by S. T. Joshi
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The Cocoon
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The Metal God
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The Little Creature
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The Pool
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The Rack
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Escape
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Capture
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The Bell
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The Unknown Color
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Monstrous Form
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Nightmare in Green
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What Followed Me?
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Fantastic Sculpture
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The Tree
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Many of the sonnets have been revised almost beyond recognition after their initial appearances, to the point that one wonders whether they can even be called the same sonnet. (Compare what was published in Weird Tales as “The Creatures” and in Poems for Midnight as “The Prey.”)[134] The version published in Poems for Midnight differs from that in Dark of the Moon by the addition of six sonnets and also by an extensive rearrangement of the others. Ultimately, the Poems for Midnight text must be regarded as Wandrei’s final version; no doubt he failed to retain the two uncollected sonnets from Weird Tales (“The Red Specter” and “Doom”) because he did not think them worthy of inclusion. Still, I would give much to read the manuscript of the Sonnets mentioned by Lovecraft in 1927.
What, then, are we to make of the Sonnets of the Midnight Hours? They are in one sense more unified than Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth in that all are narrated in the first person and that they all, evidently, were inspired by actual dreams of Wandrei’s; but they lack even more than Lovecraft’s any overriding philosophical purpose or aim. As poetry designed to send a shudder up the spine they are undeniably powerful; but not a single one of them has any other function but to horrify.
The degree to which Wandrei revised his verse has just been touched upon; but I want to cite two further examples that shew how Wandrei, in recasting a poem, could change its entire philosophical and aesthetic message. I have already quoted “The Voice of Beauty” from Ecstasy; compare this now with a revised version, now titled “The Dream That Dies”:
Like a creature unseen as it scurries and passes
With whispering steps through the wildwood grasses,
Like the ghost of an echoing note
From a meadowlark’s passionate throat,
Like the rustle of small
Blown petals that fall,
Desolate, lonely, and far
As a cindering star,
Like the sound of the sea or the rain,
Murmur of all things that wane,
Like foam in a tempest scattered and thinned
Or vanishing leaves that drift off with the wind,
Like a mist that fades into sodden skies
Is the dream as it dies.
Whereas the first version connects with Wandrei’s early theme of the transitoriness of beauty, the second has an entirely different connotation. Much of the death-imagery of the original has been eliminated or muted; even so simple a change as “meadowlark” for “nightingale” in the fourth line is momentous, the latter suggesting mourning, the former not.
A similarly startling transformation occurs in the poem called “Death and the Poet” in Ecstasy and “Death and the Traveler” in Poems for Midnight. Although the two versions begin similarly—Death offers the other the boons of his kingdom—they end very differently. In Ecstasy we read:
DEATH: Ah Poet, scorn me not,
For this I offer thee: Hast thou forgot
The face that haunts thy memory?
The soft, red lips? The shadowy eyes?
The mortal flesh that dies?
Oh Poet, this I offer thee,
They one Beloved, fair and sweet,
In whom all Beauty’s graces meet—
THE POET (wildly): I yield! I yield! Thy lips, Oh Death!
Here the poet cannot withstand the temptation to unite in death with his lost beloved. In Poems for Midnight this becomes:
DEATH: Ah Traveler, scorn me not
For I will help you find—
Have you forgot?—
The face that haunts your heart and mind.
In my domain alone you’ll capture
Your soul’s desire, all lasting rapture,
All past and future. Traveler, stay!
TRAVELER: Not now, not yet. I go my way,
I still have far to go, it’s late.
DEATH: However far you go, I wait.
TRAVELER: Goodby, but if we meet again—
DEATH: We will. We will, and I know when.
TRAVELER: Not soon for I must find a song—
DEATH: Not long, not long. . . .
The traveller is himself a poet, and the “song” he must find is a symbol for the immortality to be conferred by art. But Wandrei sees this only as a fleeting and temporary thing.
After a hiatus of about forty-five years (assuming that Wandrei wrote no poetry in this period—we simply have no way of telling whether he did nor not) Wandrei returned to poetry in late 1977 and 1978, circulating four poems to friends and colleagues. Perhaps the most remarkable is “I Am Man,” which adapts the grotesque metre of “The Corpse Speaks” to produce a quietly pensive philosophical meditation. In a work that simultaneously vaunts mankind’s achievements and puts them into cosmic perspective—similar, perhaps, to his tale “Requiem for Earth”—Wandrei has written one of his most unforgettable pieces:
I am man.
I am slayer, I am slain,
I am fire,
I am sod,
I aspire
To play God,
I am the empty brain
Of man I tire.
But although “I am master of each living thing,” although “I am the triumph of all-seeing eye,” what will it all mean at the end of Time?
Not on earth or anywhere
Will atom keep
In endless deep
Or starfire care
Of right or wrong,
Of why the pain
Or know the song
That once was man.
