The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien

Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) was an Irishman who, after dissipating his inheritance, moved to the United States, where he became an author of fantasies of science and the supernatural. From the 1850’s to his death in the American Civil War, he wrote numerous pieces which garnered him a reputation as the “Celtic Poe”. The introduction to The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien makes it clear that, due to the need for ready cash to finance the style of living to which he had become accustomed, his output was largely confined to magazine work - stories churned out to meet deadlines and thus considered in some way “inferior”.

While he perhaps did not attain the stylistic reputation of a Hawthorne or a Poe, O’Brien was clearly a pioneer of fantastic literature, following in the footsteps of these personages and their antecedent, Charles Brockden Brown. It is difficult to assess, in retrospect, the inventiveness of a talent such as his, for his heirs build upon his groundwork, and thus almost make his writings seem pedestrian. Still, he wrote, in “What Was It?” the story of a malevolent, invisible being long before Bierce and Wells, and, to my mind, “The Diamond Lens” (in which a “microscopist” uses cutting edge technology to discover a lovely, almost sub-atomic, nymph in a drop of water) prefigures the scientific fantasy of Wells. “The Wondersmith” fuses gypsy magic with prefabricated homunculi to bring forth an army of tiny assassins, programmed to bring about the extinction of American Christianity by murdering its children, as they sleep and dream of Christmas joys.

The purely supernatural has its place in O’Brien’s stories as well. “The Pot of Tulips” effectively retells a story, as old as antiquity, of a miser who in death reveals through signs and symbols the location of his hidden fortune. “The Lost Room” is reminiscent of an inferior Hawthorne – a young man steps out for a cigar, and returns to find his room weirdly transformed and occupied by a orgiastic party of Venetian revelers who, after a wager, turn him out of his habitation to wander forever in madness and despair.

“Seeing The World” is almost something out of the imagination of Borges. There is a mysterious stranger, returned from the East, who can heal the sick and confer poetic genius, but the price is outrageous, for the gift of seeing – of seeing everything in the world, in depth and simultaneously – the gift that Jupiter bestowed on Semele, is yet another doorway to madness. Finally, the collection is rounded out by the Oriental tale of “The Dragon Fang Possessed by the Conjurer Piou-Lu”, another tale of power and magic.

O’Brien writes most of the stories in the persona, apparently well know to him, of the comfortable bachelor, ensconced in his cozy lodgings, be it a haunted boarding house or a decaying Dutch mansion in upper Manhattan. Late evenings with cigar or opium, discussing supernatural possibilities with companions set a cozy tone, which will be upended by a shift of reality as objects of speculation become all too real. It would be wrong to judge O’Brien’s themes as hoary simply because we have encountered them in more well known authors who followed him down these speculative paths. Taken as exemplars of early nineteenth-century speculative fiction, these stories are still worth a read on a chill winter’s night.

(The illustration is a contemporary caricature of O'Brien as a Union Army recruiter.)

The Stories of Paul Bowles

The author, composer, and translator Paul Bowles was raised on the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and, like them, a not-so-subtle menace pervades his stories. Bowles exhibits no sentimentality in his writings but rather approaches the world as an outsider, an anthropologist of strangeness and cruelty. He is best in his stories of Morocco, which gives him an ideal stage for his dramas of fear and violence, the legitimate terror of the outsider in an inescapable downward spiral of detachment from identity. I think of the linguistics professor in one of Bowles’ most famous stories, “A Distant Episode”, whose western identity is severed when his tongue is violently (and needless to say, ironically) slashed from his mouth. Like Professor Unrat in the film “The Blue Angel”, his cultural persona flows from him like blood and he becomes less a man than a pathetic object of scorn and ridicule, wandering in incoherence, tin can lids jangling from his clothes for the amusement of ragged children. After many readings, the sudden and shocking violence of “The Delicate Prey” still gives rise to revulsion in the throat, and the deformed keeper of the underground pool in “By the Water” plays upon our age-old contempt for the grotesque. It is in the exploitation of the fearfully grotesque that Bowles found his métier.

A true expatriate, Bowles had the means to travel widely, and locales as diverse as Mexico and Sri Lanka show up in his stories. There are rare touches of humor, such as in “You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus”, but there are also instances of true American gothic, such as the madman of “If I Should Open My Mouth”, a 1954 tale of product tampering and the perverse “Pages from Cold Point”, an almost Nabokovian tale of seduction.

