Zombibliography-Caligari's Children

April 1, 2017, 3:00 am

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Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror by S.S. Prawer

(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980), 307 pp.

S.S. Prawer (1925-2012) was Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of The Queen's College. His book Caligari's Children is scholarly but accessible. I'm happy to say that Dr. Prawer was a fan of movies. His book is the first scholarly work in my own library on zombies.

S.S. Prawer's discussion of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and other zombie movies in Caligari's Children is brief but interesting. A couple of quotes from him, then one from another author, whom he quotes in his book:

The archetype and model of all zombie-movies still remains Victor Halperin's White Zombie of 1932, which curiously links its voodoo theme with that of social exploitation: the dead are raised to serve as bodyguards and as cheap labour in a Haiti sugar-mill. John Gilling's The Plague of the Zombies transfers this to England; the evil squire raises the dead to work his tin-mines and thus enable him to live in the style to which his class has become accustomed. [p. 68]

[In Night of the Living Dead] Romero has given the screw an extra turn [. . .] by showing, particularly in his final sequences, that the harm the living can do matches and even outstrips that of the pathetic clawing corpses to which the title of his film refers. The Sheriff and his posse [. . .] are more frightening in their callousness than any miraculously reanimated corpse. [p. 68]

The critical theorist might see in that first quote proof of the existence of his favorite bugaboo, the capitalist exploiter. That would be a superficial interpretation of White Zombie, I think. I have already written about just who was exploiting whom in The Magic Island, William B. Seabrook's seminal account of Haitian zombies from 1929. I have also written about how zombies, as a part of black culture, were transferred to white culture, in part by making the threatening zombie-maker and zombie-master a white person, moreover, by making the threatened zombie or the threatened living human being a white person. I think that's what the moviemakers were up to in White Zombie, hence the sensationalistic title. With this movie, the zombie went from being an affair of black people to being an affair of white people. (The title, by the way, echoes the phrase "white slavery," one that would have been on people's minds or in their recent memories in the early 1930s. The very strong suggestion would have been that a white zombie might be used for the same purposes for which a white slave might be used, i.e., as a sexual slave. See the story "American Zombie" by Dr. Gordon Leigh Burley from ca. 1936 for more on that idea. The racial implications of this association between white zombies and white slavery are unavoidable. See also the relationship between the black man and the very white woman in Night of the Living Dead from 1968.)

As for the second quote: Dr. Prawer noticed something in 1980 that viewers of The Walking Dead have no doubt seen more recently: that the human characters may actually be scarier than the zombies, which, to some degree, exist simply as an environmental condition that has to be dealt with, like rain or cold. To that point, I'll pass on a quote from Caligari's Children from R.H.W. Dillard, author of one of the earliest if not the earliest scholarly treatment of the zombie, Horror Films, from 1976:

If he [the viewer] chooses Night of the Living Dead (1968) [as an example of a valid and significant esthetic expression of experience, then] he has chosen a life in which moral failure is the natural human condition. [p. 127]

I have written before that the most basic interpretation of the zombie apocalypse is that it lays bare our fallen state as human beings. I don't think you really have to go beyond that, especially not into the realm of politics or economics, to recognize meaning in this story. I would argue on the other side that, although we are fallen, we might still be redeemed: we have that possibility within us. So is Dr. Dillard saying that there are viewers who have given up on the possibility of redemption? Who believe that our falling will not be counteracted by any rising? Is the viewer who prefers the zombie-apocalyptic story, then, a pessimist or a nihilist, a person living in despair or in a state of extreme moral lassitude or decadence? And if so, and if that viewer is actually countless millions of viewers, is not the zombie an apt monster for our time?

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Zombibliography-Monsters and Mad Scientists

April 4, 2017, 3:00 am

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Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie
by Andrew Tudor

(Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989), viii+ 239 pp.
Cover design by Miller, Craig and Cocking Design Partnership

When Monsters and Mad Scientists was published, Andrew Tudor was Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. He was film critic for New Society from 1975 to 1982, head of his university Sociology Department from 1988 to 1995, and head of its Department of Theatre, Film and Television from 2006 to 2010. He is now retired.

Dr. Tudor is a scholar and a sociologist. Consequently, Monsters and Mad Scientists is scholarly, sociological, and at least semi-scientific. He begins his study by laying out three pairs of what he calls oppositions, all in regards to the threat in the horror movie. These pairs are: 1) The supernatural vs. the secular (what I have called the scientific); 2) The external vs. the internal, that is, threats that are external or internal to the individual person; for example, a vampire is an external threat, but disease is an internal threat; and 3) dependent vs. autonomous; for example, the slave-type zombie is dependent, whereas the vampire, again, is autonomous. Dr. Tudor presents these oppositions in tabular form. A subsequent table lists types of monsters by the number of movies in which they appeared from 1931 to 1984. Zombies ranked eleventh, with forty-eight movie appearances. (Psychotics were first with 271 movie appearances.)

In his analysis of horror movies, Dr. Tudor discusses White Zombie. It's worth noting that, although sociology as a discipline tends to be leftist in orientation, Dr. Tudor's discussion is entirely absent of political content or interpretation. (1) Instead, he writes:

That there is an underlying sexual element to [Legendre's] domination [of the film's heroine], however, can hardly be doubted. In turning Madeline into a zombie he makes her entirely compliant to his will, although nowhere does the film fully draw out the implications of that absolute power. (p. 32)

Later, the author relates zombie movies as a group to "the psycho-movie":

Ultimately descended from the hugely influential Night of the Living Dead (1970) [sic], this group includes The Crazies (1978), Zombies (1980), Zombie Flesh-Eaters (1980) and Zombie Creeping Flesh (1982), all of which postulate the spread of dehumanizing 'disease' and present an apocalyptic vision of total social collapse. In effect, they create a world of mass psychosis in which we are doomed to decline into a subhuman state. Unsurprisingly, given their thoroughly apocalyptic tone, they all end with the implication that the 'disease' will continue to spread unchecked. (p. 71)

Again, as in Caligari's Children, there is the implication that the zombie apocalypse movie appeals most to viewers who are already living in a state of despair, extreme alienation, or at the ends of decadence, and that those viewers may also be essentially nihilists or extreme anarchists, not in a political sense, but in a philosophical and ultimately spiritual sense. Again, the zombie apocalypse seems to be a positive fantasy for those who would like to see the world destroyed or who, in their descent into "psychosis," would like to take the whole world down with them.

There is a good deal more on zombies in Monsters and Mad Scientists, too much, really, to discuss here but all of it piercing in its analysis and fascinating in its insights. It's clear that Andrew Tudor is from a previous generation of scholars, those whose work seems to be unpolluted or undistorted by Marxist interpretation. Now, in 2017, it may be too late for anything like it.

Note
(1) This is in no way to imply that Andrew Tudor is or was leftist in orientation.

Original text copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley

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Zombibliography-Zombies!

April 7, 2017, 3:00 am

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Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead by Jovanka Vuckovic

(New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2011), 176 pp.

Cover art by Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn

Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead is a popular, pictorial history of zombies in movies, television, comic books, and popular fiction. The author, Jovanka Vuckovic, is a Canadian writer, editor, and moviemaker. She was editor of Rue Morgue Magazine for six and a half years. I'll leave the details to her, but I would like to provide these quotes from Ms. Vuckovic's book:

It's not surprising belief in the zombie flourished during that time [i.e., during the French colonial period], given the large number of seemingly mindless, and near lifeless, drones working on plantations. Robbed of their individuality and free will, the beaten-down African slave worker would have surely had the appearance of the living dead. (p. 20)

Because a person's most valued possession--especially in a cruel slave nation--was their [sic] individuality, the Haitians' primary fear was not of being attacked or eaten by a zombie, but of becoming one themselves. It was considered a fate worse than death, the ultimate horror, particularly after the Haitian revolution, during which the nation finally overthrew its European oppressors. (p. 20)

I don't think I have to remind anyone at this point that those "European oppressors" were first feudal-statist overlords, afterwards, leftist-statist overlords. Contrary to the most fervent hopes of American academia, they were decidedly not capitalists.

Ms. Vuckovic again brings up a good point, that zombie-ism is, at its heart, about a loss of freedom, humanity, and individuality. The modern state, whether socialist, communist, fascist, or nazi in its permutation, seeks to reduce its populace to interchangeable (and highly dispensable) ciphers, essentially to zombies, hence, I think, the fear of zombie-ism in the world today, at least in a large part.

Two more points: First, Jovanka Vuckovic also points out in her book the sensationalism of zombie stories of the 1920s and '30s. In my research, I have sensed the same thing, that there may be more sensationalism than reality in those stories. I wonder how much of the beginning history of zombies in America was true and factual and how much of it came from the imagination--or at least the exaggerations or interpretations--of William B. Seabrook.

Second, she writes about an author I hadn't encountered before: Captain John Houston Craige (ca. 1886-1954) of Pennsylvania. Like Arthur J. Burks, Captain Craige served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Haiti during the American occupation. And like William B. Seabrook, he wrote about his experiences and observations in non-fictional form. His books included Black Bagdad [sic]: The Arabian Nights Adventures of a Marine Captain in Haiti (1933) and Cannibal Cousins (1934).