This is the Wandrei we recognise both as the precocious youth who wrote “The Red Brain” in his teens and as the old man who, although rarely letting his work see print—or even another’s eyes—continued to ponder humanity’s place in the cosmic scheme of things. What Wandrei’s final place in literature will be, it is not possible now to say—the vast bulk of his unpublished work must be printed and studied before we can take full stock of his literary worth. But whatever place he ultimately occupies, his flawlessly chiselled poetry, old-fashioned as it is by current standards, will surely continue to live as a vital and central component of his collected works. Among the Lovecraft circle Wandrei had no peer as a poet save Clark Ashton Smith; and the fact that nearly all his verse could, chronologically speaking, be termed juvenilia makes us wonder what heights he could have achieved, both in prose and in poetry, had he continued to write into his maturity, when philosophical calm would have tempered the white-hot fire of ecstatic youth.
Thomas Burke: Look Back in Terror
“Few biographers are faced with such problems as he will be who aspires to be a late chronicler to our modern arch-entangler of truthful self-revelation, Thomas Burke.”[135] So said John Gawsworth, who admired the work of his fellow Englishman but found himself frustrated by his inability to distinguish truth from exaggeration and, at times, outright fabrication in the life of Thomas Burke (1886–1945)—a task made more rather than less difficult precisely because Burke purported to chronicle his own life in a succession of books that are now seen to be more fiction than fact. These books have misled any number of critics—i
ncluding such noted figures in our field as Richard Bleiler and Jessica Amanda Salmonson[136]—into accepting Burke’s statements about his life at face value. Recent research, chiefly conducted by Anne Veronica Witchard,[137] make it evident that in many ways Burke was his own most interesting fictional character.
Burke attained both celebrity and notoriety on the publication of Limehouse Nights (1916), a scintillating series of short stories set in the now vanished Limehouse district of London, heavily populated by Chinese immigrants; his book raised eyebrows both by its generally sympathetic portrayal of these immigrants (in spite of his use of terms such as “Chinaman” or “Chink” that are now regarded as derogatory) and, in particular, by its suggestion that young (in many cases underage) girls were attracted to older Chinese men. Burke, having discovered a winning formula, went on to write numerous other volumes about Limehouse, including Twinkletoes: A Tale of Chinatown (1917), which created the character of the young woman of the title, subsequently made famous by the 1926 silent film. Burke also wrote volume after volume that detailed facts (or fantasies) of his own life, especially as it related to his lifelong love of the inexhaustibly fascinating megalopolis of London. For devotees of weird fiction, however, his rare volume Night-Pieces (1935) is a choice treasure whose contents, until recently, have been a closed book.
Sydney Thomas Burke was born on November 29, 1886, at Clapham Junction, a suburb of London. In contrast to his frequent assertions that he was an orphan and that he spent “years of hell” at the Hardcress Home for Orphans, Burke in fact spent reasonably happy years at the London Orphan Asylum (actually in Watford, Hertfordshire). His father had indeed died early in Burke’s childhood, but his mother was still alive. Leaving the orphanage in 1901, just before his fifteenth birthday, he took a position as an office boy with a stockbroking firm, Messrs. Stillwell & Co., in central London. At this time he lived at 4, Portland Place, Fulham, with his mother and a sister, Alice. Late that year he published his first short story in a magazine, Spare Moments. The next year he published a wide array of work—stories, poems, and articles—for various magazines and newspapers. During 1906–07 he worked during the day at a used bookstore in Clapham while working at nights on a London newspaper, the Tribune. It was at that bookstore that he discovered the work of Stephen Crane, especially the seminal work Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a searing account of a young prostitute that made Burke wish to portray the seamy but fascinating underside of London life and society, focusing on the underprivileged and the marginalised.
Burke then began work at The Literary Agency of London, where he developed an acquaintance with some of the leading writers of the day, including the novelist E. Nesbit and the literary critic St. John Adcock. He privately published his first book, a slim volume of Poems (1910), issued in an edition of 25 copies. Meanwhile, his sketches about London were appearing in prestigious magazines and newspapers of the day, including the Idler and the Daily Chronicle. These sketches led the publisher Stanley Unwin to commission him to write the book Nights in Town, published in 1914. Subtitled “A London Autobiography,” it was the first of many books in which Burke fused his own life (or the persona he had already developed of the young, unconventional Bohemian exploring the obscure byways of the city) and that of London.
Unwin, in a later reminiscence, suggests that Burke had already written Limehouse Nights by this time:
It must be remembered that the attitude towards books was much more squeamish and puritanical in 1914 than it has been since 1918. The three books I recall were George Moore’s The Brook Kerith, Caradoc Evans’ My People and Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights. We were so impressed by the last that we at once commissioned him to write Nights in Town, which we published with success, and gave him a job in our office to tide him over temporary financial difficulties. He was the fastest typist I have ever known.[138]
It is not entirely clear that Unwin’s recollections are sound, especially as regards the order of composition of Nights in Town and Limehouse Nights. Whatever the case, the publication of the latter—not by Unwin, but by Grant Richards—in 1916 created a furore. The book was reprinted in the United States in 1917 by Robert M. McBride, with evocative illustrations by Mahlon Blaine that highlighted the relationship between young British girls and Chinese men.
