Sam j lundwall, p.9
Sam J Lundwall, page 9
Poe was undoubtedly the greatest artist among modern authors; and it is his consummate skill as an artist that has led to these mistakes about the properties of his own heart. That perfection of horror which abounds in his writings, has been unjustly attributed to some moral defect in the man. But I perceive not why the competent critic should fall into this error. Of all authors, ancient or modern, Poe has given us the least of himself in his works. He wrote as an artist. He intuitively saw what Schiller has so well expressed, that it is an universal phenomenon of our nature that the mournful, the fearful, even the horrible, allures with irresistible enchantment He probed this general psychological law, in its subtle windings through the mystic chambers of our being, as it was never probed before, until he stood in the very abyss of its center, the sole master of its effects.
Although Poe is renown for his Gothic horror stories, he also wrote a number of other works; his The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is considered the first detective story, featuring as well Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later remolded somewhat as Sherlock Holmes. He also wrote a number of science fiction stories, and even a humorous story, The Man That Was Used Up (1840), in which a remarkably good-looking man turns out to be made up almost solely of prostheses. It is interesting to note that Poe's most horrific story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), a Gothic tale in all respects, generally was accepted as science fact, and during Poe's lifetime reprinted in England in the Popular Record of Modern Science as The Last Conversation of a Somnabule and later as a pamphlet entitled Mesmerism, In Articulo Mortis. A reception as curious as the theme of the story.
Among Poe's science fiction works, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1836) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym's Adventures (1838) are the most noted. Hans Pfaall is a satirical variant of the old Moon journey; a balloon made of old newspapers lands in Rotterdam, and a dwarf climbs out of the gondola with the astounding news that he has just returned from the Moon. The story consists of the dwarf's narrative of his journey and the meeting with the people of the Moon. He concludes the story by promising to tell of his adventures on the Moon later on. It is apparent that his story probably is a joke on the good citizens of Rotterdam. The story might be a commentary on Richard Locke's reputed "discovery" of life on the Moon the preceding year, a revelation that was attributed to the English astronomer Sir John Herschel and was announced in the New York Sun; real yellow press journalism, without doubt.
Arthur Gordon Pym is a very ordinary sea story, until Pym comes to an island in Antarctica inhabited by peculiar black aborigines who get scared out of their wits at the sight of white objects. They slaughter everyone aboard the ship, excluding Pym and another man, who then proceed on to the Pole in a canoe, pursued by large white birds who terrify the aborigines. The novel ends with Pym and his friend being pulled down in a whirlpool at the Pole. The novel is unfinished, but it is probable that Pym was meant to drop down into some inner world of the usual type. Jules Verne later wrote a sequel, The Ice Sphinx (1897), which, however, did not include any inner world.
Poe wrote some other science fiction works, of which Mellonta Tauta especially, a picture of a future world in the style of present-day sf, is notable. His chief works were in the Gothic horror tradition, though, and it is stories like The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Cask of Amontillado (1846) and poems like The Raven (1845) that have given him his reputation as one of the greatest examiners of the dark undercurrents of man's mind, comparable even to the Marquis de Sade.
Despite the popular acclaim that met Poe's works, he lived in genteel poverty—and often not even that. When the book Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared, Poe's only payment consisted of a few complimentary copies of the volume.
The poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845, and Poe became, without question, a famous man. "The bird beat that bug all hollow," he remarked. During Poe's lifetime, the poem appeared in eleven periodicals as well as in book form. Still, Poe was even more troubled and impoverished than before. He became an occasional heavy drinker, and his wife Virginia's death in 1847 made his private sufferings all the worse. He died two years later, still impoverished, still suffering, still famous.
In ironic contrast to this, stands the value placed on Poe's letters after his death. A six-sentence letter to the Philadelphia publishers Lea & Blanchard, in which he suggested that ". . . you receive all profits (of a collection of stories) and allow me twenty copies for distribution to friends ..." was less than a century after his death auctioned for $3,000, and recently a rare unpublished letter was auctioned for $5,200 to a New York manuscript dealer.
Poe's significance for the modern short story can hardly be overestimated. He has influenced Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Baudelaire, among many others, and the modern science fiction genre owes a great and obvious debt to his works. It is known that The Fall of the House of Usher—unquestionably one of the masterpieces of short stories—influenced many artists to a great degree; among them was Debussy, who admitted to being "obsessed" by Poe and this story, and attempted to set the story in the form of a "symphony on psychologically developed themes."
These days, Poe is most well-known for the numerous films that he has been subjected to—chiefly by American International Pictures, whose vigorous director Roger Corman has been grinding out for years a steady flow of low-budget, low-quality adaptations from Poe's stories. These mostly have very slight connections with the original works —characterized by lots of fire and gore and sepulchers and burning castles and Vincent Price. They are interesting, in a sadistic way, but they don't have anything which makes Poe's work living and breathing and significant. They are painted backdrops with gory fronts and no content.
Poe laid the groundwork for the present-day fantasy— but the now prevalent type of fantasy came later on with two writers, both of whom utilized remarkable horror elements in their works. The writers were H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson.
