{fantasy} – { feuilleton }

The Greenwood Faun

Arthur Machen isn’t usually considered to be a Decadent author even though it was in the Mauve Decade of the 1890s that he first established himself as a writer. Machen knew Oscar Wilde well enough to recount an anecdote in later life, and two of Machen’s earliest books were published with covers designed by Aubrey Beardsley. But Machen outlived Wilde and Beardsley and all the other writers and artists who expired prematurely around the turn of the century, while Machen’s 20th-century stories are now so enmeshed with the evolution of weird fiction that the world of the weird has claimed him as one of its own.

The Greenwood Faun is a novel by Nina Antonia which plays with both these phases of Arthur Machen’s career. This is a ghost story to some degree, in which the shade of Decadent poet Lionel Johnson wanders the streets of London in various stages of corporeality, as well as a tale of the dysfunctional Hartington Leacock-Jones family whose entanglements with a mysterious book—The Greenwood Faun by Lucian Taylor—comprise the main substance of the novel. Machen aficionados will recognise Lucian Taylor as being the central character of Machen’s semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams, a detail which makes Antonia’s story a novel about a novel from a novel.

It’s never entirely clear how the world of The Greenwood Faun manages to have Arthur Machen in it as the author of a novel called The Hill of Dreams while also containing the central character from that novel whose death has occurred before the story begins. The important element is Lucian Taylor’s unpublished book, discovered in manuscript form then printed in a limited edition (books like these are always limited editions) with faun-embossed boards and pages that exude a sylvan fragrance. Jorge Luis Borges would have enjoyed the intertextuality—he enjoyed inventing books, and also enjoyed Arthur Machen’s writing—which is paralleled to a small degree by Alan Moore’s The Great When in which we find another book from a Machen story—A London Walk by the Reverend Thomas Hampole—manifesting in the real world. (This isn’t to suggest any influence; Antonia’s book was first published in 2017.) The Greenwood Faun extends a fateful influence over the Hartington Leacock-Jones family, either chiming sympathetically with those receptive to its magical charm or repulsing those whose characters are blind to its visionary qualities. Roger, the oldest of the trio of siblings, is a worldly materialist who remains immune to the spell of the book, whereas Conrad, his dreamy younger brother, is a poète maudit in embryo, equally responsive to the lure of the novel and to the romantic seductions of the ghostly Lionel Johnson. The thorn in this world is Giles Gorse, a literary critic soon to be married to Violet, the brothers’ sister. Gorse has his own designs on The Greenwood Faun, seeing the novel as something he can republish as his own, if only the book would behave more like a book and less like an object endowed with magical life.

Nina Antonia’s novel is a treat for Decadent enthusiasts, littered with references and borrowings from the Mauve Decade, and to writers like Saki and Ronald Firbank who carried its spirit into the 20th century. Saki is a good match for Machen even though one of Saki’s most memorable characters, the waspish Clovis Sangrail, would be appalled to find himself repurposed here as one of the lower orders. The mysticism that surfaces now and then in Saki’s stories reaches a Machenesque peak in The Music on the Hill, another of those Edwardian tales in which Pan is encountered in the English countryside. The story is quoted in epigraph at the opening of The Greenwood Faun, and it’s to this vision of a pagan deity that the novel pays homage, not the annihilating terror of Machen’s Great God Pan.

The Greenwood Faun is published by Snuggly Books which also has a paperback edition of N by Arthur Machen, the story that concerns that other fateful volume, The London Walk.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Czech Machen
• Ibrahim Ineke’s The White People
• The White People
• The Bowmen by Arthur Machen
• Rex Ingram’s The Magician
• The Great God Pan

BWS and REH

Since Barry Windsor-Smith was absent from the previous post (or there in spirit via the pages of The Studio) I thought I’d post a few of his prints from the mid-70s. As I said in the Snaps piece, Smith and co. set up The Studio in order to concentrate on art that was creator-owned and free of the constraints they were forced to work under in the comics field. This didn’t mean that they completely abandoned the subjects which had made them popular artists. Barry Smith’s work for his own Gorblimey Press oscillated between pastiches of the 19th-century artists he admired—mainly Alphonse Mucha and the Pre-Raphaelites—and characters from the stories of Robert E. Howard, Conan in particular.

Solomon Kane (1975).

Smith’s work with Roy Thomas on the first run of Marvel’s Conan comics had given him access to a large audience of comic readers. Not all of these would have wanted to buy (or been able to afford) the Gorblimey Press run of signed and numbered prints but it made sense for Smith to offer some continuation with the previous phase of his career. My animus towards the Marvel comics format means I have little affection for the Smith and Thomas Conan comics. But it’s interesting watching Smith’s work there evolve within the restrictions of the production-line system when you know he’ll end up presenting a very different version of Conan and Howard’s other characters in his prints.

