Weird Tales, August 1925: R E Howard and N Hawthorne

Let's take a look at the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales, one of the most important of the pulps, one of the greatest of the speculative fiction magazines, the place where so many people first encountered H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and the list goes on.  Check it out with me by clicking this link, the click that will take you to a scan of the issue under discussion at the indispensable internet archive.

This August issue has a quota of high brow content, including a reprint of an 1820 poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a poem about a guy who is heartbroken because some faerie or elf maiden has won his love and abandoned him--he has become a wretched hermit, hanging around the lake where he last saw her.  At least I think that is what is going on; I think it is safe to assume that "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," like all great literature, is a reminder to not let women drive you crazy.

There's also a poem by our pal Frank Belknap Long, "Stallions of the Moon," that is less plot-focused, and more hopeful--Long describes some flying horses in brief quatrains, three or four words per line, and then tells us they are "Mounts for you and me!"  How often do we get this kind of optimism in Weird Tales?  (I know, we got some optimism from WT last time we read from the magazine, and I bitched about it, but Long here delivers the optimism in like 80 words, while Henry S. Whitehead with his "dream story" "The Wonderful Thing" took seven pages!)  We also find Long in the letters section, where he praises the cover of the June issue, in which a man armed with an axe faces a spider the size of a buffalo ("bison" to you pedants), though Long's praise does come across as kind of a gross-out joke ("I cannot imagine a more gigantic, reddish, loathsome or delicious—but I sputter and go out!")

Near the end of the magazine is a hilarious ad for back copies of the extra-large May-June-July 1924 issue of WT, the one with the story Lovecraft wrote for Houdini and the one the man from Providence co-wrote with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  As if the cartoon four-eyes and his diminutive dog, desperately running to the mailbox to send for the "mammoth" issue of his fave magazine, wasn't risible enough, the text actually says "Your life is not complete until you have read this issue," which is even funnier than Long saying a kaiju spider looks delicious.  I have blogged about five stories from this "3 in 1" issue, and please allow me to say that your life will not be complete until you have clicked on the links below:

H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini:  "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"

H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr.:  "The Loved Dead"

Galen C. Colin:                                  "Eyes"

H. P. Lovecraft:                                  "Hypnos"

Otis Adelbert Kline:                           "The Malignant Entity"

Enough with the comedy!  Let's get to why we are here, the fiction, and today that means stories by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard, and that guy they tried to make you read in school, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Oh yeah, there's a story in here by science fiction pioneer Murray Leinster that we read back in 2024, "The Oldest Story in the World."  If you expect all my short story blog posts to cover at least three stories, click the link in the previous sentence and count that one!

"In The Forest of Villefere" by Robert E. Howard (1925)

As we expect of a piece of work by a giant of American popular culture like Howard, "In The Forest of Villefere" has been reprinted in many collections and anthologies, the first of which was the collection The Dark Man.  (We read that collection's title story, "The Dark Man," back in 2021, and I judged it "a pretty good sword and sorcery story.")  I'm just going to read "In the Forest of Villefere" here in Weird Tales, though, where it takes up like two and a half pages.

In Early Modern or Renaissance France or whenever it is everybody carries a rapier around, our narrator is hurrying on foot through the night, carrying an important message.  He has been told this woods is inhabited by a werewolf, but his mission is urgent.  He meets an odd character with a mask and asks this mystery man for directions.  Of course it is the werewolf and of course it leads the narrator into a trap and he has to fight for his life.

This has the plot and themes of a filler story but somehow Howard makes it pretty scary and exciting, really elevating the material.  I'm inclined to think Howard is a master who knows exactly how many words to devote to each element of the story so that each component--atmosphere, image, the period of mounting suspense when everybody knows the action scene is coming up but it hasn't come up yet, and then the actual bloody action scene in which somebody gets horribly mutilated--has maximum effect, and that is why the story feels fresh and fun and I really enjoyed it, but it seems possible I am projecting that ability on him, that I am meeting Howard halfway because I knew it was him and like him already and was primed to enjoy the story as long as it met minimum criteria.  Would I have liked the story so much if I had read it not knowing it was him, like a blind taste test?  I'm going to say I would have, because, among other things, Howard gives the werewolf a strange and unnerving personality through its attire, behavior and dialogue, and that is one reason why the story feels fresh and pushes my buttons, even though I've seen so many werewolves.   

Whether this really is a very good werewolf story, or just a decent werewolf story that the magic of Howard's name is making me overrate, thumbs up for "In the Forest of Villefere."  According to isfdb, this is the first of two stories about de Montour of Normandy; the second debuted in Weird Tales in 1926 and we can expect to read it as we continue our advance through the history of the unique magazine.

