Frank Belknap Long: "The Man From Nowhere," "Fisherman's Luck" and "The Refugees"

In our last episode I mentioned the 1977 fanzine HPL, an elaborate tribute to H. P. Lovecraft that you can read at the link.  HPL includes an interview of Frank Belknap Long by Stuart D. Schiff (you'll remember Schiff as editor of Whispers, a series of magazines and anthologies which tarbandu and I have both blogged about) in which Long talks about his relationship with Lovecraft as well as his own long career.  In one particularly interesting passage Long suggests that the stories he got published in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding and Unknown in the 1940s are his best work, better than most of his Weird Tales stories, and he even says these stories are in the "tradition" of "the new wave," though they preceded the New Wave by over twenty years. 

(The New Wave is a vague and malleable concept and everybody seems to have a different idea of what it was all about--I was surprised when I heard Michael Moorcock, who must know as much about the New Wave as anybody, in his 2000 essay "Queen of the Martian Mysteries" say that Leigh Brackett was one of the "godmothers" of the New Wave--I think Brackett is great and the similarities between Brackett's work and Moorcock's own popular work in which moody guys kill stuff with swords is obvious, but to me the connection between Brackett and the New Wave is not all that obvious.)    

Spurred by this interview, let's surf on over to the internet archive and investigate some of these stories Long is talking about.  We'll start today with three stories from Unknown from the early Forties.

"The Man From Nowhere" (1940)

We sometimes see what we expect to see, and I was certainly primed to find this story good by Long's discussion with Schiff in HPL and by the high reputation of Campbell and Unknown.  But damned if "The Man From Nowhere" didn't immediately strike me as being more conventional, better organized and more smoothly written than most of Long's work.

Revell is a painter resident in Greenwich Village whose wild surreal canvases have won critical and commercial success among the forward-thinking bohemian set.  Our protagonist North is also a painter, and he meets Revell at a party.  Revell demonstrates to North that he has special powers and a contentious relationship with the natural laws of our universe.  He can distort reality; for example, make gravity act differently on objects, or twist and stretch objects--including people--out of shape, or tinker with the nature of time, experiencing events out of order and making past events unhappen.  He uses the word "melting" to describe his effect on reality.  Revell has a considerable level of control over his reality-defying abilities, but not absolute control, and things and people near him are sometimes autonomically affected, and he often feels urges, cravings, to employ these powers, just for fun.  One way he tries to keep his potentially destructive effect on our universe in check is by painting wild scenes that depict the melting phenomena of which he is capable, sublimating his urges, you might say if you had just been reading a psychology textbook or something.

North has a pretty girlfriend whom he is not quite sure he wants to marry because she is domineering and doesn't agree with all of North's opinions about art and doesn't even wholeheartedly support his own painting.  The plot of "The Man From Nowhere" concerns Revell's relationship with North and this young lady and how their own relationship changes under the pressure of contact with this strange man.  Things are dicey for a while, and North and his girlfriend suffer some terrible shocks, but the ending is a happy one and, after Revell's dramatic departure from Earth, North finds a letter from him that explains the man's origins.

Pretty entertaining.  The fantastic elements of the story are well handled, and the realistic elements are also noteworthy.  Besides the totally believable sexual relationship issues (you may be in love with somebody, but neither you nor this person is perfect and friction is inevitable and if the two of you marry your fortunes together you will be surrendering much of your freedom) there is the fact that Long's tale is a love letter to Greenwich Village and a celebration of the lifestyle of people who strenuously avoid working regular jobs and keeping regular hours.

I read "The Man From Nowhere" at the internet archive but it actually appears in a 1979 book I own and blogged about four years ago that is somewhere on my pretty poorly organized shelves, Night Fear, as well as a book published this year that goes for $60.00 and has like 800 pages of Long material.  The perfect Christmas or Hanukkah gift for the weirdie on your list!    

"Fisherman's Luck" (1940)

"Fisherman's Luck" is a somewhat silly story, but has its gruesome elements.

Mason works for what in those mangas they would call a "black company," and hasn't had a vacation in years.  But then the boss dies and his widow takes over and insists Mason take some time off.  Mason now has a chance to use that beautiful fishing rod he bought in a New York pawn shop.  But the first time he casts, he hooks and reels in a dead Chinese man's severed head!  (Long uses the word "Chinaman," and some minor characters use the word "chink.")  Mason puts the head in his creel, planning to go to the cops, but then he gets cold feet, fearing the fuzz will accuse him of the murder, and keeps the head in his hotel room.  He casts his line out his hotel room window to dry it, and catches and reels in a pretty 19-year-old blonde girl clad in early 19th-century clothes who says she loves him even though he has never met her!  She knows him from her dreams, dreams she found mysterious because they included locomotives and radios and other fixtures of our own lives that she didn't encounter in her own time.

Various hijinks ensue, with the boss's widow spotting the lovers and getting jealous, the cops finding out about the severed head Mason is carrying around, and so forth.  We get stereotypical Irish cops and brutal cops who relish giving people the third degree.  (As I have suggested, this story is a queer mix of hard-boiled detective rough stuff and whimsical humor.)  While Mason is in custody of the abusive policemen the 1820 girl realizes that she can save her beloved by returning to her time with the Chinese head.  After she vanishes, the god Hermes appears.  He jokes about how lame mortals are, how they don't even believe in the gods anymore.  He admits he likes to play jokes on mortals--the fishing rod is his caduceus (Long just has Hermes call it "my staff") and he enjoys leaving it in the path of random mortals and watching how its magic screws up their lives.  Mason weeps because he was really in love with that blue-eyed teenager with the narrow waist. 

