Weird Tales – { feuilleton }

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

It’s the “S” word again. I said at the beginning of this month that I was looking forward to seeing where this interest led, and here we are. My recent reading has included Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women (1998), a comprehensive study that I’d dipped into in the past but hadn’t gone through properly until now. In the section devoted to activities since the 1960s Rosemont mentions a magazine, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, which she produced with her husband, Franklin Rosemont, as part of their work with the Chicago Surrealist Group. Arsenal had more of an erratic schedule than most magazines, managing four issues that appeared in 1970, 1973, 1976 and 1989. I really didn’t expect there to be copies of such an obscure publication available anywhere but, once again, the invaluable Internet Archive has scans of the first three issues.

Arsenal proves to be a curious mix of the kind of material you’d expect from a Surrealist publication—poetry, essays, drawings, collages, significant quotes—together with chunks of Marxist politics and Freudian business that seem to have strayed in from another magazine. The latter material isn’t so unwarranted, being a reflection of André Breton’s original concerns, but committed Marxists of whatever stripe have never had much time for Surrealist art-creation and game-playing, while Freud himself was nonplussed by Breton’s attempts to interest him in the activities of the Parisian Surrealists. Breton casts a long shadow here; the Rosemonts had met him in Paris in the mid-60s, and many of the articles (also their combative attitudes) have a Bretonian cast.

Elsewhere, Arsenal breaks new ground with a Surrealist appraisal of blues musicians, music being a form that Breton and Louis Aragon had dismissed in the 1920s as “too confusing” for incorporation into the Surrealist project. The magazine also reprints a couple of comic strips, including a page of Little Nemo in Slumberland which may be the first acknowledgement from inside Surrealism of Winsor McCay’s dream-worlds as Surrealist precursors. And after posting Breton’s musings about “The Great Transparent Ones” these mysterious beings surface once again. Not only the Great Transparent Ones but also HP Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones in a piece by Franklin Rosemont about the Cthulhu Mythos. Rosemont draws attention to the obvious similarity between the names of Breton and Lovecraft’s beings, while also noting Lovecraft’s prowess as a transcriber of dreams. In doing so he complains about Lovecraft circumscribing his imagination by resorting to the story structures of the pulp magazines. Lovecraft was never a member of any avant-garde literary circle, however, unlike Clark Ashton Smith, who also receives further mention in these pages; if it wasn’t for Weird Tales we never would have heard of HP Lovecraft and there wouldn’t be a Cthulhu Mythos. This fault-picking is typical of many other pieces in the magazine, the book reviews in particular where a kind of petulant bad temper is the predominant tone. You probably can’t expect much else from a magazine that names itself after a store of weapons but the cumulative effect makes it seem that the road to the Marvellous must be paved with razor blades and broken glass. To their credit, the editors did print in the third issue some of the negative reviews they received for the previous two, including the inevitable dismissals from hardline Communists. Despite all this I’d still like to see how things developed (or came to an end) in the fourth and final issue.

• Further reading: I Could Dream In French: An Interview With Penelope Rosemont.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• First Papers of Surrealism
• The original Cabaret Voltaire
• View: The Modern Magazine

Spellbinders in Suspense

Cover art by Harold Isen, 1967.

I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds again recently, after which I went looking for the contents list of the collection where I first read Daphne du Maurier’s story. The book in question, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense, is one of the many anthologies that used the director’s name to lure potential purchasers, even though Hitchcock didn’t choose any of the stories and didn’t write any of the introductory notes or mini essays that these volumes usually contain. Spellbinders in Suspense was first published in 1967, and is one of the few such collections to feature a story that relates to one of Hitchcock’s films, so it’s odd that Random House chose to depict a scene from Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game on the cover. The copy that I owned was a Fontana Lions paperback from 1974 which rectified this with a cover that certainly stimulated my interest; growing up in a seaside town I didn’t need much convincing about the viciousness of the common seagull. The book has two further Hitchcock connections via Roald Dahl’s The Man from the South, which had been dramatised in 1960 for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, a story by Psycho author Robert Bloch that first appeared in Weird Tales and which turns up in many anthologies.

Cover artist unknown, 1974.

I don’t know when I first saw The Birds but it must have preceded my reading of the book since I remember being surprised at how different du Maurier’s story was to the film. Hitchcock and screenwriter Evan Hunter kept the basic idea of inexplicable bird attacks but moved the location from Cornwall to northern California, retaining a single incident in the scene where a dead seagull is found on a doorstep. The page for Spellbinders in Suspense at the Hitchcock Zone—an excellent information resource—has some of the illustrations by Harold Isen that appeared in the hardback edition, including a drawing of yet more marauding seagulls.

