Del Toro's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

A few years ago, there was a significant buzz that Guillermo Del Toro was going to direct a big budget version of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness".  It seemed like a good match of director and subject, and it was apparently one of Del Toro's dream projects that he'd tried unsuccessfully to do before. Del Toro himself scripted the film with Matthew Robbins. But sometime afterwards, interest seemed to dry up, and Del Toro moved on to other things. 

Recently Del Toro and Robbins's script began circulating on the web.  I understand this is an early version, but at least we now get to experience as a brain movie something of Del Toro's vision.  Alas, I found it second-rate---much more of an expansion of John Carpenter's The Thing (itself excellent) along Lovecraftian lines, than something truly Lovecraftian.  Dole in a heap of movie cliches, and a heavy reliance upon special effects, and I can see why no studio would want to fund this project.  (Of course, compared to what studios want to and do fund, this script should have seemed like a real box-office winner.)  But don't trust me.  Read it for yourself.  Currently I found it online at The Lovecraft eZine.  Direct link here. 

New Work on M. R. James

It was back in January 2008 that I saw a Call For Submissions by Patrick J. Murphy (Miami University) and Fred Porcheddu (Denison University), for an "edited collection on the fiction of M.R. James, tentatively titled Medievalists Red the Antiquary: Essays on the Fiction of M.R. James." Then there was a long period with no news about the project, which has now transmogrified into a book-in-progress authored by the two academics. So far two articles have appeared in print, with two more presently being considered for publication. It was my discovery of the second article, in the recently published new volume of Studies in Medievalism volume 22, that prompted me to check for other articles and I found the recent interview with Murphy and Porcheddu at A Podcast to the Curious.  Here's a direct link to the interview.

The John Meade Falkner Society Journal - July 2013

The latest issue of the journal of the John Meade Falkner Society (number 14, July 2013) includes rare material by the author of The Lost Stradivarius, Moonfleet and The Nebuly Coat, and essays on little-known aspects of his life and work.



George Woodman explores Falkner's final published piece of fiction in "Charalampia: A Quasi-Byzantine Romance?", and notes that it adds to our regret that Falkner did not write more fiction in his later years. One reason was certainly that Falkner was a very busy man in his role as Company Secretary of Armstrong, a major armaments firm, and another essay in this issue discusses Falkner's visit to Brazil in 1906 to sell warships, with quotations from letters showing his shrewd observation of character and brisk business sense.

Journal Editor Kenneth Hillier has made an excellent find in an old school journal of an account by Falkner of a boating trip on the Thames with friends: the excursion was beset by wind and rain, and the account has some of the facetious flavour of Jerome's Three Men in a Boat.  There's also a consideration by George Robson of the use of underground passages in Falkner's fiction, with discussion of some genuine examples which might have inspired these. Finally, the issue also reprints a previously uncollected poem by Falkner, 'Villa Adriana'. The journal is free to members of the Society, and there is also a regular newsletter.

Sorcery and Sanctity: A Tribute to Arthur Machen

To mark the 150th anniversary of Arthur Machen's birth, Hieroglyphic Press are publishing Sorcery and Sanctity - A Tribute to Arthur Machen, with new stories in the Machen tradition from seventeen authors inspired by the wizard from Gwent, including Ron Weighell, Mark Samuels, Thana Niveau, Steve Rasnic Tem, John Howard and John Gale.

The tales offer tributes to all aspects of Machen's literary career, including his work in supernatural horror and mystical wonder, the wartime legends and the ornate prose of his Nineties vignettes. The anthology, elegantly designed and produced, is in a limited edition of 150 copies, only 100 of which are for sale, and proceeds go to The Friends of Arthur Machen. It is sure to be a choice collector's item among Machenites for years to come, and an enduring homage to his work. Update: now sold out.

Checklist of Anglo-Eastern Publications

Checklist of Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company
This checklist is based on a catalogue of the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co in the National Archives of Australia, CRS A425, Prohibited Publications - General, 1943/2649.  Correspondence with the catalogue is dated February 1927, but I suspect the catalogue itself dates from mid-1926.

