Malpertuis by Jean Ray

I read Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis (1943) over the course of two evenings, and each night I experienced strange dreams of forgotten identity. (I also became reacquainted with an ancient structure riddled with hidden passageways that has haunted my dreams since childhood.) Characterized by the publisher as a “modern Gothic novel”, this book does indeed reflect the conventions of that genre: a sprawling house exuding evil, a cast of strange characters, a naïve protagonist, and a sense of overpowering malignancy casting its shadow over the proceedings.

The narrative is epistolary, with four or five persons contributing to the arc of the story. A prologue describes the discovery by a thief of a collection of manuscripts hidden away in an ancient Belgian abbey. The proper story begins with a ship seemingly lost at sea, in search of a mysterious Aegean island that appears on no charts. There is a storm worthy of Poe, Coleridge, or Lautremont, and an ancient mariner glimpses, above the rocks of the island, gigantic and repulsive corpses. His ship lost, the mariner in his delirium relates his vision to his rescuers, one of whom, a malignant priest, repays the information the sailor provides by having him strangled and cast into the stormy froth.

We then come to Malpertuis itself, inhabited by a dying magus who holds various relatives and acquaintances in his thrall. He is a repugnant presence, and in his dying days reveals, in the contents of his will, that his unimaginably vast fortune will go to the luxurious maintenance of his heirs (with the balance going to the last survivors) under the stipulation that they must remain in residence in the old man’s sprawling and decrepit house. The house is the namesake of the abode of the evil and perhaps Satanic fox Goupil in the medieval romance of Reynard the Fox. As a primary character itself in the drama, the house is described at length. The overwhelming atmosphere is one of decrepitude and darkness. The grounds are grey and seemingly perpetually stormy, and the house is inadequately lit by meager candlelight.

The inhabitants are a queer and motley lot. The narrator is young Jean-Jacques, and it is his cruel and sensual sister Nancy who largely runs the house. The others are strange and in some cases pathetic “cousins” with various obsessions that run the gamut from an unhealthy interest in taxidermy to an overweening obsession with ensuring that some degree of illumination remains in the house as protection from an ominous dark shadow. There are, in addition, small strange daemonic creatures scuttling about in the attic and currents of sexual desire and meticulously kept antipathies passing among some of the inhabitants.

Along the way, Ray drops enough clues to point the attentive reader towards an assessment of the true nature and identities of the doomed souls occupying Malpertuis. The novel is heavy on atmosphere, a delicious atmosphere that pervades the bulk of the novel. For the thick-witted, each chapter contains a relevant epigraph or two from the likes of Hawthorne (no stranger to tales of doomed houses) and others which light the path towards the ultimate revelations. For me, the narrative begins to fragment towards the end, losing momentum as poor Jean-Jacques has to suffer through a number of swoons as Satanic powers pursue him and the inevitable explanations are painstakingly revealed. But this is a minor complaint. Malpertuis, while it may not be a high water mark in world literature, is original, creepy, and compellingly atmospheric enough, with a peculiar hallucinatory power and sense of melancholy earning it a place of honor as an obvious touchstone of the latter-day gothic romance. I am aware of one recent fantasy novel that exploits Ray’s particular conceit of the existence of the old gods, whose power waxes and wanes in accordance to the degree that mortals believe in them. Were I more conversant with that genre, I could no doubt identify others.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

A hefty (almost 700 page) epistolary novel set in Restoration Oxford. The dual plot involves shadowy political intrigue and the circumstances surrounding the trial and execution of a young woman purported to be, by turns, a witch and a whore. The four narratives are, by necessity, somewhat contradictory, giving the novel a Rashomon quality as we attempt to fit together a true picture of what happened during that brief period in the midst of a bitterly cold English winter.

Pears' characterizations are finely drawn, with some individuals standing out quite vividly. A couple of the narrators are rather repugnant, however, most of the motivations and circumstances are clarified in the final narrative, that of an Oxford antiquarian. For me, the narrative did tend to drag in a few places, but not enough to abandon the effort. It helps to have some understanding of the English Commonwealth period and the circumstances surrounding the restoration of Charles II. While I wouldn't describe this as a philosophical novel, the currents of discovery relating to physiology and empiricism do play their parts, with cameo appearances by Robert Boyle and John Locke.

