Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  This rewritten ending certainly provides a more interesting climax, but it also has the effect of significantly compromising the moralizing of the story. Alvare’s mother, whose memory and image have functioned throughout the plot as a metaphorical guardian angel protecting Alvare against Biondetta’s wiles is invoked as a savior, but it is not at all clear that Alvare’s salvation from the consequences of his weakness is appropriate.

  Had Cazotte stuck to his original plan, and let Alvare become a living servant of the devil, his story would appear very different to the modern reader; it would be an important prototype of Gothic fantasy. Indeed, insofar as Le Diable amoureux was influential upon the work of other writers it seems to have nourished Gothic writers rather more than writers in a lighter vein. Critics are uncertain as to whether it should be counted among the influences of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s gaudy tale of horror, The Monk (1796), which features erotic temptation in a more lurid vein, but it seems not unlikely, given the fact that Lewis was sufficiently familiar with French work of the period to translate and then to write his own conclusion to Hamilton’s Four Facardins. There is no doubt, though, that Cazotte was read and much admired by the most important German writers of terror tales, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck. In the form in which Le Diable amoureux has actually been handed down it is more closely related to a kind of fantasy which was to become much more openly sceptical of received ideas of good and evil, but the popularity of that kind of fantasy was not to become evident until the Gothic fad had run its course.

  In the truncated tale with the revised ending Biondetta does the hero no lasting harm at all, and his romantic adventure with her might thus be counted (despite that it was not the author’s intention) entirely to his credit. For this reason, Le Diable amoureux was eventually able to take its stand at the head of a tradition of overtly sceptical works which gradually muster more and more sympathy for the supposed agents of evil. It has clear thematic links with Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte amoureuse” (1836; tr. as “The Dead Leman” and “Clarimonde”), whose title may well carry a deliberate echo, and with such stories by Anatole France as “Leslie Wood” (1892) and La Révolte des anges (1914; tr. as The Revolt of the Angels). In these stories the pleasure-denying morality of the Church is severely questioned, and ultimately condemned, and although that was not Cazotte’s aim it is easy enough to believe that—like Milton, according to Blake—he was “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” The modern reader who follows Alvare’s affair with the ever-obliging Biondetta can hardly help but find her charming even while refusing to be duped by the false explanation of her nature which she offers.

  Ironically, if the imagery of Cazotte’s tale lent inspiration to those who wanted to argue that the devil was not as black as the Church painted him, it also offered some inspiration for those who wanted to believe that all seductive women had a little of the devil in them. Baudelaire sometimes invoked Cazotte while lamenting his unhappy relationships with the opposite sex, and there is an echo of Le Diable amoureux in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s collection Les Diaboliques (1874; tr. as Weird Women and The She-Devils).

  It has to be admitted that the importance of Cazotte’s tale is largely historical; so many tales of diabolical bargains have been published since 1772 that it cannot help but seem pale and hesitant by comparison with the best of them. Even so, it remains very readable, and it holds its essential fascination for anyone who can read it with an awareness of its context.

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  It would be premature to conclude this essay without mentioning an episode which has probably contributed more to Cazotte’s posthumous celebrity than anything which he actually did or wrote: an oft-quoted prophecy which he is said to have issued early in 1788. This became famous enough to seem appropriate as the very first matter to come under consideration when Storm Jameson introduced the 1927 edition of A Thousand and One Follies and His Most Unlooked-For Lordship.

  According to the story, Cazotte, whose reputation as a Martinist mystic was by then secure, told a sceptical gathering of the cream of the French intelligentsia—including the most celebrated of the philosophers of progress, the Marquis de Condorcet—exactly what fates would befall them in the coming years. Inevitably, so the story goes, these great men of the Age of Reason refused to believe that so many of them would die on the scaffold, or in prison; nor would they credit Cazotte’s further insistence that the king and queen would be included among the victims of the coming Terror.

