many weeks or months before. He was just thirty-six years old.

The Chicago art world was shocked by the sudden loss of a greatly admired artist and mourned him for years afterward. When he died, Angarola was engaged to another artist and a former student, Belle Baranceanu. She was devastated by the his death but carried on without him. Like her lost fiancé, she was a painter and a teacher. She lived out her life, unmarried, in California.

In 1924, Anthony Angarola's illustrations were published in The Kingdom of Evil, A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht. It seems almost certain to me that H.P. Lovecraft first knew of Angarola's work through that book. From 1922 to the end of September 1925, Angarola taught at the Minneapolis School of Art. In June 1926, he landed a short-term position with the Art Institute of Chicago. (Angarola taught summer courses there in 1926-1928). In October 1926, he began work at the Kansas City Art institute and remained in that position almost three years. Even while he was away--in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or Kansas City--he remained connected to the Chicago art world.

In 1926, Farnsworth Wright was presumably back and forth between Indianapolis and Chicago, for the offices of Weird Tales didn't make the full move to Chicago until late that year. As an editor with no art director, Wright would always have been on the lookout for new artists for his magazine. Indianapolis had the Herron School of Art and plenty of commercial artists. Chicago on the other hand had its Art Institute and a much more bustling art scene. Anthony Angarola never contributed illustrations to Weird Tales. As H.P. Lovecraft later wrote, "He almost illustrated my 'Outsider,'—that is, he read it & told Wright he'd like to illustrate it." Unfortunately he was too late. Another Chicago artist had completed the job, and it was her work that appeared in Weird Tales in April 1926. She had previously illustrated "The Red Ether" (Part One) by Pettersen Marzoni and "The Other Half" by Edwin L. Sabin, both in the February 1926 issue. Her illustration for "The Outsider" was her third and last for the magazine. The artist's name was Belle Goldschlager and she had been a student of Anthony Angarola at the Minneapolis School of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

I said that Angarola may have read "The Outsider" without Lovecraft's or Wright's knowing about it beforehand. That's only speculation. A manuscript would probably have been in the possession of his student, Belle Goldschlager. It was also in the hands of his future fiancée, Belle Baranceanu, for Belle Goldschlager and Belle Baranceanu were one in the same person.

Notes

(1) "Two Memorial Exhibitions: Work of Tennessee Anderson and Anthony Angarola on View Local Galleries" by Eleanor Jewett, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 22, 1931, p. H4.

(2) From "Anthony Angarola (1893-1929)" by Richard Angarola, Connie Poore, and Joel Dryer, Illinois Historical Art Project at:

http://www.illinoisart.org/#!anthony-angarola/cffh.

An illustration by Anthony Angarola from The Kingdom of Evil, A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht (1924).

"Bench Lizards," a more conventional piece by Angarola (1926). Images of Angarola's art are hard to come by on the Internet. I wish I had more to offer.

Anthony Angarola (1893-1929)

Richard Angarola (1920-2008), son of the artist and a character actor in movies and television. Angarola was in lots of TV shows, often in ethnic roles. His credits include episodes of Twilight Zone, The Fugitive, My Living Doll, Honey West, The Rat Patrol, It Takes a Thief, and Mission: Impossible.

Happy Columbus Day to Italian-Americans Everywhere!

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Belle Goldschlager (1902-1988)

October 13, 2014, 3:00 am

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Aka Belle Baranceanu
Illustrator, Printmaker, Painter, Muralist, Teacher
Born July 17, 1902, Chicago, Illinois
Died January 17, 1988, La Jolla, California

Belle Goldschlager was born on July 17, 1902, in Chicago to Romanian Jewish immigrants Abram Goldschlager and Mary Agnes Baranceanu Goldschlager. Belle had one sister, Teresa (1904-1987). When they were young, their parents divorced or separated and the girls were sent to live on their grandparents' farm in Williston, North Dakota. Belle was interested in dance and art, Teresa in music. Their family encouraged them in their interests.