I will admit to being somewhat dissatisfied with the conclusion, which veers into a somewhat heavy handed mysticism. I would have no problem with a metaphysical gloss on the chain of events, but Pears' clarification of the identity of Sarah Blundy, one of the best drawn personalities in the narrative, strains credibility. Still, an enjoyable and well written tome for a winter's night reading.

Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus

The Basement Tapes, recorded in the summer of 1967, was a loose collection of material born of Bob Dylan’s seclusion following the burst of manic creativity that produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. It was also the product of exhaustion and a self-imposed exile following a motorcycle accident and/or a bout with drug addiction. The songs turn away from surrealism and psychedelia, finding their wellspring in what we would now characterize as roots music – the country blues, hillbilly tunes, and murder ballads recorded in the 1920’s and 30’s, but which reach back beyond the advent of the phonograph.

The Basement Tapes trickled out on publishers’ demos and bootlegs before being officially (and only partially) released on a double album in 1975, an album for which Marcus wrote the liner notes. Some of the material such as the gnomic and dirge-like “I’m Not There” have only recently seen the light of day on official releases. A definitive release of these sessions is long overdue.


Invisible Republic includes analyses of individual songs from the Dylan album wrapped up in an almost impenetrable mythologizing prose. There is also a fascinating long digression on the Virginia coal miner Dock Boggs, who abandoned his short musical career during the Depression when record sales slumped and his God-fearing wife gave him an ultimatum to put aside the Devil’s music, only to pick it up again 30 years later in the heyday of the folk revival. The centerpiece of the book, however, is a chapter on the magico-illuminatus Harry Smith, who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music as if he were preparing an alchemical treatise, complete with Renaissance woodcuts and a numerologically significant ordering of tunes. Smith’s Anthology remains, as it was in Dylan’s youth, a powerful talisman, a unique undertaking for its time which rescued dozens of country blues and murder ballads from oblivion just as upstart rock and roll was gaining its first footing as the latest iteration of Satan’s music. Anyone paying attention to Dylan’s output, especially over the last 15 years or so, will find the source of many of his best lines and imagery in the Anthology. To put it bluntly, Dylan has sampled those old 78s to a fairly astounding degree, weaving new cloth from old, and preserving therein the vernacular of a fascinating, bygone era of American folk tradition.

Marcus’s first book, Mystery Train, although a bit dated at this point, was a thoughtful and readable placement of rock and roll into its American context. (I still have a photocopy of the Robert Johnson chapter tucked into my King of the Delta Blues LP.) The great weakness of the present text is that Marcus over contextualizes the material, laying a too heavy burden on both Dylan’s Basement Tapes and their antecedent folk tunes by pushing them too hard into a mold of Americanism going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the sermons of Jonathan Edwards. His writing is maddeningly oblique and top-heavy by turns, sacrificing clarity in pursuit of a grand idea. Still for fans of old-time Appalachian mountain music and the soundtrack of (in Marcus’ memorable if overexposed phrase) “the old, weird America”, this is essential reading.

Note: Link below is to the more recent edition of the Marcus book, retitled The Old Weird America. Dock Boggs trading card by R. Crumb.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel

As he reminds us with almost comic regularity, Hanta has been operating an antiquated wastepaper compactor on the outskirts of Prague for thirty-five years. He has some acquaintances in the town, but for most of his time he shares his solitude with his compactor, and with the mice that swarm the cellar in which he works. He works at a Sisyphean labor, taking time out only to go fill his pail with beer, because he truly loves his beer. He passes his days in greasy clothes and a state of inebriated equilibrium.

Amongst the newsprint and bloody butcher paper that Hanta compacts are books - beautiful old, leather bound volumes that have no use in a totalitarian society. Hrabal's book is a memoir from Hanta's point of view. He seems a simpleton, but one with an eye for books, and the ability to recall quotations from Hegel, Erasmus, and Schopenhauer. And he does more: he blesses each bale of compacted paper with a carefully chosen book or art print, often open to a particularly significant passage. When he can, he rescues books from the brink of oblivion. Some he gives to furtive acquaintances, a churchman interested in the history of aviation, a professor with a passion for old theatre reviews. He takes books home and fills every available space with them; he sleeps under a precarious platform upon which he has stacked two tons of books, and which could crush him instantly should he make an unfortunate shift in his sleep. He clearly has a mania. It is only late in the book that we will find out if there is a purpose to his madness.