  This prophecy has one important point in common with all great prophecies—which is to say that there is no record of it whatsoever in advance of the events which it supposedly foretold. Jean-François La Harpe, who claimed to have been present, left a very elaborate account of it in his papers, but this was not published until 1806, by which time La Harpe was dead and could not be questioned about it. One suspects, of course, that the gifts of hindsight might conceivably have been brought to the assistance of La Harpe’s memory when he wrote his account; there is written evidence to supplement the conviction born of common sense, that La Harpe intended his account as an allegory rather than a memoir (it is probably intended to dramatize the inconceivability, in 1788, of his post-Revolution conversion from freethought to Catholicism). Needless to say, though, the prophecy has frequently been advanced as good evidence of the indubitable superhuman powers of the Illuminati and all who follow in their footsteps.

  What the story of the supposed prophecy actually tells us is that the love-affair which the nobility of eighteenth century France had with the substance of fantasy was not quite the superficial dalliance that it seemed. The comedy and the burlesque, as always, masked real anxieties and touched upon deep-seated doubts. Even the greatest figures of the Enlightenment succumbed to the temptation to involve themselves with such literary confections (including Diderot and Voltaire—with whom Cazotte was acquainted and of whom he disapproved) and proved by their example that even the most frothy literary confections could be fully-loaded with caustic sarcasm.

  Jacques Cazotte was not in the same intellectual league as Diderot and Voltaire, and this shows up in a comparison of their various fantastic fictions as well as in the fact that he eventually plumped for Mysticism instead of Reason. He was, however, a player of the same great game, which should by no means be written off as a trivial and insignificant amusement of no relevance to more serious affairs. As J. R. R. Tolkien has reminded us in his classic essay “On Fairy Tales,” he whose imagination is too closely bound by the straitjacket of actuality cannot properly see where the bounds of Reason lie, and what the implications of Reason truly are. Unless we can understand nonsense we cannot clearly see sense; that is why works like Le Diable amoureux are important, not merely in the history of literature, but in the furnishing of intelligent minds.

  THE TWO THOUSAND YEAR QUEST: George Viereck’s Erotic Odyssey

  My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew was first published in 1928, rapidly achieving a succès de scandale which carried it through numerous reprints and created the opportunity for its two authors, George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge, to follow it up with two sequels: Salome: The Wandering Jewess (1930) and The Invincible Adam (1932). The books marked something of a watershed in the history of American fantasy, parading a flagrant eroticism which would not have been tolerated a few years earlier.

  The much gentler eroticism of James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen—expressed entirely in symbols—had caused much controversy in the USA in 1919, the year in which assertive American moralists won their greatest and most tragic victory in the form of the Volstead Act. With the demon drink supposedly banished the moral crusaders had quickly turned their attention to “pornography”; Cabell’s book came conveniently—if rather absurdly—to hand and was swiftly banned in Boston. The ban did not, of course, work as intended; the publicity generated far greater sales than the book would otherwise have attained, wherever it was obtainable.
It did, however, cause publishers to exercise an unduly sensitive discretion for the next ten years—a discretion which Cabell and his supporters resented very fiercely.

  One of the effects of this phantom of prohibition on the US publishing industry was a kind of “speakeasy effect” by virtue of which much European fiction in an erotic/fantastic vein—including classic works by Anatole France and Théophile Gautier as well as more conscientiously erotic works by Pierre Louÿs, Rémy de Gourmont, Alfred Jarry, and Hanns Heinz Ewers—was reprinted in lavish illustrated editions “for subscribers only.” These books came to constitute a kind of naughty library of works which were easily available to “connoisseurs” although they could not be found on the shelves of public libraries or general bookstores. The kind of fiction they contained was widely considered to be distinctly un-American, in that it was, for the most part, conscientiously decadent, not only in its breezy eroticism but in its frequent championship of pagan values against the moral oppressiveness of Christianity. This calculated paganism was most explicit in the urbane literary Satanism of France’s The Human Tragedy (1895) and The Revolt of the Angels (1914), but is implicit in most of the works by the authors cited above.