Hodgson's (1875-1918) novel The House on the Borderland (1908) is a narrative from a strange and repulsive world far beyond our reality. Two tourists find a lonely house situated at the edge of an unfathomable abyss during a walking-tour in a desolate part of Ireland. Before leaving the house, they find a diary kept by the last owner of the house, describing his experiences and the hideous underworld forces that focus on the place. It tells of the narrator's travels within the house, to other galaxies, to the center of the Universe and the fights with an inhuman "pig-people" who live in the abyss beneath the house. An aura of undefinable terror pervades the story, conjured not so much by the obvious terror elements as by the feeling of insecurity and alienness that is the keynote of this novel. Hodgson's novel is a typical example of the "new Gothic tale" that after the turn of the century began to appear, in which the time-honored vampires, living dead and so on slowly were being eased out for the benefit of far more fantastic creatures and plots. Hodgson's use of modern symbols in a traditional Gothic setting heralded the coming of the "science fantasy." This method is brought further in his novel The Night Land (1912), which depicts a world of total darkness millions of years hence, peopled with monstrous beasts and the remnants of humanity living in metal pyramids. With this novel, conjuring terror with the symbols of today, Hodgson actually became one of the first modern science fiction writers.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is a name practically synonymous with modern fantasy literature, not so much by his own works—his greatness as an author is disputed and from a literary viewpoint he is at best mediocre—as by the enormous influence he had on the writers who later on would shape science fiction literature: Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner and others. Love-craft was the most diligent contributor to the U.S. fantasy magazine Weird Tales, and he corresponded with almost all of the hopeful youngsters who later on would be writers; he read their manuscripts, corrected them and gave advice. The stories of his kindness toward these aspiring writers are legion. Lin Carter says in the introduction to a collection of Lovecraft stories that:
He was one of the most amazing letter writers of all times; at the peak of his voluminous correspondence, he was writing fifteen or twenty letters a day. Nor were they brief notes; as his disciple, friend, and sometimes collaborator August Derleth has written, "they sometimes covered thirty, fifty, or even seventy typewriter-sized pages, closely written." (23)
Lovecraft also wrote a number of stories and articles gratis for the fan magazines (fanzines) that were published in sf fandom, taking up a substantial part of his time and leaving less time for more profitable writings, which might have been one of the reasons for the poverty in which he lived at the end of his life.
Lovecraft's works are mostly pronounced horror stories, featuring demons of the worst kind: ghosts, ghouls, living dead and such things. The heritage from the Gothic tale is obvious, but Lovecraft is far more devilish and detailed than the Gothic writers ever were. Madness, unmentionable rituals and fear beyond all reason figure prominently in his stories, often coupled with acute claustrophobia; the horrid events usually take place in subterranean vaults and sepulchers, incredible ancient ruins and narrow passages deep under the modern cities, where indescribable creatures haunt the protagonist down and down until merciful madness darkens the poor man's mind forever. Black magic and rituals performed in ancient sepulchers are common occurrences in Lovecraft's stories, the dead walk again and ancient gods appear regularly.
Many of these stories are powerful, but they tend to be somewhat monotonous with time. His most enjoyable works are probably the dream-fantasies The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1925), The Silver Key (1926), and Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1932), all of them clearly influenced by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany. They are set in strangely beautiful never-never lands of imagination, far removed from the morbid fantasies of his other works.
In 1939, two sf fans, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, started a publishing house, Arkham House, to publish works by H. P. Lovecraft and others. They also published eight issues of a fantasy magazine, Arkham Sampler, 1948-49, featuring among other works, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
So much for the horror. I should perhaps point out that this branch of science fiction does not solely occupy itself with vampire castles and living dead. The greater part of the fantasy literature is noticeably temperate when it comes to the horror elements, and uses the fantastic situation in the same way as the more scientifically inclined branch of the genre, to construct a situation and follow it to its logical conclusion. I can mention Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe (1949), a parody on the clichés of science fiction, in which the protagonist drops down into a world dreamed up by a young and ardent science fiction fan. In Robert A. Heinlein's Magic, Inc. (1940) magic is a socially accepted occurrence, and is used in everyday business life.
A great part of the fantasy that is written today is, however, of the time-honored blood, sword and hero type and actually just the adventure story in its most straightforward form, featuring giants, magicians, beautiful princesses and the usual broad-shouldered hero with lots of muscles and no brow and eyes not an inch apart. It is the fairy tale all over again, with the monsters bigger and more horrible than before, and perhaps a wee bit more sadistic, but that is about the only difference. It is pure entertainment with a good measure of escapism thrown in, and it never purports to be anything else. You might call it a kind of Wild West in the never-never lands of unbridled fantasy. There are, of course, works of singularly literary qualities here as well as in the Wild West genre, as we shall see later on. This sub-branch of science fiction is called Heroic Fantasy, or Sword & Sorcery, both of them exceptionally fitting names.