As he performs his assigned role, his holy calling, Hanta recalls his life. He relates the tragicomical story of a love found and lost in two scatalogical episodes, with a denouement that is told with perfection. He remembers the strange gypsy girl who followed him home and waited at his door every night, who fed his meager fire and warmed his bed, whose name he does not recall and who disappeared when the Nazis occupied Prague. (He takes particular pleasure in compacting Nazi propaganda.) In the present, he sees the future in the form of a huge, state of the art, compactor manned by efficient young men in immaculate uniforms who eat their lunch with bottles of milk and who cast nary a glance at the volumes of humanity’s intellectual heritage riding the conveyor belt into oblivion.

His goal is to retire and move his faithful compactor to a spot on his uncle’s property, where he can give artistic expression to the memory of the sorry task he has spent his life performing. He has visions of young Jesus and old Lao-Tzu, and armies of rats fighting it out in the sewers. When his boss peers down at him and calls him an imbecile, and hires two uniformed young milk-drinkers to work the compactor, he beings to see the writing on the wall. Tense dualities abound in this book, particularly the progressus ad futurum and the regressus ad originem, but dualities yearn for integration, a state of completeness. Hrabal’s book is itself simple in execution, yet enormous in its implications, both sad and hopeful. In its brevity, it approaches a state of perfection.

A Reader's Delight by Noel Perrin

When I started this blog a few years ago, it was for the vague purpose of making note of books that were by and large obscure and forgotten, yet deserving of wider acquaintance. Little did I know that Noel Perrin (among, I am sure, others) had had a similar idea many years before. He had published dozens of short reviews of such books in the Washington Post, and it is these that are collected in A Reader’s Delight.

I consider myself fairly well read, but Perrin has noted many worthwhile books that I have never heard of, but which I will no doubt be tracking down in the months and years ahead. His list, I am glad to note, also overlaps my own somewhat, and we find in it such treasures as Lord Dunsany’s The Blessings of Pan, Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and Charles Williams supernatural thriller All Hallow’s Eve. He also includes works by James Branch Cabell, Stendhal, and Herbert Read. Many of Perrin’s titles I recognize from having passed over them on the shelves of used bookstores. Thanks to his enthusiastic endorsements and the knowledge that his judgments ring true, I now know to stop and give them a second look. I’m happy to recommend A Reader’s Delight to all my fellow bibliophiles.

Tales of the Inquisition, or, You Can't Torquemada Anything!

The Inquisition: A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church by E. Vacandard


This work, published in English translation in 1907, was apparently an attempt to rebut the perceived anti-Catholicism of the 19th century chronicler of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea. In a short work, the author traces the Church attitudes towards heresy from the earliest Church Fathers through the 14th century. One has to give some grudging admiration to the author’s perseverance in asserting, in the face of the most heinous evidence, that although the Inquisition was bad, it wasn’t quite as bad as some would make it out to be. His is a decidedly uphill battle.

With memory fresh from its own brutal suppression under the Roman Empire prior to Constantine, the early doctors of the Church adopted a rather gentle approach to heresy. In his Divinae Institutiones (308 AD), Lactantius wrote: “If you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, by tortures and by crime, you no longer defend it, but pollute and profane it. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion.” While Tertullian wrote harshly of the Gnostic heresies, he likewise declared that “(i)t is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his convictions. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion.” The preferred method of dealing with heretics and apostates was that which could be traced back to St. Paul: simple excommunication. Augustine, a former Manichean who also dealt with the Donatist schism in North Africa, began with a policy of absolute tolerance which ultimately evolved into a reasoning that errant sheep must be goaded back into the fold, sometimes with firm measures (flogging is acceptable, as was exile), but that the death penalty was contrary to the ideal of Christian charity. His is an interesting evolution, inasmuch as he had to contend with secular authorities for whom the death penalty was justified in cases of groups fomenting civil unrest, a perspective which Augustine ultimately noted had some justification.