According to the website Encyclopedia.com, Captain Craige read up on Haiti in the works of "the French historian Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), the Haitian historian Thomas Madiou (1814-1884), and the Haitian writer Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855-1911), among others." The source is suspect, but those authors might be a good place to start in pushing the origins of zombies as the walking dead to before 1928. For example: Moreau de Saint-Méry used the word zombi, meaning revenant, in writing, in French, in 1792. Knowing that leads me to the book White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film by Gary D. Rhodes (2001), an even more thorough and scholarly book than Zombies! (1) In fact, Dr. Rhodes' book might be the last word on the history of zombi(e)s in America. It also includes a tantalizing discussion of H. Bedford-Jones' novel Drums of Damballa (1932) and its sources, which are supposed to have been documents or materials, brought from Haiti to the United States in 1803, that mention zombi(e)s. I wish we had more on this. There is no telling what those materials might reveal. One thing all of this reveals is that some American academics, like Dr. Rhodes, do their homework, and some--too many to name here--apparently don't.

Note

(1) That book reveals, surprisingly, that there is a connection between zombie-ism and the consumption of Jamestown weed, also called jimsonweed or Datura, in the form of "concombre zombi," a concoction for inducing the condition in an unsuspecting person. Once again, jimsonweed raises its (seed)head in relation to the supernatural and weird fiction.

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Zombibliography-Muse Magazine

April 10, 2017, 3:00 am

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Muse: The Magazine of Life, the Universe, and Pie Throwing

(October 2012)

Cover art by Jimmy Giegerich

Muse magazine did a zombie cover story in October 2012, "Zombies on the Brain" by Doug Stewart. A quote:

Blogger and "monster scholar" Jeanette Laredo, a graduate student at the University of North Texas, has another explanation for why people--young people in particular--are drawn to the idea of a zombie apocalypse. "At their core, zombies represent our fear of becoming part of a homogenous mass, our fear of conformity," she says. "That applies especially to teenagers, because they're struggling with that. They want to be 'in,' but at the same time they want to be themselves."

The important thing about zombies, in other words, isn't that they're creepy. It's that they move around in big, creepy hordes. (p. 12)

It seems to me that Dr. Laredo (what a great name for a professor in Texas) has drawn her six-gun and shot the prevailing academic "narrative" full of holes, as an ultimate conformity is one of the end-points of the leftist-socialist-statist program. It seems to me also that the author Doug Stewart seems to recognize the threat represented by conformist hordes, another feature of that same program. The upshot of all of this--of all of my series relating to zombies, going back to January--is that the leftist attempt at a theory of zombies in favor of their own program falls apart upon examination, as all of their theories eventually fall apart. But that's enough of all of it. I have beaten this undead three-legged horse enough. I have one more entry on zombies, then I'll get back to biographies of the writers and artists who contributed to "The Unique Magazine," Weird Tales.

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The Island Theory of Zombiation

April 13, 2017, 3:00 am

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The concept of the zombi(e), like much of our culture, was brought to America aboard a slave ship. The word is African, the idea is African, and the culture in which zombie-ism in America developed is African. Once here, zombi(e)s evolved from perhaps one common original to a number of different species. The speciation of zombies--the zombiation of the title here--seems to have happened on islands of African-slave culture, separated from each other by the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. In Martinique and other smaller islands, the concept was of the zombi, an evil spirit who creates discord in the night. In Louisiana, it was Li Grand Zombi, the great serpent god and perhaps the closest to the original African concept of zombi. And in Haiti, it was the zombie we know today, the walking dead, a slave to some external agent. Coming from a common origin, zombi(e)s in America, evolving in separate island habitats, became separate species. For whatever reason, the undead zombie of Haiti proved to be the strongest or most adaptable of them and has spread throughout our culture and throughout the world.

Author William B. Seabrook (1884-1945) appears to have been the first to describe the zombi(e), species undead. His reporting from Haiti, published in newspaper accounts in 1928 and issued in book form in The Magic Island in 1929, is sober and evenhanded. It doesn't appear to be sensationalized. I think we have three choices when it comes to Seabrook's writing: First, to consider that he was telling the truth. Second, that, though he may have worked from a kernel of truth, he embellished or exaggerated stories of zombies for the reading public. Or, third, that he made it all up himself. I think we can discard the third possibility. The tone of his writing suggests the unlikelihood of the second possibility. That leaves the first possibility, namely, that he reported more or less truthfully on what he heard, saw, and experienced for himself. That would mean that stories of zombie-slaves in Haiti were true, or at least true to the people who passed them on to Seabrook. I haven't found anything to contradict any of that, and I think we have to conclude that Seabrook reported the truth or something close to the truth as he saw it and, consequently, that he was the father of zombies in America.

Seabrook's account of zombies in Haiti, "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields," opens not on the island of Haiti, but on a smaller island, Île de la Gonâve, located in the Gulf of Gonâve, west of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Although it is the largest of the islands in the waters of Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, Île de la Gonâve is dry and barren, a poor place to live or to try to make a living. William B. Seabrook visited the island in 1928 and interviewed a prominent local citizen, Constant Polynice. It was Polynice who first told Seabrook about zombies and who first showed him zombies at work in a cotton field on the trail to Picmy. Seabrook described them in various terms, saying among other things that they were "like automatons."

Constant Polynice also told his American interlocutor a story of zombies working on mainland Haiti, in the "big cane season" of 1918, when the Haitian-American Sugar Company--Hasco--"offered a bonus on the wages of new workers." A man named Ti Joseph took advantage of that offer by recruiting what Polynice said were zombies. In Polynice's telling, the zombies escaped in the only way they can escape, and Ti Joseph met a fitting end. The point of all this is that zombie-ism in Haiti seems to have been a response either to economic hardship, as on Île de la Gonâve, or economic opportunity, as with Ti Joseph and his work for Hasco. It was not capitalists who made or exploited zombies, but other Haitians, black Haitians for whom the affair of zombie-ism was their own. As Lamercie, the overseer of the zombies chopping cotton on the trail to Picmy, said to the American Seabrook, when it comes to zombies, "Z'affai' nèg pas z'affai' blanc"--the affairs of blacks are not the affairs of whites.

So the first accounts of zombies as the undead--the first of the firsthand accounts--came not only from an island but also from an island off the coast of an island. As with the evolution of any new species, zombies as the undead came about through (literal) isolation. Diseases, too, often develop in isolation, often, by our experience, in tropical or sub-tropical fastnesses, where they jump from an animal host to a human host with little notice. HIV/AIDS, which has done such harm in Haiti, is an example. (1) These diseases may operate at low levels for decades before being transmitted to larger populations, after which point they proliferate, sometimes exponentially, becoming in the process plagues or pandemics. That was the case with HIV/AIDS, which claimed its first known victims--known in retrospect, that is--in the 1950s. The same process seems to have occurred, on a far more trivial scale, with the concept of the zombie. Purely by coincidence, the first zombies caused by disease--zombies in retrospect, that is--also appeared in the 1950s, in Richard Matheson's science fiction novel I Am Legend (1954). These were scientific zombies, caused by disease, moving in hordes, and always seeking to infect the uninfected. In short, they were a plague--or pandemic--in human form.

George Romero gets the credit for the first movie--Night of the Living Dead (1968)--showing zombies as we know them today. (It might be more accurate to say that Mr. Romero invented zombies as we know them today.) But two years before, in 1966, Hammer Films released The Plague of the Zombies, a movie far less well known today, but perhaps equally important or more important in evolutionary terms. I have never seen this movie, but by description, it was or may have been the first to show a zombie plague and the first to show threatening zombies rather than harmless zombie-slaves. In fact, The Plague of the Zombies seems to have been a bridge or the bridge between the harmless Haitian zombie-slave (i.e., what I have called the Seabrook zombie) and the lethal scientific zombie horde as in Night of the Living Dead (i.e., what I have called the Matheson-Romero zombie). The bridging effect is made obvious in the movie in that there seems to be a combination supernatural/scientific explanation for its zombies. There is also a zombie-maker who has been to Haiti and has returned to his native Cornwall, carrying zombie-ism from one population to another and from one island to another, where he puts them to work, as Ti Joseph put his zombies to work, this time in a tin mine. Because I haven't seen the movie, I don't know the answers to some key questions: How exactly are the zombies in The Plague of the Zombies threatening--are they murderous or cannibalistic? How are they made? How exactly are they a plague--does the disease of zombie-ism spread from zombie to person somehow? And how exactly are the zombies destroyed? Curiously, The Plague of Zombies is set in 1860, more than two generations before William Seabrook's trip to Haiti.

A long time ago, I read of the concept of the meme, a sort of gene of culture that is propagated, like genes, through a population. Zombies and zombie-ism can be interpreted as memes. As in the evolution of a species, they developed in isolation. (Evolution is defined as a change in gene frequency.) As with any successful species, they have shown themselves to be well adapted for survival. Like a pandemic or an invasive species, they have proliferated in a host or in an environment not like their original host or environment, one in which there are no natural controls on their populations. So what will be the controls on zombies and zombie-ism? Or will they be uncontrolled and continue to adapt and proliferate in our culture? If zombies are, as William Seabrook described them, like automatons, will they simply evolve into a different form, that is, into the form of the robot-zombie, as on the graph of the uncanny divide? Will they cross over from the world of fantasy (or at least allegory) into the real world? And will they eventually overwhelm us, as so many people fear, once robots reach a technological singularity?

Note

(1) Oddly enough, the origin of HIV/AIDS in humans coincides roughly with the American occupation of Haiti, though HIV/AIDS originated in Africa and is not supposed to have reached the New World until after World War II. The first known victim of HIV/AIDS died in Africa in 1959.

