The Development of the Weird Tale
Page 28
“Barry Pain: The Occasional Weirdist,” first published as the introduction to Pain’s The Undying Thing and Others (Hippocampus Press, 2007) and the introduction to Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (Hippocampus Press, 2007).
“Algernon Blackwood and the Ghost Story,” first published in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story, ed. Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (Routledge, 2017).
“On ‘A Wine of Wizardry,’” first published in Spectral Realms No. 7 (Summer 2017).
“Samuel Loveman: Shelley in Brooklyn,” first published (in part) as the introduction to Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman (Hippocampus Press, 2004).
“Clark Ashton Smith: Poet of the Stars,” first published as afterwords (in French) to Clark Ashton Smith: Intégrale (Paris: Mnémos, 2017; 3 vols.); as “Lands Forgotten or Unfound: The Prose Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith,” in The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Scott Connors (Hippocampus Press, 2006); as “What Happens in The Hashish-Eater?” Dark Eidolon No. 3 (Winter 1993).
“The Poetry of Donald Wandrei,” first published in Studies in Weird Fiction No. 3 (Spring 1988).
“Thomas Burke: Look Back in Terror,” first published as the introduction to Johnson Looked Back: The Collected Weird Stories of Thomas Burke (Hippocampus Press, 2018).
“D. H. Lawrence: Weird Fiction as Symbol,” first published as the introduction to Lawrence’s The Rocking-Horse Winner and Other Supernatural Tales (Centipede Press, 2017).
“Surprised by Horror: The Fantasy Short Stories of C. S. Lewis,” first published in Crypt of Cthulhu No. 13 (Roodmas 1983).
“A Failed Experiment: Family and Humanity in Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial,” first published in Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences, ed. Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger (Routledge, 2016).
“Atheism and Anticlericalism in the Films of Guillermo del Toro,” first published in The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro, ed. John W. Morehead (McFarland, 2015).
“Some Lost Classics of the Supernatural,” first published as follows: Introduction to Walter de la Mare’s The Return (Dover, 1997); Introduction to Algernon Blackwood’s Incredible Adventures (Hippocampus Press, 2004); Introduction to Arthur Ransome’s The Elixir of Life (Hippocampus Press, 2009); Introduction to Robert Hichens’s The Dweller on the Threshold (Sarnath Press, 2017); Introduction to Leland Hall’s Sinister House (Hippocampus Press, 2008); Introduction to Eleanor M. Ingram’s The Thing from the Lake (Sarnath Press, 2017); Introduction to Francis Brett Young’s Cold Harbour (Hippocampus Press, 2008); Introduction to Henri Béraud’s Lazarus (Hippocampus Press, 2007); Introduction to R. E. Spencer’s The Lady Who Came to Stay (Hippocampus Press, 2009).
* * *
[1]. Throughout the first part of this introduction, I shall refer to Mary Shelley as “Mary,” in part to distinguish her from her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who shall be referred to (as Mary herself did) as “Shelley.”
[2]. Cited in Eileen Bigland, Mary Shelley (London: Cassell, 1959), 29.
[3]. Cited in Bigland 138.
[4]. Richard Brinsley Peake, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. The play premiered at the Lyceum Theatre on July 28, 1823. There was also a French dramatic adaptation in 1826.
[5]. See The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
[6]. See Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
[7]. Cited in Bigland 219.
[8]. George Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 5.
[9]. “On Frankenstein,” in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (London: Ernest Benn; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926–30), 6.264.
[10]. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society (1802; Baltimore: John W. Butler, and Bonsal & Niles, 1804), “Additional Notes,” p. 10.
[11]. Joanna Richardson, Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times (New York: Coward-McCann, 1959), 23.
[12]. “Preface” to Mademoiselle de Maupin (New York: Boni & Liveright, n.d.), xxv.
[13]. Quoted in Richardson, 185.
[14]. Richardson, 201.
[15]. Letter dated 31 October 1870; cited in Richardson, 252.
[16]. Richardson, 205.
[17]. Richardson, 281.
[18]. See Albert B. Smith, Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic (University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1977), 56.
[19]. H. P. Lovecraft, “Under the Pyramids,” in Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2015), 1.434, 446.
[20]. H. P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2nd ed. 2012), 27.
[21]. For a comprehensive selection of Pain’s weird work, see The Undying Thing and Others, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011).
[22]. John D. Cloy, Pensive Jester: The Literary Career of W. W. Jacobs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), 31.
[23]. Cited in Cloy, 79–80.
[24]. Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 118.
[25]. Cited in Hugh Greene’s introduction to Jacobs’s Selected Short Stories (London: Bodley Head, 1975), 5.