Over the next few centuries, as the corpus of canon law grew, the Church found ways (albeit with some dissention) of utilizing the powers of the civil authorities as a means of punishing heretics, which meant that although the Church could identify and condemn heretics, their hands stayed “clean” as the guilty parties were handed over to the State for punishment. The condemnation and execution of the heretic Priscillian in the late 4th century was an early instance of this procedure, although it was a controversial one at the time. It was during the years from 1000 to 1250 that a great leap towards the classic model of the Inquisition took place. The irruption into Western Europe of the Manichean (later Cathar) sect shook the Church hierarchy, which saw in the sect a strong vehicle for undermining Church authority, and a rival ideology in its own right. (A threat that may seem rather odd to our eyes, as the Cathars condemned equally marriage and procreation, hardly a model for exponential growth.) The logic, which echoed earlier formulations, was that heresies such as this represented nothing less than treason against God. As it was long established that the punishment for treason against the State was death, how could treason against the Creator be any less serious? The suppression of the Cathars was intense and brutal, and increasingly went well beyond the more humane punishments of imprisonment and/or confiscation of property. Taking a cue from Germany and northern France, the authorities of which more often than not prescribed the stake for “anti-social” activities, the Ecclesiastical authorities did not long dwell on the theological aspects of the Cathar errors. It is in the chapters dealing with the “anti-social” and “anti-Catholic” aspects of the Cathar/Albigensian heresy that Vacandard is most vehement in his assertions, asserting with no small level of hyperbole that if the rigorous ideal of chastity promulgated by the Cathars was allowed to be realized, “the human race would have disappeared from the earth in a few years.” He concludes with the breathtaking statement that “(i)n bitterly prosecuting the Cathari, the Church truly acted for the public good.”

The next portion of the book deals with the establishment of what we have come to know as the classic model of coercion in the Church, the monastic (i.e. Dominican and Franciscan) Inquisition. Vacandard notes that the true beginning of the Inquisition dates to the Sicilian Code of Frederic II, prepared in response to Gregory IX’s request that heretics be prosecuted with utmost severity. It became codified that all suspected heretics were to be tried by an ecclesiastical tribunal, with the guilty and unrepentant being condemned to the stake. The persecution was an active one, with bishops and archbishops being directed to visit once a year or more any parish where heresy was thought to exist. One or two “trustworthy” men were then compelled to denounce any citizen whose mode of thought or living deviated from that of the “ordinary Catholic”. It was the reluctance or ineptness of the bishops to engage in such practices, with such latitude for abuse that compelled the Pope to put the real power of the Inquisition in the hands of the mendicant orders of Dominicans and Franciscans. The procedures established under the Inquisition were, to our sensibilities, atrocious. Suspected heretics were not informed of who might have given their names to the authorities, they were not allowed counsel, and witnesses in their defense were rarely given the opportunity to appear (and most likely wouldn’t have, given the risk of associative guilt). All these were considered by the Inquisitors to be adequate “safeguards” against abuse, although we find them tragically laughable today. The accused had a simple choice: abjure his heresy and repent, or deny heresy and suffer the consequences. Penance might range from (among other minor humiliations) having to wear the yellow cross for a period of time to confiscation of property and imprisonment. Quoting Lea, Vacandard notes that the “Inquisitor never condemned to death, but merely withdrew the protection of the Church from the hardened and impenitent sinner who afforded no hope of conversion, or from him who showed by relapse that there was no trust to be placed in his pretended repentance.” In other words, there was no appeal to individual conscience in the face of the authority of the Church.

Next, the establishment of the use of torture in 1252 under the papacy of Innocent IV is discussed. Vacandard makes some objection that the heinous activities of the Inquisitors did not necessarily echo the directives of the Popes, who “exercised a supervision which was always just and at times most kindly.” I need not go into the details of the cruel procedures inflicted by secular authorities under the “direction” of the Inquisitors, but suffice it to say that they do not bear out Vacandard’s summation that “we must at least give [the Church] credit of insisting that torture ‘should never imperil life and limb’”. It is interesting to note that he admits that, although they did utilize hideously cruel means of extracting confessions, the Inquisitors did in fact realize “so well that forced confessions were valueless, and that they required the prisoner to confirm them after he had left the torture chamber.” It was the fact that it was the confession taken outside the torture chamber that counted as “official” that allowed the preceding torture to be downplayed, a tactic that plays right into Vacandard’s hands as an apologist for the Church.

The remainder of the book is largely a summation of what was discussed before, with emphasis on the thinking of theologians and canonists on the purpose and methods of the Inquisition, which saw heresy first and foremost as an offense against God. By the end, Vacandard’s attempts to mitigate the worst excesses of the Inquisition as being subsequently exaggerated, or being prosecuted with a cruelty beyond that prescribed by the Papacy, or being simply reflective of the harsh times in which they occurred ring hollow. The Inquisition was symptomatic of a pervasive mindset in which deviation from a dominant ideology was simply not allowed, and could be punishable by anything ranging from confiscation of property to imprisonment to death. It was the evolving political situation in Europe, and the rise of the Protestant reformation, quite bloody in its own right (John Calvin’s condemnation and execution of Michael Servetus was hardly more humane than the persecutions of the Catholic Church) that slowly reined in the Church’s coercive authority, not any great humanistic awakening on its own part.