Novels of Bree Narran
1. One Night
2. Three Nights
3. Seven Nights
4. A Night and a Day
5. Six Nights Near the Moon
6. The Hour of Temptation
7. Cora Pearl: The Lady of the Pink Eyes 
8. The Dangerous Mrs Raymond
9. The Kinema Girl 
10. A Woman of Forty
11. A Woman of Temperament
12. The Love Child 
13. The Dancing Girl
14. The Right to Motherhood
15. Eve and the Man 
16. Eve out of Eden
82. EVE OUT OF EDEN
83. THE KINEMA GIRL
84. THE LOVE CHILD

A marketing postcard of a Bree Narran novel:

  Guy de Maupassant's Short Stories [probably translated by Bree Narran]
29. Short Stories, No 1 Series
30. Short Stories, No 2 Series
31. Short Stories, No 3 Series
32. Short Stories, No 4 Series
33. Short Stories, No 5 Series
34. Short Stories, No 6 Series
35. Short Stories, No 7 Series
36. Short Stories, No 8 Series
37. Short Stories, No 9 Series
38. Short Stories, No 10 Series
39. Short Stories, No 11 Series
40. Short Stories, No 12 Series
41. Short Stories, No 12a Series
80. Short Stories, No 14 Series
42. A Ladies' Man
43. A Woman's Life [was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1920 – noted in The Times]

Various French Authors.  Translated from the French by Bree Narran
27. Crisp Stories vol 1
28. Crisp Stories vol 2
81.Crisp Stories vol 3
26. Rare Stories, vol. 1
79. Rare Short Stories, vol 2 

The Novels of Paul de Kock. Translated from the French by Bree Narran (unabridged)

44. My Neighbour Raymond
45. That Rascal Gustave
46. The Bride of the First Night
47. The Wife, the Husband and Lover
48. Cards, Women and Wine
49. Mistress or Wife
50. The Girl With Three Petticoats
51. Georgette
52. Madeleine

 W.N. Willis

53. White Slaves of London
54. White Slave Market
55. Western Men with Eastern Morals
56. Should Girls Be Told?
57. A Girl of London Town
58. White Slaves in a Piccadilly Flat
59. The Taint in the Blood
60. Betrayal
61. Why Girls Go Wrong
62. Anti-Christ in Egypt
63. THE GRIP OF THE VENEREAL MICROBE

Sporting Novels, W.N. Willis
64. Bluey Grey [‘A Romance of the Turf’]
65. The Lady Jockey

Novels
17. Valentine, Cuddl'ums
18. Valentine,The Adjusters
19. John Bernard, [Annie O'Meara de Vic Beamish], A Woman of Fire
20. John Bernard [Annie O'Meara de Vic Beamish], The New Race of Devils
21. Herbert Parker, The Midnight Lady
22. Herbert Parker, The Cuckoo Woman
23. Louise Heilgers, Further Tabloid Tales
24. M Lehane-Willis, THE PAINTED WOMAN
25. M Lehane-Willis, Dean’s Rosemary
66. Boccaccio, Decameron
67. Marguerite Queen of Navarre,  Heptameron
68. Aristotle, Works
70. T. Faukner, M.D., Book of Nature
69. Balzac, DROLL STORIES
85. Rex Ryan, MIDNIGHT LOVE
86. [No author given], THE GIRL WHO CHARMS MEN
87. Noel Despard, THE TYRANY OF VIRTUE

Another marketing post card

Sexual Science Series.

71. J P Gair, CONTROL OF MOTHERHOOD
72. Brenda Barwon, MARRIAGE AND BIRTH CONTROL
73. W N Willis, Wedded Love
74. J P Gair, Sexual Knowledge for the Young Man
75. J.P. Gair, Sexual Knowledge for the Young Woman
76. John Hurstcot, Love Ethics: Sex and the Divine
77. Thomas Herne, Love, Courtship and Marriage
78. Thomas Herne, ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES OF LOVE.


The following books are known to have been published by the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co:
Arthur Wolseley D'Ombrain, Boomerang Verses [the foreword is dated February 1924]
C.J. O'Donnell, Outraged Ulster: why Ulster is rebellious with an introductory letter to the Right Hon Viscount Craigavon [1932]
D.C. Daking, Feed My Sheep [1933]
D.C. Daking, Jungian Psychology and Modern Spiritual Thought [1933]
W.N. Willis, Luvvy Muvver: letters from her dorter Miss Jane [first published in 1916]
Rex Ryan, Crooked Love [advertised in a 1932 catalogue of Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co titles]

Thanks to Andrew Parry who provided many of the cover scans.