If you want an idea of Hitchcock’s personal popularity and the power of the Hitchcock brand, look no further than the US poster for The Birds in which the director’s name is almost as large as the title (and much more prominent than those of the actors), while the man himself is also there to offer further enticement. Hitchcock was the first film director I became aware of by name, although when I was 10 or 11 I doubt I could have told you what it was that a film director actually did. The ubiquity of the Hitchcock brand made his presence unavoidable in the 1950s, 60s and 70s in a manner more usually reserved for film stars and pop stars; in addition to books, radio shows and the TV series there was Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which launched in 1956 and was still running 50 years later; also a long-playing record, Music To Be Murdered By, in which the director’s familiar drawl delivers snatches of black humour between each musical selection. In the book department, the Hitchcock Zone lists 127 Hitchcock-themed anthologies, many of which (like Spellbinders in Suspense) received multiple reprints. And those 127 volumes are just the collections. There’s also Robert Arthur’s mystery novels for younger readers, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators (1964–87), a 43-volume series in which a trio of Californian boys undertake investigations—many of them with a spooky flavour—whose outcome they report to Mr Hitchcock at the end of each story. I read the first few books in the series, also another story collection compiled by Robert Arthur, Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery (1962), a book which in its Puffin reprint gave me my first encounter with The Upper Berth, F. Marion Crawford’s frequently anthologised tale of clammy nautical horror. Ghostly Gallery was another illustrated collection, with scratchy drawings by Barry Wilkinson.

Cover art by Barry Wilkinson. The Puffin edition dates from 1967 but this edition has a decimal price which places it circa 1971.

The extension of the Hitchcock brand into books aimed at children is a curious thing when none of his films are intended for a young audience. My edition of Spellbinders in Suspense was published by a juvenile imprint yet all the stories are ostensibly adult fare. Children in Hitchcock’s cinema are either treated as a nuisance (the small boy who has his balloon burst by Bruno in Strangers on a Train) or end up in serious peril, as they do in The Birds, The Man Who Knew Too Much (kidnapped and threatened with murder), Strangers on a Train (an out-of-control merry-go-around), and, notoriously, in Sabotage, where another small boy is made to unwittingly carry a time-bomb that blows him and a busload of passengers to pieces. Strangers on a Train also reinforces the Hitchcock brand by showing Farley Granger’s character with one of the earliest anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Fireside Book of Suspense Stories, in the scenes on the train at the beginning of the film.

Product placement: Robert Walker and Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train (1951).

All of this retrospection has had me wondering whether Hitchcock might have been interested in adapting another Daphne du Maurier story, Don’t Look Now, since The Birds was his second adaptation after Rebecca. Supernatural stories turn up in the Hitchcock TV series, and there are several more anthologies like Ghostly Gallery yet the films mostly avoid the paranormal (although Vertigo toys with the idea for its first half hour or so). Nevertheless, the subject is given ambivalent treatment in du Maurier’s story which has other qualities that might have appealed. The story wasn’t published until late 1970, however, by which time Hitchcock was planning his return to London with Frenzy. And besides which, the film we have is more than adequate, as well as being a much more faithful adaptation than Melanie Daniels’ journey into avian nightmare.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Painted devils
• The poster art of Josef Vyletal
• The Magic Shop by HG Wells

Weekend links 663

Weird Tales celebrates its centenary this month (although the first issue was on the shelves in February, 1923). Thirty years later, one of the last issues from the initial run had Slime by Joseph Payne Brennan as the story featured on its cover. The magazine maintained a viscous consistency if nothing else. Tentacular art by RR Epperly.

• A big surprise in yesterday’s Bandcamp Friday was the announcement of Singularity, a new album by synth ensemble Node. Or new-ish since the previously unreleased recording is almost 30 years old:

Singularity is the legendary “lost” Node album. Recorded at the same time as their original sessions in 1994 this has DiN stalwart Dave Bessell join Buller & Flood alongside original member Gary Stout who was later replaced by Mel Wesson for the two DiN releases. Presented here for the first time, mastered to modern standards but otherwise untouched and in its original form and recorded to two track with no overdubs.

Node have never been very prolific—two decades separate their first album from their second—so this was very welcome. The new release includes a bonus addition of the 16-minute version of Terminus, one of their best pieces which has only been available previously on a scarce CD-single.

