It is the same tale in all the arts: the low comedian was always sure of a laugh if he cared to tumble over a pin; and the weakest murderer is sure of a certain amount of respectful attention if he will take the trouble to dismember his subject.
While Welsh author and newspaperman Arthur Machen is best known today for his weird and fantastic fiction, during his life he never restricted himself to any one narrow genre. A particular focus of his during the early-mid 1920s was true crime, which resulted in the publication of The Canning Wonder in 1925—a book-length non-fiction study of the disappearance of Elizabeth Canning in 1753. True crime inspired crime fiction, most notably “The Islington Mystery” (1927), which references the infamous case of “Dr.” Crippen‘s murder of his wife. Machen’s style in “The Islington Mystery” is not that of a thriller or a melodrama; it is told with sly humor and a certain jaded recognition as to what the public is looking for when it comes to crimes—lurid details, tawdry affairs, courtroom dramatics.
In 1958, “The Islington Mystery” was published in Spanish translation (as “El misterio de Islington”) within the pages of the Antología de cuentos de misterio y terror. The story was adapted into a screenplay by Luis Alcoriza de la Vega, who effectively localized the story: transposing the setting from London to Mexico, changing Mr. & Mrs. Boales to Señor and Señora Morales (played by Arturo de Córdova and Amparo Rivelles), and adding as elements and motivation the religiosity of Señora Morales and her denial of the sexual advances of her husband. Directed by Rogelio A. González, the result was the black-and-white masterpiece of Mexican cinema El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales (“The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales,” 1960).
“The Islington Mystery” is a sketch of a story, with the kind of dark humor and subtle suggestion of terrible things that Machen was known for; in the film adaptation, it becomes something else. Machen’s rather meandering opening is swept aside and two lives are put under the microscope. Machen’s original story is genially sardonic; written so that readers might sympathize with the murderer, to recognize and admire the tropes of the evidence being presented and disproved.
In the adaptation, the film is more dramatic, and a visual feast for the eyes, lingering on the skeletons and taxidermied animals for the morbid aspect they lend to the film. Raul Lavista’s score is likewise dramatic, with musical stingers like punctuation, yet here and there touched with the eerie. There is some wonderful cinematography, and unusual shots that are very Hitchcockian, making excellent play of light and shadow and unusual angles. While not a horror film or thriller, it borrows many of the tropes of such films, and the scene with a real animal carcass being processed, and the carefully-shot scene where he goes to work on her corpse are incredibly effective.
Where Machen can tell in a few words that “Mrs Boale was a tartar and a scold,” in the film they have to show it—and in doing so they add depth to the relationship, and to the character of Mrs. Morales, though she still does not come across as sympathetic. Quite the opposite; the leads have a wonderful chemistry, with Arturo de Córdova suffering with every smile, and Amparo Rivelles playing the cruel bitch, the prude, gossip, scold, and martyr-in-her-own-mind to the hilt. It is not a feminist portrayal by any stretch, and a contemporary remake might give Señor Morales more obvious flaws, but it is true to Machen’s intent: the audience is meant to sympathize with the long-suffering husband who is tortured and embarrassed by his wife in any number of ways, rather than the long-suffering wife whose troubles seem to be mostly in her head or of her own making.
Women have died for far less in films, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that for all that Señor Morales was put upon by his wife, she was ultimately the victim and he the murderer. Divorce or abandonment might not have been options that she sanctioned, but they were at least options. Nor was it a crime of passion, but a coldly deliberate and calculated affair—right down to the disposal of her corpse.
There is a great deal of dark humor in the script, but also deeper psychology than in Machen’s book. Señor Morales’ soliloquy to the skeleton could have made a fantastic scene on stage, as would his final confession, with him savoring every word as the priest chokes on his own bile. If it isn’t Shakespeare, it is as revealing and self-serving as any murderer’s speech, blaming the victim for driving him to do it, and turning the sanctimoniousness of his tormentor, the priest, against himself. The latter part of the film is a courtroom drama, and the minor character actors, each with their brief parts to play, are fantastic.
In Machen’s story, the guilt of Mr. Boales is never expressed explicitly, it is left as an open question—the “mystery” of “The Islington Mystery”—and Boales goes on to what may be a happier marriage. In El Esqueleto de la Señora Moralesthe guilt is explicit, and the film ends in a flourish with a final dramatic irony.
There are painfully few adaptations of Machen’s fiction to film, but it cannot be argued that El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales is the best so far, if not in absolute accuracy, then in being a wonderful film as enjoyable today as it was when it was released.
Historical Antisemitism Warning Some quotes in this article contain antisemitic sentiments from translations of stories written in the 1920s. These quotes are included as part of a discussion of the historical context of antisemitism in relation to weird fiction and Weird Tales. Reader discretion is advised.
The shortest tale, John Flanders’ Nude With a Dagger, was a peach. Let’s hear more from him.
The November 1934 issue of Weird Tales featured a cover by Margaret Brundage illustrating a scene from E. Hoffmann Price’s “Queen of the Lilin”; Robert E. Howard’s latest serial of Conan the Cimmerian, “The People of the Black Circle,” came to its conclusion; and familiar names like August Derleth, Dorothy Quick, Kirk Mashburn, Arlton Eadie, and Paul Ernst all made an appearance. A highlight for many readers was a reprint of “The Music of Erich Zann” by H. P. Lovecraft—and right before it, a new author, one John Flanders with the provocatively-titled “Nude with a Dagger.” Lovecraft must have seen the story, and probably read it, though he made no comment on it at that time. Yet it was not the last time John Flanders would appear in Weird Tales…and Lovecraft would take note of him.
Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (8 July 1887 – 17 September 1964) was a Belgian (Flemish) writer born in Ghent. His first book of weird fiction, Les Contes du Whisky (“Whisky Tales,” 1925) published under the pen-name Jean Ray garnered immediate praise; critic Gérard Harry dubbed him “the Belgian Edgar Allan Poe.” This literary fame was brief; de Kremer was arrested and convicted for embezzlement in 1926, and served two years in prison. On his release, de Kremer wrote to live in multiple languages and under many pseudonyms—weird fiction and detective stories in French as Jean Ray, boy’s adventure stories in Dutch as John Flanders, etc.
The United States possessed both a tremendous appetite for fiction and a considerable production capacity; millions of words were being written every month for pulp magazines in the United States in the 1930s, and some of those magazines were being distributed internationally, or repackaged and produced in localized versions, as sometimes happened in the United Kingdom and Canada. Translations both into and out of English also occurred; a savvy pulp writer who sold only the North American serial rights to a story could have their agent sell the story to international markets. The payments for translation rights were often less than the original sale, but the same story could be sold multiple times to different language markets and make a decent profit. The same was true, to a smaller extent, for stories translated into English for the pulp market. The only trick was finding a pulp willing to pay for them.
Weird Tales represented an unusually approachable market for non-English fantastic fiction. Fantasies and exotica translated into English was nothing new; the 1,001 Nights filtered into English originally from French editions, and Greek and Roman ghost stories would be familiar to Classics students. In his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” H. P. Lovecraft noted the fame of certain German and French writers of the weird whose work had filtered into English translation, as well as Lafcadio Hearn whose Kwaidan (1904) had helped to popularize Japanese ghost stories and folk tales. Weird Tales had included occasional translations from as early as 1923, under Edwin Baird, and editor Farnsworth Wright continued the practice—not always regularly, but occasionally. This included works like “Fioraccio” (WT Oct 1934) by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani and “The Violet Death” (WT Jul 1935) by Gustav Meyrink…and de Kremer, aka Jean Ray, aka John Flanders.
English-language readers first encountered Jean Ray’s fiction in the 1930s, when Roy Temple House, the founding editor of Books Abroad, translated seven stroeis fro the American pulp magazines Weird Tales, Terror Tales, and Dime Mystery. These works all appeared under the Flanders pseudonym. […] House translated other authors from French and German for Weird Tales during the mid-1930s, most notably Gustav Meyrink, but Jean Ray’s ales appear to have dominated his efforts for the pulps. These early translations of the author’s work are competent and flow smoothly. House tok some liberties with his source material: he made significant changes in at least one case, and the titles are often complete different, though to what extant these English titles were his doing or the results of editorial decisions is unclear. His versions are faithful to the overall content, however, if not always down to the level of the sentence or word. A more incisive criticism might be that House did not choose the best of Jean Ray’s material in print by that point, though perhaps not all of it was available to him.