[26]. Cited in Alfred Sutro, Celebrities and Simple Souls (London: Duckworth, 1933), 182.
[27]. John D. Cloy, Muscular Mirth: Barry Pain and the New Humor (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2003), 12.
[28]. HPL to August Derleth, 8 September 1934; in Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecrqft and August Derleth, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008), 2.660.
[29]. H. P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2nd ed. 2012), 27.
[30]. See S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue, 4nd rev. ed. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2017), 175.
[31]. Collected Essays, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004–06), 5.229
[32]. See my essay “Autobiography in Lovecraft,” in Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2014), 224–25.
[33]. Cloy, 41.
[34]. Episodes Before Thirty (1923; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924), 124–25.
[35]. Ibid., 39–40.
[36]. Ibid., 249.
[37]. The Human Chord (London: Macmillan, 1910), 318.
[38]. The Listener and Other Stories (1907; London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1930), 20.
[39]. Ibid., 53.
[40]. John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 1.
[41]. The Centaur (1911; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1938), 58.
[42]. Ibid., 40.
[43]. Ibid., 228.
[44]. Ibid., 89.
[45]. The Lost Valley and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 79.
[46]. Ibid., 97.
[47]. See p. 192.
[48]. Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (London: Macmillan, 1912), 26.
[49]. Ibid., 99.
[50]. The Human Chord, 307.
[51]. Jimbo: A Fantasy (London: Macmillan, 1909), 53.
[52]. Ibid., 82.
[53]. The Education of Uncle Paul (London: Macmillan, 1909), 10.
[54]. Ibid., 52–53.
[55]. Ibid., 79.
[56]. The Bright Messenger (1921; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), 227.
[57]. Ibid., 219.
[58]. Shocks (1935; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), 36.
[59]. Ibid., 38.
[60]. All letters between Bierce and Sterling are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
&n
bsp; [61] George Sterling, “A Wine of Wizardry,” in Complete Poetry, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013), 1.77–82. Subsequent references to the poem will occur parenthetically in the text by line number.
[62]. Ambrose Bierce, “A Poet and His Poem” (1907), in Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (1909–12; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 10.180.
[63]. Ibid., 10.181.
[64]. Ibid., 10.185.
[65]. Bierce, Collected Works 10.181.
[66]. Harry E. Martin, “Samuel Loveman,” National Times No. 1 (June 1921): [3].
[67]. “N.A.P.A. Official Criticism by Bureau of Critics,” National Amateur 28, No. 4 (March 1906): 4.
[68]. Collected Essays, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004–06), 1.273.
[69]. For Bierce’s letters to Loveman, see Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce (Cleveland: George Kirk, 1922; rpt. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1991). Loveman’s letters to Bierce survive in ms. in the Stanford University Library.
[70]. Loveman to Bierce, 20 October 1908.
[71]. Loveman to Sterling, 14 February 1925 (ms., Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA [hereafter abbreviated HL]).
[72]. Loveman to Carol Smith, 25 January 1970 (ms., John Hay Library, Brown University [hereafter abbreviated JHL]).
[73]. Sterling to Bierce, 12 October 1909 (ms., New York Public Library [hereafter abbreviated NYPL]).
[74]. Sterling to Loveman, 8 May 1913 (ms., HL).
[75]. The joint correspondence of Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith (his letters to Loveman are at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA) is forthcoming from Wildeside Press.
[76]. Loveman to Clark Ashton Smith, 12 August 1915 (ms., JHL).
[77]. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 8 November 1917; Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005), 119.
[78]. See Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1994).
[79]. In “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist” (1958) Loveman states that he owns “500 folio pages” of Lovecraft’s letters, but these do not appear to refer to Lovecraft’s letters to himself: around 1940 he had purchased Lovecraft’s letters to Frank Belknap Long, which apparently were subsequently destroyed.
[80]. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, 11 December 1919; in Letters to Alfred Galpin (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 64.
[81]. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 14 December 1920; Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner 200.
[82]. Loveman to Clark Ashton Smith, [August 1920] (ms., JHL).
[83]. Hart Crane to Gorham Munson, [c. 18 June 1922]; The Letters of Hart Crane 1916–1932, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Hermitage House, 1952), 91.
[84]. John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 17.
[85]. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 21 September 1921; Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner 218.
[86]. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, 8 February 1922; Selected Letters 1911-1924 (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965), 166.
[87]. Loveman to Clark Ashton Smith, n.d. (ms., JHL).
[88]. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 9 August 1922 (ms., JHL).
[89]. The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works, 2nd ed. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013), 254–56.
[90]. Loveman to Clark Ashton Smith, 4 February 1918 (ms., JHL).
[91]. Loveman to Clark Ashton Smith, [c. 21 February 1921] (ms., JHL).