 

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) 

This piece (a portion of the "high brow material" I mentioned earlier) appears under the simple text heading "Weird Story Reprints"--the beautiful hand drawn mermaid heading by Hugh Rankin (I reproduced it at the bottom of my August 14 post) is still in the future, first appearing in 1928.  This story by the man who brought you Hester Prynne was, according to wikipedia, first printed anonymously under the title "The Fountain of Youth" in 1837 in the magazine The Knickerbocker, and that same year in the Hawthorne collection Twice-Told Tales.  "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" was one of the three stories adapted in the Vincent Price film Twice-Told Tales, and genre fiction anthologists like Peter Haining have presented the story to readers many times.

Elderly Dr. Heidegger is a physician, an amateur scientist, and, reputedly, some kind of wizard, or at least possessor of a book of spells and magic devices like a bust of Apollo that some say can talk and a painting of a lost love that some have said can move.  The doctor invites over four friends, fellow oldsters who are kind of losers--Hawthorne flat out says they would be better off dead.  ("They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves.")  Among them is a woman, once attractive, now ugly, whom the other three friends, men, all courted at one time; a merchant who lost all his money on a desperate gamble and is now almost a beggar; a politician whose career collapsed after a scandal and who is now forgotten; and an army officer who in his youth wrecked his health pursuing pleasures.

Heidegger has acquired water from the Fountain of Youth, and suggests the four drink it, warning them not to waste their second youths misbehaving, like they did the first time they were young.  Of course, within seconds of becoming young they act like total jerks, insulting Heidegger, fighting amongst themselves, and so forth.  It then becomes apparent that the water only works for a few minutes--they are old again.  The four head to Florida so they can drink from the Fountain all day.

The descriptions of Heidegger's home and magic items are good, and the writing over all is pretty good, but the plot and characters are kind of obvious.  If I am biased for Howard because of my admiration for many of his works, it is possible I am biased against Hawthorne because I associate him with school and a sort of established canon of writers you are supposed to like, but I think this story is merely acceptable, no big deal.

Peter Haining included in Beyond the Curtain of Dark several stories
we've already read, among them Robert Bloch's 
"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." and "Return to the Sabbath,"
Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad," and
Theodore Sturgeon's "The Other Celia"

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I feel like these are competently constructed stories with unexceptional plots and themes that you have to judge on style--is each just adequate, or particularly effective and enjoyable?  Howard and Hawthorne being famous names whose work is important in American culture, it can be hard to judge these stories without letting preconceived notions influence that judgement, but the importance of their authors also makes it all the more easy for me to say that all students of horror and fantasy should read "In The Forest of Villefere" and all students of American literature should read "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." 

The weird train rolls on to another station next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; don't lose your ticket.

Stories of the Fantastic by Important American Authors: Hawthorne, Melville, & James

You and I, dear reader, may recognize that Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson and Thomas Disch are important American writers, but I fear many ordinary people have never heard of them, while many "educated" people would dismiss them as mere genre writers who wrote for money and perhaps had suspect politics.  But this weekend I read short stories that qualify as what we now call "speculative fiction" by writers nobody would deny recognition as major figures in the American literary canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James.

I found these stories in a public library copy of the first volume of The Library of America's 2009 anthology American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.  I'm not crazy about the jacket of the book; the photos seem too contemporary for the contents (stories from before 1940), and their colors are irritatingly garish.  I have no opinion of Straub, whose fiction I've never read, but his intro to the volume has interesting things to say about the use of allegory in speculative fiction (he argues that "to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality") and American attitudes toward independence ("For Americans of all decades, it seems, the loss of agency and selfhood, effected by whatever means, arouses a particularly resonant horror") and Nature ("the belief that the natural world itself deludes, tempts, misleads, wishes to devour careless human beings, takes a commanding role here [in several of the stories in the volume.]"

"Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)

I was the worst kind of student in grammar school and high school, totally lazy and disconnected, absorbed in my own thoughts and hobbies, but just clever enough and obedient enough to get passing grades while doing almost no studying.  I would learn things long enough to pass the test, and then absolutely forget them.  As a result, I gained very little knowledge in school, and very little experience of, or respect for, hard work.  Like a lot of the books we were assigned, I passed tests on The Scarlet Letter, but today I know almost nothing about it.

I'm not sure whether "Young Goodman Brown" is about the ubiquity of human evil and hypocrisy, or the way unfounded suspicions can sabotage your happiness, or both.  Brown leaves his wife Faith to walk in the woods in the evening--he has an appointment with the Devil!  The Devil reveals that everybody in the town is a worshipper of his, even those who are the most outwardly pious, like the town's religious leaders and the woman who taught Brown his catechism.  A sort of black mass is taking place, and even Faith appears, to be baptised with blood along with her husband.