It was in these translated stories in Weird Tales in the mid-1930s that Lovecraft got his only taste of Jean Ray’s work—and even filtered through Roy Temple House’s translation and Farnsworth Wright’s editing, he found them worth commenting on, at least in passing. For fans of Lovecraft or Ray, it is worth considering each of these translations in turn.
The old money-lender bumped into a weird problem that all his hardness could not penetrate.
Weird Tales Epigraph
This story first appeared in Les contes du whisky (1925) under the title “Le Tableaux” (“The Portrait”). Scott Nicolay noted that Jean Ray’s collections work on themes, which are often lost when stories are taken out of that context. In this case, the tale of a pawnbroker and the dead man’s vengeance echoes several other tales in the same book, variations on a theme of supernatural comeuppance. The thrust of the plot is well-worn; Lovecraft assayed something thematically similar in “In the Vault” (1925), and usurers and pawnbrokers are familiar villains from Shakespeare’s Shylock on down. The degree to which translators can take liberties with the original might be glimpsed by comparing two translations:
Gryde chuckled. Having noticed me, he motioned for me to examine a medium-sized canvas standing in the library. I had a moment of astonishment and admiration. I had never seen anything so beautiful before.
It was a large figure of a nude man, godlike in beauty, approaching from some far-off realm of clouds and distant thunderstorms, of night and flames.
Gryde sneered. When he noticed me, he called my attention to a moderately large painting which stood against his bookcase. When I caught sight of it, I started with surprize and admiration. It seemed to me that I had never seen anything so perfect.
It was a life-sized nude, a man as handsome as a god, standing out against a vague, cloudy background, a background of tempest, night and flame.
“The Portrait,” trans. Scott Nicolay, Whiskey Tales144
In his notes to the translation, Nicolay notes the provocativeness of the title, and suggests a “bait-and-switch,” a shock to readers expecting a female nude. What strikes me, however, is the last part of the title—”with a dagger” is more than a slight foreshadowing of the story’s end, almost giving the game away, as happened when H. P. Lovecraft’s “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” was published in its pages as “The White Ape.” Weird Tales had a habit of “spoiling” stories a bit in this way, which as much as anything suggests that editor Farnsworth Wright may have had a hand in the title.
Lovecraft never referred to this tale in any of his published letters, though he could hardly have missed it. Weird Tales readers seemed divided on it, with one reader noting it “falls into the class of the stale plot”; another simply called it “rank.” In truth it probably isn’t that bad, but as a small and homely tale of spectral vengeance, it is a little too familiar in outline and bereft of style to have much impact on veteran Weird Tales readers.
The tale of a ghastly horror that stalked at night through the cemetery—a blood-chilling story of the Undead
Weird Tales Epigraph
“Le gardien du cimetière” (“The Cemetery Guard”) first appeared in abridged form in Ciné (30 Nov 1919), the complete version in Le journal de Gand (3 Aug 1920), at which journal Ray would be part of the editorial staff in the 1920s, and it was included in Les contes du whisky. Once again, Weird Tales does not go for subtlety: the title, opening illustration, and epigraph all more than hint at the nature of the story and the eponymous duchess. Yet for all that, like many of Jean Ray’s other stories in Whiskey Tales, while the subject matter isn’t terribly original, there is a charm in the manner of the telling, and the manner of the ending fits well with similar stories in Weird Tales. Most of the comments in the Eyrie concerning this issue are taken up with Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and the sensational debut of C. L. Moore, but reader Fred Anger wrote:
John Flanders’ The Graveyard Duchess was next in line; despite its briefness, it was well written, and the hackneyed vampire plot was given a new twist. More from Flanders.
Another reader who enjoyed “The Graveyard Duchess” was H. P. Lovecraft:
The Derleth-Schorer & Byrne stories are both good of their kind, while “The Graveyard Duchess” is really excellent.
While Lovecraft was not over-fond of vampire tales, he did appreciate those that approached the old idea from a different angle, like “The Canal” (1927) by Everil Worrell. In that respect, “The Graveyard Duchess” as it develops is almost a psychological horror tale until the end, and in the manner of its narration—a frame-story of explaining matters to the authorities—it shares the same basic approach that Lovecraft would take in stories like “The Statement of Randolph Carter” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Also like the latter story, the ending essentially involves emptying a revolver into an undead corpse.
The brevity of the story was probably a plus for Wright, who would often be stuck trying to fill the pages between longer stories.
A story of the grim and terrible conflict that took place one night in a pawnbroker’s shop
Weird Tales Epigraph
“Josuah Güllick, Prêteur sur gages” (“Josuah Güllick, Pawnbroker”) was first published in L’Ami due livre (15 Apr 1924); a slightly revised version appeared in Les contes du whisky the next year. This was the story most altered between its initial French version and the English translation that ran in Weird Tales; while readers might guess with the given name “Josuah” or “Joshua” who was depicted as a greedy pawnbroker was intended as a Jewish stereotype character, in the original there is no question of the antisemitism:
When whiskey unlocks the magnificent door to the City of Dreams, I envision myself in a room piled high with all the luxuries I have glimpsed in museums, in the displays of fine department stores, and pictures in fancy books. A huge fireplace surrounds me with its friendly glow, a club chair soothes my limbs, the heavenly liquor casts strange flames at the whims of crystal decanter, and upon the dark marble of a high, high chimney, bold letters are inscribed:
May God punish the Jews!
Alas, all my wealth is there, in the City of Mirages. My stove is more often red with rust than with flames, and the inscription of my contempt is not in golden letters in the beautiful polished stone of a fireplace, but in the aching flesh of my heart—and each night my prayer carries to God the cry of my singular hatred:
May God punish the Jews!
“”Josuah Güllick, Pawnbroker”,” trans. Scott Nicolay, Whiskey Tales144
Almost twenty years after the Dreyfus affair and eight years before Adolf Hitler would become Chancellor of Germany, antisemitism was still rife in Europe. This style of fantastic tale that centers around prejudice wasn’t unknown in French-language literature at the time; Black Magic (1929) by Paul Morand being another example focused more on anti-Black prejudice and stereotypes. The surprise is not that these words were written as much as that somewhere between Ghent and Chicago, where Weird Tales had its offices, someone had the good sense to strike out these two passages and every other overt bit of antisemitism in the story. There were other, smaller changes to the story, too. Originally the gem set in the ring is an “Inca jewel”; presumably “Aztec” had a bit more familiarity and cachet, and so it became the new title, taking further attention away from the original subject.
Without those passages, the story turns from an explicitly antisemitic morality play to a more generalized anti-usury story—very much in the vein of “Nude with a Dagger.” Readers gave it faint praise, noting “The Aztec Ring was very good of its type.” Lovecraft was more blunt:
“The Aztec Ring” & “The Man Who Could Not Go Home” are routine stuff.
Lovecraft, who increasingly copied portions of his letters to multiple correspondents to help deal with his massive correspondence, said the same thing to Emil Petaja (LWP429). It is perhaps worth noting that this was the second time Jean Ray and Lovecraft appeared together in Weird Tales though neither under their real name: Lovecraft was represented by “Out of the Æons” as by Hazel Heald.
“Le Dernier Voyageur” (“The Last Guest” or “The Last Traveller”) was first published in La Revue Belge (1 May 1929), and then republished in the collection La croisière des ombres: Histoires hantées de terre et de mer (“The Shadow Cruise: Haunted Tales of Sea and Air,” 1932). These were the stories that came out of Jean Ray’s two years of incarceration, where his mind could roam free, even if his body could not. As with Whisky Tales, the collection has a theme that works better together, one story dovetailing with another, than apart. In truth, the stories in La croisière des ombres verge much more closely on the kind of fiction that William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood would write than the earlier stories of supernatural vengeance and comeuppance; it would have been fascinating to get Lovecraft’s comments on Jean Ray’s “The Mainz Psalter”—but instead, the last tale of John Flanders that Lovecraft read was “The Mystery of the Last Guest.”