The girls' parents reunited in 1920. Belle and Teresa went to live with them once again, in Minneapolis. Belle Goldschlager graduated from West High School in 1921 and studied at the Minneapolis School of Art under Anthony Angarola. She graduated in 1924 and spent 1924-1925 in post-graduate studies. In 1925 or 1926, she went to the Art Institute of Chicago to further her studies. Angarola was there at about that time also, and in that brief window, Belle Goldschlager contributed three illustrations to Weird Tales magazine. They were printed in the February and April issues of 1926.

Belle's father objected to her relationship with Angarola, one that had grown from teacher-student to something more. In 1926 or 1927, he sent her to live with her uncle, Zack Baroney, in Los Angeles. She spent two years in California and returned to Chicago in 1928 or 1929. Anthony Angarola had spent the year in Europe (Aug. 1928-Aug. 1929) on a Guggenheim Fellowship. At some point the two were engaged to be married, but Angarola died suddenly within days of his return to Chicago. Despite the loss, Belle Goldschlager stayed on in Chicago, teaching, painting, and exhibiting her work.

In 1932, Belle Goldschlager changed her name to Belle Baranceanu, her mother's maiden name. The following year she relocated to San Diego. Belle Baranceanu was a painter, printmaker, illustrator, and muralist. She also taught at numerous institutions, including the Frances Parker School (1946-1969), the San Diego School of Arts and Crafts (1946-1951), California Western University (1959), and the La Jolla School of Arts and Crafts. Her students called her "Miss B." Belle also painted murals in the La Jolla Post Office, La Jolla High School, and Roosevelt Junior High School. In 1950 she was elected president of the San Diego Art Guild.

Belle Baranceanu took part in many exhibitions from 1926 to 1985 and won a number of awards from 1931 to 1945. In addition to drawing pictures for Weird Tales, she illustrated two textbooks of gynecology written by Dr. George Huff. Late in life, she was afflicted by Alzheimer's Disease. Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu died on January 17, 1988, in La Jolla, California. Her estate is managed by the San Diego Historical Society.

Belle Goldschlager's Illustrations in Weird Tales

"Red Ether" (Part One) by Pettersen Marzoni (Feb. 1926)

"The Other Half" by Edwin L. Sabin (Feb. 1926)

"The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft (Apr. 1926)

Further Reading

A simple search will turn up plenty of information on and images by Belle Baranceanu.

Three paintings by Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu, top to bottom: "The Bobs at Riverview Park,""Still-Life," and "The Johnson Girl."

And two photographs of the artist in her roles as muralist and printmaker.

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They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Charles Beaumont (1929-1967)

October 14, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Rod Serling and Weird Tales

≪ Previous: Belle Goldschlager (1902-1988)

In writing about Ben Hecht, I mentioned the writer Charles Beaumont. I have mentioned him before in my article about his friend, Richard Matheson (1926-2013). I will write about him again today.

Charles Beaumont has been gone for nearly half a century, yet there was a time when his name or work was in every kind of medium--in books, comic books, magazines, television, and movies--and in essays, articles, reviews, fiction, and drama. If he had lived, it's easy to imagine that he would have joined Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury in a category of men whose names are synonymous in our popular culture with fantasy, fear, dread, and horror.

Born Charles Leroy Nutt on January 2, 1929, Beaumont contracted spinal meningitis as a child. In his invalid state, he began reading the Wizard of Oz books, then Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. With that, he said, "the jig was up." He published his own science fiction fanzine, Utopia, as a teenager and wrote letters to science fiction magazines. He even drew pictures for the pulps and co-illustrated Out of the Unknown by A.E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull (1948).

After knocking around for awhile (and changing his name twice), Beaumont had his first published story, "The Devil You Say," in Amazing Stories in January 1951. He turned twenty-two that month and his writing life was on. Over the next fifteen years he wrote dozens more stories published in If, Orbit, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Infinity Science Fiction, and Gamma. Playboy accepted his story "Black Country" (Sept. 1954) as its first published short fiction. Thereafter Playboy kept him on retainer and listed him as a contributing editor.

