The Eldritch Evola & Others

by James O'Meara

  [←123]

  Many critics have discussed the checkerboard and “x” symbols found throughout the film; I of course would liken them to the Traditional symbolism of Universal Manifestation as a weaving pattern of warp and woof. See “The Corner at the Center of the World: Traditional Metaphysics in a Late Tale of Henry James,” above.

  [←124]

  “So plainspoken as to be a parody of the hardboiled detective she imitates in her inexorable and inexpressive search for knowledge”—Martin Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife, p. 74.

  [←125]

  Leavis, op. cit., p. 143.

  [←126]

  “Old (’30s–’40s) term for a handgun: same vintage as gat, heater, cannon, etc. ‘He pulled a roscoe and ventilated the gorilla’”—Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=roscoe.

  [←127]

  Darren McGavin, who would star in “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” (1957–’59) later starred in a short-lived 1968 series, The Outsider.

  [←128]

  “The Thriller of Tomorrow”; a similar confrontation occurs in “The Jolly Corner,” the James ghost story I analyze in the work cited in Note 35 above.

  [←129]

  See Evola’s Hermetic Tradition, Part Two, where he discusses how the Realized Man creates for himself a new, indestructible body—the Tantric Diamond Body—by reconstructing himself from the atomic level on up—the film’s atomic chain reaction is an inverted symbol of this.

  [←130]

  Ironically, after being shot by Gaby, Soberin transforms himself into the dog, Cerberus.

  [←131]

  Prominently featured in the Bunker Hill locations is the “Angel’s Flight,” a rather Lovecraftian funicular railway, featuring two cars, Sinai—pillar of fire?—and Olivet.

  [←132]

  It’s as if Brigid O’Shaughnessy shot Sam Spade and took off with the Maltese Falcon. Usually, it’s Mike who does the gut-shooting. In Spillane’s own film, The Girl Hunters, he tricks Shirley Eaton into blowing her own head off with a shotgun.

  [←133]

  Soberin’s enigmatic remark that the Whatzit “can’t be divided” suggests the extra-dimensionality of one of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods.

  [←134]

  “Character Gullibility in Weird Fiction; or, isn’t Yuggoth Somewhere in Upstate New York?” in Discovering Lovecraft, loc. 1003.

  [←135]

  See my review of Graham Harmon’s Weird Realism, “‘A General Outline of the Whole’: Lovecraft as Heideggerian Event,” above.

  [←136]

  Blackwood was an initiate of the Golden Dawn; Evola even deigns to quote John Silence on some occult self-defense techniques in his Introduction to Magic.

  [←137]

  Anomalously, the folklorists from Arkham know just the right formula to dispatch the Dunwich horror and dismiss the revenant Charles Dexter Ward.

  [←138]

  “. . . he gradually discovers layers of power and danger that surround him of which he knows nothing and with which he is unprepared to cope” (Luhr, p. 134).

  [←139]

  “Kiss Me Deadly looks back both to canonical film noir, whose era was winding down, and ahead to neo-noir, or resurrected noir, which would not emerge for more than a decade. Death and resurrection are central themes [as we saw with Gaby] . . . embodying the baroque endpoint of an exhausted genre, pushing that genre’s tropes to and beyond their limits” (Luhr, p. 144).

  [←140]

  Hoberman, “Thriller of Tomorrow.”

  [←141]

  Conveniently summarized in “The Restoration of Kiss Me Deadly” by Glenn Erickson, http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2356kiss.html, from which I take the following summary of the endings.

  [←142]

  It’s a bit like the end of Bride of the Monster, and any number of other ’50s movies where atomic blasts happen right and left, with only a small danger of mutating into a 50-foot giant or something, as long as you wear your “protective goggles.”

  [←143]

  See, as always, Baron Evola’s The Hermetic Tradition, especially Chapter One on the symbolism of the Tree.

  [←144]

  In the James tale we analyze in “The Corner,” this is how the protagonist ends up, sprawled out on a checkerboard patterned floor; while there’s none here, there is one in Mike’s apartment.

  [←145]

  Remember those “long shadows” they “throw down the beach”?

  [←146]

  See René Guénon, The Multiples States of the Being, trans. S. D. Fohr (Ghent, N.Y.: Sophia Perennis, 2001), ch. 12, “The Two Chaoses.”

  [←147]

  See Guénon, Multiple States, but especially Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Door in the Sky: Coomaraswamy on Myth and Meaning, ed. Rama P. Coomaraswamy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) that exhaustively documents the symbolism of, for example, the hole in the roof of a teepee or another traditional structure, which smoke outlet serves as a symbol of the path of the soul.

  [←148]

  “This opus has become a cult film . . . I cannot say why—I never completely understood our screenplay, and my confusion was still there when we ran the completed film”—producer Victor Saville, quoted in Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor, Mickey Spillane on Screen: A Complete Study of the Television and Film Adaptations (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012), p. 61.

  [←149]

  “Private Legends: An Introduction” in The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999).