Rex Ryan/R.R. Ryan

Kudos to researcher and fellow archivist, Andrew Parry, for discovering more Rex Ryan novels, which he revealed on the excellent Vault of Evil site.  Andrew made the link between the publisher of Noel Despard’s Tyranny of Virtue, Nicholas F. Willis, and the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co, both of which advertised at the same address.  Anglo-Eastern is one of the more obscure publishers of the first half of the twentieth century; as far as I know only Professor John Arnold of Monash University has done any extensive research about it and the related Camden Publishing Company – see here. 

 There appear to have been three phases to the life of the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company:

1.   From its founding in about 1910 to the death of William Nicholas Willis Snr in 1922, when the company was run from 48-50 Waterloo Rd, London.

2.    From 1922-1932 when William Nicholas Willis Jnr evidently took over the reins and published only intermittently.  The address of the firm varies between 48-50 Waterloo Rd, 48-50 Waterloo Bridge Rd, and 50 Waterloo Bridge Rd.

3.     From 1932, when the original Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co went into receivership, and a new publishing firm with the same name was formed, which acquired the stock, copyrights, stereotypes and printers’ moulds of books of the earlier company.  According to a 1932 issue of The Publisher, “The Anglo-Eastern Publishing Co (1932) Ltd, of 15 Cecil Court, W.C. 2, have taken over the business of the company of the same name formerly of Waterloo Rd, SE 1, and are issuing new editions of their ‘Bree Narran’ and other well-known fiction.”  While it advertised an extensive stock, it’s not clear how much of it was actually published.

 Andrew Parry found an extensive catalogue at the back of one of the 1932 reissues which included two Rex Ryan titles as well as Noel Despard’s Tyranny of Virtue.  The Rex Ryan titles are Midnight Love and Crooked Love. 

 John Arnold has sent me a working checklist of Anglo-Eastern/Camden titles drawn mostly from a similar catalogue of Anglo-Eastern titles at the back of a copy of Crisp Stories, published by Camden.  While there was no Rex Ryan titles in this catalogue, John did find an advertisement for Rex Ryan's Midnight Love at the back of another copy of Crisp Stories.

In addition, a full catalogue of Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company publications, which dates to early 1927, includes both Rex Ryan's Midnight Love and Noel Despard's Tyranny of Virtue. They are numbered 85 and 87 in the catalogue, out of a total of 87 titles. 

Le Fanu and Herbert van Thal

I was recently reading Herbert van Thal’s interesting autobiography, The Tops of the Mulberry Trees (1971), which covers many of van Thal’s roles in publishing—as an agent, anthologist, editor and publisher.  Here are a few paragraphs on J. Sheridan Le Fanu:

An author to whom I have always been greatly addicted is Sheridan Le Fanu. It was that remarkable person A.J.A. Symons who first drew my attention to him. I have always been surprised that Le Fanu has never achieved the popularity of his contemporaries, such as Wilkie Collins, though Collins’ reputation rests solely on The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and of whom I am no less of an admirer. Le Fanu is barely known save for Uncle Silas, and some of his short stories from In a Glass Darkly. A. J. A. Symons had a remarkable collection of his works and now that the Sadleir collection is no longer in this country, his works are one of the scarcest to be found. I began collecting his books late in life, and therefore was unable to complete a run of volumes. Those I had I regret now I sold at Sotheby’s in 1964.

Ardizzone's frontispiece to In a Glass Darkly

Peter Davies had the good ides of republishing In a Glass Darkly with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, but as usual, the result was not so admirable financially. I have always felt that it is a pity that the marriage between illustrator and novelist is no longer popular. I suppose everyone has a preconceived idea in their minds’ eye as to the appearance of the characters in their favoured writings, and prefer not to have this dispelled by an artist’s view. I, however, do not agree with this argument. I always see Alice through Tenniel, Pickwick thought Boz, and I felt similarly Edward Ardizzone completely captured the spirit of Le Fanu, and I only wish that had In a Glass Darkly been a success we could have continued to republish Le Fanu with that artist’s illustrations.

