Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  The literary style of this narrative involves a curious alloy of the portentous and the comic, which may reflect to some extent the different agendas of its two writers (Viereck notes of the light-hearted and flippantly sarcastic Gloria that he had originally drafted it in a much more earnest mode, but had been persuaded to lighten it by the arguments of a young friend nicknamed “the Gadfly”). Had My First Two Thousand Years been one whit less witty and ironic than it is it might not have crept through the window of opportunity which opened before it, but there is no doubt that its lightness is a double bluff; the authors meant every shocking syllable of it, and then some. The success of the book allowed the collaborators to indulge their mocking fancies a little further in its sequels—which are more correctly reckoned counterparts, in that they run in parallel, only the final few pages carrying the story further forward in time—but they remained careful enough to fight shy of authentic literary Satanism. Their closest approach to that extreme is a mere flirtation, in a brief passage in which Cartaphilus and Salome improvize a fragmentary drama in which they take the parts of Lucifer and Lilith.

  * * * *

  Salome is more overtly erotic than its predecessor, as befits an extrapolation of a tale beloved of so many famous Decadents—Gustave Moreau, Oscar Wilde, and Jules Laforgue all produced their own versions of it. Although Jokanaan declares that its sexy heroine is “too vile for the grave,” the authors clearly do not agree.

  Like the Wandering Jew’s female partner in Eugène Sue’s famous elaboration of the legend—who was Salome’s stepmother, Herodias—Salome becomes symbolic of the plight of women in general, and the quest which gives her life meaning is the liberation of women from the curse under which the entire sex labors. While Cartaphilus attempts to inspire an endless series of anti-Christs Salome cleaves to those women fortunate enough to reach positions of political power, hoping to use them to advance the cause of feminism. With Queen Zenobia Salome attempts to resurrect the ghost of Cleopatra. In Africa—where Cartaphilus is worshipped as the god Ca-ta-pha by courtesy of the exploits of his “prophet” Kotikokura—she briefly establishes a religion of her own and tries to create a society where women are dominant. She is the creator of Pope Joan and Jeanne d’Arc and rallies to the causes of Elizabeth I of England and Catherine the Great of Russia. In every case, though, she is disappointed.

  Perhaps inevitably, in a Freudian fantasy, it is accepted at the axiomatic level by Viereck and Eldridge that the exercise of power is essentially masculine. Salome discovers that powerful women can remain effective only while the process of their physical and psychological development is arrested; in the end, all of them become incompetent when they are weakened by the delayed onset of their “bloody sacrifice to the moon.” Salome too is corrupted by nature, albeit more moderately, and she knows that she must eventually give way to the destiny which has marked her out as Cartaphilus’s loving mate—but she cannot be content with that. If nature has made her frail, she is determined to overcome it.

  Like Nietzsche, Salome looks forward avidly to the victory of the coming Übermensch—but unlike the misogynistically-inclined philosopher, she assumes that the coming regime will involve a new equality of male and female. In the novel, however, the World Spirit incarnate in Nature—as conceived and animated by Viereck and Eldridge—cannot yet tolerate such an evolution, and Homuncula is cataclysmically destroyed even as she is born. In the end, Cartaphilus has to console Salome with the proposition that the time is not yet ripe, and that there are preliminary dilemmas to be addressed and resolved as well as new scientific discoveries to be made before the human story can possibly reach that kind of climax.

  Salome was almost as successful in the marketplace as its predecessor, and has continued to be reprinted along with it in various paperback editions, but the third volume in the series is not included in these more recent editions and failed ignominiously to achieve similar sales in its hardcover editions, perhaps because it is the most fantastic and most explicit of the three. The Invincible Adam is the story of Kotikokura, the servant and sometime worshipper of Cartaphilus, who began life as a proto-human but has evolved into a handsome person of culture and intelligence. In the first chapter we find him temporarily employing the alias Lord Kotesbury, on the run from the outraged forces of law and morality having allegedly molested a young woman. (The chase is interrupted by the declamations of an amateur philosopher crying “To Hell with Prohibition!”—the authors could not know that by 1937, the year in which the novel is set, the Volstead Act would have been repealed.)