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Bertrande Harry Snell (1882-1949)

April 15, 2017, 10:00 pm

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Telegrapher, Poet, Newspaper Columnist
Born June 6, 1882, Fort Plain, New York
Died June 26, 1949, Syracuse, New York

Bertrande Harry "Bert" Snell was born on June 6, 1882, in Fort Plain, New York, to Jacob and Mary Snell. He graduated from Parish High School in 1898 at age sixteen and went to work as a Morse code telegrapher the following year. Snell worked for railroads in Pennsylvania for many years before moving to Syracuse, New York, in 1917. He spent the rest of his working life with Western Union in Syracuse.

Snell was a poet and had his verse in various newspapers over the years. He wrote three poems published in Weird Tales, "Starkey Strang" (Aug. 1926), "Vampire" (June 1929), and "In the Valley" (Dec. 1929). I wonder if Snell knew Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981), who also lived in Syracuse for many years and who was also a railroad enthusiast.

Bertrande H. Snell started as a columnist with The Post-Standard of Syracuse on January 13, 1945. His popular column was called "Just Around the Corner," and he kept it up until his death. Snell's last column was in the typewriter when he had a stroke in June 1949. Taken to the hospital, Snell died on June 26, 1949, and was buried at Pleasant Lawn Cemetery, in Parish, New York. He was sixty-seven years old.

Bertrande Harry Snell's Poems in Weird Tales

"Starkey Strang" (Aug. 1926)

"Vampire" (June 1929)

"In the Valley" (Dec. 1929).

Further Reading

"Biographical Sketch of Bertrande H. Snell, Parish, Oswego Co., NY" by Richard Palmer at the following URL:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nyoswego/biographies/snellpt1.html

In the centennial year of the American entry into the Great War, here is a poem from Betrande Harry Snell.

And for Easter, a poem on life and death, from 1916.

Snell also wrote an acrostic poem to a fellow poet, "To Mahlon Leonard Fisher," dated May 9, 1914.

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Sybla Ramus (1874-1963)

April 19, 2017, 3:00 am

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Musician, Playwright, Librettist, Musical Arranger, Teacher, Artist

Born October 3, 1874, probably or possibly in Chicago, Illinois

Died January 1963

Sybla Ramus was born on October 3, 1874, probably or possibly in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents were Charles Emil Ramus (1827-1891?) and Sybla Faulds Ramus (1844-1934), who were married in Chicago in 1871 (on Halloween). Charles E. Ramus was a native of Denmark and a veteran of the U.S Army. His wife, whose name was misspelled "Sybilla" and "Sylvia," was born in London, Ontario, Canada. The younger Sybla Ramus' brother was a prominent physician and surgeon, Dr. Carl Ramus (1872-1963), who served in Honolulu, Hawaii, and at Ellis Island in New York.

The Ramuses were a musical family. Carl played cello and maintained a string quartet while stationed in Hawaii. Sybla Ramus was a pupil of a Madame Rounseville of Chicago and gave a piano recital at the age of twelve. She also studied under Max Bendix (1866-1945) in Chicago; Arno Hilf (1858-1909) at the Royal Conservatorium of Leipzig; Otakar Ševčík (1852-1934) at the Prague Conservatory; and others. She played piano, violin, and viola, and was herself a teacher at the Chicago Musical College (ca. 1899) and the American Violin School, also in Chicago. Sybla Ramus played in St. James' Orchestra at St. James' Parish in Chicago. She also wrote the libretto for an opera, Armand, with a musical score by Gerard (or Gerardo) Carbonara (1886-1959), published in 1921. Her Girl Friend, a comedy drama in three acts, from 1923, was also a product of her pen. Her lone story for Weird Tales was the three-part serial "Coils of Darkness," printed in the issues of February, March, and April 1924. As a musician and a former Chicagoan, she may have been in contact with Farnsworth Wright, who was a music critic in Chicago, though not yet the editor of Weird Tales when her story was published.

In addition to Chicago, Sybla Ramus lived in Lincoln, New Mexico, with her mother and brother (1900), and in New York City with her mother (1915, 1920, 1925). She died in January 1963 at the age of eighty-eight.

Sybla Ramus' Story in Weird Tales

"Coils of Darkness" (three-part serial, Feb., Mar., and Apr. 1924)

Further Reading

"Dr. Carl Ramus (1872-1963) Physician and Surgeon," a biographical sketch of Sybla Ramus' brother, at the website of the National Park Service, Ellis Island, here.
Biographical highlights for Dr. Ramus at a website here.

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Binny Koras, "The Gypsy Poet" (ca. 1895-?)

April 22, 2017, 3:00 am

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Psychiatric Nurse, Journalist, Poet, Translator, Teacher, Occultist
Born ca. 1895
Died ?

Binny Koras, known as "the Gypsy poet," was born in about 1895. According to a newspaper article of 1922, Koras

grew up on the highways and byways of middle America, lived in Australia for several years, served during the war as a psychiatric nurse and since returning to the United States in 1919 has been engaged in newspaper writing, teaching and work with boys. A student of oriental languages, he has translated verses from the Japanese, Arabic, and Urdu. (1)

Koras had poems in Dial, Nation, Pagan, Pearson's, Shadowland, and Survey. His poem "Growing Up," originally in the Rock Island Argus and reprinted in The Literary Digest, The Bookman, and Anthology of Newspaper Verse for 1921, was called by the same article "perhaps the most widely printed verse of 1921." He had one poem in Weird Tales, "For Clytie," in the issue for November 1926. Oddly enough, Koras was also an occultist and was listed in Who's Who in Occultism, New Thought, Psychism and Spiritualism, compiled and edited by William C. Hartmann, and published in 1927 by The Occult Press of Jamaica, New York. Here is the entry on Koras in its entirety:

SEVENTAN FELLOWSHIP. Based on the Book of Seveta (Arabic, Seventh Century, A.D.). Missionary for North America, Binny Koras, A.M., Ph.D.

Binny Koras wrote from Davenport, Iowa; Mattoon, Illinois; and St. Paul, Minnesota. His nickname as "the Gypsy poet" may have come from his wandering ways. It may also have referred to a possible ancestry in eastern or southeastern Europe. But what I have written here is all I know of him.

Binny Koras' Poem in Weird Tales
"For Clytie" (Nov. 1926)

Further Reading

None known except for the newspaper article noted below and the poems that follow.

Note
(1) From Des Moines Sunday Register, May 14, 1922, page 31.

Some poems by Binny Koras, perhaps his complete poems extant:

Growing Up
by Binny Koras (1921)

Gee! But I wanted to grow up.
I wanted to put on longies
And smoke cigars,
And be a man
With a pay-day on Saturday.
I wanted to grow up
And have somebody to buy sodas for,
And take to the circus
Once in a while.

We all did, then:
Pat, who could throw any kid in town,
And Don, who went to the Advent church.
And said the world was coming to an end
In Nineteen-hundred,
And Brick Top and Eppie and Skin and Spider.

We all wanted to grow up
And become pirates and millionaires and
Soldiers and Presidents and
Owners of candy stores.
And all the time we were eating home-cooking
And wearing holes in our pants,
And talking Hog-Latin
And doing what two fingers in the air
Stood for;
And saving stamps.
And making things we read about
In The Boys' World.
Do you know how to play mumble-de-peg,
And skim rocks,
And tread water,
And skin the cat?
Do you know what a stick on the shoulder stands for
And what "Commggery, wiggery, meggery" means?

Skin is running a wheat farm, now,
Up in North Dakota.
Pat is on the road
Selling something or other.
Brick Top never grew up, quite,
And was making darts for a kid of his own
When I saw him last.
And Spider is yelling his head off
About Socialism and the class struggle
On street corners.

Don was with the Rainbow Division when the world ended.

Yesterday I heard a little freckle-face
Whistle through his fingers
And tell a feller called Curley
What he was going to do when he grew up.

"Smoke" from 1922, "Evolution" from 1927, and "To One Departed" from 1922.

Original text 2017 Terence E. Hanley

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Bernard Austin Dwyer (1897-1943)

April 25, 2017, 3:00 am

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William Bernard Augustine Dwyer
Poet, Artist, Fantasy Fan and Correspondent, Farm Worker and Farmer, CCC Camp Worker, Sign Painter
Born May 29, 1897, West Shokan, New York
Died August 19, 1943, presumably in Kingston, New York

Bernard Austin Dwyer is known now among fans of weird fiction as a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) of Providence, Rhode Island. I don't know that the two ever met, but I don't have many sources on Lovecraft's biography or voluminous correspondence. What I can say is that Bernard Austin Dwyer, who has largely escaped the investigations of biographers, is a little more known today than he was yesterday.

Bernard Austin Dwyer was christened William Bernard Augustine Dwyer--or at least that's the name he claimed on his draft card in World War I. His parents were Philip or Phillip Dwyer (1862-?), an Irish-born farmer and factory worker, and Mary A. Dwyer (Aug. 1863-?), a native of New York. We can speculate that her maiden name was Augustine, thus the origin of her son's second middle name, and, by contraction, his assumed middle name. Dywer had a sister, Katherine or Catherine A. Dwyer Sherman (1899-?), a widow later in life who nursed him when he was sick. He also had a brother, Charles P. Dwyer (1901-1973), possibly nicknamed "Zip."

The Dwyer family moved from place to place in New York State. In 1900, they were in Claverack in Columbia County (which may have been Mary Dwyer's native county). In 1905, Olive, in Ulster County, was their home. By 1915 and through 1920, William B. Dwyer was working on the farm in West Shokan, a place evidently within the town of Olive and in the area of the artist's and writer's colony of Woodstock and Bearsville. By 1925, he was calling himself Bernard W. Dwyer, though still working as a farmer, again in Olive. And by 1930, Dwyer had an industrial job working as a polisher in a factory in Kingston. He was then living with his widowed sister Katherine Sherman.

