Donald Wandrei: "The Tree-Men of M'Bwa," "The Lives of Alfred Kramer" and "Spawn of the Sea"

As regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log (God have mercy on their souls) are aware, I aspire to blog about at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales produced in the 1930s.  In pursuit of this lofty goal, today we read three stories by Donald Wandrei, member of the Lovecraft circle, cofounder of Arkham House, poet, and winner of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.  These stories would later appear in book form, but I am reading the versions printed in Weird Tales in the 1930s via scans freely available at the internet archive.

(We have already read some of Wandrei's stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log: from Astounding--"Raiders of the Universes" and "Colossus"--and from Weird Tales--"The Fire Vampires," "Something From Above," and "The Red Brain.")

"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa" (1932)

The narrator of "The Tree-Men of M'Bwa" is a big game hunter who travels around the world bagging rare beasts so they can be stuffed and put on display in museums.  Talk about a dream job!  He's a passenger on a boat travelling along the African coast, en route to the site of his next big expedition.  When the boat stops at a smelly little coast town, he strikes up a conversation with the only other white man in the local bar, a man who is missing both of his legs.  When the legless guy, geologist Daniel Richards, learns that the narrator plans on crossing the Mountains of the Moon, he warns him against it, and tells the story of how he lost his lower limbs. 

Richards was mapping uncharted territory and looking for valuable mineral deposits a few years ago, and, after crossing the Mountains of the Moon, his local guides abandoned him rather than explore a hill Richards thought was interesting.  Richards ignored their warnings and went up the hill on his own.  On the other side of the hill was a strange circular valley where no grass grew on the ground and no insects buzzed in the air.  At the center of the clearing sat a strange red object that seemed to have a different shape every time he looked at it--was it a pyramid or an obelisk or an orb?  The red object was surrounded by peculiar trees that looked like crude sculptures of men, trees with no leaves or branches, just two limbs much like a man's arms; the tallest tree looked least like a man, while the smallest looked quite like a human being, and, in fact, was looking at Richards!  

Before you know it, Richards is fixed in the soil alongside that smallest "tree man," having been overpowered by a zombie named M'Bwa who is over a thousand years old and shanghaied into the ranks of the tree men.  The second most recent draftee, the tree man right next to Richards, explains that a being from another dimension arrived here in Africa before the sinking of Atlantis and resides in that weird red shape-shifting object behind them, The Whirling Flux.  This alien turned M'Bwa into a zombie so he act as The Whirling Flux's eternal guardian.  This tree-man has gradually becoming less man and more tree for twenty years, and the effort of talking to Richards exhausts his humanity--he never speaks again.

Richards is spared a similar vegetative doom when a colleague of his comes looking for him a few weeks later.  Swinging and throwing a machete like nobody's business, this hero manages to outfight M'Bwa and cut Richards out of the earth.  The two white men only just barely escape, as the alien's powers put M'Bwa back together again with ease after he's been chopped apart.  We don't get a happy ending, though.  On the way back to civilization, Richards's savior dies of malaria, and Richards can't bring himself to return to the West--every month he has to have the fresh shoots that are growing out of the stumps of his legs pruned off!

This is a pretty good Lovecraftian story, with all kinds of fun elements: fear of the exotic Other, an inscrutable alien, the living dead, and plenty of body horror with people being dismembered and their bodies responding in shockingly unnatural ways.  Thumbs up!

"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa" has never been anthologized, but has been included in the Wandrei collections The Eye and the Finger (1944)  and Don't Dream (1997.)         

I enjoy Margaret Brundage's sexually
provocative covers as much as the next guy,
but much of her work looks pretty wan
beside that of John Allen St. John, who has a 
knowledge of human anatomy and an 
ability to convey motion that she sorely lacks 

"The Lives of Alfred Kramer" (1932)

We recently read stories by those top tier members of the Weird Tales crowd Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith in which 20th-century people experience the phenomenon of racial memory and have their consciousnesses thrown back into the past so they can live out stressful events in the lives of their ancestors, only to wake up back in their native century.  In "The Lives of Alfred Kramer," Donald Wandrei takes a crack at these themes.

Our narrator is on a long train ride, and can't sleep, and so ends up shooting the breeze with a weird dude, Alfred Kramer.  Kramer smells odd, his eyes have no pupils, and he doesn't move his mouth when he speaks.  Most of the story's word count is taken up with Kramer's discussion of his theories and narrative of his life.

In his youth Kramer had a recurring dream in which he was standing in the woods, wielding a knife before a stone altar upon which lay a beautiful naked girl.  Certain this was a memory of an actual event passed on genetically by his ancestors, Kramer studied dreams, the brain, and psychiatry in hopes of discovering a way of unlocking more of the ancestral memories that he was sure were locked up in his grey cells.  Eventually he developed a machine that used "Kappa rays" to energize the brain cells, and, in dreams, relived remarkable adventures from the lives of his father and grandfather, like witnessing the great Chicago fire of 1871 and surviving a shipwreck in 1809.   Kramer kept using the machine, and the dreams progressively depicted older and older events, until he was a Druid high priest in the 5th or 6th century.  