  Following his apprehension, Kotikokura defends himself before a jury of scientists, including those who earlier psychoanalysed Cartaphilus. He begins his tale with an account of his childhood in prehistoric Africa, when he was condemned to be sacrificed to his tribe’s deity, the Great Ape, by virtue of possessing what the Great Ape has taken away from other men as a punishment: a penile bone. This is referred to throughout as a “rib,” partly for reasons of coyness but mainly to insist that this equipment was what Jehovah took from Adam in order to make Eve. In the event, Kotikokura escapes his allotted fate, becoming instead an immortal heretic, devoted to the service of a new god, Ca-ta-pha, whose accidental (and wholly illusory) revelation gives him a purpose in life. This personal mission eventually reaches a kind of fulfilment when he meets the person who seems to be the incarnation of all his hopes and desires: Cartaphilus.

  By virtue of his permanent erection Kotikokura is perennially popular among women even though he retains a crucial immaturity, having been made immortal when not yet fully grown. Although he seemed in the stories told in the first two volumes of the trilogy still to be primitive and simple-minded, The Invincible Adam reveals that this was mostly camouflage employed in his dealings with Cartaphilus and Salome, and that he is ready enough to display his sophistication to others. His physical appearance changes slowly with time, so that he “evolves” from being a dark-skinned pygmy to a condition in which he can pass readily enough for an English aristocrat.

  Having heard Kotikokura’s account of his irrepressible instincts, and the reason for the assault which he is supposed to have committed, the jury of scientists is prepared to concede that his occasional outbursts of erotic exuberance are entirely natural. His crime—biting the ear of the girl he is charged with molesting—is forgiven once it is explained that ear-biting was the ultimate gesture of affection in the tribe into which he was born, and still remains his ultimate tribute to female beauty. As in the first volume, the scientists cannot agree on the literal truth of what they have heard, but of its profound symbolic significance they have no doubt at all.

  * * * *

  The Invincible Adam is followed by a “personal note” which explains the allegorical significance of the trilogy (somewhat after the fashion of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who used to excuse his occasional ventures into fantasy by appending portentous allegorical decodings of a rather dubious nature). Kotikokura, this note assures the reader, “is the eternal youth—Pan, the Pied Piper, Michelangelo’s David, David slaying Goliath.” (As if this collection of analogues were not sufficiently bizarre, the authors subsequently add Gargantua and Til Eulenspiegel to it.) Kotikokura’s ever-elusive goal is Love, which he can never attain because he is torn by a struggle within: “the struggle between the monkey and the god, the primitive and the sophisticate, subman and superman, the libido and civilization”—or, to put it another way, id and superego frozen in time at a point when they cannot quite be reconciled into a healthy ego.

  According to this same scheme Cartaphilus is “the sophisticated, highly civilized modern man, conscious of the feminine component which he inherits from Mother Eve.” He seeks “unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged and a new synthesis of woman.” In so doing he becomes “brother to Faust and Don Juan” and also a kind of Everyman figure. Salome is his counterpart, “the sophisticated, highly civilized modern woman,” free at long last of the seven
symbolic veils which enshrouded her when she danced for Herod, but not from the burdensome restraints of her biological nature.