In the 1930s, Dwyer worked at the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps at Peekskill and Cornwall, New York. Described by the Kingston Daily Freeman as a "powerful giant, talented writer and what not," he was a farmer, gardener, woodcutter, and all-around worker in the outdoors. Dwyer was also an artist, a poet, a writer, and the proprietor of Dwyer Sign Shop in his hometown. For a time, there was a place called Dwyer's Corner where his parents lived, worked, and entertained frequent visitors among their family. For a time also, Dwyer was on a live radio program called "Soph and Joseph" with Sophie (Pinkosz) Miller (1910-1997), who also wrote the script. The show was on WKNY of Kingston.

Dwyer, who modified his name to Bernard Austin Dwyer, had a brief career as a writer in and for pulp magazines. His only work for Weird Tales, other than his letters to "The Eyrie," was a poem, "Ol' Black Sarah," from October 1928. He also had a letter in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror.

Dwyer died on August 19, 1943, presumably in Kingston, New York. Like his friend by mail, H.P. Lovecraft, Dwyer was forty-six years old at his death, an event that occurred on the eve of the anniversary of Lovecraft's birth more than half a century before.

Bernard Austin Dwyer's Poem in Weird Tales
"Ol' Black Sarah" (1928)

Bernard Austin Dwyer's Letters to "The Eyrie" (plus one to Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror)
Letter (June 1929)
Letter (June 1930)
"Oy! Oy! Oy!" (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Oct. 1932)
"Quinn's Masterpiece" [i.e., "Roads"] (Mar. 1938)
"A de Grandin Movie"(Sept. 1938)

Further Reading

"Quinn's Masterpiece," Dwyer's letter to "The Eyrie" from March 1938, at Wikisource, here.
"'A Mighty Woodcutter': Bernard Austin Dwyer and His Possible Influence on Lovecraft" and comments, posted by David Haden on the blog Tentaclii:: H.P. Lovecraft Blog, July 13, 2014, here.

A group photograph of Red Cross workers and others from the Kingston (New York) Daily Freeman, June 15, 1943. Bernard Austin Dwyer is the tall man on the far left. His co-worker in radio, Sophie Miller, is on the far right. A little over two months after this picture was in the Kingston paper, Dwyer was in his grave.

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A Swipe from Virgil Finlay and Back Again?

April 28, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Sudie Stuart Hager (1895-1982)

≪ Previous: Bernard Austin Dwyer (1897-1943)

Virgil Finlay (1914-1971) lived and died by making swipes from the other artists, photographers, that is, who took pictures for the sake of art or commerce. (Those two fields are not, of course, mutually exclusive.) However, I don't know him to have swiped from other illustrators or draftsmen. Until now. But this one is a little tricky. I'll go through it step by step:

First came Finlay's black-and-white interior illustration for Pearl Norton Swet's story "The Medici Boots," published in Weird Tales in the August-September issue of 1936:

Next came Harold W. McCauley's (1913-1977) cover illustration for Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy, from May 1953. Although the pose is similar to that of the conjured spirit in Virgil Finlay's illustration above, I would not call this necessarily a swipe by McCauley:

But Finlay's cover illustration for Weird Tales, Summer 1973, published posthumously, is at once an update of his drawing from nearly forty years before and a swipe of McCauley's cover. It's not a straight swipe, though, because Finlay rotated McCauley's Shiva figure slightly, recolored it, and recast it as a kind of Medusa or Gorgon figure:

So what do we call that? A swipe of a swipe? I'm not sure. Another possibility is that both Finlay and McCauley swiped their pictures from an unknown original source. That may actually be the best explanation. On the other hand, it could be that, as the wise old owl said, "The world may never know."

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Sudie Stuart Hager (1895-1982)

April 30, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: George Whitley aka A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984)

≪ Previous: A Swipe from Virgil Finlay and Back Again?

Teacher, Poet
Born June 30, 1895, Manchester, Grant County, Oklahoma
Died May 27, 1982, Kimberly, Idaho

Sudie Bower Stuart was born on June 30, 1895, in Manchester, in Grant County, Oklahoma, to Marion V. and Susan Elizabeth Allison "Allie" (Starks) Stuart. According to her niece, Sudie and her family moved to Binger, Oklahoma, where she attended school. The enumerator of the 1910 Federal census found the Stuart family in Fern, in Caddo County, Oklahoma.

Sudie B. Stuart taught at the Henley school in Klamath Falls, Oregon, from 1917 to 1919. Prior to that, she had lived in Silverton, Oregon. By 1920, Sudie was married and living in Kimberly, Idaho, with her husband, Everett G. Hager (1890-1971). Sudie B. Stuart Hager seems to have resided in Kimberly for the rest of her life, working as a teacher at the junior high school there for ten years before retiring to devote herself to her poetry. Called "a poet of the people and a Solomon of the Soil," (1) she was appointed the third poet laureate of the State of Idaho in 1949, succeeding in that post Irene Welch Grissom. (Ezra Pound was the state's first poet laureate.) Sudie's poetry appeared in Country Gentleman, Farm Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as many newspapers. Her only poem for Weird Tales was "Inheritance," in the issue of July 1940. Sudie's poems were collected in Earthbound (1947) and Beauty Will Abide (1970).

Sudie Stuart Hager served as poet laureate of Idaho until her death on May 27, 1982, in Kimberly. She was buried at Twin Falls Cemetery, Twin Falls, Idaho.

Sudie Stuart Hager's Poem in Weird Tales

"Inheritance" (July 1940)

Further Reading

"Poet Laureate of Idaho Is Former Klamath Woman,"Klamath Falls Herald and News, February 26, 1949, page 14.
"Writers Will Mark Idaho Poetry Day" by Frances C. Yost, Idaho State Journal, October 12, 1950, page 9.

Note

(1) From "Writers Will Mark Idaho Poetry Day" by Frances C. Yost, Idaho State Journal, October 12, 1950, page 9.

Sudie Stuart Hager (1895-1982)

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George Whitley aka A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984)

May 2, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Kirke Mechem (1889-1985)

≪ Previous: Sudie Stuart Hager (1895-1982)

Arthur Bertram Chandler
Aka Andrew Dunstan, S.H.M., George Whitely, George Whitley
Author, Poet, Essayist, Reviewer, Merchant Mariner
Born March 28, 1912, Aldershot, Hampshire, England
Died June 6, 1984, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

I thought I had covered most of the authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction in previous articles, but then I find that the author called George Whitley was actually the well known Anglo-Australian author A. Bertram Chandler. I suppose I'll keep making these discoveries until I have written about all of the men and women who contributed to Weird Tales.

Arthur Bertram Chandler was born on March 28, 1912, in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. He served in the merchant marine in his native country and in Australia, to which he emigrated in 1956 after the breakup of his first marriage. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, his earliest science fiction story was "'This Means War!'" in Astounding Science Fiction for May 1944. His first and only story for Weird Tales was "Castaway" from November 1947, published under the byline of George Whitley. Chandler was a very prolific author. Much of his fiction has to do with life aboard ship.

You can read about A. Bertram Chandler at various websites. Just one more fact before the facts of his death: Chandler's daughter Jenny is married to Ramsey Campbell, who has also contributed to Weird Tales.

A. Bertram Chandler died on June 6, 1984, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He was seventy-two years old.

George Whitley's Story in Weird Tales

"Castway" (Nov. 1947)

Further Reading

Besides Wikipedia, see the following sources (and embedded links found therein):

A. Bertram Chandler

AustLit

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Astounding Science Fiction, July 1946, the British edition with "Special Knowledge" by A. Bertram Chandler as the cover story. Cover art by William Timmins (1915-1985).

Cosmo #170, a complete science fiction novel (or, in the Italian, "i romanzi del fantascienza") by Chandler, from June 1965. The Italian title is Nelle Immense, Profondita Spaziall, in English, The Deep Reaches of Space. Cover art by Luigi Garonzi.

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Kirke Mechem (1889-1985)

May 5, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960)

≪ Previous: George Whitley aka A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984)

Baseball Player, Chess Player, Editor, Author, Historian, Poet, Playwright
Born December 20, 1889, Mankato, Kansas
Died June 5, 1985, Santa Clara County, California

Kirke Field Mecham was born on December 20, 1889, in Mankato, Kansas. Before the Great War, he was a stenographer for the Southwestern Journal in Kansas City, Missouri. On October 25, 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served overseas with the 137th Infantry, 35th Division. Mechem's unit arrived on the front lines in France on June 18, 1918. Several months of heavy fighting and heavy casualties followed. After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Mechem served as editor of The Jayhawker in France, a service paper. He also wrote poems and other pieces for papers back home. He was released from service on May 10, 1919.

Kirke F. Mechem was at various times in his life editor of The Legionnaire, a paper of the Thomas Hopkins Post of the American Legion in Wichita, Kansas; editor of The Price Current, a commercial newspaper; and author of poems published in Harper's Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Weird Tales, and newspapers in Kansas and elsewhere. He wrote at least two plays, Who Won the War? (1928) and John Brown (1938), which won the Maxwell Anderson Award. Mechem wrote John Brown while on a thirty-day vacation spent in a Santa Fe railroad caboose on Wakarusa Creek. Living on salmon, potatoes, and coffee, Mechem wrote out his play in longhand while he reclined in a caboose bunk.