• Steven Watson at Print Mag on skeuomorphic magazine design that turns print into play. Now I want to design a book that fits inside a cassette box.

• RIP jazz giant Wayne Shorter, and David Lindley, co-founder of one of my favourite psychedelic groups, the incredible Kaleidoscope.

• S. Elizabeth at Unquiet Things on The Sensitive Plant, a poem by Percy Shelley illustrated by Charles Robinson.

• Christopher Parker at Smithsonian Magazine asks “Did Salvador Dalí paint this enigmatic artwork?” Yes, he did.

• Tangerine Dream in 1973 playing Atem live (with pre-recorded drums) on Spotlight, an Austrian TV show.

• New music: Mohanam by Shakti, and Area Code 601 by William Tyler & The Impossible Truth.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Bento boxes inspired by notable Japanese architecture.

• At Tentaclii: Ian Miller cover art for metal albums.

• Northern lights seen across the UK.

• New Blue Ooze (1970) by Kaleidoscope | Ooze Out And Away, Onehow (1986) by Harold Budd/Simon Raymonde/Robin Guthrie/Elizabeth Fraser | Ooze (1986) by 23 Skidoo

Weekend links 661

Zephyr (1970), a blacklight poster by Jupiter Rubin. Via.

• I wouldn’t usually expect Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique to be mentioned at Literary Hub for any reason, but there it is. Emily Temple recommends some of the best stories from a century of Weird Tales that you can read online.

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Gamut Inc, and The Last of Us, “a non-stop mix of ambient soundscapes, experimental electronics and modern classical music”.

• “…Yaggy believed that wonder was the helpmate of learning.” Sasha Archibald on Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Maps and Charts (1887/93).

Stylistically, Beardsley’s pictures for Salome are among his most derivative and original. In the sharpness of their lines and great swaths of black and white, we see the well-documented influences of Japanese woodcuts and Ancient Greek vase-painting. And yet, Beardsley’s work bridges these grand traditions of East and West with such fresh dynamism and taboo as to be undeniably, and ultimately definitionally, Nouveau.

Mirror and Window Both: The Brief Superabundance of Aubrey Beardsley by A. Natasha Joukovsky

• New music: Rhinog Fawr by Somatic Responses, and Sargo/Posidonia by Sleep Research Facility/Llyn Y Cwn.

• “Why is there such a voracious consumer appetite for miniature things?” asks Steven Heller.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Julio Cortázar Blow Up and other Stories (1967).

• At Unquiet Things: The Prolific Pioneering Pulp Art Of Ed Emshwiller.

• Random images from DJ Food’s desktop.

• Miniature Sun (1989) by XTC | Adventures In A Miniature Landscape (2009) by Belbury Poly | Miniature Magic (2020) by Plone

Painted devils

Alright, these devils are inked rather than painted, but the phrase is a memorable one from Macbeth which was also used by Robert Aickman as a title for one of his story collections.

The devils in question are the work of Thomas Bewick (1753–1858), an English engraver referred to twice in Casting the Runes by MR James. I was reminded of this recently after I’d watched the excellent film adaptation, Night of the Demon, and decided to reacquaint myself with its origin. In James’ story, Karswell, a vengeful occultist with a vague resemblance to Aleister Crowley, torments a man he’s cursed by reminding him of the escalating supernatural threat and its potentially fatal outcome. One of the warnings is as follows:

…two things came for him by post during those weeks, both with a London postmark, and addressed in a commercial hand. One was a woodcut of Bewick’s, roughly torn out of the page: one which shows a moonlit road and a man walking along it, followed by an awful demon creature. Under it were written the lines out of the “Ancient Mariner” (which I suppose the cut illustrates) about one who, having once looked round—
walks on,

And turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

The Coleridge quote makes it into the film but there’s no mention of the woodcut, although we do see some other engravings of medieval devils. (Likewise, the ITV Playhouse adaptation from 1979 includes the quote but omits the woodcut.) Since the quote is a genuine one I was curious to know whether the Bewick picture also existed. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m equivocating, as usual, because I’m not entirely certain, but in an article from 2006 Tom Lubbock had this to say about Bewick and James:

Like Borges, James delights in the fictional but plausible work of literature. In Casting the Runes, he also contrives a fictional work of art. Though a contemporary of Coleridge, the engraver Thomas Bewick never made any woodcuts illustrating The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, nor do any of his works quite correspond to the one described in this passage. Still, it’s a good fake. Many of Bewick’s woodcuts have travellers. Some of them have moonlight and demons, too. You can see what James had in mind.

Continue reading “Painted devils”