  [←150]

  Stapledon’s 1930 Last and First Men was, weirdly, the third title in Penguin’s Pelican series in 1937; “Why the book was not published as a Penguin is a mystery, made curiouser by the almost palindromic fact that Last and First Men was the first and last novel to be published as a Pelican.” For a chronological collection of Penguin’s Stapledon covers: http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/covers.html#1875.

  [←151]

  Olaf Stapledon: Anthology (Last And First Men, Odd John, The Flames, Sirius, Last Men in London, Death into Life, Darkness and the Light, A Man Divided, Star Maker and Collected Stories); no publisher given, October 24, 2013.

  [←152]

  “Snow is, of course, a—no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist. . . . as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.” See Stefan Collini, “Leavis vs. Snow: The Two-Cultures Bust-Up 50 Years On,” The Guardian, Friday, August 16, 2013 and “The Two Cultures Today” by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, February 1994.

  [←153]

  Most famously, Edmund Wilson’s “the only horror is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” See “Edmund Wilson, H. P. Lovecraft’s Best and Worst Critic” in Grim Reviews, November 30, 2007, http://grimreviews.blogspot.com/2007/11/edmund-wilson-hp-lovecrafts-best-and.html

  [←154]

  “My Debt to H. P. Lovecraft” (http://www.rawilsonfans.com/ articles/debtHPL.htm). Wilson’s conclusion deserves note as well: “Ultimately, I think the value of a writer can be measured by how much he is merely expressing his own idiosyncratic moods of joy or misery and how much he is expressing something that is common to all humanity. I feel that HPL and Stapledon expressed very powerfully a species-wide problem—our disorientation in space and time, consequent upon the Copernican and post-Copernican discoveries which revealed that the human race is not the center of the universe and not the special darling of the gods. Few “mainstream” writers have tackled that intellectual and emotional shock as unflinchingly as did HPL and Stapledon. For that reason, I think many, perhaps most, ‘mainstream’ writers are not ultimately serious. HPL, in his terrified way, and Stapledon, in his (guardedly) optimistic way, were serious.”

  [←155]

  Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 106.

  [←156]

  First pu
blished in Astounding Stories in 1936; the definitive “restored” text is in S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, eds., The Shadow Out of Time: The Corrected Text, 2nd ed. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003).

  [←157]

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmicism%20/%20cite_ref-1

  [←158]

  Although Wikipedia, op. cit., says “H. P. Lovecraft thought of himself as neither a pessimist nor an optimist but rather an ‘indifferentist,’” but without any cited proof.

  [←159]

  Olaf Stapledon, The Flames—A Fantasy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1947).

  [←160]

  First published in 1931, the definitive text appears in S. T. Joshi, ed. The Dunwich Horror and Others, 9th corrected ed. (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House). Graham Harmon, in his Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012), disagrees with my designation “masterpiece,” finding it an interestingly flawed work.

  [←161]

  “Thos” of course is the common abbreviation of Thomas, at least on tea box labels and shop signs in Old Blighty, but we are not given any clue as to whether it is pronounced “those” or “thoz” or indeed just rather pointlessly “Thomas.” If we had to read it more than a few times this would be quite irritating to those of us that enjoy listening to our own inner voice.

  [←162]

  “Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.”—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945). See “It’s all on account of the War” by Christopher Hitchens (The Guardian, Friday, September 26, 2008), which itself reminds us nostalgically of viewing the Granada TV series on PBS in the ’80s, where William F. Buckley, their tame “conservative” was pressed into service to explain why normal people didn’t just punch affected twats like Sebastian, to say nothing of Anthony B-b-blanche. Today, of course, Buckley would have some ’splaining to do himself; looking back on his famous dust-up with Gore Vidal, over a decade before, it’s remarkable how Buckley has so absorbed the Anglophile as to look like he has his own teddy bear under the chair, while the home-grown, proudly American Vidal seems to affect the same taciturn amusement John Wayne might greet an assault by Wally Cox. Buckley’s “I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered” is straight out of the boy-manliness world of Stalky & Co. On the non-Negroid manliness of the real Right, see my The Homo and the Negro.

  [←163]

  One thing that keeps amusing me about Bertie is his umbrage-taking when, as frequently happens, some more conventional character, an aunt or fiancée’s father, starts spreading around their opinion that he’s balmy. See, for instance, Thank You, Jeeves (1934), which also includes some wonderful references throughout to “nigger minstrels” and blackface—which Bertie of course winds up sporting—for outrage at which on Amazon I am still awaiting. Anyway, 1934 is an interesting date for this kind of foolishness, as it has been said that Hitler underestimated the Brits due to having formed his impression of them from Wodehouse books. No wonder the Nazis thought Wodehouse would make an excellent propagandist. Stephen Fry, himself a big old poofter, deals with the Wodehouse “collaborationist” nonsense in his introduction to What Ho!: The Best of P. G. Wodehouse (New York: Penguin, 1981); Fry of course played Jeeves on the BBC series, with Bertie essayed by Hugh Laurie, best known to Americans as quite balmy Dr. House—viz, Holmes, as in Sherlock, another Victorian bachelor living with a nanny and an old chum, Dr. Watson, who has old school friends with names like “Stinky.”