In the original French, there is a certain playfulness and precision of language that is lost; set as it is in an English seaside resort, some of the original lines were in English, and the names like Buttercup and Chickenbread are, as Nicolay points out, very Dickensian. Like “The Graveyard Duchess,” the horror is initially very much psychological rather than supernatural, only at the end does Ray leave some evidence to suggest the unseen reality. Unlike that earlier tale, his development of the plot is slower and more careful, the tension building steadily to a revelation …and then a kind of afterthought or meditation. It is without question the weirdest of the four John Flanders stories, and even in House’s translation probably scans the best. Readers of Weird Tales appear to agree when they wrote:
The Mystery of the Last Guest left me all goose-pimples. Flanders is always good. […]
The Mystery of the Last Guest by John Flanders is an excellent tale of a dreadful menace, which is suggested, making the story extra creepy. […] My selections for first, second, and third places are, respectively, The Mystery of the Last Guest, The Cold Grey God, and In a Graveyard.
Despite the accolades, the praise for Flanders was entirely overshadowed by praise for C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other popular and prolific writers. While Farnsworth Wright wouldn’t give up on using the occasional translation in Weird Tales, the experiment with John Flanders seems to have run its course by the end of 1935. Whether this was a matter of cost or lack of reader response or both, no one can say now. It probably didn’t help that Jean Ray happened to hit the page at the same time as startling new talents like C. L. Moore.
The first note Lovecraft received on “The Mystery of the Last Guest” came from Price:
In my hasty critique of WT shorts, I overlooked John Flanders’ story—I hereby make an amendment of the blanket indictment. His drawing of the characters was quite delightful and the ending—striking, when it got under one’s skin.
The Flanders story is really quite notable—with some actually convincing atmospheric touches. I’ve seen fairly good stuff of his before—especially a yarn called “The Graveyard Duchess.”
W T of late has been lousy. “Vulthoom” & the Bloch item only decent Sept. features, & Oct. saved only by “Cold Grey God” & a tale by one John Flanders.
W T is rather lousy of late. In the Sept issue “Vulthoom” & “Shambler form the Stars” barely save it from being a total loss, while “Cold Grey God” & “Last Guest” perform a similar service fro the Oct. number.
Oct. W T certainly beat the Sept. issue. I liked the Flanders tale exceedingly, & believe the author will be worth watching. He had another good thing some months ago—“The Graveyard Duchess.”
The pithy comments on the contents of Weird Tales were typical of Lovcraft’s letters; he rarely went into great detail about the stories he enjoyed or why he enjoyed the, although those occasional discussions are a real treat. In the case of John Flanders, he appears to have made enough of an impression to have been more than a blip on Lovecraft’s radar—but there would, sadly, simply be nothing more forthcoming from John Flanders in Weird Tales.
Dime Magazine and Terror Tales
Jean Ray had three other stories published in American pulps during this period:
“A Night in Camberwell,” Terror Tales (Sep 1934): “La nuit de Camberwall” first appeared in L’Ami du Livre (15 Nov 1923), collected in Les contes du whisky. A noir-esque vignette with no supernatural element.
“If Thy Right Hand Offends Thee,” Terror Tales (Nov 1934): “La dette de Gumpelmeyer” (“Gumpelmeyer’s Debt”) first appeared in Le journal de Gand (11 Oct 1922), collected in Les contes du whisky. A Jewish jeweler accidentally cuts off a hand; guilt or something more weighs on him. An antisemitic parable-cum-conte cruel in line with Ray’s other stories of the period, but notable for the image of severed or disembodied hands that reoccurs in his work.
“The Broken Idol,” Dime Mystery Magazine (Jul 1935): “Le singe” (“The Monkey) first appeared in Le journal de Gand (18 Mar 1921), collected in Les contes du whisky. A collector has bought an ivory statue of Hanuman, but does not heed the warning and suffers the consequences. Of a piece with “The Aztec Ring,” minus the antisemitism.
Terror Tales and Dime Mystery Magazine were both entries into the “shudder pulps” or “weird menace”; they rarely dealt with supernatural or super-science threats, but often included stories of weird crimes, bondage, torture, sadism, and excessive violence and cruelty. They formed minor competitors to Weird Tales, which sometimes dabbled in publishing weird menace stories itself. Given that several of the tales in Les contes du whisky have no supernatural element, if Weird Tales rejected them then the weird menace pulps may have been the only likely market—or vice versa.
There are no comments about these stories in Lovecraft’s letters, and he generally didn’t take these magazines. However, Lovecraft claimed to have purchased the first (Sep 1934) issue of Terror Tales (ES2.655, LPS127, 326), so he probably did read at least “A Night in Camberwell.” This piece is unlikely to have raised Lovecraft’s appreciation for John Flanders.
Recommended Further Reading (in English)
While there are many excellent books collecting Jean Ray’s work, and critically analyzing his life and fiction, in French, Flemish, or German; sources in English tend to be more scarce. The best and most complete translations currently available is the six-volume series from Wakefield Press translated by Scott Nicolay, who also provides informative introductions and afterwords, beginning with Whiskey Talesand Cruise of Shadows.
Hubert Van Calenbergh’s “Jean Ray and the Belgian School of the Weird” was first printed in the (now scarce and expensive) My Own Private Spectres (1999, Midnight House), but was also published in Studies in Weird Fiction #24 which may be more accessible.
Those Virginia pictures probably came from some member of that Poetry Circle branch in Washington–whose personnel persistently & rather insanely address me as “Judge” because I judged a poetry contest of theirs six years ago.
According to census data, Florence Riley Radcliffe was born in January 1870, the first surviving child of Dr. Samuel J. Radcliffe and his wife Florence C. Radcliffe. She was joined by a little sister, Mary L., about four years later. We get only the barest outline of a life from the census data—Florence R. Radcliffe never married, her formal schooling stopped with the 8th grade, she lived all her life in Washington, D.C. with her parents and her sister, having never married. The 1900 census lists her occupation as “Author”; 1910 working in accounting for some government office; 1920 a telephone operator at a bank; by 1930 the 60-year-old Florence is listed as a “nail cutter.”
Beyond the census data, we know one thing for certain: Florence R. Radcliffe was a poet. She was a member of the American and British Poetry Societies, and the American Poetry Circle. Her first encounter with H. P. Lovecraft came in 1924, when Lovecraft served as judge for a poetry contest held by the League of American Penwomen. Four years after that contest, Lovecraft received a letter from one of the participants, Elizabeth Toldridge of Washington, D.C., sparking a correspondence that would last the rest of his life. In 1929, we get the first mention of Toldridge’s fellow Washingtonian and American Poetry Circle member Florence R. Radcliffe:
Incidentally, I trust that Miss Radcliffe will persevere in her idea of having a book, & that she will entrust its publishing to the able & conscientious W. Paul Cook. You might shew her the two Recluse Press products sent under separate cover—fair specimens (except for one hideous misprint in the Loveman book, due to an 11th hour text change & not really Cook’s fault) of Athol typography & workmanship. As to my ‘not being interested in her poetry’—I’m sure here’s nothing in the two printed specimens I ahve seen to warrant such a prophecy. I would be glad to see more, if you have any easily transmissible copies; though as I have previously pointed out, I am no authority whose verdict can be considered of any ultimate value.
At the time, W. Paul Cook of Athol, Mass. published a few small works through his Recluse Press, including The Hermaphrodite (1926) by Samuel Loveman; Cook was also busy with a small edition of Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, but this particular endeavor would end in disarray—not that Lovecraft knew that at the time. He was simply trying to promote his friend’s printing business.
In the beginning, neither Lovecraft nor Radcliffe wrote to one another directly, so their first correspondence happened through the medium of his letters to Toldridge. We can get a sense of their correspondence during this period through passages like this one:
Oh, yes—& you need not hesitate to send specimens of Miſs Radcliffe’s work when you have some on hand; although as always, I must not be regarded as any supreme authority or final arbiter of merit. If suggestions will assist, well & good—but I can’t guarantee the insight & acumen of my suggestions! Incidentally, I am sure that Miss R’s recent depreciation of all her work is based on modesty rather than on impersonal analysis. In the matter of the last line of “Love”, she is entirely in the right; for so far as I can see, the editor’s substitution produced a wholly false, & unintended, & peculiarly meaningless implication—i.e., an implication that the answer to life is the fact that he who love knows that answer! Puzzle—find the sense! In the original, the idea is clear—that love provides an answer to life because the process of loving provides a sense of the adequacy of living. In other words, the editor’s unwarranted liberty placed the substance of the last line in the position of being the answer referred to in the line preceding; whereas the poet’s intention was obviously to have it form the reason for the condition referred to in that preceding line. So much hinges on one apparently insignificant conjunction! But I have known errors in mere punctuation to produce almost equally great distortions of meaning.