If one reads Vacandard’s apologetics with a critical eye, this is not (considering its age) a bad short summary of the history of the Inquisition. For the gruesome, gothic details, Lea’s work remains entertaining. For another perspective, we have Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, which treats in exhaustive detail the persecution of converted Jews in Catholic Spain, an area ignored in this study.

This work is available through Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/inquisitionacri01vacagoog), and in a reprint edition as linked below.

City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems by James Thomson

My LibraryThing friend and Master of the Chapel of the Abyss ben waugh recently led me to a consideration of Thomson’s work. Of the poems in this volume (available on Internet Archive), most of which I have admittedly only skimmed, none carries the force of the title piece (although “Sunday Up the River” contains a nice tribute to my beloved Jameson’s whiskey). “City of Dreadful Night” is an extended night wanderer’s meditation on the vanity of life and the comforts of the grave’s dreamless sleep. It is a kind of British cousin to the more exquisitely constructed - but thematically similar - German masterpiece Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura.

Atheistic at heart, the wanderer cannot help a knife thrust at the great deceiver, the absent God, author of this deficient world, who created man in a spirit of mockery –

Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

There is, in a litany of circumstances, a refrain that speaks of the vanity of human wishes in a meaningless existence -

I wake from daydreams to this real night.

And yet there is some comfort in the void, in the liberation from the fear of God and the monotony of eternal life-

Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being’s gall.
.
.
.
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again

The wanderer views the corpse of a dead beauty on a bier before ending up in a dark and gloomy cathedral, in which a preacher, announcing the nonexistence of God, gives absolution to all who seek relief from the vale of tears and presents the holy sacrament of suicide -

Lo, you are free to end it when you will-
Without the fear of waking after death.

The gloomy odyssey continues on to the River of Suicides before ending before a colossal statue representing Durer’s Melancholia, the guardian spirit of the City of Dreadful Night. Thomson’s verse may not be a high poetic achievement, but it is an impressive statement of a subterreanean current of existential despair in the Victorian era.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

The House, located in our dimension within a remote region of Ireland, is a simulacrum of its celestial archetype, a tear or portal in the universe by which the reclusive narrator of the tale encounters the terrifying gods of ancient lore, gigantic and inhuman. In the physical present, the house is besieged by swinish creatures from the depths of the earth, noxious beings which resemble a creature of unimaginable foulness which assails the narrator, driving him to madness at novel’s end.


Following several chapters in which the narrator seeks to preserve the house from the repugnant creatures, he is ultimately translated into a realm beyond time and space. As the physical universe accelerates, he witnesses the decline and death of the earth, the sun, and, ultimately, the universe before he returns, like Muhammad from his night journey, to his familiar study, with only one important bit of evidence revealing that his journey has not been a hallucination. The excursion through the dying cosmos is, it must be admitted, rather overlong, veering towards tediousness, but still with some remarkably evocative passages - not least being the recluse’s recognition that it is his own body that has crumbled to dust on the stone floor after the passage of eons. There is a certain unreality in the recluse’s tale that gives one pause to consider if his experiences are no more than madness, a worm in the brain. (His elderly sister, with whom he lives, seems quite unaware of the remarkable occurrences passing within the environs of the old house.)


It has been rightly noted that Hodgson’s tale is a transitional form between the gothic romance and Lovecraft’s tales of ancient evils and unspeakable interstellar horrors. Despite a curious and overindulged attention to the details of imagined astronomical phenomena – dark nebulae, green suns and the like – The House on the Borderland stands, even as it utilizes the standard narrative tricks of the nineteenth century while finding new ways to exploit old fears, as a classic work of modern horror.

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology

Expanded from a Harper's magazine article, this short and entertaining book introduces readers to the strange Museum of Jurassic* Technology in Culver City, California. With nary a trace of irony the proprietor, David Wilson, has stocked his storefront museum with weird and mind-boggling curiosities (a bat embedded in a solid block of lead, illuminated from the inside, no less!) and accompanies the exhibits with pitch-perfect museum quality explanatory texts and recorded remarks. The MJT is a Chinese box of fiction and reality - an elaborate puzzle begging to be deciphered.