In his tenure at Playboy, Beaumont wrote a series of nostalgic articles collected in the book Remember? Remember? in 1963. Among them is an essay called "The Bloody Pulps," of which he wrote:

Happily, no sober, critical evaluation of them is possible. Like any other narcotic, they defy rational analysis. One can speak of their effect, even of their ingredients, but not, without wearisome and unconvincing pomposity, of their causes. Something in them froze the addict's critical faculties. He might entertain a difference of opinion on the relative merits of Putnam's and Shelton's translation of Don Quixote, but on the subject of Weird Tales he was, and is, adamant. (1)

Beaumont wrote for other men's magazines as well, including Manhunt, Nugget, and Rogue. His stories have been reprinted and anthologized in the years since their first appearance, including in several of his own books. The first, The Hunger and Other Stories, came out in 1957.

If you watched Twilight Zone (1959-1964) in its original run or in syndication, you could not have avoided seeing Charles Beaumont's name in the credits. He wrote or co-wrote twenty-two episodes in all, second only to the creator Rod Serling. Writer William F. Nolan remembered:

Chuck was the perfect Twilight Zone writer, more than Matheson or Rod Serling, even. Matheson is very much of a realist who can mentally lose himself in those worlds. He doesn't live in them the way Chuck lived in them. Chuck actually lived in the Twilight Zone. (2)

Beaumont also wrote scripts for Steve Canyon, Buckskin, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Have Gun-Will Travel, Naked City, Route 66, Thriller, and other television shows. His film scripts were far fewer in number, but his list of credits is impressive. His first was Tradita from 1954. Then came Queen of Outer Space (1957) from an outline by Ben Hecht. Beaumont co-wrote (with Richard Matheson and George Baxt) the screenplay for Burn! Witch! Burn! (1962), based on Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife. Other adaptations included Premature Burial (1962) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), both from Poe; The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962); The Haunted Palace (1963), from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft; and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) from the novel by Charles G. Finney.

William F. Nolan observed that Charles Beaumont "actually lived in the Twilight Zone." In a way, he also died in the Twilight Zone. At thirty-four, he came down with a mysterious illness that caused constant headaches, weight loss, slurred speech, and a rapid and premature aging. Towards the end, he "looked ninety-five," according to his son Christopher. (3) Described by his friend Richard Matheson as "meteoric," (4) Charles Beaumont died on February 21, 1967, in Woodland Hills, California, after just sixteen years as a published writer and only thirty-eight on this earth.

Notes

(1) Page 120.
(2) Quoted in The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree (1982), p. 74.

(3) Quoted on Wikipedia.

(4) The Twilight Zone Companion, p. 75.

The Hunger and Other Stories by Charles Beaumont (1957), his first book, with a cover design by Robert Clyne.

The Hunger and Other Stories in a Bantam paperback edition from 1959. The cover art is a collage of work by Heinrich Kley and Hieronymus Bosch.

Run from the Hunter (1957) by Charles Beaumont and John E. Tomerlin writing as Keith Grantland.

Yonder, a second collection of stories from 1958. The cover artist is unknown, and though I wouldn't lay any money on it, it looks a little like the work of Richard Powers.

The Intruder, a hardbound novel from 1959. This might be the version with a cover by Robert Clyne. The word on the cover is ugly. It would never appear on the cover of a book today, even if people still use it. I considered not showing this cover here. But I don't think the word will go away by our ignoring it or running away from it. It will go away only when people stop thinking this way. By the way, The Intruder was made into a movie in 1962 with William Shatner in the lead role.

Night Ride and Other Journeys from 1960. The artist is unknown.

The Magic Man and Other Science-Fantasy Stories, yet another collection from 1965.

The Magic Man in a British edition, also with a photo cover.

The Edge, another British edition, from 1966.

Remember? Remember?, a collection of nostalgic essays from Playboy, reprinted in book form in 1963. Leo Manso designed the cover.