The connection seems to have finally been made in 1929, when Radcliffe sent Lovecraft some of her poetry for review and comments. Very little of this correspondence survives; there are two letters from Radcliffe to Lovecraft and a handful of her poems listed in the inventory at Brown University in Providence. Lacking Lovecraft’s side of the correspondence, we have to rely on his letters to Toldridge with their small asides about her friend. For example:
I appreciated yours of the 27th with enclosures, & am glad you found the “Brick Row” lines worth reading. If the thing appears in print* I’ll send a pair of copeis for you & Miſs Radcliffe.
This was “The East India Brick Row,” a poem Lovecraft composed on the demolition of several old brick warehouses in Providence, which was published in the local paper. It was probably this poem which caused Radcliffe to write back:
Dear Judge Lovecraft;
Thank you so much for the copy of your delightful poem – it expresses so beautifully all that I would like to say.
A follow-up to this exchange on the demise of old landmarks in the name of progress is recorded in Lovecraft’s letters to Toldridge:
Not long ago I received from her a magazine with a very appealing poem about the Great Falls of the Potomac, which I believe are imperilled by some miserable mechanical water-power project.
A series of dams had been proposed along the Potomac River to generate hydroelectric power and for flood control; they never came to pass, and both Radcliffe and Lovecraft would likely be happy to know that the natural features were eventually protected as part of Great Falls National Park. Radcliffe wrote a poem “Sanctuary” on the beauty of the Great Falls, which was included in her letter dated 6 Apr 1930.
Florence Radcliffe was 60 years old in 1930, and had been working in some form for her entire adult life. Reading between the lines a little, by now she was probably on the verge of retirement, if not from lack of work opportunities than from ill-health:
I’m sorry, likewise, to learn that Miss Radcliffe’s health continues to be so unsatisfactory.
The nature of the illness is undisclosed in Lovecraft’s letters, and the possibilities are too numerous to invite speculation. She was unwell, and Lovecraft gave his sympathy and continued to correspond with her, as he did with many older people. The primary topic, besides her health, seemed to be her ongoing desire to publish a book of her poetry. Lovecraft tried to help as best he could:
I am sorry likewise to hear of Miss Radcliffe’s continued indisposition, & hope that rest & interesting activities may bring about a decided improvement. In time I am sure that you & she can issue your respective collected verse, even though a resumption of Cook’s enterprises seems unfortunately unlikely. When in Vermont I shall inquire further into the conditions & prices of the Stepehn Daye Press—Orton’s venture, which I think I mentioned to both you & Miss R. Last week I returned Miss Radcliffe’s book of manuscripts for safety’s sake; since my room is likely to be upheaved by a wholesale cleaning during my absence, & I don’t want any important items to be lost or mislaid.
Vrest Orton was a friend of Lovecraft’s in Vermont. Ultimately, however, it appears none of Lovecraft’s suggestions for printers panned out in the end. The references to Radcliffe get fewer in his letters to Toldridge, so there is little data to go on. They must have still been in touch as late as 1934, because Radcliffe is listed among those correspondents to whom Lovecraft sent postcards on his trip to Nantucket (Collected Essays 5.267), and the final reference to her in his letters to Toldridge is in 1936.
In many ways, Florence Radcliffe’s letters to H. P. Lovecraft were the shadow of Elizabeth Toldridge’s own correspondence. While we can’t but guess at the true extant, she found in Lovecraft someone who encouraged and praised her poetry, who shared her appreciation for old landmarks, a sympathetic ear for her pains and praise for her small victories when a poem was placed or an honorable mention awarded. A small friendship via letters, but perhaps a light in the waning days of life.
It is an open secret that H. P. Lovecraft created the Mythos as a kind of literary game. Alongside the artificial mythology and geography he developed, Lovecraft would work in references to friends like Clark Ashton Smith and his creations of Tsathoggua and the Book of Eibon. In turn, Smith & others at Weird Tales would start to play the same game, working references to the Lovecraft Mythos into their own stories. Frank Belknap Long, Jr. and Robert Bloch would even include fictional representations of Lovecraft himself into the Mythos, as an in-joke. Writers like August Derleth and Manly Wade Wellman would go a step further—putting Lovecraft himself into their stories, alongside his fictional creations.
He wished that Lovecraft were alive to see and hear—Lovecraft knew so much about the legend of Other-People, from before human times, and how their behaviors and speech had trickled a little into the ken of the civilization known to the wakeaday world. De Grandin, too—a Frenchman, a scientist, and with the double practicality of his race and education. De Grandin would be interested to hear of all this later. Thunstone had no doubt that he would survive to tell de Grandin about it, over a bottle of wine at Huntington, New Jersey.
The idea had a bit of cachet in the 1940s, but in the ensuing six decades the idea that Lovecraft was really writing the truth and existed in the same continuity as his own fictional creations has become cliché. Yet part of the reason the idea remains so popular after so many decades is that Lovecraft’s own mythic image has become intimately entwined with his Mythos. The Old Gent from Providence has engrossed decades of fans and scholars, and his image—typically a somber face with a prognathous jaw, in a plain and unassuming dark suit without ornament, a bit like an undertaker—has become as indelible to Mythos-art as Cthulhu or the Necronomicon. Lovecraft is still in many ways the face of the Mythos, and as a character in his own right has appeared in many media, from fiction and poetry to comic books and film.
It is important to emphasize that there’s nothing inherently wrong with having H. P. Lovecraft as a character in a Mythos story, or pursuing the idea that Lovecraft was writing the truth as fiction. Many writers have done it, from Robert Bloch in his novel Strange Eons (1978) to Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows in Providence (2015). A cliché is not bad by itself, but with so many other examples to compare it against, the execution becomes all-important—does the author do anything new? Do they do it well?
In the case of Jasmine Jarvis and The Rise of the Great Old One, there are a couple of good ideas buried in the narrative, but the execution doesn’t really give them time to develop. The style of the story is very reminiscent of a creepypasta: short, unadorned, straightforward, largely a first-person narrative, and set in the contemporary period. There isn’t a lot of character development or a lot of characters; the lore isn’t especially deep, there is a strong element of random weirdness, and the Lovecraftian element is most strongly represented by a kind of general aesthetic of crawling tentacles and fish-faced cultists. This isn’t a sequel to any specific Mythos story as much as a story inspired by the very existence of Lovecraft and the Mythos.
So what kind of ideas are buried in there?
One evening, whilst browsing the Internet and flicking through HP Lovecraft books I had obtained from the local library, I noticed that Lovecraft had stopped writing for a period of about twelve months. My interest was piqued—why? No one can account for his whereabouts during this time,and when he finally returned to writing, it seemed he struggled to put his stories together.
In real life, Lovecraft’s letters provide an incredible record of his life and it’s unlikely you could squeeze a gap year in there. Of course, this isn’t real life, so that offers some interesting possibilities: if Lovecraft was recording truth as fiction, and if there was a missing year in his life, what was he up to during that chunk of missing time?
Unfortunately, length and format don’t really give The Rise of the Great Old One a chance to explore this fully. While the conceit of the plot is that Lovecraft was onto something, the point of view character is an unreliable narrator named Angus who is spilling his guts to a psychiatrist. The result is a story that feels more like a sketch of what could have been, with more evolution, an interesting novella. What we get instead is a narrative that is very full of Lovecraftian clichés, but doesn’t do enough new and interesting with those clichés to really elicit interest. It is a little too generically Lovecraftian, more devoted to the pop culture idea of what Lovecraftian is rather than in the sense of how Lovecraft and his contemporaries wrote it.