It seems that, to at least some extent, this is merely a dream from which Bown awakes before the baptism of evil is accomplished.  But is it a dream that reflects the reality that the human race is fallen, and people are all hypocritical sinners, or one that simply reflects Brown's own irrational anxieties?  Whatever the case, we are told that after this event Brown becomes "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man," unable to enjoy a happy relationship with his wife and neighbors.  Is it his accurate knowledge of human evil that cripples his emotional life, or vain scruples and unfounded suspicions?

Of the three stories I read in Volume I of American Fantastic Tales, this is the least remarkable, the one that feels most conventional in style and content.  It's not bad,  but it's no big deal, either.  

"The Tartarus of Maids" by Herman Melville (1855)

I'm a big fan of Moby Dick, which I have read multiple times as an adult.  So I had high hopes for this story, hopes which were realized.  "The Tartarus of Maids" is a great little story, full of terrific sentences, images, metaphors, and ideas.  I can highly recommend this one, especially to people interested in industrialism and women's issues.

A businessman who purchases vast quantities of paper for his firm's operations visits a paper manufacturer in a remote region of New England to make a deal and to tour the factory.  Melville's descriptions of the pale white women who work there, the blank white paper that is produced, and the  complicated black machines and intricate processes involved in paper production are very evocative.  The journey of raw pulp through a machine that turns it into usable paper seems to be a metaphor for our journey from conception to birth, and perhaps to the course of our lives in a deterministic universe.  The narrator inquires why female factory workers are always called "girls," no matter their age.  The names of all the people and places in the story seem to have been carefully selected to give clues as to what Melville is thinking. There's a lot of thought-provoking stuff going on in this little story!

Very good.  "The Tartarus of Maids" is a companion piece to another story, "The Paradise of Bachelors," and apparently they are usually printed together as a single story in two parts.  For whatever reason, this volume only includes "The Tartarus of Maids;" I should track down the other component of the pair ASAP.

"The Jolly Corner" by Henry James (1908)

Henry James is one of those writers, like Jane Austen, whose work I am familiar with only through TV adaptations.  (Specifically, a 1972 six-hour BBC presentation of The Golden Bowl which I bought for my wife, then my girlfriend, back in the VHS era.) So this will be my first taste of what Henry James is really all about.

Oy, these are some long convoluted sentences!  I'm having flashbacks to my first reading of Swann's Way!  This is no light reading--it seems that you really have to focus when reading Henry James!

Spencer Brydon grew up in a mansion on a corner in Manhattan.  As an adult he went to Europe to experience culture, and after three decades there has returned to New York, in his fifties, to look over his properties.  Supervising the construction of a massive apartment building on one of his lots, he realizes he has a talent for managing such business, and suspects that, if he had stayed in America instead of gallivanting across Europe ("leading...a selfish frivolous scandalous life"), he might have become a real estate billionaire, a sort of Victorian Donald Trump!

Brydon tells a woman he is courting, Alice Staverton, that he senses within himself an "alter ego" which, under different circumstances, might have blossomed into a man of power.  He wonders if Staverton might prefer a super rich industrious Brydon to the current art lover Brydon, who is merely rich.  Can he start a new career, still become that man of greatness?

Our hero takes to haunting his childhood house late at night, during what the woman who comes over to the mansion everyday to sweep calls "the evil hours"--she is afraid to go there at night, sensing some kind of weird presence!  Brydon's family is extinct, and the house is almost entirely empty of furniture, and he stalks the physically barren but emotionally resonant rooms for hours, sure that the ghost of who he might have been lurks somewhere among one of the shadows of one of the mansion's four vacant floors.  Brydon compares hunting for this ghost to hunting a dangerous tiger or bear: "...he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone."  Is he hunting the ghost, or is the ghost hunting him?

They say sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you, and when Brydon finally confronts the ghost he loses his nerve and retreats, and then collapses in a swoon.  He is awakened by the tender touch of Miss Staverton.  She also saw real-estate-magnate-Brydon, the Brydon who might have been, in a dream, and took it as a signal to come looking for real-life artsy-fartsy Brydon.  "...I knew it for a sign. He had come to you."

Brydon's lady friend kisses him and assures him she loves him regardless of whether he is a powerful mover and shaker in New York business circles or just a rich slacker who loafs at art museums and nice restaurants all day.  The reader presumes these two aesthetes live happily ever after, and that the point of the story is that if you were born on third base, it makes no sense to work hard to get to home plate, if you will permit me to repurpose one of those cliches lefties love.

This plot of "The Jolly Corner" is fine, and I support any story that tells me I should avoid real work and devote my life to experiencing culture, but it feels long and difficult.  James's style is quite challenging.  I'll make sure to eat my Wheaties before tackling another of his works.

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The Melville is the standout, but all three of these stories are worth reading.  And even if I think the jacket is bad, I like Straub's introduction, and the way the book itself has been produced, the fonts, and the paper, and binding and all that.  American Fantastic Tales is a good piece of work, and I will certainly read more stories from Volume I and get my hands on Volume II when I have the chance.