  “Our saga,” the authors claim, “aims to bridge the gulf between the sexes, to establish a truce in their ageless struggle,” adding by way of justification that “The latest discoveries of endocrinology and psychology confirm the poetic intuitions of Plato. No understanding of love is possible until we realize that each sex bears within itself the replica of the other” and “No one can assail the inhibitions and complexes of life without attacking the taboos which dominate civilized man no less than his progenitor in the jungle.”24

  This note serves to emphasize the fact that the authors’ intention to offend against the taboos of the censorious American tribe—and not to do the job by halves—has been backed all along by a genuine conviction that such taboos reakly do need to be smashed, in the name of Progress as well as that of Liberty. George Viereck’s ideas about sex may have been decidedly unconventional but they were certainly sincere. His peculiar combination of prurience and eccentric feminism was to be given even freer rein in Gloria, in which a woman who might or might not be the Goddess of Love (a cynical character suggests that she is merely a deceptive drug-smuggler) insists that all the great lovers of history and legend were, in fact, woefully inadequate to the task of satisfying their female companions. According to her, Casanova—with the aid of a cunning technological device akin to Kotikokura’s “rib”—was the only man who ever managed to overcome the limitations of male physique, and even he remained prey to the dismal faults of male psychology. As to the roots which this insistent conviction may have had within Viereck’s own psyche we can, of course, only speculate.

  As an extended conte philosophique Viereck and Eldridge’s trilogy cannot hold a candle to Anatole France’s fantasies, and as a exercise in eroticism it seems gauche when set beside the works of Pierre Louÿs. As Samuel Johnson famously remarked about a female preacher, however, the marvel is not that it is done well, but that it should be done at all. However blatant the trilogy’s faults as a commentary on human psychology and human progress might be, the fact remains that it served as a powerful provocation to further speculation. It spearheaded a brief revivification of the tradition of American philosophical fantasy which had languished sadly since the days of Hawthorne and Poe, and which might conceivably have gone from strength to strength had not fantasy been condemned to the status of a mere genre—and consequently shunted downmarket into the pulp magazines—in the late thirties.

  It is ironic, but not entirely inappropriate, that the influence of the Viereck and Eldridge trilogy should be most conspicuously exhibited by a work very obviously designed as a parody of it: The Memoirs of Satan (1932) by William Gerhardi and Brian Lunn. These British collaborators wholeheartedly—but very sarcastically—embraced the literary Satanism of which the two Americans fought shy, and were enabled thereby to adopt a rather more objective viewpoint than Viereck and Eldridge’s all-too-human protagonists. The first part of the novel—which ends, in synopsis, by wondering whether Salome was an intellectual snob—is modestly entitled “My First 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Years,” and its subsequent sections expand upon the themes of the trilogy with considerable farcical effect. The book was not a great success commercially (parodies rarely are, for obvious reasons) but it remains very readable, and its satirical edge is unblunted by the passage of time.

  The moral crusaders of America were able to wreak a revenge of sorts on George Viereck during World War II, when he was imprisoned for refusing to register as an agent of Germany—which he did on principled grounds, being no great admirer of Hitler even though he retained a patriotic fondness for the Fatherland itself. He died in 1962, aged seventy-eight; Eldridge—who was four years his junior—lived to the ripe old age of ninety-four. Their other work in collaboration was a conventional scientific romance in a decidedly British vein, Prince Pax (1933), in which the Ultimate Weapon is used to put an end to war. It was not published in America, which had no use for fantasies of that type until 1945.

  24Viereck, George Sylvester, and Paul Eldridge. The Invincible Adam. London: Duckworth, 1932, p. 411-412.

  THE PROFESSION OF SCIENCE FICTION: 42

  It is sometimes said that life begins at forty. Having recently passed that dubious landmark in my life I now feel that I am in a position to comment on this old saw. I find it on the one hand absurdly optimistic and on the other absurdly pessimistic. It is absurdly optimistic in making the bold assertion that one really can start afresh, discarding the legacy of the error-strewn past; it is absurdly pessimistic in tacitly assuming that everyone has to. Perhaps one might rather say, with apologies to George Orwell, that at forty everyone has the future that he deserves.