From about 1930 to 1951, Kirke Mechem was secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society. He edited Annals of Kansas, publiched in two volumes in 1954 and after. His articles and other publications for the Kansas Historical Society included "The Bull Fight at Dodge" (Kansas Historical Quarterly, Aug. 1933); "The Mythical Jayhawk" (Kansas Historical Quarterly, Feb. 1944); and The Story of Home on the Range (booklet, 1950). Some other credits:

"Baulny Hill" (poem, Topeka Daily Capital, 1919)
"These Ageless Themes" (poem, Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1922)
"A Bob Ballade" (poem, The Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 6, 1924)
"Night Specters" (poem, Weird Tales, July 1932)

Mechem's son, Kirke L. Mechem (b. 1925) is a well-known composer of choral music and other works. The elder Mechem's wife Katherine was a pianist.

Kirke Mechem died on June 5, 1985, in Santa Clara County, California, at age ninety-five.

Kirke Mechem's Poem in Weird Tales

"Night Specters" (July 1932)

Further Reading

Mechem's articles for the Kansas Historical Quarterly, listed above, are available on the Internet.

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Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960)

May 8, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Dudley S. Corlett (ca. 1880-1946)

≪ Previous: Kirke Mechem (1889-1985)

Née Edna Ethel Morgan
Author, Artist, Teacher, School Principal
Born December 12, 1880, Shreve, Ohio
Died September 14, 1960, Fairhope, Alabama

Edna Ethel Morgan was born on December 12, 1880, the seventh daughter of Hugh Morgan, a farmer, and Sarah (Weiker) Morgan, his wife. Edna graduated high school and continued her education with two years at an unknown college. In 1900, calling herself by then Ethel, she lived far from home, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, at a place called Raceland.

Still in existence, Raceland is an old stagecoach tavern converted to a home for an old Virginia family. Originally called Rice's Tavern and built circa 1750 (more information at this link), Raceland was once owned by William "Racer Billy" Wynn (1784-1853), an owner and breeder of racehorses. There was a racetrack at Raceland (and slave quarters, too). Racer Billy passed the house on to his son, Marshall Ambler Moncure (1841-1900) once of the Ninth Virginia Cavalry, C.S.A. In 1900, when Ethel Morgan was living there, the head of the household was Elizabeth Imogene "Bettie" (Wynn) Moncure, widow of Marshall A. Moncure. Also in the house was Bettie's son, Ambler B. Moncure (1868-1933), and Ambler's wife, Rhoda (Morgan) Moncure (1875-1946), older sister of Ethel Morgan.

Ethel Morgan taught in the public schools of Iowa for many years. In 1910, she was at Stanton, Iowa, and in 1915, at Dunkerton. In 1921, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, she married Leroy A. Dunham (1886-1977), a U.S. Army veteran of World War I (1886-1977). By 1930, the couple were in Elgin, Iowa, where Dunham was a school superintendent and his wife was a school principal. The two shared a birthday, December 12. Upon his death in 1977, Dunham was buried at Biloxi National Cemetery in Mississippi.

The Dunhams moved to Alabama in the early 1930s. In 1935 and 1940, they were at Loxley in Baldwin County, Alabama. Ethel Morgan-Dunham had one poem in Weird Tales, "Magic Carpets," from July 1934. She preceded her husband in death, passing away at age seventy-nine on September 14, 1960. Ethel Dunham was buried at Colony Cemetery in Fairhope, Alabama, a place founded more than half a century before by Iowans.

Ethel Morgan Dunham's Poem in Weird Tales
"Magic Carpets" (July 1934)

Further Reading

There is much to read on Raceland and the Wynn-Moncure families. If you have access to Ancestry.com, you can read a little more on Ethel Morgan-Dunham and see a few images of her or related to her life, including the self-portrait shown below.

Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960), a self-portrait. Uploaded by a user of Ancestry.com.

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Dudley S. Corlett (ca. 1880-1946)

May 11, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Bruce Bryan (1906-2004)

≪ Previous: Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960)

Agricultural Expert, Public Speaker, Author, Playwright, Orientalist, Occultist
Born ca. Feb. 1880, Sutton, Surrey, England
Died January 25, 1946, 58 Rue el-Assa, Tangier, Morocco

Dudley Stuart Corlett was baptized on February 15, 1880, at All Saints Church in Benhilton, Sutton, Surrey, England. Presumably, he was born shortly before that, probably in the first half of February 1880. His parents were Stuart N. Corlett and Flora Corlett. His mother's name was fitting, for Dudley S. Corlett became an expert in tropical agriculture and an officer in the operation of botanical gardens in Ceylon and the United States.

Corlett traveled in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States and served in the oriental service of the British army, attaining in his twenty years of service the rank of captain. He was stationed for a year in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and knew Emperor Haile Selassie. Corlett also served in India, Egypt, and Sudan. For four years, he was director of the Economic Experiment Station at Peradiniya Botanical Gardens, Ceylon. An article from 1935 observed: "He was in close touch with eastern peoples, their religions, and customs, and made a special study of archaeology and ancient philosophies." (1)

From about 1920 onwards, Dudley S. Corlett lived in the United States, in southern California. There he worked as an author, public speaker, and secretary of the California Botanical Garden Association. He was also on the Board of Governors of that organization with William Randolph Hearst, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, among others. He may have lectured on tropical agriculture at the University of Southern California. He also gave lectures to clubs and other groups on botanical gardens, China, Egypt, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), the Mayan Indians, and so on. Among his other topics was the theory that the lost continent of Atlantis was the birthplace of mankind. A list of Corlett's articles and other works:

Experiments in Manuring of Cocoa, Department of Agriculture, Ceylon, Bulletin No. 26, with M. Kelway Bamber (1916)
"Notes on the Products of Harer Plateau, Abyssinia: A Report" (1917)
"The Charm of Chocolate," Los Angeles Times (Nov. 21, 1920)
"The Snare of Sugar,"Los Angeles Times (Nov. 28, 1920)
"The Tragedy of Rubber,"Los Angeles Times (Dec. 12, 1920)
"The Stars in Their Courses--A Contrast,"Los Angeles Times (Jan. 1, 1922)
"The Gardens of Cashmir"Art and Archaeology (Nov./Dec. 1922?)
The Magic Art of Egypt (1923)
"The Ancient Land of Punt," Travel (Apr. 1923)
"The Kohl Pots of Egypt,"Vogue (Sept. 1, 1923)
"Art on the Screen: or the Film of Tutankhamen,"Art and Archaeology (Dec. 1923)
Article, Art and Archaeology (Oct. 1924)
"The Black Crucifix of Esquipulas,"Los Angeles Times (June 28, 1925)
"Romance of Botanic Gardens,"Los Angeles Times (Mar. 13, 1927)
"A Garden in Mandeville Canyon,"Los Angeles Times (May 27, 1928)

Dudley S. Corlett was also the author of a play called Amber from about 1926 and one story (with Bruce Bryan) for Oriental Stories, a short-lived companion magazine to Weird Tales. He died of heart failure on January 25, 1946, at 58 Rue el-Assa, Tangier, Morocco.

Dudley S. Corlett's Story in Oriental Stories

"The Dancer of Quena," with Bruce Bryan (Spring 1932)

Further Reading
Numerous articles by and about Corlett are available on the Internet.

Notes
(1) Covina Argus (Calif.), Oct. 18, 1935, p. 6.

Dudley S. Corlett had an article in this issue of Travel, from April 1923 (the month after Weird Tales began). I have shown it here not only for art's sake but also to point out a similarity--namely, the two-color process--between this cover and those of Weird Tales from the same period. It was a cheap way to get color on a magazine cover without breaking your printing budget.

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Bruce Bryan (1906-2004)

May 14, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Earl Pierce, Jr. (1910-1982)

≪ Previous: Dudley S. Corlett (ca. 1880-1946)

Leslie Bruce Bryan
Author, Editor, Archaeologist, Anthropologist
Born January 16, 1906, Washington, D.C.
Died September 16, 2004, North Hollywood, California

Dudley S. Corlett's collaborator on the story "The Dancer of Quena" (Oriental Stories, Spring 1932) was another adopted Angeleno, writer, archaeologist, and anthropologist Bruce Bryan. Born Leslie Bruce Bryan on January 16, 1906, he was a native of Washington, D.C. His father was Paul M. Bryan, a government worker. His mother was Ethel (Hughes) Bryan. In 1947, Bruce Bryan earned himself some notoriety by throwing his mother out of their North Hollywood home, on Mother's Day no less. I'm not sure how that all turned out, but Bruce R. Bryan, son of Bruce Bryan, also evicted that day, later died in an automobile accident. You can read about the whole mess on the blog 1947project: The original Los Angeles time travel blog, here. Bruce Bryan was first married to Charlotta R. Bryan, maiden name unknown. His second wife was (Mary) Katherine Fahrenwald, whom he wed on November 25, 1936, in Washington, D.C. Bruce R. Bryan, the son, was Charlotta's child, not Katherine's. That might have made the eviction a little easier on the boy, but hardly by much, I imagine.

Despite his successes as a writer, Bruce Bryan was known as an archaeologist and anthropologist. He started in his career as the first staff archaeologist with the County Museum of Natural History, Science, and Art (now the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History) in 1926. In that capacity, he carried out investigations on San Nicolas Island, one of the Channel Islands, in October-December 1926. Soon after that, he went to the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles, where he eventually became archaeological curator. In the 1930 census, he listed his occupation as staff writer for a trade magazine. That may have been for the magazine of the museum, called The Masterkey. Bryan was also editor of that magazine at some point. Further expeditions followed his first, to Carpinteria in about 1930 and to the Dragoon Mountains of southeastern Arizona in 1932. Bryan left the museum to return to Washington, D.C., and to work in public service. He was once again with the Southwest Museum from 1959 until his retirement in 1983. He carried out further archaeological explorations of San Nicolas Island in 1958 and 1960.