  The attack on Jurgen seems ridiculous today, in that the supposed obscenity of the offending passages is only evident to readers who can decode the symbolism, and may thus be deemed to exist entirely in the eye of the beholder. Even so, it expressed a widespread conviction that any dabbling in the kind of calculatedly-archaic and fondly fantastic material that Cabell favored posed a pollutant threat to the moral rectitude of a nation founded by valiant Puritans.

  The few native American writers who had earlier taken inspiration from the lushly exotic kinds of fiction which flourished in the naughty library had found their endeavors unwelcome even at the bet of times. The fervor of Prohibitionism intensified that hostility, much as the trials of Oscar Wilde had earlier intensified moralistic hostility to those British writers who had taken aboard French notions of Decadence. Most American adherents of “Bohemianism” had already forsaken the cause—Edgar Saltus and James Huneker had directed their efforts in other directions while Lafcadio Hearn emigrated to Japan and Stuart Merrill elected to restrict his own endeavors to the French language—and it is hardly surprising that the roaring twenties saw the near-total eclipse of its ideologies. There still remained, however, a small group of immigrant writers who chafed bitterly under what they considered to be the oppressive narrowness of their adopted land’s moral guardians, and raged intemperately against it. One of these was Ben Hecht, whose vividly offensive Fantazius Mallare was published (“for private circulation only”) in 1922 with a blistering eight-page dedication “to my enemies.” Hecht ended up writing for Hollywood, in a suitably cynical vein. Another was George Sylvester Viereck, who had come to the USA aged eleven in 1895; he followed a different but arguably parallel career path, becoming a journalist famed for his interviews with “great men.”

  Viereck’s first “Bohemian” novel was The House of the Vampire (1907), a homoerotic tale of psychic vampirism seemingly inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The story describes the manner in which the genius—and eventually the consciousness—of a young writer is leeched away by an older and ominously versatile artist. This had been preceded by two earlier volumes, A Game at Love and Other Plays (1906) and Nineveh and Other Poems (1907), the former described by its publisher as treating “problems of life and love as seen through the medium of an extremely modern temperament.” Alas, Viereck’s temperament seemed altogether too modern to the American audience and his literary career did not develop as he would presumably have wished, although he published several more volumes of his own poetry as well as editing collections of poems by Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and Lord Alfred Douglas. His reputation was not aided by his activities as an apologist for the German Empire during and after the Great War, but his ailing fortunes were spectacularly revived by the success of My First Two Thousand Years.

  The window of opportunity though which My First Two Thousand Years passed had already been prised open by other writers, but very recently, and it still stood ajar as Viereck and Eldridge approached it. Cabell had, of course, remained active as a writer throughout the twenties, and—doubtless still pained by the injustice of the assault on Jurgen—had clung hard to his determination to oppose hypocrisy. His deft but cutting Something About Eve had appeared a year before Viereck and Eldridge’s book in 1927. In the same year the satirist John Erskine published Adam and Eve, which carefully avoided any hint of literary Satanism but nevertheless trod on controversial ground in preferring the free-loving Lilith to the hectoring and hypocritical Eve. The humorist Thorne Smith had begun his long series of assaults upon the blindness of those who hated sex and strong liquor a year earlier, in Topper. It was, however, My First Two Thousand Years which shattered the barrier of primness which American publishers had erected, and left it in ruins.

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  My First Two Thousand Years displays a kind of jeering irreverence for the narrow minds of American Puritans which is closely akin to the dedication of Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare. The story exhibits the same determined fascination with sexual psychology that Hecht displayed in that work and its sequel, The Kingdom of Evil (1924). A similar scientistic fascination came to preoccupy several subsequent writers in the same vein, including Guy Endore, author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933) and the remarkable Freudian romance Methinks the Lady (1945), and the early SF writer David H. Keller, author of the Satanist fantasy The Devil and the Doctor (1940) and the bizarre Freudian fantasy The Eternal Conflict (1949). Viereck had the advantage of knowing Freud personally—in the foreword to his last erotic fantasy Gloria (1952) he refers to him as “my friend and master, the Columbus of the Unconscious”—although it is not at all clear that Freud would have approved of the highly idiosyncratic use made of his ideas in My First Two Thousand Years and its sequels.