Bowles long had a reputation as a writer’s writer, and for many years his novels such as The Sheltering Sky, Up Above the World, and The Spider’s House languished in hard to find editions, until they were revived in the 1980’s. For the Beats, Bowles was a link to the past and a certain sort of respectability, and Burroughs and Ginsberg played out some of their most memorable antics in Bowles’ Tangier, the Interzone of Burroughs classic Naked Lunch. Later on, lured by his reputation as a composer and musicologist who pioneered recordings of the musicians of the Rif Mountains, Jagger and Jones sought him out (see Bowles’ notes for “Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka”). In truth, through recordings and translations, he did an invaluable service in attempting to preserve aspects of Moroccan culture before it became too contaminated by outside influences.

In documentary film and books such as Michelle Green’s The Dream at the End of the World, Bowles in old age became a pop icon, the dandy who traveled into the Sahara with a dozen trunks full of nappy suits and ties. The attention is deserved, but should not distract from the essence of Bowles: his novels, travel writings, memoirs, and short stories. Paul Bowles died in 1999.

Goethe's Tales for Transformation

It should come as no surprise that the author of Faust had a long and abiding interest in alchemy and the mythology of renewal and transformation. This collection brings together five stories and a short libretto (conceived as a continuation of Mozart's "The Magic Flute"), most of which touch directly upon themes corresponding to the Great Work.

Some of these pieces are heavily allegorical, particularly "Fairy Tale", a parable of metamorphosis which, as Alice Raphael convincingly illustrates in Goethe and the Philosopher's Stone, draws heavily on Egyptian mythology as understood by Masonic acolytes. Archetypes of Thoth (as Ferryman), the Lily or prima materia, the transforming serpent (which as the ouroboros embodies continuity or eternity, the Elder or lamp-bearer (who hold the key to the Great Work), and others act out a ceremony of transformation, the understanding of which is essential to the philosophical study of hermeticism and alchemy.

"The New Melusina" is the most enchanting tale of the lot, relating a young man's discovery of and betrothal to a beautiful and mysterious gnome princess. "The Counselor" and "The Good Women" (a kind of symposium) explore femininity and male/female duality, with an emphasis on female "constancy" which must have been a matter of discussion and importance to Goethe and his circle. "Nouvelle" is another allegory, this time pertaining to the taming of emotional passions, another significant step in spiritual transformation.

The collection is rounded out with Goethe's continuation of "The Magic Flute", in which the Queen of the Night imprisons Genius, the child of Pamina and Tamino, in a golden sarcophagus upon which a terrible curse has been lain, a curse which is finally overcome by trial and initiation.

The stories collected in this short anthology should appeal to anyone interested in Goethe's Masonic involvement, his lifelong interest in philosophical alchemy, and the aesthetic impact of these studies on his work.

Oriental Tales by Marguerite Yourcenar

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar's best known novel, is in the form of a fictional memoir of the Emperor Hadrian, written to his successor Marcus Aurelius. There are some lovely passages here - wistful meditations on astronomy, history, the living of life, and sensual passion. This melancholy novel is mostly based on the biography of Hadrian from the Augustan History , but downplays the late Emperor's more vile characteristics, which were probably somewhat exaggerated in the original telling anyway. Fully deserving of its reputation as a 20th century classic.

Oriental Tales is Yourcenar's collection of ten stories, encompassing an "Orient" which stretches from the Balkans to China, in fantastic tales seemingly derived from folklore. Yourcenar has a way with a sensual phrase, and a sympathetic ear for the roguish seducer. Seduction is, in fact, a leitmotif of these stories, be it the artist Wang-Fo, whose superb paintings render pale the real world for a young Emperor (a seduction which carries an awful penalty, until the artist devises a means of saving himself), or the aging Japanese Don Juan, Genji, whose memory holds loving remembrance of all women save the one who loved him most deeply. There is a touch of the ribald in the sun-dappled stories of Greece and the Balkans (it is not a smile which almost betrays Marko Kraljevic in the story "Marko's Smile", feigning death until a dancing girl awakens his manly passion) and hints of the unearthly power of the feminine in "The Milk of Death", "Our Lady of the Swallows", and "Kali Beheaded", stories which seem to trace the beginnings of folklore and myth in anguished cries against patriarchal injustice.

Revised and supplemented from the original 1938 text, and translated lovingly by Alberto Manguel, these stories affirm Yourcenar as one of the premier (and most enjoyable) storytellers of the 20th century.

Not to be overlooked are two enjoyably diverse volumes of Yourcenar's essays - The Dark Brain of Piranesi and That Mighty Sculptor, Time.