  [←164]

  http://www.waggish.org/2003/the-flames-olaf-stapledon/

  [←165]

  I can find no evidence that Stapledon had ever read or even heard of Lovecraft; he even claimed that he had never read any of Wells other than The Time Machine. As for Lovecraft, “H. P. Lovecraft held the book in very high regard (though he did not say whether it influenced any of his own stories), saying in a 1936 letter to Fritz Leiber ‘no one ought to miss reading W. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. . . . Probably you have read it. If not, make a bee line for library or bookstall!,’” and in another 1936 letter to Leiber “I’m glad to hear of your perusal of Last and First Men—a volume which to my mind forms the greatest of all achievements in the field that Master Ackerman would denominate ‘scientifiction.’ Its scope is dizzying—and despite a somewhat disproportionate acceleration of the tempo toward the end, and a few scientific inferences which might legitimately be challenged, it remains a thing of unparalleled power. As you say, it has the truly basic quality of a myth, and some of the episodes are of matchless poignancy and dramatic intensity.” Finally, in a 1937 letter to Arthur Widner he said “I don’t care for science fiction of the sort published in cheap magazines. There’s no vitality in it—merely dry theories tacked on to shallow, unreal, insincere juvenile adventure stories. But I do like the few real masterpieces in the field—certain of H. G. Wells’s novels, S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below, & that marvelous piece of imagination by W. Olaf Stapledon, Last & First Men” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_ and_First_Men

  #Influences_on_other_writers).

  [←166]

  Reviewing Leslie A. Fiedler’s Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided (Oxford, 1983), Robert Philmus says that “As Fiedler demonstrates, Stapledon was very much a product of the 1930s, embracing a set of leftist attitudes that were common to many other ‘Oxbridge-educated sons of the English upper classes’” (http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/ review_essays/philm32.htm). According to Gregory Benford, “[Stapledon’s] Marxism, which remained his only irrational faith throughout his life, told him that surely the United States could never be a positive influence,” in Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Gollancz Books, 1999), p. x.

  [←167]

  Stapledon’s description of the flames awakening in the bitter cold of some planet reminds one of Lovecraft’s sympathy for the members of the Ancient Race awakening in the howling Arctic winds when thawed out in “At the Mountains of Madness.”

  [←168]

  Kasper Gutman: “Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously, unless you keep in practice.”—The Maltese Falcon.

  [←169]

  Jonathan Bowden, “Sarban’s The Sound of his Horn,” in his Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature, ed. Greg Johnson (Counter-Currents, 2013).

  [←170]

  Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1997), Chapters 28 and 37. Both remarks are put in the impudent mouths of Judaics, one a concert promoter, the other a private scholar of hyper-conservative views, based perhaps on Leo Strauss. Mann apologizes in both cases for presenting such unflattering portraits of a people he professes to otherwise find admirable. Le pauvre Mann! He taught us, malgre lui, that the Judaic is always on both sides of every issue!

  [←171]

  “Karajan on the music of today,” interview, Stereo Review, 1963, http://www.overgrownpath.com/2008/09/karajan-on-boulez-stockhausen-and.html. Karajan falls victim here to the myth of “natural rhythm.” Actually, “swing” doesn’t involve metronomic rigidity but rather a kind of syncopation; Armstrong invented it himself, and later had to teach it to Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, which was reputed to be the finest in Harlem. Later, Detroit techno legend Carl Craig returned Karajan’s compliment: “Kraftwerk were so stiff, they were funky.”

  [←172]

  To anticipate, is it not interesting that Wagner fits right in with globalist imperialism, the destruction of a traditional society, and ultimate ignominious defeat? And that the Colonel’s antics are greeting with big grins by the Negroes riding along?

  [←173]


  Julius Evola: Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2003), Chapter 23, “Modern Music and Jazz.”

  [←174]

  Daniélou was the only first generation Traditionalist to actually live for decades in an actual Traditional setting—rural India, far from the Raj or Gandhi. When he encountered the works of his fellow Frenchman Guénon, he gave them his approval, on the basis of the fearsome amount of traditional Hindu sciences he had learned, by memorization, from authentic pandits, not, as with every later Traditionalist, vice versa.

  [←175]

  See his Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), first published in India in 1943.

  [←176]

  Nova Express (New York: Grove Press, 1992), p. 7.

  [←177]

  This is the advantage of the Gesamtkunstwerk or, as we would say today, the full multi-media experience. Tolkien has recently acquired the similar benefit of having his books, which I confess to having never found readable, turned into easily digestible films, the Gesamtkunstwerke of our age. On the LOTR films, and movies as the Gesamtkunstwerke of our age generally, see Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies; ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012). If my confession of Tolkien’s unreadability sounds blasphemous, I can adduce C. S. Lewis as a parallel—on hearing a colleague describe a new book called The Castle by this Kafka chap, he concluded it was a new, great Myth for our time and eagerly sought out a copy of the book, only to find the actual text to be quite a letdown.