  The plot of My First Two Thousand Years recounts the story of Isaac Laquedem, a Jew who rejects his cultural heritage by enlisting in the Roman army which occupied Judea in the time of Christ, adopting the name Cartaphilus to mask his origins. Cartaphilus knows Jesus personally but despises his prophetic ambitions, which he considers absurd. His hostility is increased when Jesus wins his dearest friends, John and Mary Magdalen, to the Messianic cause. Cartaphilus sees Jesus condemned by Pilate and follows him to Calvary, where he refuses an appeal for help after Jesus stumbles, thus occasioning the famous curse which secures his immortality.

  In traditional extrapolations of the legend the Wandering Jew is a miserable figure whose guilt-laden immortality is horribly burdensome, but Viereck and Eldridge’s Cartaphilus is far more resilient. He is in the prime of life and fully appreciates the wonderful opportunity which has been afforded him. He soon discovers that Jesus is not the only miracle-worker in the world, and deduces that Jesus’s powers must have been natural, providing no evidential support for the delusion that he was the Son of God. Later, Cartaphilus concludes that his own condition is due to a spontaneous mutation of his flesh, for which Jesus merely provided a psychological stimulus. The problem of finding a purpose to guide him through a potentially-limitless existence causes him some slight anxiety, but he is in no mood to submit to “the Great God Ennui” without a fight and he embarks zestfully upon a twofold quest in search of wisdom and sexual fulfilment.

  In pursuit of this quest Cartaphilus seeks out various sages whose bold experiments in thought and deed place them at the cutting edge of progress: a deliberately controversial selection which includes Apollonius of Tyana, Mung Ling, Spinoza, and the Satanist Gilles de Retz. The last-named attracts particular interest by virtue of his attempt to create a Homunculus, but he is cast as an out-and-out villain and is brought to ruin by Cartaphilus’s design. Cartaphilus also searches for the secret of “unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged.” He dallies with many women, but his attention is abruptly seiz
ed and gradually captivated—by means of a series of cunning temptations and frustrating evasions—by one in particular: an immortal woman who seems to him to be his destined partner in life. This female counterpart is the princess Salome, similarly condemned to immortality by Jokanaan (John the Baptist).

  Throughout his adventures, Cartaphilus retains a determination to take his revenge on Jesus by smashing the Christian “empire of faith.” This ambition leads him to be the secret inspiration of Attila, Muhammad, and Martin Luther. Their partial successes are, for him, steps on the path to a final conflict which he is in the process of engineering as the story proceeds towards the present day—which it does at a headlong rush, the last century figuring hardly at all.

  Laquedem narrates this tale while under hypnosis, spilling it into the eager ears of two psychoanalytically-inclined scientists whom he meets while sheltering in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1917. They cannot agree as to whether the story is to be taken literally or figuratively, but they wholeheartedly endorse its significance as an allegory of humanity’s progress to modern civilization. The final passages of the narrator’s account of his adventures become rather surreal as he tells of his final rendezvous with Salome is a new Garden of Eden, where she is attempting to succeed where Gilles de Retz failed in creating an artificial human being. In accordance with her feminist principles this new being is to be a Homuncula rather than a Homunculus, capable of becoming the mother of a new and better race. Cartaphilus, meanwhile, has only one more phases of his grand plan to complete before he may join her again; he and his enigmatic servant Kotikokura are now in the process of unleashing the combined forces of a “Red King” (Lenin) and a “Black King” (Mussolini) upon the tottering “White King” which is Europe and Christendom, in order to clear the way for a Millennium very different from that imagined by the dutiful and misguided followers of Jesus.