Bran Mak Morn (1975).

Most of the pieces here are from the Gorblimey Robert E. Howard portfolio, a collection of five prints presenting portraits of characters from Howard’s stories. Smith included three of these—Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and Thoth Amon—in his section of The Studio.

Thoth Amon (1975).

Continue reading “BWS and REH”

Snaps: The Studio tour, 1979

I’d been hoping that Malcolm Whitehead’s Snaps might be made public eventually, and here it is, a 25-minute film documenting the northern end of a British book-signing tour undertaken by three artists and their publisher in October 1979. Not only that, there’s also this shorter compilation of footage that didn’t make the final cut.

The artists were three of the four whose work is showcased in the book known as The Studio: Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson. The other member of the quartet, Barry Windsor-Smith, either missed the jaunt to Leeds and Manchester or avoided the tour altogether. The publisher was fellow artist Roger Dean whose success in 1975 with his own art book, Views, prompted him to turn his self-publishing imprint, Dragon’s Dream, into a bona fide publishing company. Views was followed by a short run of art books by prominent fantasy and science-fiction illustrators including Chris Foss, Ian Miller, Bruce Pennington and Syd Mead. The Studio was one of these titles, a collection of the art produced by the quartet working in the communal loft (“The Studio”) they established in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, a space intended for the production of more personal work than the comic art for which they were all known. Malcolm Whitehead’s film is unusual for documenting an event in sound and vision that usually wouldn’t be documented at all beyond a handful of photographs.

New Manchester Review, 1979: Michael Butterworth and David Britton in the Beardsley-papered Savoy office. Photo by Kevin Cummins.

The trail of circumstance that led to the creation of Snaps goes something like this: David Britton and Michael Butterworth were setting up Savoy Books in Manchester at around the same time that Roger Dean was expanding Dragon’s Dream. Both publishers had established co-production deals with Big O, a poster company, distributor and publisher of many pop-culture art books, notably the British edition of HR Giger’s Necronomicon. One of the first Savoy books in 1978 was James Cawthorn’s The Jewel in the Skull, an 80-page comic-strip adaptation of the novel by Michael Moorcock, which was a one-off co-production between Savoy and Big O. In addition to being a fledgling publisher, Savoy at this time also had a chain of bookshops in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, selling the usual 70s blend of genre and “cult” paperbacks, posters, comics (mainstream and underground), magazines, and so on. The main outlet was Bookchain on Peter Street, Manchester, which is where much of Snaps was filmed. Given the connection between Dragon’s Dream and Savoy I’d guess that Big O suggested the Savoy shops as venues for the Studio signing tour. Dave Britton would have been keen on this even without the extra business the signings generated for the shops. He’d bought some of the posters produced by Barry Smith’s Gorblimey Press, and always spoke highly of Smith’s Studio-era work. As for the film, Mike Butterworth was good friends with local film-maker Malcolm Whitehead, and it was he that commissioned “Malc” to document the signing. Whitehead is best known today for his subsequent involvement with Ikon, the video division of Factory Records. In addition to making Snaps, in 1979 he was also filming some of the live footage of Joy Division that’s been circulating ever since. He later directed a couple of the early New Order videos, and helped with the direction and editing of many video productions by other Factory artists and affiliated groups like The Fall and Cabaret Voltaire.

Snaps is a short and somewhat amateurish film but it’s a valuable record all the same. Anyone today can pull out their phone and record an event like this in high-definition and stereo sound; in the 1980s and 1990s you would have needed video equipment, but in the 1970s you had to have film, and 16mm film was an expensive professional product. Whitehead was using the cheaper option of Super-8 but he did at least manage to organise synchronised sound, something you don’t get on Pirate Tape, Derek Jarman’s Super-8 record of a William Burroughs signing. Mike Butterworth provides the stentorian voiceover for Snaps which he says he now regrets. Equally regrettable is his mispronunciation of the names “Paolo and Francesca” when he’s talking about Barry Smith’s art.

