Farnsworth Wright: "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension," "Poisoned," and "The Great Panjandrum"

A few weeks ago we read three 1920s stories by Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales.  Let's go back, Jack, and do it again!  Two of today's stories were printed in Weird Tales in 1923, when the magazine was edited by Edwin Baird; the third appeared in the first issue Wright edited, the November 1924 number.

"An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (1923)

In 1997 there appeared an anthology edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt and graced with a great Stephen Fabian cover entitled The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, and "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" was among its contents.  So I guess we have a treat ahead of us!

Or not!  This is a wacky joke story, a sort of filler piece.  It isn't good, but it isn't particularly annoying, so we'll call it barely acceptable.  

The narrator of "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is a goofy sort of character who addresses us chummily and colloquially.  I guess we are supposed to both like him and look down on him as a dope, sort of like how we look at a Wodehouse narrator.  He relates to us a ridiculous tale in which a space ship from Jupiter lands right next to him in Chicago.  Hundreds or thousands of Jupiterians emerge form the ship; the aliens are hard to visualize because the narrator describes them in a way that is totally absurd, and their behavior is almost as ridiculous.  A college professor of the narrator's acquaintance s on hand and he explains that the Jupiterians are from or encompass a fourth-dimension, so can fold themselves inside out, change their size, pass though walls, etc.   As we expect of a college professor, he prefers the aliens to his own race, calling them superior, the only true intellectuals, etc.

The leader of the expedition from Jupiter gets drunk on the narrator's whisky, and loses some of his fourth-dimension powers and so is trapped here in Earth.  His fellows try to rescue him and in a way I won't describe this leads to an explosion that kills all the aliens...and wakes up the narrator, who was having a nightmare after trying to read a book by Einstein.

The somewhat understated style of humor in "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is easier to swallow than the style of humor employed by Robert Bloch in the story we read by the Psycho scribe for our last blog post, this story is mercifully brief, and I appreciated the satire of college professors, so I'm not being as hard on Wright's filler piece here as I am on so many other joke stories.  Still, I find it confounding that Kaye and Betancourt considered "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" one of the best stories from Weird Tales' first year, and that in 1927 it was included in the anthology The Moon Terror, like four years after its debut in the October 1923 ish of WT.  Don't people open up Weird Tales for the blood and guts, the sex and violence, the terror and despair?  Are people really looking to Weird Tales for laughs?

"Poisoned" (1923)

"Poisoned" feels like a mainstream story about scandal and broken friendships and blackmail and all that sort of thing--it has no weird or science fiction elements.  It is also boring.  Thumbs down!

Two middle-class guys, an apothecary and a lawyer, are best buddies.  They do everything together!  They both bear the first name Aubrey.  They got the flu together and recovered together, both tended to by the same nurse.  One of them fell in love with the nurse, and he and the nurse are engaged to be married.

These jokers play cards together every day, and every day get into stupid arguments because one of them plays carelessly, throwing down a card that only a dolt would play, and then saying he'd made a mistake and should be able to take the card back and put down a more appropriate one.  One day their argument gets very heated and one of the men storms off and the men stop seeing each other.

The plot gets kind of convoluted and the Aubrey who is not engaged tries to get his mitts on the nurse to which his former pal is engaged and as part of his strategy reveals to her that the other Audrey, her fiancé, has an illegitimate child with some other woman.  The marriage is called off and the nurse marries some third guy.  

Both Aubreys are miserable, each lacking the woman he desired and lacking his only real friend.  The lawyer contemplates suicide and buys poison--the apothecary hears through the apothecary grapevine about the purchase of the poison and looks forward to hearing of the other Audrey's demise, but the attorney decides not to kill himself after all.  The apothecary goes to visit the lawyer to see how unhappy he is and there is a complicated scene involving wine with poison in it and some uncertainty about whether one guy wants to commit suicide in front of the other guy and/or murder the other guy blah blah blah and both of them end up drinking poison and keeling over.

Waste of time.  In general I like disastrous sexual relationships and men acting stupidly over a woman and people committing suicide in my fiction, but Wright absolutely fails to make these characters interesting and the business with the cards and with the glasses of wine is a little hard to follow even though Wright spends too many words explaining it all.  A failure.

"Poisoned" has never been reprinted.

"The Great Panjandrum" (1924)

This story, appearing a year after "Poisoned," was printed under a pseudonym in an issue of the magazine Wright himself edited.  The identity of the author of the piece would have been no mystery to veteran readers of the magazine, as under the bogus name we see "Author of 'The Teakwood Shrine,'" a tale which appeared under Wright's real name in the September 1923 issue.  A little joke, I guess.

Jokes abound on the ten pages which "The Great Panjandrum" occupies.  Wright immediately gets on my bad side by employing one of my least favorite literary devices--using phonetic spelling to represent an accent.     

‘‘Why yo’ all didn’t go an’ ’list in de ahmy an’ come back f’um France a hero, like Mandy Johnson’s man, so’s I could be proud ob yo’? I’se plumb tired ob scein’ de same ol’ face, day aftah day, day aftah day. Ah sho wishes yo’ had gone an’ ’listed.’’

Maybe this would be amusing to hear an actor say, but reading it is kind of a chore.

The protagonist of "The Great Panjandrum" is George Washington, an African-American gentleman of leisure who lives on the South Side of Chicago with his wife Martha.  Martha, quoted above, regrets that her husband didn't join the army, but how could our hero have joined the colors and fought the Hun when he suffers from rheumatism?

Out delivering a load of laundry Martha has washed, George crosses paths with the man he considers the wisest among the inhabitants of the South Side.  Eavesdropping, George realizes that this savant is in cahoots with a voodoo master, the Great Panjandrum, who is going to launch a race war in hopes of establishing an independent black nation right there in Chicago.

George hurries to the police station to report the coming revolution, but the Irish sergeant on duty there just insults George, dismissing his valuable intelligence on the coming revolt--scheduled for this very afternoon!--as the delusions of a drunk.  So George takes matters into his own hands!  He makes his way to the Great Panjandrum's HQ and fast talks his way past the various voodoo-adherents into the lair of the voodoo master himself!  The diabolical sorcerer has just sacrificed a goat and its heart sits in a bowl of blood!  George's entreaties that the uprising will only cause pointless death on a large scale among the "colored" population of the Windy City fall on deaf ears, and a comic fight ensues that sees George, the high priest of darkness, and several other "negroes" fall down into a pit under a trap door.  In the fracas, George's hat is dislodged, and some of the blood of the poor goat who is the real victim of all this stains it.  Somebody has corroborated George's report and so the police arrive, and find the blood-stained hat before they find George.  The authorities report to Martha that her husband has been slain, and Mrs. Washington makes a dramatic show of being hysterical over her hero husband's untimely demise in the course of sparing the South Side a catastrophic race war.  But when George shows up, having finally been rescued by the police, she sets him to work helping her with the washing and points out that in the excitement he seems to have forgotten he has "de rheumatiz."

In depicting black people as ridiculous schemers and deceivers, and in its liberal use of the "n-word," "The Great Panjandrum" is very racist by today's standards.  The jokes are weak and the plot is just a rickety frame upon which to hang the jokes.  Thumbs down for this one, which has never been reprinted as far as I can tell.

**********

Not good, Mr. Wright, not good.  Three stories full of banal material ("It was all a dream!" "Blacks are lazy!" "Did he switch the glasses while I was in the other room?"), two of them silly joke stories, none of them with any legit weird elements.  It is unlikely we will read any additional stories by Farnsworth Wright, though two more lurk in 1930s issues of WT.

Hopefully we'll encounter some more impressive material the next time we crack open a copy of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.