All Hallow's Eve by Charles Williams

The fact that Charles Williams has not had quite the rise in stock as his Oxford associates C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien is interesting, although I do recall that when I was an undergraduate in the early 80’s, the campus Christian book shop was quite well stocked with his novels. I attribute his relative obscurity to the fact that his fiction, which is opaque to a frustrating degree, does not appeal to juveniles (there are no Hobbits). The present novel, Williams’ last, is given a kick upwards on the legitimacy scale through an introduction by that grand dame of English letters, T.S. Eliot, who was also addicted to detective novels and Marx Brothers films (Eliot carried on a brief correspondence with Groucho Marx that does no great service to either of their reputations).

Early in his life, before he found theological comfort in the bosom of the Church of England, Williams had an association with the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross which testified to his lifelong interest in things supernatural. This interest colors his major novels, including War in Heaven, The Greater Trumps (referencing the Tarot), and All Hallow’s Eve, which concerns the spirits of the dead in immediate postwar London.

Londoners Lester and Evelyn (of course one would have to be an Evelyn) had the bad luck to be occupying the space where an airplane chose to crash, and now they are disembodied spirits wandering a transdimensional London that is even gloomier than its archetype. Lester has her newlywed husband Richard on her mind, whilst Evelyn, despite her transubstantiation to the ghostly realm, still cannot keep her mouth shut. Lester is not too keen to spend the afterlife with this chatterbox, and lets Evelyn know it. Evelyn spends the rest of the novel harboring resentments against Lester, and a good/bad duality tends to color the novel through their relationship.

Now, the girls had an acquaintance in their school days who just happens to be the daughter of the Antichrist, or at least an ancient Magus a couple hundred years old who has acquired a reputation as a faith healer, and who is well versed in the magic arts, being able to conjure female homunculi with little more than spit, dust, and a weird unearthly light that he emanates when the feeling strikes him. His daughter, Betty (and who would have thought that the Antichrist would have a daughter named Betty?) was sired upon some ol’ sourpuss who goes by the name of Lady Wallingford.

Betty is important to the Magus (Simon the Clerk), because she can disembody herself and wander the streets of London, listening for whispers of the dead and intimations of future events (Simon's goal, if you haven't guessed it, is world domination). Betty is betrothed to a London artist who paints with a God-given clarity, and who has done a portrait of Simon which, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, reveals something of Simon’s true nature. The descriptions of the malevolent Simon and his nativity are some of the most rewarding (evil is always interesting) in the novel.

Charles Williams is not one to spend a lot of time on action, so be ready to read a lot of obtuse blather about the inner motivations of the characters, with generous Christian symbolism, between the surprisingly few scenes where something actually happens. In the course of the novel, Lester learns something about grace and the healing power of love, and comes compassionately to the aid of poor Betty, whose father is just about ready to make her his tool and a permanent resident of the land beyond, an idea to which her loathsome mother is fully in support. Evelyn, on the other hand, becomes even more small minded and resentful, and is clearly headed for the outer darkness.

Williams is a masterful writer, although clarity is not his strong suit. Some of the passages of All Hallow’s Eve are indeed eerie, the kind of eeriness which comes from the realization that Williams himself must have felt quite at home in that nether land between the living and the dead, and had a profound imagining of it. The complex character of Lester is particularly well described, although this makes most of the other characters seem rather one-dimensional in comparison. Despite long stretches of dense prose and thinly veiled theology, there is enough suspense to keep one interested, and by the last chapter, the author is finally willing to let the characters act and speak for themselves enough to propel the action forward. All Hallow’s Eve is a highly literary ghost story with some good points, but overall, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s worth the effort.

The Longest Memory by Fred D'Aguiar

The Longest Memory tells the story of a pivotal event in the life of an antebellum Virginia plantation - the whipping to death of a young slave - from the perspectives of several different characters.

The aged slave Whitechapel is central to the narrative. He has learned the art of compliance, of accepting the slave's lot without complaint. For this he has earned the admiration and respect of the plantation owner, and acts as an elder to the slave population. For Whitechapel, existence, despite its sorrows, has become comfortable. In the context of the novel, Whitechapel is an ambigous character. He ultimately loses his status in the eyes of the slaves, for it is he who has revealed (following a promise of leniency) to the plantation owner the location of Chapel, the runaway slave, whom he regards as his son, but whose lineage is more complex. Chapel has committed one of the great sins of slavery. The plantation owner's daughter has taught him to read, and fired by this Promethean knowledge, his head becomes full of his own verses, and of visions of freedom.

I will avoid any further synopsis. This is a short book, imbued with the poetic sensibilities of its talented author, a Guyanese poet. Mercifully, D'Aguiar does not attempt to recreate the vernacular speech of the characters, but rather allows them to speak to us with a precise clarity well suited to the narrative. Despite its brevity, The Longest Memory speaks eloquently of the universally corrupting effect of slavery.