The film opens in Leeds for the first of the day’s two signings, a sequence I can’t say much about since I never visited the Leeds shop. The participants then pile into cars and drive across the Pennines where they pause for a brief Kraftwerk-soundtracked inspection of the landscape. The three Studio artists were Americans so all of this activity must have been very novel and interesting despite the drabness of the cities. The shots in Manchester are the ones I like to see since they capture Bookchain when the place was at its height of popularity. In 1979 I was still living in Blackpool and didn’t visit the shop until early in 1980 when I made a daytrip with friends to explore Manchester. By the time I moved to the city in 1982 Bookchain was set on its gradual decline although it managed to survive until the block of buildings it was part of was demolished in 1999. The basement area looks quite salubrious in the signing footage but I only knew it as a dank and unlit storage area with a toilet that belonged in a horror film. One thing that Whitehead didn’t capture was Dave Britton asking all the artists to sign the wall of the shop near the counter. I was in the place every Saturday when we were working on the Reverbstorm comics in the 1990s, and it was always a strange thing to see Roger Dean’s signature (plus dragon doodle) peeping out from behind rows of dusty shrinkwrapped books and magazines. You never see much discussion of this side of the city’s cultural history in writing about Manchester’s musical output. Yet without the Savoy shops, and other outlets like Percival’s and Grass Roots, Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith, Howard Devoto and others would have had a harder time finding the fuel for their imaginations.

In addition to being a record of a lost place, Snaps is also a record of lost people: Jones, Wrightson, and Britton are all no longer with us, while Malcolm Whitehead died in 2019. Whitehead’s involvement with Factory Records is documented in a scattering of posts at Cerysmatic. This one seems like a good place to start.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• David Britton, 1945–2020
• Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 1944–2011
• Roger Dean: artist and designer
• Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein

The art of Helmut Wenske

A Tab in the Ocean (1972) by Nektar.

This is another post in which I refer to Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (Thames & Hudson, 1978) as a source of discovery. Rottensteiner is Austrian which no doubt explains why his study of fantasy and horror in art and fiction had a broader reach than you would have found in a similar study from a British or American editor. Some of the writers whose work he discusses—Stefan Grabiński, for example—hadn’t been translated into English at that time. Among the artists whose work appeared as illustration Helmut Wenske was one of several whose paintings were seldom seen in Anglophone publications, although a few album covers that featured Wenske art—those for Nektar in particular—were a common sight in British record shops in the 1970s.

Remember The Future (1973) by Nektar.

Wenske is a German artist with a penchant for Dalí-like Surrealism that might have been strained through a psychotropic filter. Most of his work in the 1970s was as an album cover designer for the Bellaphon label, and most of those covers are designs rather than paintings. There are a number of book covers, however, some of which are recycled from his album covers. From 1971 to 1975 Wenske painted the covers for a series from Insel Verlag, “Phantastische Wirklichkeit: Science Fiction der Welt”, a collection of reprints edited by Franz Rottensteiner. Wenske’s ISFDB credits list a few horror covers along with these, a small percentage of which are Lovecraft-related. In the past I’ve drawn attention to many different Lovecraft illustrators but Wenkse is one of a small number of these to have also written Lovecraftian fiction of his own (Die Krypta von Shaggay’h, 1974). He enjoys the work he’s being asked to illustrate, in other words, which isn’t something you can always expect from illustrators.

Electric Silence (1974) by Dzyan.

The covers below aren’t the best quality but better copies have proved hard to find. For those who’d like to see more Wenske art there’s at least one German catalogue that collects his work from the early 70s on.

Horizonte (1977) by PSI.

Continue reading “The art of Helmut Wenske”

Rhino Head

A new book arrived in the post this week. Rhino Head is a collection of words (in both German and English) by Carlos Atanes and drawings by Jan van Rijn which describes itself thus:

This illustrated fantastical narrative consists of 21 chapters and features short, self-contained stories told from shifting narrative and temporal perspectives. It is a collaboration between author/director Carlos Atanes and illustrator Jan van Rijn, and explores the realms of eroticism and magical realism.

What lies behind a simple fable about wolves and rabbits? An actress fleeing in terror from an underground film shoot on the slopes of Mount Fuji? A New Mexico scrap dealer serving coffee to two visitors from outer space? A fashion designer who believes she is being dreamed by a mythical figure? An antiques forger who discovers an old tale has come true? A female cult disrupting the cosmic order with terrifying rituals?

This interwoven web of stories includes a summons to a fictitious event, sunflowers acting as orgasmic energy batteries, rhino heads at the farthest reaches of the world, pornographic films projected inside the viewer’s mind, dolls transformed into women and women transformed into dolls – a constellation of strange intertwined incidents creating a hyperfable, moving beyond its individual characters because the meaning of the whole can only be revealed to each individual reader.

Having known Jan for some time—I contributed to the Genet-themed collection he put together in 2021—I was happy to write a foreword for his new publication. In books like this you tend to find the pictures acting solely as illustration but here there’s more of a dialogue going on between the different media. The drawings show you things the texts don’t provide, and vice versa.

Rhino Head doesn’t appear to be on sale just yet but anyone wanting further information should contact Kraut and Rubies.