The MJT is a modern iteration of the Renaissance and Enlightenment Wonderkammer, private museums which can consist of (as the name suggests) a collection of curiosities exhibited in a cabinet or an entire suite of rooms given over to the bounty of natural oddities encountered during the first centuries of European exploration and discovery. David Wilson's cabinet is chock full of imaginative and awe-inspiring panoramas and exquisitely detailed minutiae, and has a healthy cult following among museum professionals. Weschler's fascination with the MJT is genuine and his story (which he seems reluctant to put to bed) is enthusiastically told.


The second half of the book, an expansion of the narrative, looks at the history of the Wunderkammer in general, and Weschler doggedly runs down connections and convergences between some of the more famous ones and the MJT. One feels admiration for Wilson's having pieced together such a remarkably seamless reality, while still feeling a tinge of regret for seeing some of his minor secrets revealed. Weschler also cites some apparently remarkable books on the history of wonder cabinets, works which are, alas, ridiculously rare and expensive, but to which Wilson clearly had access. This book is a good exposition of our ancestors' curiosity about the world of wonders around them, and a reminder that our world is no less wonder-full.

*As a note of explanation, Jurassic in Mr. Wilson's imagination refers not to the time of the terrible lizards, but rather to a what is prosaically known as the Nile River Delta.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson was always quite effective, in her own way, in portraying the inner life of the psychically disturbed. This tale in the tradition of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a signal bit of American Gothic, with a proto-feminist twist.

Two sisters, one quite mad, and an old uncle have sequestered themselves on the family estate after one of the sisters has done off the rest of the (apparently) unpleasant family with arsenic. They live in a reasonably comfortable stasis until the arrival of a male cousin whose motives seem torn between freeing the older sister into society and plundering the family's hidden weath. His presence breeds resentment and threatens the delicate balance, until a crisis is reached on one dreadful, apocalyptic night when the house burns and is trashed by vengeful villagers right out of an old Frankenstein movie. Jackson does not end the novel there, but instead shows how a new normalcy is built in the chaos by the beleagured sisters. This is a popular novel that is, at the same time, deserving of its reputation as a modern classic.

Note: I have the classic 1963 Popular Library paperback edition of this book (shown above), however, the link below is to the recent Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, with the wonderfully weird cover illustration by Thomas Ott.

The Last Museum by Brion Gysin

Of an older generation, Brion Gysin was a precursor to the Beats and a catalyst for them and for the bohemian generation that followed. His activities and interactions are the stuff of legend: he introduced Burroughs to the Dadaist “cut-up” method of writing; he worked as a multimedia artist, creating the “Dreamachine”, a stroboscopic device alleged to alter consciousness; he was proprietor of the “1001Nights” bistro in Tangier; he was artist in residence at the Beat Hotel in Paris; he submitted a recipe for hashish brownies to the Alice B. Toklas cookbook; he did avant-garde sound recordings and introduced the master musicians of Joujouka (his former house band) to Brian Jones.













But for all his accomplishments, Gysin ended his life in 1986 (succumbing to cancer) with a wistful regret for having not pursued specific disciplines more diligently. He was a catalyst for so many, but in his own career he was all over the place. His was a peripatetic existence, following whatever artistic whim took his fancy at any particular time (he might now be classified by heartless psychiatry as ADHD). There is perhaps a lack of rigor in his work, more than made up for by enthusiasm, and in the end he was more muse than artist (Burroughs describes him in the Introduction as “the only man I ever respected” and “regal without a trace of pretension”). Still his art is worth seeing, and as such he is currently the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Arts. It goes without saying that he died poor.

















The Last Museum is Gysin’s final novel, a loose and freewheeling remembrance of the famous Beat Hotel, told as postmortem adventure in the Bardo, the intermediate death state of Tibetan Buddhism. The work itself is, sadly, a truncated version of Gysin’s much longer unpublished text. There is a progression through the rooms of the Hotel, which is itself being removed piecemeal by the Interdead International Movers to a vast museum site on the San Andreas faultline (the west is the realm of the dead), where it will share space with the Sphinx, the Louvre, the Acropolis, and other detritus of human civilization. Anyone hoping for a simple and straightforward narrative will be disappointed; there are a dizzying number of shifts of name, gender, and sexual orientation, quite often within the same sentence. One of the pleasures of this book is in the anecdotes, the thinly disguised references to the Beats and their associates that we tease from the text. Gysin’s reimagining of his life as he travels the stygian stream of memory is scatological, raunchy, at times tedious, and at times hilarious. Apparently a life of Rabelaisian pansexuality was, in his last years, Gysin’s fondest recollection. He reveals himself - and I say this with no malice - as the pervert’s Dante.