This story is kind of a mess.  I've already mentioned the dissonant tone--gore and horror and tragedy on the one hand, whimsical practical jokes on the other.  Even worse is the way magic works in the story--it makes no sense, just random stuff happens that doesn't follow from any premise and doesn't add any value to the story.  The dead Chinese guy's queue seems to be alive, thrashing like a snake and propelling the head around sometimes--did Hermes' staff bring the hair to life?  Did Hermes' staff also give that 19th-century beauty prophetic dreams that made her fall in love with our 20th-century hero?  And why does Long think the living hair and the prophetic dreams improve the story?  They do not!  

Barely acceptable.  Allow me to present a little theory about this story that I doubt is true but has occurred to me.  In the correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft we find it repeatedly stated that Long was a communist,* and his depiction in "Fisherman's Luck" of a businessman who wouldn't let his employee have a vacation certainly accords with this facet of his personality.  But let's take that a step further.  My well-educated readers no doubt know that we get the words "merchant" and "commerce" from "Mercury," and that the caduceus is sometimes used as a symbol for commerce.  So, is this story a way for Long to symbolize his belief that private property, money and trade ruin people's lives?

"Fisherman's Luck" has been reprinted in several Long collections.  In The Early Long, the author provides an intro to the story; he doesn't address economic or political theory, but instead focuses on "Fisherman's Luck" as a love story, which I thought odd, as I found the love component of the tale to be quite weak.  

*See HPL to C. L. Moore, June 19, 1936; HPL to August Derleth, Nov 26, 1932 and early December 1932; and Robert E. Howard to HPL, Jan-Feb 1935.     

"The Refugees" (1942)

Here's another tale included in 1975's The Early Long.  In his intro there, Long says he wrote the story in three hours.    

"The Refugees" is one of those stories that romanticizes the special relationship the people of the Emerald Isle have with the wee faerie folk!  This kind of thing generally makes me roll my eyes; I don't read these old magazines looking for cutesy little yarns, I want blood and guts or heartbreak or at least some tendentious bitching that we have too much government or too little government--I want dramatic tension, I don't want stuff that is supposed to make you go "Awww..." like a picture of a newborn baby is supposed to make you go "Awww...," and I don't want "whimsy." 

The British Empire is locked in a death struggle with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy!  Which means bombs are detonating all over the British Isles!  So a bunch of the faerie folk have moved to America, taking up residence in the mansion of one Mr. Kelly, an Irish-American.  Kelly has died, so his daughter, charming colleen Helen, has been living there alone with the little people.  Roger Prindle, CPA, and Helen have fallen in love.  Prindle isn't Irish, so he can't see the legions of little people who swarm in the mansion, but he can hear their incessant whisperings, and it unnerves him.  So, as soon as he and Helen are married, he is going to insist they move, even though she would prefer they reside in the mansion.  On the day he arrives to issue his ultimatum, the faerie folk cast a lot of spells on Prindle, making him very tall, then very small, then turning him into a horny satyr and presenting him with the illusion of a beautiful nymph--Rog chases the nymph, catches her, and is going to ravish her when the little people change the illusion so she looks like a wormy corpse.

The little people, whom Long in the end of the story starts calling "trolls," and Prindle negotiate.  Even though the whole basis of the story laid out on the first page is that Prindle can't see the trolls because he isn't Irish, it turns out he can see the trolls because one of his great-grandparents is Irish.  They become friends and Prindle agrees to let them move in with him and Helen in their new home if they'll use their magic to help him manage his boat and collect worms when he goes fishing.

This story is another mess.  The tone is inconsistent: on the one hand we have the cutesy crap, like the trolls' sing-song dialogue, which includes irritating repetition of a single phrase, and on the other hand we have the whole scene about how man's undoubted inner nature is that of a rapist, a scene which culminates in the description of a maggot-infested cadaver.*  The narrative is not at all smooth, the thrust of the plot slippery and unclear, with Long changing multiple important plot elements on the fly even though the story is only four pages long.  The CPA isn't Irish--oh, no, he is Irish!  The central crisis of the story, I initially thought, was where the couple would live, with Helen wanting to stay in the mansion and Roger wanting her to move (in the prologue to the story Helen is trying to convince a minor character, an Irishman she knew as a little girl in the old country, to help her get the trolls to leave the mansion so Roger can move in) but this shifts so that the central crisis becomes over whether they will live with the trolls.  I thought the trolls were terrorizing Roger to scare him away or win concessions from him or something, but then it turns out they were just doing it to let off steam because they were lonely.  Wait, why were they lonely, haven't they been living with the Kellys?  In the end of the story the trolls talk about how they love love love the Kellys and don't want to leave them, but they were living in Ireland for over ten years without them, and only left the Ould Sod because they were scared by the bombings, or so it said in the start of the story.  I can believe Long wrote this in three hours, because it reads like he made it up as he went along and didn't revise it so everybody's motivations and all the plot threads were consistent from start to finish.

Thumbs down!

This corny hunk of rotten cabbage shows up in several Long collections, including a French one, the title story of which is "The Flame Midget," which I blogged about two years ago.

*This is a recurring problem in Long's body of work.  Many years ago I was carping that The Horror From the Hills had a totally inappropriate slapstick scene cheek by jowl with discussion of bodily mutilation.             

**********

"The Man From Nowhere" is good, and maybe is even a little New Wavey what with its nuanced view of sexual relationships and its celebration of bohemianism, but "Fisherman's Luck" and "The Refugees" have shortcomings that are characteristic of much of Long's work and which I often attack Long for.  Of course, I am curious enough about the Lovecraft circle and John W. Campbell's editorial career that I have no regrets over spending time on any of these stories, and the plan is to read three more Frank Belknap Long stories from 1940s Campbell magazines in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.