I guess we've all heard those stories about politicians who extol the public schools and defend them from reform but send their own brats to private schools or who tell you to not go on a trip because of coronavirus but then go on a trip themselves.  Well, Alfred Kramer's Druidic ancestor was one of these hypocritical jackasses who enforces painful regulations on others but exempts himself.  In this recovered ancient memory, it's time to sacrifice yet another virgin to the gods, and when the high priest realizes that the virgin going under his knife this time around is the girl he has a crush on, he contrives a Rube Goldberg contraption to help her escape. 

Kramer didn't stop his investigations there, but continued unearthing still older memories.  One ancestor witnessed Jesus Christ perform a miracle, another narrowly escaped the sinking of Atlantis, another was the cave man who figured out how to cook meat.  Kramer's Kappa-ray-enhanced brain coughs up older and older memories, his dreams put him in the role of progressively more primitive ancestors, featuring many fights over women, the topic that is illustrated on the title page of the story here in its Weird Tales appearance.  (Alas, the illo is not nearly as sexy as it sounds.)

So busy was he experiencing these dreams and then writing them down that Kramer had not looked in a mirror in days.  When he finally decides to take a break from reliving the adventures of the cave men whose genes he has inherited and goes to the washroom we get the story's twist ending, which made me laugh out loud.  The Kappa rays don't just unlock old racial memories, they alter your body to match the body of the ancestor whose memory you have relived.  Kramer's 20th-century brain is now encased in the body of a "massive, shaggy beast-like man of fifty thousand years ago!" 

Kramer stopped using the Kappa rays but it was too late, his body chemistry has been permanently altered, and the dreams continue every time he sleeps.  The chronological gap between different dreams increases, and when Kramer falls asleep on the train our narrator witnesses the final horror--Kramer's mask and concealing clothes slip off, revealing that he has reverted to a quivering pile of protoplasmic slime.    

All the historical anecdotes get tedious, but the totally crazy and hilarious twist at the end, which took me by surprise (I thought Kramer was just having his life force expended and would be a sort of emaciated lich or something under the mask, not primordial ooze!), makes the slog worth it.  

People who have read my last blog post, in which I griped about stuff in stories by August Derleth and Mark Shorer that made no sense, may wonder why I like the twist in Wanderi's story here, which is also quite nonsensical.  (At one point was Kramer a monkey or a rodent or a Devonian tetrapod behind that mask?  How could he talk?)  The difference is that Wandrei's silliness is fun, and that its diversion from logic streamlines the story, getting us efficiently to our awesome "man has become slime!" conclusion.  The absurd elements of the Derleth-Shorer stories we talked about in our last blog post were just inherently boring impediments that slowed the story down and should have been excised in the drafting or copy-editing process.   

Like "The Tree-Men of M'Bwa," "The Lives of Alfred Kramer" can be found in both The Eye and the Finger and Don't Dream. 

"Spawn of the Sea" (1933)

More slime!  Weird Tales, it seems, is just crawling with fiction about menacing slime and blobs.  Just recently we read a story by Edmond Hamilton about primordial slime which almost exterminates all life on Earth, and then a story by Clark Ashton Smith about a blob monster bigger than the Empire State Building that devours entire jungles on Venus, and today we have already seen a guy turn into protoplasmic slime in one story by Donald Wandrei, and here in "Spawn of the Sea" we have another carnivorous pile of goop!

There is a brief frame story in which a guy finds a manuscript in an old bottle--the first page of the document is faded, so he can't be sure of the date on it, but it seems it must have been written in the 18th century or the early 19th century.  The rest of the tale is the legible portions of the manuscript.

The message in the bottle was penned by a gentleman, a passenger on a ship.  While in the tropics, the ship is struck by a terrific storm.  The masts fall over, the hold is full of water, etc, so the captain and everybody else thinks the ship is about to sink and so the order is given to abandon ship.  In the chaos, the narrator is knocked unconscious by a falling piece of rigging or something and doesn't make it off the vessel.  When he wakes up, like 48 hours later, the sea is calm and the ship in fact has not sunk, though it is no more than a drifting wreck.  Only one other person is on the ship, a scumbag who failed to leave with the others because the captain shot him in the leg when he tried to get aboard a life boat in front of some women and children.

The ship drifts for weeks.  Some strange chemicals were being transported by the ship, along with some seeds, and in the storm when the crates down in the hold broke they got mixed up.  Somehow, this mixture developed into a carnivorous blob monster, a big heap of slime that can detect other life and reach out pseudopods to capture it.  (A similar thing happened in Donald Wollheim's 1951 "The Rag Thing," which I read many moons ago.)  Day after day, the men toil up on the deck, desperately trying to build a boat or raft that will carry them away from this horrible predicament, all the while able to hear and smell the monster that is down in the hold moving around, hungering for their flesh and endeavoring to get its tentacles on them.  Wandrei does a good job describing the odor and the sounds of the monster and the fear it instills in the two men who are threatened not only by the monster, but by each other and the ocean itself.  

This is a good one--thumbs up!  After its maiden voyage in Weird Tales, "Spawn of the Sea" set sail again in the 1965 Wandrei collection Strange Harvest and again in the 1994 anthology Sea-Cursed.

**********

"Spawn of the Sea" is quite good, "The Tree-Men of M'Bwa" is solid, and "The Lives of Alfred Kramer" is weak in the middle there but has a very fun ending, so a decent showing by Donald Wandrei today here at MPorcius Fiction Log.