L. Sprague de Camp, in his foreword to an anthology of heroic fantasy defines it as:
. . . stories laid in an imaginary world, superficially somewhat like ours, but a world where magic works and machinery has not been invented. Sometimes this world is that in which the story-teller imagines ours was like in prehistoric times. Sometimes he fancies it will exist in the distant future, when the sun has dimmed, science and civilization have decayed, and magic has once again come into its own. Sometimes the scene is a world in another universe parallel to ours, where the laws of nature are different. (24)
In the foreword to another collection of fantasy stories (25), de Camp stresses the high entertainment value of this fiction, and ridicules the contemporary social novel ("should an heiress marry her chauffeur?") and the acknowledgment of sex as a driving force of man ("stories that reduce human beings to animated sets of genitalia with legs and other parts vaguely attached"). I agree with the high entertainment value of fantasy, but as for the rest, I don't. There is a lot to say about, for example, the undercurrents of sex in Heroic Fantasy. I will take this up in a later chapter.
This mixture of ancient Nordic sagas and Gothic tales that is called Heroic Fantasy or Sword & Sorcery appeared regularly chiefly in the U.S. magazine Weird Tales, without which the branch probably never would have become what it is today. It had existed in the form we now know it for some time, indeed since before the turn of the century, but Weird Tales encouraged writers like L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard who were to rise to predominance in the field. It proved immensely popular, but after World War II interest in the branch waned noticeably; obviously people had had enough of murder and violence. De Camp writes that:
The cause, however, was the trend of the time, in mainstream fiction and also in science fiction, towards stories with a strongly subjective, sentimental, psychological slant. In such tales, the anti-hero was often a wretched little twerp who could never do anything right. Instead of providing the reader with a heroic model with whom he could for the moment identify himself, giving himself a warm glow of vicarious heroism, the writer presented his reader with a protagonist so ineffectual and contemptible that the reader—the writer hoped—would enjoy the thought that at least he was better than that. (26)
After having delivered this unabashed praise to escapism, de Camp goes on to note the renewed interest in Heroic Fantasy ("The Hero shall ride again!") and in this respect he is undoubtedly right. Old classics are reissued by the score together with new stories of blood, thunder and well-sharpened swords. The spectrum goes all the way from the gentle novels of James Branch Cabell to the sadistic tales of Robert E. Howard and the almost Dickensian Gormen-ghast trilogy of Mervyn Peake. The source of this sudden interest in fantasy might be partly attributed to the success of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy; however, looking at the state of the world—the real world —today, I can well believe there are some deeper reasons, too. There was a similar interest in heroes and mighty deeds in Hitler's Germany. Richard Wagner's Der Ring der Nibelungen, a heroic Sword & Sorcery fantasy of no mean qualities, was not the only work of its type popular at the time.
First among the writers of Heroic Fantasy stands Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth baron of Dunsany (1878-1958), holder of one of the most ancient baronial titles in the British Isles and an aristocrat of the time-honored British big white bwana lion hunter type, the author of more than sixty books of drama, poems and fantasy (with a quill pen, his biographers note). His fantasy stories—built on elements heavily drawn from old Anglo-Saxon folklore and sprinkled with myths of his own making, characterized by a robust handling of the fantastic themes of monsters, heroes and elves as well as an almost tender, richly poetic language—influenced most of the following writers of the genre.
One might say that he practically invented the pastoral never-never land for fantasy. It had, of course, been there all along, in the fairy tale, but these tales had very seldom been written for anyone over the age of twelve. The Gothic tale only made use of the most ghastly elements of the old sagas. Dunsany used it wholesale, with his own details added, and did it for adult readers. He didn't use quite as many swords and spilled guts as his successors, though; that was for lesser geniuses to invent. Most of his books are now out of print, but two volumes of Dunsaniana have recently been issued under the editorship of Lin Carter.
Far away from Lord Dunsany's elves and magicians, and yet closely related to him in the use of ancient myths, although utilizing them with a greater awareness and more humor (and, many think, too much long-windedness) stands James Branch Cabell (1879-1958). His novels are usually set in a world bearing traits of classic mythology as well as the medieval world of Southern Europe. The country of Cabell's fantasy books is called Poictesme, a place bearing some modest relations with medieval Provence but actually a land of Cabell's own creation, formed under the influence of Cabell's extensive knowledge of medieval romance and ancient myths from all parts of the world.
The cycle of books that chronicles the adventures of kings, magicians and common people in this country is called collectively Biography of the Life of Manuel, Manuel being a swineherd who by various devious means rises to the position of Count of Poictesme. The story of his life is told in the second volume of the Biography (there are twenty of them, in all), Figures of Earth, while he appears as a much-revered statue in the third, The Silver Stallion. From having been a thorough rascal in his life, he is now considered as being something very close to a saint; and this is a way of turning things that can be found in all Cabell's fantasy works. Cabell is a romanticist with a difference, knowing that no object of admiration is quite worth the emotion it causes. Cabell is at the bottom disillusioned, and his humor, ranging from sarcasm to farce and burlesque only underlines this. Jurgen (1919), Cabell's most well-known novel, is a typical example of Cabell's subtle style. He regards his protagonist with the same kind indulgence with his many bad traits as he earlier showed toward Manuel in Figures of Earth. They don't behave like gentlemen, they are cowards and liars, you can never trust them, but such as they are, such is man and has always been.