Bruce Bryan had a respectable career as a writer for popular magazines and newspapers. He had five stories in Oriental Stories and Weird Tales, plus a dozen letters in those two titles and in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror and The Magic Carpet Magazine. All were printed in the period 1932 to 1939. Like his collaborator Dudley S. Corlett, Bryan wrote about movies for Art and Archaeology. His article "Movie Realism and Archaeological Fact" was published in that magazine in the October issue of 1924. I have also found a story, "Shakespeare Said It!", in Parade of Youth for June 26, 1938, and mention of an unpublished book called The Archaeology of San Nicolas Island. In 1970, Bryan published a version of his research in the book Archaeological Explorations on San Nicolas Island. Readers of children's literature will remember San Nicolas Island as the setting for Scott O'Dell's wonderfully good novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960).

After a very long life and career, L. Bruce Brian died on September 16, 2004, in North Hollywood, California, at age ninety-eight.

Bruce Bryan's Stories in Oriental Stories and Weird Tales

"The Dancer of Quena," with Dudley S. Corlett, in Oriental Stories (Spring, 1932)

"The Ho-Ho Kam Horror" in Weird Tales (Sept. 1937)

"The White Rat," with Earl Pierce, Jr., in Weird Tales (Sept. 1938)

"The Sitter in the Mound" in Weird Tales (June/July 1939)

"Return from Death" in Weird Tales (Aug. 1939)

Bruce Bryan's Letters to Weird Fiction Magazines

Oriental Stories, Spring 1932

Oriental Stories, Summer 1932

Oriental Stories, Winter 1932

Weird Tales, Feb. 1932

Weird Tales, Apr. 1932

Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Oct. 1932

The Magic Carpet Magazine, Apr. 1933

The Magic Carpet Magazine, Jan. 1934

Weird Tales, Nov. 1936

Weird Tales, Feb. 1937

Weird Tales, July 1937

Weird Tales, Oct. 1937

Further Reading

"History of Archaeological Research," Natural History Museum, here.

Obituary of Bruce Bryan, here.

From the Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1969, part II, page 1. In the same crime, the burglars made off with poison darts. That sounds like the beginnings of a weird tale . . .

Happy Mother's Day to All Moms!

(Including Mrs. Bryan)

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Earl Pierce, Jr. (1910-1982)

May 17, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Skilled Destroyers

≪ Previous: Bruce Bryan (1906-2004)

Earl Monroe Pierce, Jr.
Aka Earl Pierce; Earl Peirce, Jr.; Earl Peirce
Born June 7, 1910, San Francisco County, California
Died March 14, 1982, Alameda County, California

Earl Pierce is a fairly common name. Locating him might not be easy, but I think I have the right Earl Pierce for this article. I base this on the fact that the Earl Pierce, Jr., in question here lived, like his collaborator Bruce Bryan (1906-2004), in Washington, D.C., as did Everil Worrell (1893-1969). All wrote for Weird Tales and all apparently knew each other and associated with each other in the nation's capital. Seabury Quinn was also in their group. With that in mind, I'll offer a very brief biography of the Earl Pierce, Jr., I have found with the assumption that he wrote for Weird Tales.

His name was Earl Pierce, Jr. I can say that with almost certainty, as I don't believe Peirce is at all a correct spelling. I wonder now if Pierce misspelled his own name to distance himself in some way from his family or his past. If I have the right Earl, and he was born in San Francisco, then Washington, D.C., is about as far as he could have gone from home while remaining in the United States. That's mere speculation. More likely, the misspelling of his name is a simple typographical error. The Earl Pierce, Jr., I have was Earl Monroe Pierce, Jr., born on June 7, 1910, in San Francisco County, California, to Earl Pierce, Sr., an interior decorator and furniture salesman, and Lizinette (Hoyle) Pierce. Earl Pierce, Jr., had one younger sister as far as I can tell.

In 1920, the Pierce family was in San Francisco. Earl, Jr., presumably graduated from Berkeley High School in 1928. In what would have been his senior year, or shortly after his graduation, he got his name in the papers by having a loud party at his parents' house, complete with wine, women, and song. That was in September 1928. In 1930, Pierce was still living in Berkeley with his family and working as a typist for a railway company. By 1940, he was on the other end of the continent, in Washington, D.C., and employed as the manager of an apartment building. Half of those years, 1935 to 1941, more or less coincided with his career as a fan and author of weird fiction and other popular stories. He had ten stories and three letters in the pulp magazines of the time. Seven of those stories and all of the letters were in Weird Tales. And then he fell silent. In later years, Earl Pierce, Jr., lived in the area of San Francisco and Oakland. He died on March 14, 1982, in Alameda County, California, at age seventy-one. With him died all of the hopes, dreams, and pleasures of his youth. His successes--his ten stories--remain for us to read today where we can find them.

Earl Pierce, Junior's Stories in Weird Fiction Magazines
"Doom of the House of Duryea" in Weird Tales (Oct. 1936)
"The Last Archer" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1937; reprinted in Startling Mystery Stories, Summer 1968)
"The Death Mask" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1937)
"The Homicidal Diary" in Weird Tales (Oct. 1937)
"The White Rat," with Bruce Bryan, in Weird Tales (Sept. 1938)
"Satan Fills the Morgue" in Strange Detective Mysteries (Nov./Dec. 1938)
"The Stroke of Twelve" in Weird Tales (June/July 1939)
"Portrait of a Bride" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1940)
"Legacy of the Dead" in Terror Tales (July 1940)
"The Shadow of Nirvana" in Strange Stories (Feb. 1941)

Letters to "The Eyrie"
Nov. 1935
Nov. 1936
July 1937, from Earl Peirce, Jr.

Earl Pierce, Jr., from the Berkeley High School yearbook, 1927.

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Skilled Destroyers

May 20, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: A Long Time Ago . . .

≪ Previous: Earl Pierce, Jr. (1910-1982)

It becomes more and more plain to me that genre fiction in America is descended mostly from conservative writers--not conservative in the contemporary political sense, but in an older, non-political or even anti-political sense. One exception among the various genres might be science fiction, which tends to be, in its purest or original forms, progressive, forward-looking, and optimistic. But then you could make a case that Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a founder of science fiction in America (maybe the founder), and Poe was no liberal or progressive.

In reading Poe and reading about Poe recently, I came across the following quote again, from Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill by Peter Viereck (D. Van Nostrand Company, 1956, pp. 102-103):

Cultural Conservatives: Melville, Hawthorne. But, although a narrowly political conservatism in America may today require such a business élite [discussed in the previous section], conservatism need not be political at all. Instead, its characteristic American form may be a lonely soul-searching by American artists to transcend what Melville called "the impieties of progress." (1) Many of America's greatest literary figures have been cultural conservatives in their anti-optimism, their qualms about external reforms--for example, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Herman Melville (1819-1891), Henry James (1843-1916), [and] William Faulkner (1897- ). Hyatt Waggoner's Hawthorne, 1955, represents the latest research of those scholars who see the real American cultural tradition as a conservative "tragic sense," affirming Original Sin and rejecting liberal illusions about progress and human nature. These liberal illusions, concludes Waggoner, "were useless for any artist who would not wilfully [sic] blind himself to the existence of tragedy. . . . The 'evolutionary optimism' of . . . nineteenth-century liberalism was affronted by anyone who concerned himself with the 'deeper psychology.'" [. . . .] The ideal inspiring America's cultural conservatives has been best expressed by a little-known quatrain of Melville:

. "Not magnitude, not lavishness,

But Form--the site;

Not innovating wilfulness,

But reverence for the Archetype." (2)

My own notes:
(1) The quote is from Melville's epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), from Canto 21, "Ungar and Rolfe." In its original, the phrase is:

The impieties of "Progress" . . .

(2) That quatrain is the poem "Greek Architecture" in its entirety.

If you read a little more of "Ungar and Rolfe," you will find the following lines of dialogue. Ungar, a Catholic and a believer, speaks first. He is questioned by the more skeptical Rolfe, who is Protestant:

"True heart do ye bear
In this discussion? or but trim
To draw my monomania out,
For monomania, past doubt,
Some of ye deem it. Yet I'll on.
Yours seems a reasonable tone;
But in the New World things make haste:
Not only men, the state lives fast--
Fast breeds the pregnant eggs and shells,
The slumberous combustibles
Sure to explode. 'Twill come, 'twill come!
One demagogue can trouble much:
How of a hundred thousand such?
And universal suffrage lent
To back them with brute element
Overwhelming? What shall bind these seas
Of rival sharp communities
Unchristianized? Yea, but 'twill come!"
"What come? "
"Your Thirty Years (of) War."
"Should fortune's favorable star
Avert it?"
"Fortune? nay, 'tis doom."
"Then what comes after? spasms but tend
Ever, at last, to quiet."
"Know,
Whatever happen in the end,
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts--
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled--brutalized
By popular science--Atheized
Into a smatterer--"
"Oh, oh!"
"Yet knowing all self need to know
In self's base little fallacy;
Dead level of rank commonplace:
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy."
America!