This is something that you tend to see a lot of these days, especially in relatively low-budget Lovecraftian cinema like H. P. Lovecraft’s Witch House (2021) or H. P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones(2020). Stories that are trying to invoke a Lovecraft, but what they’re aiming for is less the careful development of mood and ideas of cosmic insignificance and biological determinism that Lovecraft wrote, and more a generic idea of robed cultists, old grimoires, and tentacle monsters—the elements that were so easy to pastiche and have thus become synonymous with the Mythos for a lot of people who have absorbed their idea of what the Mythos is through other media instead of reading his stories and letters.
When you look at what world can accommodate not just the individual narratives of each weird entity, but all of them together, you’re moving past the stage of passive consumption. Like the ancient citizens on the streets of Rome, facing a bewildering array of divinities from across the known world with all of their stories and attributes, some conflicting, some paralleling one another closely…the shared universe can become richer, tying together disparate elements of their backstories, hinting at a more complex relationship with more stories waiting to be told. Then you get films like The Monster Squad (1987) and comics like Screamland(2008), works powered by something more than nostalgia and replaying the same classics.
While all the individual elements might be familiar, when you play them off against each other, something new emerges.
The Cthulhu Mythos already exists as a shared universe, and it has been remixed and crossed over with more traditional horror franchises and creations dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. Aquaman has fought Cthulhu. Sherlock Holmes has interacted the Mythos in dozens of stories and novels, including “A Study in Emerald” (1993) by Neil Gaiman. A Night in the Lonesome October (1993) by Roger Zelazny sees Holmes, the Cthulhu Mythos, and various Universal monsters play off against each other in the Game. In “From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6” (2005) by Caitlín R. Kiernan revisits “The Shadow over Innsmouth” by way of The Creature from the Black Lagoon(1954). Whether or not a horror/Mythos crossover succeeds is whether it transcends the formula of “X vs. Y”; whether it builds on its constituent elements to create something new and distinct.
“The One That Got Away” (2011) by Esther M. Friesner is that kind of story.
Damn it, it wasn’t fair! I went through just as much as that little blond chippie, and her big-shot showbiz pals knew it. Sure, they lost their star attraction, but what was stopping them from salvaging something from their losses by giving me a chance at the spitlight? I would’ve worn my native costume. I would’ve acted like I couldn’t speak a word of English so someone could pretend to translate while I recounted my terrible ordeal in his hairy clutches—even though I’d dodged those cltches pretty slickly, if I do say so myself. And if one of those puffed-up producers would’ve thought to scrape the pavement, salvage what was left of him, hire an army of taxidermists to pretty up the remains a bit, and stuck him back on stage, I would’ve screamed on cue like a champ at the results. Hell, I’ll bet I could’ve shrieked loud enough to make the audience believe—just for a moment—that he was still alive!
Friesner can’t come out and say things explicitly, because copyrights and trademarks are still owned by others, but the waltzing-around the subject is part of the charm of the narrative. The crossover is the premise; a nigh-forgotten character from a classic story dropped into an encounter with some Innsmouth sailors. What makes it work is the telling, and how Friesner develops the story. A young woman, late of Skull Island, left to her own devices in the United States of America during the Great Depression and Jim Crow has turned into a hardboiled woman of the world—and a surprisingly open-minded one.
Bat-winged and taloned, with what looked like an octopus boquet for a mouth, the creature reared out of the depths and strode toward me with eldritch lust in his fiery eyes.
The tone is flippant, and the story is a play on wits worthy of the fast-talking repartee in a noir film. It is the unexpected (one might say sacrilegious if either Lovecraft or King Kong is one of your sacred cows) lightness that makes the story work. There is a darkly comic Pollyanna aspect of the narrator as she compares the cultural rituals of Innsmouth and Skull Island with gallows humor and no hard feelings.
Two mythologies meeting in unexpected ways…but also ways that are oddly fitting. For those who like to explore the culture of Innsmouth, in works like Innsmouth (2019) by Megan James, it’s nice to see what happens when the sailors get out into the wider world and encounter folks from other cultures. It is all good fun.
up 8 p.m.—Read Mysteries of Udolpho—retire 9 a.m. Friday
H. P. Lovecraft’s 1925 diary, entry for 3 December, Collected Essays 5.173
Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns, And, as the portals open to receive me, Her voice, in sullen echoes through the courts, Tells of a nameless deed.
In 1764, Horace Walpole kicked off the Gothic novel craze with The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Thirty years later, Otranto would serve as the blueprint for Ann Radcliffe’s fourth novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance (1794). Radcliffe had begun her literary career in 1789 at age 25, first publishing anonymously, and then eventually using her own name as her novels grew in popularity and commanded higher prices from publishers. Immensely popular during her own life despite only publishing five novels in that time, Udolpho which would go on to rival Otranto as the archetypical Gothic novel, to the point of being satirized in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817).
To H. P. Lovecraft, Radcliffe was essential reading in the history of horror literature; although he did not first encounter her by reading the whole novel:
Belknap, having sharper eyes than his old Grandpa, picked up a book which I would have given much to have seen first—”Tales of Mystery”, composed of extracts from the most celebrated horror novelists of the 18th century—Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis, &c. He will later lend his prize to me—just as I am lending him my own prizes.
Tales of Mystery (1891) was an anthology edited by George Saintsbury collecting excerpts from the Gothic romances of Radcliffe (including bits of Udolpho), Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin. Frank Belknap Long, Jr., who had spied the book first at a bookstall during Lovecraft’s trip to New York, would later gift it to his friend as at Christmas 1922:
I’ve been eating up Gothick stuff lately—all the posterity of “Otranto”. Miss Reeves’ “Old English Baron” (1777) is infernally tame, but in damned good Georgian English. Radcliffe stuff is vastly—immeasurably—superior in interest & atmosphere, though the language is more stilted. (And yet beats Reynolds by a mile!) I’m reading that volume of selections which Little Belknap picked up right under his Old Grandpa’s nose at the shop in Vesey-Street, & which he magnanimously gave the poor old gentleman as a Christmas gift.
In 1925, now living in New York, Lovecraft was asked by W. Paul Cook to write the article that would become “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” While Lovecraft would learn relatively heavily on The Tale of Terror (1921) by Edith Birkhead for his section on Gothic novels, among the books we know he read was The Mysteries of Udolpho. He later noted that his friend, the bookseller Goerge Kirk, gave him a copy of Udolpho (LWP 180), and his diary entry for 9 May 1925includes the notation “GK call—Udolpho” (CE 5.158), which may be when he received his copy, although he didn’t devour the noel until December:
I waded through the whole of “Udolpho” last week, & am now on the hunt for Maturin’s “Melmoth”.
[…] all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary of wholly superior order—Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe’s visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her delightful landscape touches—always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, and never in close detail—as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of the characters.
Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parents and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle—the scheming nobleman Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant Annette; but finally, after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors—the abandoned wing where the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall—but is finally restored to security and happiness with her lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only the familiar material re-worked; but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs. Radcliffe’s characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent among those of her time.
It is easy to see both what Lovecraft would have enjoyed and deplored in Radcliffe’s Udolpho, which was the only complete novel of hers he had read at the time of writing. The moralistic tone of the story with its sappy ending and romances were largely anathema to his aesthetic style. Many characters, not least of them the heroine Emily, are prone to fainting and melodramatics, the story is peppered with bits of verse, quotes from Milton and Shakespeare, and some convoluted linguistic expressions typical of the period which probably earned a bemused smile from Lovecraft. Yet there are also many vivid descriptions hinting of terrible horrors and revelations to be made, of castles and battlements, and old family histories with their buried secrets.
For critical analysis, Lovecraft would have had The Tale of Terror, and it was from Birkhead that he probably drew his facts about Radcliffe’s life and her other novels, but his impressions appear to be his own. The note about her “insipid little poems” is interesting in particular because Radcliffe later wrote an essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), which Lovecraft apparently never read, where she wrote:
The wild attire, the look not of this earth, are essential traits of supernatural agents, working evil in the darkness of mystery. Whenever the poet’s witch condescends, according to the vulgar notion, to mingle mere ordinary mischief with her malignity, and to become familiar, she is ludicrous, and loses her power over the imagination; the illusion vanishes.