When I had my own publishing house, I naturally wanted to republish Le Fanu, but I only republished one short story from The Purcell Papers—A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay.  Montague Summers reproved me for not stating that the story first appears in Cassell’s Magazine Volume IV, 1868, and not in The Purcell Papers. The Le Fanu of Spook Sonatas no loner terrifies—the host, the familiar and the vampire only hold court in the world of the cinema—and in its place something far more realistically horrid is necessary to titillate the flesh of the toughened and permissive young of our time.

The small Le Fanu volume that van Thal published, A Strange Adventure of the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay: A Tale from Chronicles of Golden Friars (London:  Home and van Thal, 1947) included an introductory note by van Thal and a frontispiece by Felix Kelly.  Van Thal also included Le Fanu’s “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” in his anthology Great Ghost Stories (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), and introduced a reissue of Le Fanu’s novel, The Cock and the Anchor (London:  Cassell, 1967).  

A sample page-spread from In a Glass Darkly (1929)

Edward Ardizzone contributed over 150 illustrations to the Peter Davies edition of In a Glass Darkly, published in November 1929.  Only six of these are full-page illustration; the rest are smaller vignettes.  All are rather impressionistic ink sketches.  I find I can’t agree with van Thal that Ardizzone is especially desirable as an illustrator for Le Fanu’s writings, nice and atmospheric as those the illustrations may be.

S. T. Joshi’s UNUTTERABLE HORROR and its Reception

S. T. Joshi read an immense amount of material prior to compiling this two-volume history in order to present the most comprehensive study of supernatural literature yet published. He has also organized this material with exemplary care, yet it troubles me that everyone has either lauded this book without noting the extent to which its author's biases compromise the study's integrity, or they have skirted these deficiencies as minor matters that will have little major effect on future critical assessments of supernatural literature.

Even though some reviews have called attention to the overly harsh criticism he doles out to canonical and obscure authors alike, none of the reviews I have read have attempted to address the fallacies and inconsistencies Joshi applies to the works he so readily dismisses. Iconoclasm is such an ingrained part of American culture that we tend to accept the explosion of myths, unseating of sacred cows, and the revelation that the emperor has no clothes without examining whether the iconoclasts have truly opened our eyes to the truth or merely found a new way of distracting us from it.    

I will begin with two quotations from Stefan Dziemianowicz's review, which appeared in the July 2013 issue of Locus.

  

"Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction can be regarded as his ambitious elaboration on Lovecraft’s landmark essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'."

Unfortunately, this is one of the major deficiencies of the book. Even though Lovecraft’s letters and a careful comparison of Lovecraft's essay with Edith Birkhead's The Tale of Terror (Constable, 1921)[1], reveal that Lovecraft was not always very familiar with the authors he critiqued, Joshi takes virtually every opinion of Lovecraft's as gospel. Furthermore, if Lovecraft felt an author's work did not meet his standards, Joshi echoes that opinion faithfully, though at greater length.

"Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James (all of whom Joshi credits for using their tales of the supernatural as vehicles for expressing their worldviews)" 

Here is one of the key fallacies into which Joshi falls again and again and again, not only in this work, but in its predecessors. When he first wrote about M. R. James in an article later reprinted in The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), he dismissed the author as a writer of trifles who lacked the coherent world-view of the other authors in the book, i.e. Bierce, Blackwood, Machen, and Lovecraft. Years later, he has accepted the fact that James does have a world-view, though one he had initially missed, and now acknowledges him as a superior craftsman.  Oddly, as anyone who has read more than a smattering of his work can attest, Blackwood’s fiction does not present a single, coherent worldview, but shifts as his settings and the focus of his individual novels and collections changes. Most of the time his work is pantheist or animist in its concerns, but there are strong traces of a very Christian conception of good and evil in a great many of his works, even though no established church would embrace the way he conceives or presents them.

Joshi tends to award a Weltanschauung to authors with whose views he is in sympathy; but has the unfortunate tendency to deny any legitimate worldview to those writers in whom he sees mirrored elements of traditional religion, even when those views are transformed by such powerful personalities as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Russell Kirk (to name two authors dismissed summarily in this book) or treated in a complex manner that subverts traditional canons of belief, as appears regularly in the work of Le Fanu and Machen.