I have written before--or maybe I have just passed on the observation--that conservatives, though their eyes be directed on the past, are far better at predictions and prognostications than are liberals with their "illusions about progress and human nature." (See what happens when you read classic literature? You start using the subjunctive mood.) Look what Melville foresaw and look what we have now as night falls on the Dark Ages of Democracy: A fast-breeding state . . . a hundred thousand demagogues leading rival sharp communities . . . a civic barbarism of men, myriads of them playing their pygmy parts, all existing at a dead level of rank commonplace . . . unchristianized, disennobled, brutalized by popular science, atheized, debased into equality, yet each knowing all the self need know in self's base little fallacy. And though we don't yet have war, there are at least rumors of war among us. And all of it new confirmation of the fall of Adam, as if we needed any further evidence that we are indeed fallen.

In reading further in Viereck's book, I came on a section on George Santayana (1863-1952) and liberalism:

In Dominations and Powers, 1951, Santayana pointed out the paradoxical consequences of idealistic nineteenth-century liberalism: it either ended in twentieth-century anarchy or, to avoid anarchy, imposed its will on an unliberal world. But by imposing its will, it ceased to be liberal, became despotic. Because of these equally deadly alternatives, Santayana pronounced the history of liberalism "virtually closed." (p. 105)

I have written before, too, about these two alternatives, anarchy (or chaos, or, alternatively, apocalypse) and despotism (or tyranny, or, alternatively, dystopia). In drawing further distinctions, I think you could say that anarchy and despotism are real-world conditions, while apocalypse and dystopia are more nearly fantasies. And because they are fantasies of the future, apocalypse and dystopia can be considered science fiction, and it is within that genre that stories of this kind ordinarily reside.

It occurs to me now that both apocalypse and dystopia are outgrowths of a Christian worldview. Apocalypse is of course another name for the biblical Book of Revelation, which describes, by some interpretations, Christian end times. That's easy enough. Dystopia is a little tougher, but once you realize that Utopia is Dystopia, and that Utopia is simply either a Heaven or a Garden of Eden on Earth (both are called Paradise), then you can see that Dystopia is just another variation on what seems to me a Christian notion that time is an arrow rather than a circle and that it is flying fast and straight, inexorably towards the Millennium. In other words, history is a chronicle of progress, with the benighted pre-Christian era in the past and a glorious Millennial future awaiting us. Science fiction may be an outgrowth of a secular age of reason, but would it have been possible without the Christian concept of progress and of a looking forward to a glorious (and earthly) future?

* * *

I know I have written a lot here, but I can't pass up the opportunity to quote George Santayana at length. Again, from Conservatism, pp. 183-184, originally in Dominations and Powers (1951):

The hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. The traditional order, which was pregnant with all sorts of wars, civil, foreign, religious, and domestic, was to be relaxed precisely for the sake of peace. . . . When we have conceded everything that anybody clamors for, everyone will be satisfied. . . . Swimming in the holiday pond of a universal tolerance, we may confidently call our souls our own. . . . So, all grievances being righted and everyone quite free, we hoped in the nineteenth century to remain for ever in unchallengeable enjoyment of our private property, our private religions, and our private morals.

But there was a canker in this rose. The dearest friend and ally of the liberal was the reformer; perhaps even in his own inmost self was a prepotent Will, not by any means content with being let alone, but aspiring to dominate everything. Why were all those traditional constraints so irksome? Why were all those old ideas so ridiculous? Because I had a Will of my own to satisfy and an opinion of my own to proclaim. Relaxing the order of society, so as to allow me to live, is by no means enough, if the old absurdities and the old institutions continue to flourish. . . . No pond is large enough for this celestial swan . . . no scurry into backwaters will save the ducks and geese from annihilation. How should I live safe or happy in the midst of such creatures? . . . [Hence] the price of peace, as men are actually constituted, is the suppression of almost all liberties. The history of liberalism, now virtually closed, illustrates this paradox.

Again, a conservative writer and thinker foresaw the future, the future in which we now live, and one in which the liberal reformer, possessed of a "prepotent will," seeks not only to live free from traditional constraints but also to destroy traditional order and traditional institutions because he finds their continued existence so intolerable. There is peace in Dystopia and no freedom.

If Santayana was wrong about anything in the quote above, it may be that the history of liberalism is not yet closed. We see that every day, every time one among Melville's myriads playing his pygmy part throws a rock through the window of a person whose rights or property he covets . . . shoots pepper spray into the eyes of the woman who opposes his ideas . . . sets fire to a car or building at a protest against violence and hatred . . . silences by force the speaker with whom he disagrees . . . requires someone to labor for him under threat of legal penalty . . . revolts at any perceived contraction of the power of the State . . . and on and on. I suspect that the history of liberalism may never be closed, as liberalism as a state of mind is just one more bit of confirmation of the fall of Adam. If we exist in a fallen state, then we will continue to aspire to godhood and to order the universe in accordance with our own dark whims and desires. There will always be within each of us a skilled destroyer and a ruthless tyrant.

So that brings me back to Poe as a founder of genres of fiction. (I just finished reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is, in its final sequences, first, a story of Lost Worlds, then, a strange and mysterious dream-vision or apocalyptic fantasy.) If conservatism is in some apprehension of the truth about human nature, then the genres of fiction that tend towards a conservative worldview--weird fiction, supernatural fiction, horror, fantasy, historical fiction, romance--will go on easily enough. And if conservatism is right about the liberalism which rages against it, then the more liberal or progressive genres--namely, science fiction--will continue to struggle. You might consider the success or un-success of various genres to be a test of this hypothesis.

One alternative to a struggling science fiction is for there to be conservative version of the genre, a seeming contradiction, but not out of the question. There has been conservative science fiction before, and I imagine there is still some now, as well. Two examples from past and present are the very sub-genres about which I have written here, that is, apocalypse (or post-apocalypse) and dystopia. Both seem to be doing fine, and because the contemporary liberal or progressive in America has broken the mirror in which he might view himself, the latter--stories of dystopia--seem to be flourishing. Never mind that they tend to be descriptions of liberal rather than conservative excess, just as George Santayana implicitly predicted. The liberal or progressive reader likes them just the same and seems blissful to read them in his ignorance.

A picture illustrating the very last strange and mysterious words in the main action of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838). Illustration by the British artist Arthur David McCormick (1860-1943).

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A Long Time Ago . . .

May 24, 2017, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Reading the Pulps

≪ Previous: Skilled Destroyers

(I wrote this article for my blog Indiana Illustrators and Hoosier Cartoonists and have posted it here for today's anniversary.)

Today's entry is eccentric. In its spinning and turning, it will catch a renowned artist, poet, and critic; a pop singer who cast herself as a witch; an actress who played a princess; two worldwide pop-cultural phenomena; a song about dreams; and the dreams themselves of countless young people--dreams of quest and conflict and a chance at becoming a hero in a battle that never ends. Among those who dream and who have dreamed were four boys who, on a day forty years ago, sat in a darkened theater in Indianapolis, eagerly awaiting the start of a movie that would prove unlike any before it, even if it was drawn from tales as old as storytelling. My older brother had seen the movie before. My younger brother, his friend Tom, and I had not, but we were excited in a way that only children can be excited to see a movie about which we had heard so much. Not long before that day at the Eastwood--a theater now laid low by the passage of time--the movie had opened across the country and had almost instantly become a sensation beyond any moviegoing experience before it. Nothing before and nothing after--not even Jaws from two summers before--would match what it became in the year and more following its release. It has since grown into a franchise, moreover, a worldwide phenomenon. The movie was of course Star Wars. It came out forty years ago today, on May 25, 1977.

Strange details stick in your head. I remember that as we waited to see Star Wars, a song played in the theater. (Those were the days before commercials were shown before the movie begins.) The song was "Dreams," by Fleetwood Mac, from the album Rumours. I didn't know it at the time, but Rumours was released on February 4, 1977, not long before Star Wars came out. It was a sensation, too, and became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. "Dreams" reached number one on the pop-music charts on June 18, 1977, probably around the time the four of us went to see Star Wars. (Our seeing it was an early birthday present from my parents to my younger brother.) Another thing I probably didn't know at the time: "Dreams" was sung by Stevie Nicks.

Now comes the strange part--strange, then somewhat plausible, at least in my view. The heroine of Star Wars was of course Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher, who was only nineteen years old when filming began on Star Wars in March 1976--nineteen and completely convincing not only as a princess but also as an interstellar senator. Although she had been in movies before, Carrie Fisher became a household name with Star Wars. Millions mourned her death this past year. She was loved as few people in popular culture are truly loved. Stevie Nicks is also loved that way, by millions the world over. She who sang "Dreams" for us has, strangely enough, been named as a possible replacement for Carrie Fisher. This isn't just some lone fanboy's dream: it's actually a thing on the Internet. As soon as I heard about it, I thought That might actually work. Whereas some people seem to be saying that Stevie Nicks should just be a stand-in or a body double for Carrie Fisher, I think she could actually be Princess Leia. No one I can think of could fill the role, but Stevie is loved like Carrie was loved, and she has a similar stature, not just physically but also in pop-cultural terms. The pop culture of the 1970s is falling into pieces with age as all things do--sadly, neither Linda Ronstadt nor Steve Perry can sing anymore--but if you want to hold it up for at least a little longer, I say Why not? If she can act and if the deal can be swung, why shouldn't we have someone new in Stevie Nicks to play the forty-year-old part of Princess Leia? I realize that it's only a fantasy--a dream--to think that way, but what else is all of this but a dream and a fantasy?

So what does any of this have to do with Indiana and its artists? Well, as any Star Wars fan ought to know, Ralph McQuarrie (1929-2012), the conceptual artist behind the film and the franchise, was born in Gary, Indiana. He worked with director and screenwriter George Lucas as early as the spring of 1975, two years before the movie was released. He would go on to work on other films in the series. I would like to go beyond Ralph McQuarrie, though, and write about another Indiana artist who had nothing (or almost nothing) to do with Star Wars but by the turns of an eccentric idea can be caught in a discussion of the movie and its related phenomena.