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

Soul Mountain is a metaphorical pilgrimage by a modern Chinese writer, undertaken after he is mistakenly diagnosed with terminal cancer, only to find several weeks later that the diagnosis is in error, earning him a reprieve from death. It is a grand work, but curiously, grand in its individual pieces, not necessarily as the sum of its parts.

In the early 1980’s, Gao Xingjian was a playwright under suspicion by the Chinese government. Faced with a threat of forced rehabilitation, he sets out for the mountainous regions of western China. Once there, he seeks to undertake a pilgrimage to the holy mountain of Lingshan, or “Soul Mountain”. This is clearly a metaphor for a journey of self-examination, for although a mountain – or various mountains (ambiguity is a hallmark of this novel) – is explored, it is never explicit that they are the elusive Lingshan.

Wandering through villages and remote outposts, the misty valleys and isolated Daoist enclaves the protagonist encounters are almost timeless, like images from an ancient scroll painting. As a means of illustrating, perhaps, the transitory states of being of the protagonist, Gao never settles on a defining pronoun, which makes for some head-scratching until one gets into the flow of the narrative. Even the term “narrative” is somewhat misleading, in my mind, at least, for one could well shuffle and rearrange the 81 chapters with little discernable impact to the novel.

In addition to being an inward examination of the protagonist, Soul Mountain is also a book about the spatial and temporal immensity of China itself. It is replete with secret Daoist rituals, ancient ruins, folk songs and tales seemingly passed down from time immemorial. Bronze artifacts and stamped bricks seem to litter the landscape, and every abandoned bandit camp seems haunted by the ghosts of China’s deep past. There are abducted maidens and corpses of lovesick girls washed down the mountain streams, and at times the stories might well be updates from the classic anthology of weird tales, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. The protagonist muses on his fate and that of his family, he seeks tales of the legendary Wild Men of the mountains and collects folk songs and artifacts. Amongst it all, the specter of the Cultural Revolution – that forced agrarianism that decimated the intelligentsia – looms large.

There is a certain self-conscious indulgence in some of the writing, especially in the chapter where the author defends the fluid use of pronouns in the novel, in the end telling the reader that there is no point in even reading the chapter he has just finished. There is also an underlying misogyny in the work: many of the chapters alternate with encounters between a man and a woman (or multiple women – that ambiguity again). The women come across as frivolous, needy, or naïve, and the author seems preoccupied with describing their positive and negative physical attributes, and one of the later chapters is a long complaint of having to listen to an uninteresting narrative spoken by an “ugly” crone whom the narrator finds particularly repulsive.

The curious thing about this novel of personal pilgrimage and discovery is that, despite flashes of awareness, there seems to be no fundamental shift in the mind of the protagonist, no summit to the mountain except the pessimistic reinforcement of the idea of the transitory futility of human life, and the awareness that, despite his attempts to break away, he is not ready to abandon human society. Anyone approaching Soul Mountain in search of spiritual uplift would likely come away, assuming they have gotten through the 500+ pages, seriously disappointed. Still, the writing is lyrical and compelling in places, enough for a serious reader to stay engaged. For its faults, it remains a fascinating document of a man’s restless and troubled inner life. It is, on its own terms, a masterful book.

Gao Xingjian received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. He lives in Paris, working as a novelist, playwright, critic, and painter.

Pale Fire

From the archives, some old notes on a classic. Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite authors.

A poem with commentary, the telling of a man's ordinary life and thoughts, interpreted by a exiled king, who sees in every word a reflection of lost Zembla. Or, alternatively, a lost king invented by a poet and interpreted by a madman, or someone's dream world, inhabited by shades.

An ultimately perfect work, and a book that can be read many times in many different ways, Pale Fire is by turns touching and overwhelmingly comic, the rage against tyrants and cruelty and the forces of mediocrity is always just below the surface. One suspects that the deepest compassion of the author (the true author) is particularly evident in this work, portions of which are some of the most clearly spiritual (I use the term loosely) that I've come across in Nabokov's work. Speaking of sins, John Shade states: "I can name only two: murder and the deliberate infliction of pain." Despite his biting criticism and strong opinions, Nabokov never comes across in his works as particularly judgemental.