And yet the revelry - or the summary memory of it, the blessed and profane recollection- hurtles toward an end. After 28 days in the Bardo, the soul becomes rank. It was not meant to be stationary, and our hero, our Little PG, our Gysin surrogate with all memory spent yearns for that state to which all good Buddhists aspire: release. Despite the comfort, or horror, of a vision of the interconnected totality of existence, the obligatory peek at that Great White Light, and a cameo appearance by the Devourer of Souls, he longs for that laminated Get Out of Jail card, he seeks to beat cheeks from this mortal coil and not look back. “There is no one in this world I want to see again.” Before this freedom, the freedom which comes from nonexistence, all others pale. But is the sensuality a sacrament or an impediment? Does the road of excess lead, to paraphrase Blake, to enlightenment? Can the story have a happy ending?


Brion Gysin died at the age of 70. Perhaps in the fullness of time he (or some constituent elements of him) will return to this plane of existence in yet another fleshy iteration and read his own text, and remember.

Note: Nothing Is True - Everything is Permitted is a biography of Brion Gysin written by John Geiger. I have not read it, but it seems to have elicited favorable reviews.

The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues by Giles Oakely

This book was first published in 1976 as a companion volume to a BBC television documentary series on the blues. That such a deeply American musical form would receive such capable treatment from an Englishman should come as no surprise, given the enthusiasm for the blues felt by a generation of British musicians that included Clapton, Page, John Mayall, The Rolling Stones, et al. The book forms a social history as much as a musical one, giving documentary testimony to the grinding poverty and oppression suffered by generations of African Americans in the Deep South. The arc of the blues, of classic blues as it were, was a relatively short one. The blues developed from a variety unschooled musical forms - field hollers, jug band music, stomps and other manifestations that were miles away from what was considered respectable music at the turn of the 20th century. When in 1903 W.C. Handy, a formally trained musician and bandleader, heard a guitarist on a train platform in Clarksdale, Mississippi playing with an old knife for a slide, and later had a request for his orchestra to forgo his more accomplished tunes in favor of “native music”, he began to see the potential of the blues. Handy’s revelation was a somewhat conscious turning, as opposed to the pianist Jellyroll Morton, who absorbed the music in whorehouses, gambling joints and dives along the Gulf Coast. The Holy Land of the Blues was the fertile delta between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers near Clarksdale, where the music - unamplified as it was, and performed by men (and women) who toiled all day at hard labor - had to be loud to compete with the whoops and shouts of the gamblers, johns and drunkards in some pretty rough spots scattered among isolated communities. Even as the music spread, west to Texas and up to Chicago, it was looked down upon as a very low, unsophisticated type of music, the music of the downtrodden and the poor, attitudes that persisted even among some black communities as the momentum of the music wound down in the postwar era. The blues largely remained a rural music, despite being carried to and being revitalized in cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and Dallas. It was in some ways analogous to the “hillbilly” music of the southern whites that would coalesce into country music, and there was clearly some cross influence going on, even if the performers tended to labor under segregation.



Oakley’s book, while putting the music in social context, does not skimp on discussions of the great blues artists of the 20’s and 30’s such as Mamie Smith, Peetie Wheatstraw (“the Devil’s Son-in-Law”), “Ragtime Texas”, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Victoria Spivey, and the big-hearted Ma Rainey. The legends are also here – Charley Patton (whose only known photo, with his serious mien, belies the man’s expansive sense of humor), Skip James, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Son House – as well as the postwar greats such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Elmore James. If you are lucky enough to have recordings of these artists, you’ll want to supplement your reading with some listening. When Oakely and company were preparing their documentary, they had opportunity to interview some of the greats and get some terrific anecdotes. (A vaudeville performer tells the notoriously unlovely Ma Rainey that there are only two things he’s never seen, “an ugly woman and a pretty monkey”, to which Rainey replies “bless you, darlin’”.) This book is a sympathetic, informative, and entertaining history, with an emphasis on the singularly remarkable blues of the 20’s and 30’s, and is well worth the attention of any blues enthusiast.