Limehouse was an extensive district in east London, now overtaken by the districts of Pennyfield and Docklands. As Chinese immigrants flocked to the area, it became a source of both fascination and trepidation on the part of Anglo-Saxons, who were then in the grip of the purported “yellow peril” menace. The very notion that lovely and underage white girls could be seized by—or, indeed, would willingly enter into the embraces of—Oriental men sent a frisson of sexual terror through the British populace. Indeed, Burke himself was worried about facing prosecution for obscenity upon the publication of his book, but in fact no attempt at banning the book occurred. The book’s popularity led D. W. Griffith to purchase the film rights for the immense sum of £1000; the film emerged as Broken Blossoms (1919).
Burke subsequently went on to write numerous volumes expanding on his account of Limehouse, including The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse (1920), East of Mansion House (1926), The Pleasantries of Old Quong (1931; published as A Tea-Shop in Limehouse in the U.S.), and Abduction: A Story of Limehouse (1939). He also wrote more general sketches about London—Out and About: A Notebook of London in War-Time (1919), The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London (1921), Whispering Windows: Tales of the Waterside (1921), The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels (1922)—as well as such chronicles of his own life as The Wind and the Rain: A Book of Confessions (1924). Many of his Limehouse stories are narrated by a Chinese figure, Quong Lee, whom many critics have assumed to have been a real individual; but in fact he was an entirely imaginary figure drawn from the work of Ernest Bramah, whose sketches of China—beginning with The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900)—were a significant influence on Burke.
During World War I Burke worked for the American branch of the Ministry of Information. In early 1918 he met Winifred Clara Wells, herself an aspiring writer who went on to write books under the pseudonym Clare Cameron. They married on September 19, 1918, and remained united for the rest of Burke’s life. But their marriage was troubled: Burke’s single-minded focus on writing led Winifred to feel neglected, and she carried on several affairs over the years. In 1929 the couple moved to 33, Tavistock Square, in Bloomsbury. Burke would later commemorate this period in his life in the memoir Living in Bloomsbury (1939). He remained as productive as ever, generating book after book, sometimes several in a single year. But all this work was not necessarily remunerative, and in 1936 the couple moved to a rural enclave, Gipsy Hill, in South London. In 1939 Burke made a desperate plea with the occult writer Dennis Wheatley, asking his help in getting a Civil List pension for himself. The pension was rejected, but his finances seemed to improve somewhat. In part this was due to an offer by the publisher B. T. Batsford to write a series of books about London. Burke complied by quickly generating The Streets of London (1940), English Night-Life (1941), and Travel in England (1942), as well as volumes of a roughly similar sort for other publishers.
All this work allowed Burke and his wife to move back to central London, where they lived at 66, Queensway in Bayswater. It was, however, here that Burke endured the bombing of London during the early years of World War II. In 1945 he was admitted to a hospital for pneumonia. His wife advised homeopathic treatment, but it failed, and Burke died on September 22, 1945, after an operation for peritonitis. His final memoir, appropriately titled Son of London, appeared in 1948.
John Gawsworth noted that the authors with whom Thomas Burke “might have liked to be placed” were W. W. Jacobs, F. Marion Crawford, Oliver Onions, O. Henry, and Ambrose Bierce.[139] It is no accident that all these writers either were exclusively devoted to the weird (at least in their short stories) or dabbled in it from time to time. What strikes us about Burke’s weird tales is the degree t
o which—from as early as Limehouse Nights to the tales in Night-Pieces and beyond—the author runs the gamut of weird motifs, from psychological terror to pure supernaturalism to an engaging mix of fantasy and terror.
It would be unreasonable to expect the Limehouse Nights stories to feature any heavy dose of weirdness, as their prime focus is precisely the realism of both their settings and their characters, albeit with a liberal infusion of romance and exoticism. A single story in Limehouse Nights, “The Bird,” can qualify as a weird tale, although it is in fact a grisly tale of the pseudo-supernatural in which a Chinese man, having murdered the captain of a sailing ship who had brutalised him, believes—to his own detriment—that the captain’s ghost is speaking to him.
Burke continues the fusion of the Limehouse atmosphere and weirdness in “The Tablets of the House of Li,” a poignant tale of benign supernaturalism. Two of Burke’s most powerful stories, “The Bloomsbury Wonder” and “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole,” demonstrate his most skilful merging of the mystery story with the strange. The former, published separately in 1929 before being gathered in the late volume Dark Nights (1944), seems on the surface nothing more than the account of a particularly savage serial killer (or gang of killers) who has murdered an entire family, leaving only one survivor; but as the narrative continues, we develop a chilling sense of the psychological aberration—bordering, indeed, upon psychic possession by the force of pure evil—that led the killer to his act. “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole,” one of several weird tales in The Pleasantries of Old Quong (1931), is exquisitely balanced on the very borderland between psychological suspense and supernaturalism, and the final sentence may take us over the edge into the latter. And yet, this tale—adapted for radio in 1949 for Suspense (re-broacast in 1950), and then for television in 1957 for Alfred Hitchcock Presents—was in 1950 voted by a panel assembled by Ellery Queen as the greatest mystery story of all time.[140]