Nabokov's calm assurance regarding the sort of afterlife he envisions is eloquent, as is, as usual, his precise and exhilarating style of writing. Kinbote, for his insufferability, is a masterful creation of pathos and hedonism, a dim cousin of Humbert Humbert. The poet Shade is less well envisioned, in the commentary, at least (which forms the bulk of the book), but he is a warm enough figure as seen through "his" poem, and the canto dealing with his daughter's death is heart-wrenching. But in the shifting mirror of this complex book, neither identity nor reality is fixed, yet a sense of loss and distance comes through in every word. 09/01

Accumulated Wisdom

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

-Bertrand Russell, quoted in a letter to the editor of NYT Magazine (9/14/2008)

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss

I revisited this book in 2004 after 20+ years (a boarding pass bookmark is dated June 1982). Rereading a book after a number of years, especially if it is a good one, rewards one with new insights and perspectives. At times, one is disappointed. I believe that in rereading Levi-Strauss, with his sense of sorrow and the futility of the human race, his sense of the human and environmental catastrophe we have wrought upon the earth these last several hundred years (and accelerated in the 20th century), one must see the truth in his dire perspectives.

Written in 1955, this account, primarily of Levi-Strauss's researches among Brazilian/Mato Grosso tribes in the 1930's*, contained a damning enough account of the miseries of disease, deforestation, and cultural collapse which, true to his prediction, has had a devastating effect on native Brazilians. Other meditations on the miseries of Calcutta; the wasteful cycle of land use in the Americas; the authoritarian, frozen in time deficiencies of Islam; and the transcendent truths of Buddhism tie into the author's narrative.

Finally, this memoir is an excellent exposition of the mental makeup and the cultural rootlessness which characterize the anthropologist. The last few pages, which I have revisited many times over the years, are a beautiful, lyrical (in a book characterized by its lyricism) exposition of man's beginnings and his ultimate significance in the universe. An anthropological classic. 3/04

*Levi-Strauss was the editor of the Tropical Forest volume of the Handbook of South American Indians.

The Black Spider

Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider is an overlooked masterpiece of horror, a novella telling the story of a Faustian pact made in the Middle Ages, with repercussions through the centuries.

A Teutonic Knight makes cruel and impossible demands upon his subjects, involving the transplantation of one hundred full grown beech trees across a mountain to serve as landscaping for his newly constructed castle. While the peasants are driven to despair by this order, one brave and foolhardly woman makes a pact with a mysterious huntsman, dressed in green with a red beard and devilish eyes. He will see that the task is accomplished, but his price is the unbaptised soul of a newborn infant. The woman, Christine, believes that she can reneg on her end of the bargain with the careful connivance of the peasants and the local priest, but with each child withheld, dire afflictions and death overtake the peasants.

At the conclusion of their deal, the Huntsman had given Christine a peck on the cheek, which immediately burned as if she were being pierced by a red hot poker. Over time, the black spot grew and took on the appearance of a large venomous spider. At one point it bursts, sending forth innumerable spiderlings to plague the valley. Eventually, Christine is subsumed into the spider, which goes on an apocalyptic rampage. In the midst of the carnage, one brave soul finds the inner strength and resolve to trap the spider and cheat the Huntsman, but like the Satan of Revelations, the creature is bound for only a certain number of years, until the morals of the mountain folk degenerate again and the creature is again briefly let loose.

The tale is framed in the context of a 19th century baptismal celebration, and is told by the old grandfather to a group of fat and ruddy faced villagers, who listen with growing terror. The tale is a warning of the necessity of staying on the narrow Christian path, for the spider and it's master, while temporarily defeated, are ever present, ever ready to strike.

The horrors of the arachnid, so well described, contrast vividly with the sunny vitality of the prosperous villagers at the feast. Gotthelf was a "militantly conservative" Christian who wrote this allegory as a cautionary tale. The slow growth of the spider on Christine's cheek, and her growing sense of despair bear unavoidable comparison to Kafka, and although the narrative in summary sounds like something from a B movie, the writing is effective in inducing the sense of terror that grips the valley. The Black Spider is an excellent example of early horror writing.

There are several anthologies which include The Black Spider. The translation I read was in German Novellas of Realism, Volume One in the excellent series The German Library, published by Continuum. The old Anchor editon of Nineteenth Century German Tales, edited by Angel Flores in the 1950's, includes this story in a different translation and, as an added bonus, has a fantastic Edward Gorey cover.

Much more information can be found at a journey round my skull (see favorite links).

Accumulated Wisdom

From Michael Lind's NYT review of Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (8/17/08):

Frank's analysis of why there are so many libertarian think tanks in a country with so few libertarians is dead on: "The reason that we have so many well-funded libertarians in America these days is not because libertarianism suddenly acquired an enormous grass-roots following, but because it appeals to those who are able to fund ideas...Libertarianism is a politics born to be subsidized."