A sentiment that echoes some of Lovecraft’s sentiments in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and which he might well have appreciated. As it was, at the time Lovecraft had read only Udolpho and some excerpts from Radcliffe’s other novels, and his literary opinion was set on that…although it was sufficient that when August Derleth was looking for recommendations, he would write:
Incidentally—have you read other early horror work? If not, let me advise the following as worthy ingredients (if only for historical reasons) for any fantaisiste’s library:
Mysteries of Udolpho (1793) by Anne Radcliffe The Monk (1795) by Matthew Gregory Lewis
In other letters, Lovecraft gives a few more details on his private thoughts on Radcliffe and Udolpho, spurred in large part by a course on Gothic fiction that Donald Wandrei was taking:
As to “Melmoth”—of course it dags in places, like all the interminable novels of its time; but it seems to me to hold a certain convincing kinship with horrors beyond the veil which we find lacking in its predecessors—such as “Udolpho”, “The Monk”, &c.
You’re lucky to get hold of “The Romance of the Forest”—the only Radcliffian oeuvre which I’ve ever seen in toto is “Udolpho”, now being lent to Dwyer. Yes—her gentle melancholy is certainly both romantic & hydraulic!
Of the Goths, only Maturin had the sense of unholy outsideness developed to any considerable degree—you couldn’t bribe me to swallow all the sobbing Radcliffery which your course is forcing upon you. The few selections in an anthology by George Sainstbury are all I want—though I have read Udolpho through. (Just now, by the way, I’ve lent it to Dwyer.)
Dwyer is just forming the acquaintance of our gushing friend Mrs. Radcliffe through my copy of “Udolpho”, & expresses the opinion that she is unsurpassed in imparting horror to a frowning castle landscape. Cook is going to lend me “The Italian” shortly.
Your Radcliffian satiation is scarcely an encouraging emotion to confront me as I stand on the brink of “The Italian” & “The Romance of the Forest”—lent me by Cook—but I do not think I shall let it deter me from at least a skimming. The author of a standard treatise on supernatural horror in literature ought to read—as a matter of duty—one or two of the volumes he has analysed & appraised so sagely. You & Dwyer can work up an interesting controversy about the sombre & sentimental Mother Anne, for “Udolpho” had made him a shouting Radcliffe-fan of the first & foremost order. He is, of course, right so far as the sheer weaving of vague, terrible impressions of cyclopean mystery & imminent nightmare is concerned; & we ought not to let the peterings-out or the salt lakes of “poetic” sensibility deter us from giving credit where credit is due.
Lafcadio Hearn averred that Gothic cathedrals frightened him with their bulk and mystical design. They seemed to him about to rise from the ground. Of this quality of size-terror I fancy Mrs. Radcliffe is, as you say, the chief exponent. Certainly, it recurs throughout her work.
Lovecraft did eventually read Radcliffe’s novels The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Italian (1797), which were lent to him by W. Paul Cook in 1928, noting:
I have also read lately those old Radcliffe standbys—”The Italian” & “The Romance of the Forest”—neither of which is really weird according to my standard.
H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 20 Aug 1928, Essential Solitude 1.153
In truth, the supernatural element in Radcliffe’s novels was always a false one, like the ghosts and ghouls in the typical Scooby Doo episode, at the end the mask will come off and a rational explanation offered. Yet she showed great skill in the build-up of such terrors, and this is nowhere as prominent as in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Lovecraft, to his credit, appeared to recognize that Radcliffe had earned her place in the pantheon of weird fiction authors for her work:
Also—are you familiar with the so-called “Gothic” novels of the later 18th & early 19th centuries—Mrs. Radcliffe’s “Udolpho”, Lewis’s “Monk”, Maturin’s “Melmoth”, &c? Some years ago I wrote an article on the history of the weird tale, mentioning the titles of things which had particularly impressed me. If you’d like to see this as a guide to weird reading I might be able to dip up a duplicate to lend you.
It is difficult to say how much Lovecraft was influenced by The Mysteries of Udolpho; there is certainly a deliberate echo of the Gothic manse in “The Rats in the Walls,” which was written after he read the Saintsbury Tales of Mystery but before he read the full novel. It might be fair to say that Lovecraft’s study of the Gothics confirmed in him the lessons of what not to do. No fainting heroines, little to no romances, something more than drafty castles at work. Nor did Lovecraft follow Radcliffe in explaining away every mystery with a rational explanation:
“I perceive,” said Emily, smiling, “that all old mansions are haunted; I am lately come from a place of wonders; but unluckily, since I left it, I have heard almost all of them explained.”
The syntax of horror shifts through the years, decades, and centuries; in Lovecraft’s day, the old familiar terrors of Radcliffe’s Udolpho no longer held the same power as they did when they were fresh and new in the late 18th century—yet they were a part of the legacy of horror to which Lovecraft was an inheritor, and so too are both Radcliffe and Lovecraft part of the genealogy of horror fiction today, literary ancestors whose works have been often lampooned and satirized, adapted and criticized, but still read, still relevant to us today.
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
For ego and satyr, for lover and beloved;
ask to know for whom the heart beats, send to ask for whom the quickened pulse, bend to hear the hushed impassioned voice sobbing your name or mine in all the body’s rapture: or send to know for whom arms’ clasp, eyes’ love, the hot possessive mouth;
for lover and beloved, islandless man, of sea and land equally, of sky and stars, of heaven and hell— but never need to ask for whom the bell tolls; make each man’s answer to yourself: It tolls for me.
August Derleth, canto XIV of “Enigma: Variations on a Theme of Donne,” in Psyche(1953) 25
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, Meditation XVII in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes (1623)
August Derleth’s greatest fame today is as a publisher, co-founder of Arkham House in 1939 with Donald Wandrei. Derleth was also an editor and anthologist of note, and a writer of diverse works of fiction and nonfiction, from the quiet regional portrayals of his Sac Prairie Saga to the potboiler horrors of Weird Tales, from the delicately plotted pastiches of Solar Pons to young adult and juvenile fiction; in non-fiction his works included everything from a book on Wisconsin’s rivers to newspaper columns on his nature walks to his biography of Henry David Thoreau.
Yet before, and during, and among all this other writing, August Derleth was a poet. He wrote, and what is more importantly published, reams of verse from the fantastic and the macabre to the lighthearted, odes on nature to sonnets on love, in many different meters and forms. Poetry was a sensibility and avocation that Derleth shared with many of his contemporaries, including Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and many other writers for Weird Tales. Some of it has been republished here or there, particularly those bits of verse dedicated to or relevant to Lovecraft fans such as “Providence: Two Gentlemen Meet at Midnight” and “On Reading Old Letters, For H. P. L.,” but for the most part Derleth’s poetry remains unreprinted and largely unexamined.
This is a pity as such works provide, if nothing else, an interesting study of the importance of historical context. Derleth’s 1953 collection of love poetry Psyche is a good example.
These are poems of love and anguish. In this cycle of thirty-one poems, August Derleth tells the moving story of a love from its first awakening through uncertanty and agony to its foreseen dissolution.
These poems not only represent August Derleth at this best, but bid fair to take a place among the finest love poetry of our time.
To anyone that holds this book in its hands, it may appear the prosaic but well-made product of a small press—in this case, the Prairie Press of Iowa City, Iowa—72 pages of good paper on cloth boards with a floral print; the dust jacket, when intact, is often rather tanned by sun and age. The contents are divided into two sections; “Enigma: Variations on a Theme of Donne” runs to 14 cantos, each taking inspiration from John Donne’s lines, and the second cycle of thirty poems runs the gamut of a love affair, from “I. When first I saw you” to “XXX. Beloved, now you are gone.” A few of these later poems have erotic elements, such as:
Something speaks for the essential you scattered here in the black skirt and the blue blouse, and the aqua pants with the embroidered I love you and Forget-Me-Not (and who could?), the slip in the usual pink and the gold slippers, and the little bra from which the breasts have spilled tightly above the taut belly and Venus’ mound and the indolent legs in their skilled proportions where you lie waiting for love, savoring your victory sweet in your smile, in your eye, aloof, serene: the thin shoulders, the slender arms, the small round still firm nates behind, all waiting for love, to be possessed and to possess in ecstasy of union, knowing my Achilles’ heel: with that small cat’s contentment of triumph the smile aware and the eyes confident and the legs parted where the dark hair already glistens and the lips, there shadowed, opening to sheathe my sword, waiting for love and lust, knowing I will cross the room and touch and feel, knowing I will possess and be possessed, not alone because our mutual wish dictates but because I must.