  From one viewpoint, my entry into the profession of science fiction has been a recent one, occurring when I quit my job (abandoning as I did so any hope of ever getting another one) and became a full-time writer. From another viewpoint, however, this move looks uncomfortably like a mere capitulation with the inevitable—my final belated acceptance of a fate forged by a peculiar chain of petty obsessions and existential accidents.

  I still, on occasion, bump into slight acquaintances to whom my defection from academic life comes as news. Some of them, exhibiting a flair for delicate diplomacy which is typically English, politely ask “Was that a brave decision?” I usually say yes, but it is a lie; I don’t think that I have ever taken a brave decision in my life. In fact, I have difficulty in seeing the move as a “decision” at all; I see it rather as a matter of defaulting on my debt to society, or dropping out of the struggle to maintain a facade of respectability. It is an action perfectly consistent with the way I have contrived to live my whole life. In the human race I was always a long shot, destined to be listed among those who failed to win or place, but “also ran”; I sometimes feel that I should never have been entered.

  * * * *

  Life actually begins somewhere around the age of four—at least, mine did. Some people claim to be able to remember a good deal about their infancy, but I cannot. I have written more than once that a good memory is one adept at forgetting, which does not clutter itself up with a crippling burden of trivia but concentrates instead on the important stuff. I always write this with a sense of self-satisfaction; its frequent repetition in my repertoire testifies to the fact that I believe myself to have a good memory. Unfortunately, I might be wrong. Perhaps I have actually forgotten all the important stuff and remembered only the trivia.

  I can only take it on trust that the things I happen to remember are the things which were significant in forming my character. There are many people, I know, who would argue that I must have repressed all the vital and traumatic moments, and that I can never hope to understand myself unless I can delve into the mysterious depths of the unremembered to recover the truly important by some magical process of abreaction. If that is so, the bulk of what follows here is a waste of my time and the reader’s. Freudians, Jungians and devotees of primal therapy might as well skip to the next article right away—but those with a less dogmatic interest in psychoanalysis may stick around, because I will permit myself the luxury of a little deep-psyche diving if and when it seems appropriate.

  It seems to me now, looking back, that the experiences which truly shaped me, and set my steps upon the path which led me to what I am today, were those which happened to me between the ages of four and eighteen. I was no tabula rasa before that, and I hope that I have continued to gather knowledge and sophistication since, but the crucial blows of the sculptor’s chisel—which eventually chipped away from the unhewn block everything that was not the science fiction writer—were probably struck during those years.

  * * * *

  I had no sense of being a total misfit until I was four. The earliest sensations of being an outsider which my memory has preserved date from my first days at school (a hazardous rite de passage to
which I came a little early). I am told that it proved very difficult to keep me in school during the first few days, because I kept returning home at break-time, but I cannot remember why I did it. I do, however, recall several factors which exaggerated my sense of being apart from the society of my fellows.

  I remained in the reception class of the school for only a few weeks before being moved up to the next grade; at the end of the year I skipped a grade entirely, so that at the age of six I was in a class of eight-year-olds. This was because I had already learned to read and do arithmetic before arriving, and the policy of the school was to move children along as ability dictated. There was, however, one subject for which I had to leave my advance class to return to the society of my peers: religious instruction.

  The school was attached to a Catholic Church, and it took the business of indoctrination very seriously. The walls of all the classrooms were decorated with religious pictures; in art classes we colored in cartoons of the life of Jesus or painted pictures of Noah’s Ark, and I can remember a history lesson we had one November 5th when we were told that it was wicked to attend bonfires because Guy Fawkes had been a good Catholic protesting against the iniquities of a Protestant tyrant. Despite this permeation of the whole world of the school by the True Faith, it was still necessary for me to be removed from my class of eight-year-olds and put back in with my peers because it was the six-year-olds who were rigorously prepared for their first Holy Communion, forced to rehearse the relevant ritual responses for both confession and communion. I loathed the indignity of that periodic removal, which I felt much more keenly as a proof of my separation and difference than the fact that I was normally taught in the company of older children.