A painting by Indiana illustrator Ralph McQuarrie for The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Kenneth Rexroth was born on December 22, 1905, in South Bend, Indiana. A home-schooled prodigy, then a teenaged orphan, he moved to Chicago to live with his aunt around 1919 or so. Although he is now known as a poet and critic, Rexroth studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in his youth. I would be surprised to find that any of his artwork survives. On the other hand, maybe there are drawings by Kenneth Rexroth hiding among his papers, wherever they might be housed.

Rexroth had a varied career as a traveler, friend, husband, lover, critic, essayist, poet, author, translator, activist, and associate of many famous people, including Beat Poets and other literary figures in San Francisco. You can read about him on the Internet and in those ancient artifacts known as "books." I'll note only that Kenneth Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982, at age seventy-six.

"Dorothy," a portrait by Andrée Dutcher (1902-1940), first wife of Kenneth Rexroth.

Now comes a part about which I'm not sure, followed by some thoughts that I hope will stand on their own, even if I'm wrong about this connection to Kenneth Rexroth. And here is that connection, if it really is a connection: a long time ago, I read that there are only two kinds of stories, namely, the Iliad and the Odyssey. I think the quote was attributed to Kenneth Rexroth, but I can't be sure. As happens too often, when you lose a quote, it's hard to find again, even in this age of the Internet. But I have kept that thought in my head and have applied it to the analysis of books and movies over the years. It seems to hold up pretty well. Boiled down even further, the idea is that every story is either of a conflict--the Iliad--or of a quest or journey--the Odyssey. I would like to look into that idea in relation to two high-powered, pop-cultural franchises.

The cover (altered, I believe) of Poetry Readings in the Cellar (Fantasy, 1958), a spoken-word record with Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I wrote that there is no connection between Rexroth and Star Wars. Well, that's if you stop too soon. If you don't stop too soon, you'll learn that Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) was friends with Erik Bauersfeld (1922-2016), voice of Admiral Ackbar and Bib Fortuna in the Star Wars movies.

Before Star Wars, there was Star Trek. Since the former came out in 1977, the two have lived side by side. One is fantasy. It appeals or is meant to appeal especially to children. The other is science fiction, though not always of the highest order. It appeals to children but also to adults, as the best entertainment of the 1960s and '70s did. I'm sure there is some overlap in the fandom associated with each, but the stereotype is that there are just two kinds of people: Star Wars fans and Star Trek fans. I'm not sure what these fans think of each other. If you fall back on stereotypes, you might say that Star Wars fans think that Star Trek is boring and that Star Trek fans think Star Wars is childish and one-dimensional. But those are stereotypes. Anyway, consider their titles: Star Wars. Star Trek. Take away the word Star and you're left with what? Wars--a conflict, the story told in the Iliad. Trek--a quest or journey, the story told in the Odyssey. There are wars in Star Trek and quests in Star Wars, but each is essentially of its own type. (With that in mind, might Princess Leia be Helen of Troy, with the Millennium Falcon as the Trojan Horse and the Death Star as the fortress city of Troy itself?)

So just by their titles, these two franchises bear out the idea I have attributed here to Kenneth Rexroth. If there are only two kinds of stories, each must cover a lot of ground. The possibilities for storytelling would seem vast. However, there are limits in each. War eventually ceases. The journey finally reaches its end. Wars and journeys without end can only mean misery and despair. So what does that mean for a pop-cultural franchise? I saw part of the results in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). The moviemakers seem to have been recreating Star Wars for a new generation. That's fine. Star Wars is after all a story for children. Why shouldn't children now have the same chance we had--we four and millions more like us--in 1977 for an exciting fantasy of rushing from one star system to another towards a climactic battle against an evil empire?

But there's a crack in the Star Wars story. I say it as a fan, but there's a crack, for in Star Wars, there must always be an Empire and there must always be a Rebellion. The Empire can never at last be defeated, and the Rebellion must always be the underdog, even when it attains power. The Star Wars universe is vast and the possibilities for storytelling are theoretically endless, but the main action in every movie is the same: Imperial forces against Rebels, Sith against Jedi, the Dark Side against the Force. Without that conflict, Star Wars may well amount to nothing. So the war goes on, movie after movie, decade after decade, all with variations on a simple theme: the Empire or its equivalent always builds a big, impenetrable fortress and the Rebels or their equivalents always penetrate it and destroy it, often with what is seemingly the most powerful weapon in the universe, the X-wing fighter. Maybe Star Wars: The Force Awakens recapitulated the original trilogy not so much for a new generation of moviegoers but because it's the only story that can be told in the Star Wars universe. An entire universe and only one story to tell. And maybe Darth Vader returned in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) because of a further limitation: maybe only he makes a truly compelling villain and a suitable embodiment of the spirit of the Empire. One thing is for sure: he beats the heck out of his weak little tantrum-throwing emo grandson.

In Star Trek, on the other hand, there are always new horizons of outer space where no man has gone before. Storytelling in the Star Trek universe is far less limited than in the Star Wars universe if only because it isn't framed and delineated by war, which has, significantly, a classic narrative structure. There is always a Federation and the starships of the Federation, but beyond that, only the writer's imagination places bounds upon what stories might be told. Star Trek, as Kenneth Rexroth wrote of the Odyssey, "is a collection of adventures, of little melodramas." There are limitations even here, though. One is that in the Star Trek universe, there isn't the classic narrative structure as in a story of war. The story just goes on and on, with all parts being equal to all other parts. There isn't any growth or development in the characters. They simply live out their lives in stasis, returned at the beginning of each episode to where they were at the beginning of the last episode, despite anything that might have happened in between. Captain Kirk might have great adventures, but he doesn't grow. Luke Skywalker, on the other hand, might grow (in addition to being a story of conflict, Star Wars can be considered a Bildungsroman), but he can never have peace in a universe that must always be at war. Maybe that explains his retreat to a monastery on top of a rocky island off the coast of Ireland where he will forever look at Rey and she will forever hold out to him his lightsaber. At least it seemed like forever at the movie theater.

So which limitation is worse? I can't say. A better way might be to look at possibilities rather than limitations. Star Wars and Star Trek have both told great stories. When they have not told great stories, it hasn't been because of the limitations of their respective types. And I would say that neither franchise has reached the bounds of possibility. There are still more stories to tell, and it's nice to think that forty years from now there will still be excited children waiting in the dark, waiting for the words Space: the final frontier . . . or A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .

Copyright 2017 Terence E. Hanley
Happy 60th Wedding Anniversary to My Parents!

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Reading the Pulps

May 28, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Shoals of Reality

≪ Previous: A Long Time Ago . . .

Sunday, May 14

This afternoon, I finished re-reading Saul Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, published in 1944. In its imagery of the twentieth-century American city and of life in that city, it makes me think of the stories of Fritz Leiber, Jr., for example, "Smoke Ghost" (1941), "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942), and "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" (1945). It also makes me think of another first novel, Hanger Stout, Awake! by Jack Matthews (1967), in its form (a series of journal entries), in one of its themes (a young man waiting to go into the army), and in the imagery of its title (dangling vs. hanging). The story in Dangling Man, such as it is, is of a man named Joseph, last name unknown (like Josef K. from Kafka's earlier novel The Trial). Dangling as he is between a kind of freedom in civilian life and regimentation in the military, Joseph spends his time reading the paper, walking from place to place, and talking--too often arguing and fighting--with his wife, his family, and his friends. He likes the comics and sometimes reads them twice in the same daily. He makes note of a lower form of art and literature, as well:

January 13

A DARK, burdensome day. I stormed up from sleep this morning, not knowing what to do first. . . . I fell back into bed and spent an hour or so collecting myself . . . . Then I rose. There were low clouds; the windows streamed. The surrounding roofs--green, raw red blackened brass--shone like potlids in a darkened kitchen.

At eleven I had a haircut. I went as far as Sixty-third Street for lunch and ate at a white counter amid smells of frying fish, looking out on the iron piers in the street and the huge paving bricks like the plates of the boiler-room floor in a huge liner. Above the restaurant, on the other corner, a hamburger with arms and legs balanced on a fiery wire, leaned toward a jar of mustard. . . . I wandered through a ten-cent store, examining the comic valentines . . . . Next I was drawn into a shooting gallery . . . . Back in the street, I warmed myself at a salamander flaming in an oil drum near a newsstand with its wall of magazines erected under the shelter of the El. Scenes of love and horror. . . . (Meridian Books, 1960, p. 107)

In its description of a world so remote and alien from our own, this and other passages from Dangling Man are like something from science fiction, something that no longer exists, drawn from what is for us a fantasy approaching that of Coruscant in its galaxy far, far away, or an urbanized Mars of the future as in Total Recall.

The events in Dangling Man take place between December 1942 and April (the cruelest month) 1943. Joseph's entry quoted above, then, is for January 13, 1943. The magazines that Bellow's diarist might have seen on that newsstand under the El would probably have been dated February or March, but for the snapshot below of a month in the history of science fiction, fantasy, and horror pulps, I'll choose the month of January 1943. As you can see, a couple show the imagery of war. The rest might easily have come from a time of peace.

War looms over Dangling Man as it does over the January 1943 issue and cover of Weird Tales. Art by A.R. Tilburne.

War, too, on the cover of Amazing Stories. Art by J. Allen St. John.

Art by William Timmins.

Artist unknown.

Art by Robert Gibson Jones.

Art by Rudolph Belarski.

Artist unknown.

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