There is no doubt in my mind that Lovecraft belongs on the very highest tier of weird fiction writers due to the quality of his vision, the conscientiousness with which he shaped his greatest works, and his success in driving his personal vision towards a realization capable of capturing the imagination of people with whom he otherwise had very little in common. Yet, Lovecraft’s vision is not the only vision of horror capable of doing this, since not all of us are atheists, nor materialists, nor is every member of the human race uninterested in the finer workings of the mind or interactions among its fellows. There are important strands of weird fiction Lovecraft failed to appreciate or understand, which predecessors such as James Hogg, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, and many others brought to the fore.  

By setting up Lovecraft as the most appropriate, or in some extreme cases the only legitimate, yardstick with which to measure the human capacity for horror, I believe current scholarship in the field of weird literature risks embracing a fallacy akin to that described by Herbert Butterfield in his famous essay, The Whig Interpretation of History (Norton, 1965). Butterfield warned historians that they risked compromising their work by applying contemporary value judgments against historical figures or events, and assuming that factors we perceive as advantageous to our current condition or favorable to development in any particular field must necessarily be deemed as inevitable and progressive:

"It is part and parcel of the Whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present; and though there may be a sense in which this is unobjectionable if its implications are carefully considered, and there may be a sense in which it is inescapable, it has often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present. Through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it; so that a handy rule of thumb exists by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis. (page 11)"

"Our assumptions do not matter if we are conscious that they are assumptions, but the most fallacious thing in the world is to organize our historical knowledge upon an assumption without realizing what we are doing, and then to make inferences from that organization and claim that these are the voice of history. It is at this point that we tend to fall into what I have nicknamed the Whig fallacy. (pp. 23-4)."

Nor is this fallacy peculiar to historical studies, since the most egregious example known to me was responsible for a Serialist hegemony in classical music among publishers, performers, and academics during the first five decades following World War II, during which composers writing tonal music were labeled "useless" and had increasing difficulty having their concert works performed or published. This fallacy thrives on the assumption that a given concept or artifact embraced by a segment of contemporary society (e.g. Democracy, free market economy, serialist music, horror fiction with a  cosmic or materialist basis antagonistic to established religion, mint-flavored toothpaste)[2] is the logical and only legitimate result of sustained development in that sphere.  By accepting these preconceptions, anything that deviates from progression to the desired result must be viewed as wrong, as anything leading up to it is viewed as immature, and anything deviating from it in the present is viewed as flawed, decadent, old-fashioned, wrong-headed, silly, and what-have-you.

Dziemianowicz begins the final paragraph of his review as follows:

“Unutterable Horror is a very opinionated historical study, and Joshi’s criticisms are sometimes unnecessarily caustic. But this book is indisputably a work of considerable scholarship. Joshi has done his homework to fill the gaps in the fossil record of supernatural fiction, and the wealth of data with which he provides the reader for primary and secondary sources is invaluable.”

This is a just appraisal of all the work Joshi has put into this study. The crucial sentences, however, appear in the final two lines:  

“Invariably, readers will seek out many of the works cited in its two volumes to render their own critical estimates. Present and future scholars will undoubtedly treat this book as one that establishes the critical standard for evaluating supernatural fiction.”

I cannot express strongly enough my desire that the final sentence of Dziemianowicz’s review be yoked indissolubly with, and tempered by, that which precedes it.  All too often, the opinion of one authority is deemed sufficient reason for any reader, perennially as short of time as he or she may be of funds, to forego the opportunity of investigating an author on their own.  Joshi may have established a “critical standard for evaluating supernatural fiction” in this book, but that does not mean that his assessments are always either just or unassailable.  Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Fraser Cerf dismissed “hundreds and hundreds of stories” as “commonplace” or “sheer trash” in the “Introduction to the Notes” to their benchmark Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Random House, 1944). Nearly seventy years later, and without knowing specifically which works they omitted, their criteria for inclusion seem reasonable. In Joshi’s case, the exclusions are named, and the criteria again seem reasonable, as stated, even though the way Joshi applies these criteria does not always seem reasonable or equitable. It is up to us who do not share Mr. Joshi’s particular set of biases (admittedly due to biases of our own, which can be overcome or placed into context via a community of readers and scholars in this field) to ensure that a perspective is maintained that allows for appreciation of the full panoply and richness of supernatural literature.  

---

[1] A work from which "Supernatural Horror" borrows more than is usually acknowledged.

[2] Efforts to market dental hygiene in Asia were rewarded when it was realized that Green Tea was accepted as a more palatable dentifrice in China than the mint or fruit flavors favored in the West.