This collection of thirty poems was apparently a selection from a much longer cycle of love-poetry, which came to light after Derleth’s death when Peter Ruber, who had become editor of Arkham House in 1997, went through some of Derleth’s old files:
Another very important find was the entire Psyche lyric love poems cycle. Derleth published 30 in a 72-page book of that title in 1953. In reality, he had written 233 Psyche poems, and we have them in chronological order. The entire group will be published late 1997 or early 1998.
M. Dianne Bergenske, “Hidden Literary Treasures Revealed: Unpublished Works of Wisconsin Author August Derleth” in BookLovers (V5, N1), 7.
As with Ruber’s projected biography of Derleth and other projects, this never came to pass. However, Psyche did reach a wider audience in another form: as an LP.
It isn’t clear how well Psyche sold, but it evinced enough interest that in 1960 Derleth recorded the lyrics onto vinyl at the Cuca Records Company in his native Sauk City:
The LP was released with both a blue and a red slipcase; it isn’t clear if this represents separate printings or one printing, as the discs and backmatter are otherwise identical.
The title Psyche is in reference to the tale of Cupid and Psyche from the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and Derleth’s dedication in the book is: “for the woman who was Psyche and is gone…” which casts Derleth as Cupid, overcoming obstacles to achieve union. Such dramatic romances were not unusual within Derleth’s fiction, and there was often a quasi-autobiographical element, for example, the teenaged romance with “Margery” (a local Sauk City girl) which formed the basis for his first novel, Evening in Spring (1945).
The liner notes are clear on the autobiographical element of Psyche:
That PSYCHE is an immensely felt autobiographical experience can hardly be questioned, and the alert listener will learn that it is a tribute to two women—not only one called “PSYCHE” but another known as “Cassandra”—but primarily it is the celebration of love and passion by a widely-known poet and novelist.
Liner notes to Psyche (1960)
“Cassandra” had been the subject of a previous book of primarily nature poems, Habitant of Dusk: A Garland for Cassandra (1946). In Psyche, Cassandra is mentioned by name only in a single poem:
Death is my mistress; what name I give her matters not— call her Psyche or Cassandra, Call her by any name you will, Death it is in love’s own guise, my mistress.
August Derleth, canto XIII of “Enigma: Variations on a Them of Donne,” in Psyche(1953) 24
According to Derleth: Hawk…and Dove (1997) by Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky, Cassandra was another romantic entanglement of Derleth’s in the early-mid 1940s, and their affair would be the subject for his unpublished novel Droughts of March.
For all that Derleth mined his personal experiences for fictional and poetic material and inspiration, he was not keen to publish his love affairs and generally avoided providing sufficient information in print for the average reader to identify who he was talking about. Sauk City was, after all, a small town and people would talk. Still, students of Derleth’s life would not be surprised at reading in Litersky’s biography that “Psyche” was none other than Sandra Winters, who married August Derleth in 1953, the year that Psyche was published. There is nothing unusual about a man writing love-poems to his wife, after all.
Except for one important detail.
PSYCHE is now virtually done in its 4th draft, and it seems to stand up very well in amatory verse, at which I have never pretended to be very good. But then, I have always had that as a poet I am at best a second-rater, which is saying a good deal, because there are a lot of poets far worse than that. But this book is most revealing and cannot be published for some (3) years because it is plainly about an affair with a girl who is not more than 15, and the facts wd currently be too obvious to local readers.
August Derleth to Carl Jacobi, 9 Jul 1949, MSS. Bowling Green University Library
Sandra Evelyn Winters was born 1 March 1935; according to Litersky she met August Derleth in 1948, and they married on 6 April 1953. That his relationship with her before their marriage was sexual is not much doubted; in another letter, he wrote:
Oh, yes, I would not deny that Sandra has done me a lot of good. Not just making love to her, Sandra herself. Of course, she is sharp enough to know that, and I think that in this lies the ultimate dissolution of the affair, unless an accident makes it necessary for us to be married. For, being young, she is entirely likely, even with her mother’s advice, to take me for granted, and that might well be fatal. She has been frank enough to say that she intended all along that I should ultimately need her more than she needs me, and, while she intends to marry me, she intends also to have as much of her cake and eat much of it too, as possible. That never works, manifestly. But whatever takes place, it is certain that I have already benefited a great deal, and all the clothes and jewelry I’ve bought her won’t balance my own benefits.
August Derleth to Zealia Bishop, 18 Aug 1949, MSS. Wsconsin Historical Society
Given the age gap (August Derleth was born in 24 February 1909, making him 40 years old in 1949 when these letters were written), Derleth may have had more to worry about than his reputation; statutory rape charges were a real possibility. As Litersky points out, this fact rather changes how Psyche is read. When Derleth writes:
When first I saw you, but one among a sea of faces, my glance swept past, came wondering back in search of something from alien places to see the countenance of little more than child, demure, aloof, and bland, not akin to what I felt—that wild, strange beauty, that warm impassioned spirit lurking deep, hidden by a child’s serene and lovely face, inscrutable as sleep.
As Iseult, Helen of Troy, immortal Psyche—you, too, in this child’s guise: something from deep within gazed tranquil back, the challenge of your untamed spirit looked from out your eyes.
At what age would you as the reader have put Psyche and Derleth based on this poem? Do you read it differently now that you know he met his future wife as a thirteen-year-old girl, and this poem might be an attempt to capture—or at least capitalize on—the beginning of that relationship? Without that piece of information about who Psyche was based on and her age at the time, Psyche is little more than an innocuous curiosity. With that bit of historical context, it becomes a different thing entirely, and a reader might not only look for new meaning in the lines, but find it. Comparable in some ways to “Doom of the Thrice-Cursed” (1997) by Marion Zimmer Bradley, it is impossible to turn back the clock to before you knew, and read the words they wrote with innocent eyes.
With thanks and appreciation to John Haefele for his help with this article.
Bertha was born c. 1863 in the Kingdom of Hungary, and her native tongue was Magyar. In 1882 she emigrated to the United States, and in 1883 she married Anthony Rausch, another Hungarian immigrant who was about 11-12 years her senior and had immigrated in 1875. The 1900 census data lists Anthony Rausch as a confectioner, living in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife and two daughters, Flora Marie (b. 1888) and Isabella (b. 1900). The decades of census data and the occasional newspaper article trace the broad strokes of their lives: in 1910 they were in New York; in 1920, Fort Meyers, Florida, now sans children. Then in 1926:
In 1930, the widowed Bertha M. Rausch was living a retired life in Providence, Rhode Island, alone in a rooming house; her daughters were grown, her husband was dead. No doubt she took some comfort with her friends and neighbors, such as Annie E. P. Gamwell—and when in early 1936 Annie fell ill and had to be hospitalized, Bertha came a-calling:
Awakened 9 a.m. by bell—Mrs. Rausch calling. She was tremendously sorry to hear you are ill. Is moving back to #67.
Presumably, Lovecraft had at least heard of Mrs. Rausch of old from his aunt, if they had not met before. #67 refers to a house on Slater Avenue, where she and Annie had once been neighbors. It isn’t clear how Bertha learned of Annie’s illness—perhaps they still met on occasion, or kept in touch, or had friends in common that passed on the news—but after her visit, it would only be polite of Lovecraft to write her a letter. So he did.
Then wrote Rausch & Sisson notes & mailed them. Then dinner.
Charles Peck Sisson and his wife Margaret A. Sisson were members of the Providence Art Club, as was Annie; Lovecraft’s letter to (presumably) Margaret Sisson is not known to survive, but the full letter to Bertha M. Rausch is preserved at the John Hay Library in Providence:
As might be expected, the letter is principally concerned with Lovecraft’s aunt and an invitation for Mrs. Rausch to visit her friend at the hospital, whenever it is convenient. Whether or not she did, we do not know—but we know that Bertha kept in touch with Annie, and scarcely a year later when Howard himself was dead, she returned the letter to her friend. On the envelope, Annie wrote:
The letter my dear Howard wrote to Mrs. Rausch when I was ill—She was so pleased with it & savied it & brought it to me after my beloved Howard’s death.
