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.

Farnsworth Wright: "The Closing Hand," "The Snake Fiend" and "The Teak-Wood Shrine"

As I keep telling you, I aspire to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales.  But you may have noticed that I only ever seem to read stories from issues of the magazine printed after January 1, 1930, but that the first issue of Weird Tales has a cover date of March, 1923.  Well, today we take action to begin filling that gap by reading three stories from the Unique Magazine published in 1923, stories written by the most famous editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright.  Wright did not actually begin editing WT until late 1924, so these stories appeared during the editorship of Wright's predecessor, Edwin Baird.

"The Closing Hand" 

Alright, a story from the very first issue of Weird Tales!  We won't be lingering on this inaugural issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual for long, as Wright's story here occupies two pages and there is room left over for an advertisement on the second page.  Weird Tales Volume 1, Number 1 does include the first installment of a serial by Otis Adelbert Kline, so maybe we will return to it someday; we'll see.

"The Closing Hand" is barely a story, more like an anecdote with lots of essentially superfluous description.  On a stormy night, two sisters are trying to sleep in a house reputed to be haunted.  They just moved in today; their parents will arrive tomorrow.  We hear all abut the house's reputation and the sounds of the wind and all that.

The sisters hear movement downstairs.  One of them goes to investigate.  She is very late in returning, and sister #2 sits in bed terrified.  Something creeps up the stairs, into the bedroom--is it a ghost, a monster, a killer?  No, it is sister #1, dying from a stab wound administered by a burglar whose despoiling of her family's property she interrupted--the sisters hold hands as sister #1 dies.  

We'll call this mere filler; it isn't bad, just slight, and is more of a crime story than a weird story.  I guess in some ways, "The Closing Hand" is more disturbing than a story with vampires or zombies or alien gods from other dimensions--there are no vampires or zombies, and we have yet to see concrete evidence of alien visitors to Earth (though it could happen any day!), but there are thousands of burglaries and dozens of homicides every day here in the United States, and this story reminds you of that.  Stay safe out there!

In 2020, "The Closing Hand" was reprinted in an Italian magazine, Providence Tales.  One of the fun things about maintaining this blog has been realizing how robust a speculative fiction scene there is in Italy, how Italian fans have embraced English-language science fiction, fantasy and horror and how handsomely Italian publishers present American and British spec fic to Italian readers.

"The Snake Fiend"

The second issue of Weird Tales has a different look than the first, and Wright's included story, "The Snake Fiend," is like three times as long.  Like "The Closing Hand," "The Snake Fiend" is a crime story in which one of the characters scares himself by thinking a mundane danger is a supernatural one.

The theme of "The Snake Fiend" is how passionate, how emotional, how excitable, how superstitious Italians are!  (I know, just after I was saying nice things about them!)  I have noted in the past how, in American weird fiction, Italians sometimes play the role of the superstitious or irrational "other," and here we have another example.  

Italian-American Jack Crimi, a collector of snakes since his youth, falls in love with his friend Marjorie Bressi, but Marjorie is in love with Jack's pal Allen Jimerson.  Jack never reveals his desire for Marjorie, and when Allen and Marjorie get married, Jack continues acting like their buddy, even though his thoughts are dominated by a determination to murder them!

Engineer Allen gets a job in the remote desert and Jack follows the married couple, saying he is going to write a scholarly paper on the rattlesnakes endemic to the region.  Jack collects dozens of the serpents and one day seals up the Jimersons' house and leaves the swarm of venomous reptiles in the house with them while they sleep.  He assumes they will be killed.

The Jimersons get bit, but Allen busts open a window and they escape and are able to recover.  Wright opines that rattlesnake venom is not as deadly as ordinary people assume, and tells us that, despite his life-long familiarity with snakes, Jack shared the ignorance of the common run of humanity.  A few days later the Jimersons go to Jack's shack to visit their friend, whom they do not suspect (they blame a minor character whom Allen gave the sack) and when Jack sees them he thinks they must be ghosts seeking vengeance and he goes insane.

Certainly better than "The Closing Hand" because the plot is driven by the personality and decisions of the protagonist.  Filler, but a higher grade of "acceptable" than "The Closing Hand."  Doesn't look like it has ever been reprinted, though.

"The Teak-Wood Shrine"

"The Teak-Wood Shrine" appears in the sixth issue of Weird Tales, which sports yet another cover design.  Like "The Snake Fiend," this one does not seem to have been reprinted.

The shrine of the title of this two-page story is a wooden box carved by Indians to represent some kind of fat devil and decorated with jewels.  One of the jewels conceals a push button that activates a spring that slides open a little door and reveals something--something the sight of which drives people to insanity, to suicide!  The story details how the shrine falls into the hands of white people, the havoc it wreaks among those who acquire it, the strategies they employ in hopes of rendering themselves immune to its supernatural power, and their efforts to destroy it.  The text comes to us in the form of the dialogue of the shrine's current possessor, who is standing at a bridge with the plan of hurling the cursed artifact into the waters below and is accosted by a friend who seeks to stop her.

This story is pretty good--thumbs up!

**********  

It is fun to read hundred-year old stories that I assume few other people alive today have read, and especially so when they aren't bad.  Hopefully the rest of the 1923 Weird Tales stories we sample will be as entertaining as these.