[92]. See Loveman to Bierce, 18 May 1909 and [27 July 1909].
[93]. Mencken, “Confidences,” Smart Set 70, No. 1 (January 1923): 142.
[94]. [Lovecraft], “Rainbow Called Best First Issue,” National Amateur 44, No. 4 (March 1922): 44; rpt. in Collected Essays (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004), 1.310–11.
[95]. “Poets of Amateur Journalism: III. Samuel Loveman,” Oracle 3, No. 4 (December 1922): 12–17.
[96]. Galpin, “A Critic of Poetry,” Oracle 4, No. 2 (August 1923): 8–10; Long, “An Amateur Humorist,” Conservative No. 12 (March 1923): 2–5.
[97]. Hart Crane to Elizabeth Belden Hart, 10 November 1923; Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, ed. Thomas S. W. Lewis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 229.
[98]. Loveman and Bregenzer, “A Foreword,” A Round-Table in Poictesme (Cleveland: Colophon Club, 1924), ix.
[99]. Crane to Grace Crane, 14 September 1924; Letters of Hart Crane 1916–1932, 187.
[100]. Crane to Grace Crane, 14 October 1924; Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, 354.
[101]. Loveman to Smith, n.d. (ms., JHL).
[102]. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 24–27 October 1925 (ms., JHL).
[103]. See Crane to Gorham Munson, Thanksgiving 1922; The Letters of Hart Crane 1916–1932, 91.
[104]. Mencken, “Edgar Saltus,” Prejudices: Fifth Series (New York: Knopf, 1926), 282.
[105]40. In a letter to his aunt, Lillian D. Clark (6 August 1925), Lovecraft speaks of reading the first chapter of Loveman’s Civil War novel Thracia Deane. This work does not survive.
[106]. Unterecker, Voyager, 771.
[107]. See Rheinhart Kleiner, “My Friend, Samuel Loveman,” Aonian 3, No. 3 (Autumn 1945): 244.
[108]. Obituary, New York Times (18 May 1976): 18.
[109]. The Occult Lovecraft (Saddle River, NJ: Gerry de la Ree, 1975), 22.
[110]. Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, 15 April 1922; Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner 222–23.
[111]. Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004), 201. Subsequent citations will occur in the text, with the abbreviation L.
[112]. Loveman to Clark Ashton Smith, n.d. (ms., John Hay Library, Brown University).
[113]. The Letters of Hart Crane 1916–1932, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Hermitage House, 1952), 191.
[114]. Loveman to George Sterling, 23 January [1916] (ms., Huntington Library and Art Gallery).
[115]. Clark Ashton Smith to Loveman, 1 February 1916 (ms., Bancroft Library, University of California).
[116]. Loveman to Clark Ashton Smith, n.d. (ms., John Hay Library).
[117]. I shall not consider The Sphinx here, for although its prose is musical to the point of poetry, it remains a prose drama.
[118]. The Black Diamonds, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002); The Sword of Zagan and Other Writings, ed. W. C. Farmer (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004).
[119]. Stuart Merrill, Pastels in Prose (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), v–vi.
[120]. Francis Scarfe, “Introduction,” in Charles Baudelaire, The Poems in Prose, with La Fanfarlo (London: Anvil Press Poetry, [1986]), 14.
[121]. George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith, The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005), 158. Subsequent citations will occur in the text under the abbreviation SU.
[122]. Clark Ashton Smith, Nostalgia of the Unknown: The Complete Prose Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Marc and Susan Michaud, Steve Behrends, and S. T. Joshi (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1988), 2. Subsequent citations will occur in the text under the abbreviation N.
[123]. Clark Ashton Smith, Selected Poems (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1971), 66. Subsequent citations will occur in the text under the abbreviation SP.
[124]. The Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003), 108. Subsequent citations will occur in the text under the abbreviation SL.
[125]. First published in Klarkash-Ton No. 1 (June 1988): 22; now in SL 366.
[126]. Steve Behrends, “Clark Ashton Smith: Cosmicist or Misanthrope?” Dark Eidolon No. 2 (July 1989): 12–14.
[127]. Letter to Frank Belknap Long, November 1927; Selected Letters 1925–1929 (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1968), 186.
[128]. Steven J. Mariconda points out to me that the mechanical repetition o
f “dead” may have been derived from a sonnet by the obscure poet Park Barnitz, whose The Book of Jade (1902) Wandrei sought out at the John Hay Library when he visited Lovecraft in 1932 (see Lovecraft’s letter to James F. Morton, 21 September 1932; Selected Letters 1932–1934 [Sauk City WI: Arkham House, 1976], 69).
[129]. As “In the Pit.”
[130]. As “The Old Companions.”