Charles Beaumont began his career in science fiction and fantasy as an artist named Charles McNutt. In 1948, at age nineteen, he contributed three illustrations to Out of the Unknown, a hardbound collection of stories by A.E. van Vogt and his wife, E. Mayne Hull. The cover art is by Roy Hunt.

Charles McNutt's interior illustration for "The Patient" by E. Mayne Hull. This is the only one of the three that bears his name. The others are only initialed.

McNutt's illustration for "The Sea Thing" by A.E. van Vogt. Note the mix of scratchboard technique and pen. It seems a pretty good bet that McNutt--Beaumont--was influenced by Virgil Finlay.

An illustration for "The Wishes We Make" by E. Mayne Hull. Charles McNutt also drew pictures for Fantasy Book No. 1 (July 1947) and No. 2 (Feb. 1948). In November 1942, when the future Charles Beaumont was only thirteen, Startling Stories printed his letter to the editor in its November 1942 issue.

Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) in a serious mood, 1960.

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Rod Serling and Weird Tales

October 15, 2014, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Fortean Writers in Weird Tales

≪ Previous: They Should Have Been in Weird Tales: Charles Beaumont (1929-1967)

Yesterday I wrote about Charles Beaumont. That leads me today to Rod Serling (1924-1975) and The Twilight Zone.

Not long ago I read a story reprinted from Weird Tales--I wish I could remember the title--and when I reached the end, I thought, "This is like an episode of The Twilight Zone." Then it occurred to me that a story from Weird Tales isn't like The Twilight Zone. If anything, the reverse is true, for Weird Tales came first. That leads to this question: Was Rod Serling a reader of Weird Tales in his youth? It took me awhile to find the answer.

I started with a biography, Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone by Joel Engel (1989). The book lacks an index, so I had two choices: read it or page through it. I paged through it and finally came to this:

So what attracted Rod Serling, the writer, to the world of the fantastic? Bob Serling says that his brother told him "The Twilight Zone" sprang from his frequent insomniac nights, when his active imagination--fed by his lifelong love of horror films, his war experiences, and the stories of such writers as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and H.P. Lovecraft--contrived fantastical plots that seemed plausible in the predawn. Carol Serling says that her husband "wanted to believe" in the unseen, but had no direct experiences himself. (p. 103)

Although Robert Heinlein contributed to Weird Tales, he was more closely associated with Astounding Science-Fiction. Ray Bradbury had twenty-five stories printed in Weird Tales beginning with the November 1942 issue. It's likely that if he read Ray Bradbury, Serling also read Weird Tales. However, in pretty rapid order, Rod Serling turned eighteen (on December 25, 1942), graduated from high school (in late January 1943), was inducted into the army (the next day), and boarded a bus for Fort Niagara (on February 3). In other words, he got one chance to read a story by Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales before reaching draft age. But Bob Serling mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, too, and though Lovecraft's works were reprinted in different places after his death in 1937, his name is inextricably linked with the magazine Weird Tales.

Still no proof.

Next I found The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree (1982). The index in that book is scanty. That meant more page-by-page searching--but not much. Here's Bob Serling again on page 3:

We were fairly close as kids . . . . The two of us used to read Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Weird Tales--all of the pulps.

With that, we can put Rod Serling on the list with Ward Cleaver as famous readers of Weird Tales.

All that brings up another question. Was The Twilight Zone in the genre of weird fiction? I can't say. I have never read a good definition of "weird fiction." But there are episodes of The Twilight Zone that are very much like stories from Weird Tales. Rod Serling read Weird Tales as a boy. In his insomnia, he "contrived fantastical plots." Although Weird Tales met its end in 1954, it would have still been fresh in the memory when The Twilight Zone made its debut in 1959. Maybe one way of thinking of Rod Serling's brainchild is simply as a continuation in the spirit of Weird Tales.

Note: You can read more about Rod Serling and Weird Tales in my article of September 16, 2011, "Weird Tales on Film: Rod Serling's Night Gallery,"here.

Rod Serling (1924-1975), not from The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) but from Rod Serling's Night Gallery (1970-1973).

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