If this correspondence seems unusually brief, well, so it was: Bertha was Annie’s friend, and Lovecraft as the conscientious nephew was serving as his aunt’s secretary and factotum during the period of her hospitalization and convalescence, all while managing his own correspondence and writing. We are fortunate at least that Bertha and Annie both thought so well of Howard’s letter that it was preserved, and was finally kept along with his other papers as an eloquent testament to the care he devoted to his aunt during Annie’s presumed battle with breast cancer and recovery.
Much discussion has been brought to light, in recent times, to ponder what it means to identify with a gender identity. Perhaps ponder is too gentle a word, these discussions have often been led by those who oppose the idea of gender nonconformity and thus are designed to diminish the credibility of those outside of the gender binary. “What is a woman?”—the question is asked tirelessly by this crowd in an attempt to quell the happening of gender nonconformity. It is often put forth as an idea that was only recently made blurry:
… and now our culture is telling us that the differences between girls and boys don’t matter, that if you identify with something then you are that thing. (Walsh, What is a Woman 2022)
Gender is a concept that has grown and evolved over numerous cultures; the modern idea of one gender identity can seem a stark contrast to that of past times. Looking at gender across cultures brings difficulty to a single unified ideal. The idea of asking the question, “what is a woman?” is poised to be one of critical discourse, e.g.:
… if I’m talking publicly about what a man or a woman is, I’m not going to give credence to an argument that has no biological or logical basis. It doesn’t make any sense. (Shapiro 2019)
But there is quite an argument to be made that viewing gender as a single, unified concept is an uninformed idea.
I bring all this to light after having recently read through Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman,” a story I had suspected would fall victim to such uninformed ideas. Knowing of other pulp stories that had explored queer themes such as Fred Hayley’s Satan Was a Lesbian (1966), I had expected a tiring Mulan-type story with much less the feminine liberation and far more derogatory discussion of gender expression. Instead, “Sword Woman” allows its characters to explore an incredibly nuanced idea of what gender and expression can mean both within and outside of the perception of others. I was surprised to find such a story written in the 1930s at first, but this later served as a reminder of the queer happenings that this time period was littered with.
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“Sword Woman” is a burning fire of feminine rage, gender exploration, and a hard, “who cares?” To the question of “what is a woman?” The story’s lead, Dark Agnes, finds themself on a murder spree, killing men time and time again as each threatens seizure of Agnes’ free will. Murder frees them from betrothal, from slavery, and from two attempted assassinations; Agnes begins the story a mere damsel in distress and ends it as a serrated blade, sharpened by the necks of those who would oppose them.
In exploring such a presentation of gender identity and expression, it is important to understand how gender has evolved over time. It is easy to think of gender as a single, static state tied to the presence of particular genitalia, though this has not always been the case for humanity. In fact, even where such ideas have been linked, the presentation of specific genders has changed drastically over time.
In Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), she writes about the nuance of gender in Native American cultures:
In considering gender-based roles, we must remember that while the roles themselves were fixed in most archaic American cultures, with divisions of ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’, the individuals fit into these roles on a basis of proclivity, inclination, and temperament. (Allen 1986)
This kind of gender expression, one which is determined by the individual’s own experience with their identity, is quite opposed to the modern conservative perception of gender, in which it is a defined state determined for the individual rather than by them.
This is where Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman”follows its approach to gender identity. The story centres around Dark Agnes, a character who whisks themself and anyone around them into a whirlwind explosion of feminine rage and tyranny. Agnes begins this story as a product to be owned; they are betrothed to a man named Francois and the thought leaves a revolting taste in their mouth. So, when their sister, Ysabel offers Agnes with the means “… to free herself. Do not cling by your fingers to life, to become as our mother, and as your sister…” (Howard 1979) by handing them a dagger,Agnes refuses the proposed suicide and instead murders Francois.
Agnes does a lot at this moment: not only are they shattering the chains that bind them to the ownership of men, but they are also leaching the masculine blood to take wholly as their own. As from this point onward, Agnes refuses their position as a woman; refuses being the key word here. Thrown to the side are their betrothal, the temptation for suicide, their placidity, even their feminine garbs are thrown into a river to be forgotten. Agnes refuses everything that had once defined them and takes this moment to reinvent themself. It would have been easy for this moment to mirror the suffragettes and their seizure of the typically masculine roles, swapping one gendered cage for another, but instead, Howard allows Agnes a freedom of exploration that will go on to bring a new, personal definition of gender by the end of the story.
I have been referring to Agnes here with they/them pronouns, though it should be noted that Agnes is referred to with she/her pronouns in the book. I choose they/them here as I feel such pronouns better reflect who this character is; perhaps even he/him would be better fit, as Agnes themself proclaims at the book’s conclusion, “Remember, I am woman no more.” To which their comrade, Etienne Villiers, agrees, “[we are] brothers in arms” (Howard, 1979).
This proclamation taking place near the end of the story further cements how Agnes’ gender evolves throughout the story. As they continue their murder spree of dastardly men, Agnes finds themself constantly covered in blood. They make efforts to wash, though eventually, the blood that stains Agnes’ body sinks so deep into their skin that the blood of man and the blood of Agnes are one and the same. I hear an echo of the struggles that the Macbeths encountered after their murder of Duncan, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather…” (Macbeth 2.2.75).Unlike Macbeth, however, Agnes takes in this stolen crimson stain with pride and sanity. It is as though they becomes more wholly themselves, the more blood they leech.
Importantly, Agnes does not reject this gender identity. It is one that is somewhat thrust upon them, the idea of Agnes becoming a masculine figure is first proposed by Etienne Villiers who fears Agnes will be too recognisable by their father’s scouts dressed in their royal, feminine attire. However, the actual expression of Agnes’ identity as a masculine figure is one defined only by Agnes. Not once do they actually refer to themself as a man, only that they are no longer a woman. I think that it is poignant to point out that had this story been written today, Agnes would likely have aligned more with a non-binary gender identity rather than strictly male or female.
Agnes is the loudest voice when it comes to their newfound identity, often reminding Etienne, here they feel truly as they ought to be. Early after taking the masculine identity, Etienne jests, “By Saint Michele, in all my life I never saw a woman drain a flagon like that! You will be drunk, girl.” Which is met by Agnes’s cold reminder, “You forget I am a girl no longer,” (Howard, 1979) Interesting to note that they say girl here and not woman as they do come the conclusion, a reflection of their growth.
I think what is most pertinent here is the determination of gender. Understanding that gender can be determined not just at a singular point in one’s life, but rather at multiple points allows a much broader description of what gender is. Allen writes:
… the Kaska would designate a daughter in a family that had only daughters as a boy. When she was young, around five, her parents would tie a pouch of dried bear ovaries to her belt… and she would function in the Kaska male role for the rest of her life. (Allen 1986)
We see here a clear presentation of gender as a fluid state, with an understanding of roles existing outside of biology. Here, gender seems to be focused more on the utilitarian aspect of the community. Dark Agnes’ gender identity is not unlike this determination. They take up their masculine identity as it is better fitted to the position they find themself in, and will later take a more personal position at their meeting with Guiscard de Clisson.
Here, Agnes seeks to become a sword woman, to ride among men in the fields of battle. Only, this position they take ends in turmoil as their party is ambushed and killed. Absolutely we can understand that Agnes’ party’s deaths are not caused by their readoption of the female identity, but there is certainly a metaphorical message in that Agnes suffers when they return to the facade. This is where Agnes’s proclamation, “Remember, I am woman no more.” (Howard 1979)takes place, after losing their brothers in arms, after suffering in the position they had rejected in the beginning.
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It should not be ignored when this story was likely written either. The 1920s through to the 1930s were a period of much change; the world itself was both recovering from and about to enter a world war after all. And among all of this change, a woman named Lili Elbe had begun an exploration of her own gender identity.
Lili Elbe was the second trans woman ever to receive sex reassignment surgery ninety years ago in 1931. There is quite a lot to discuss with her story, but what is important here is the timing and widespread knowledge. Lili’s story, along with many others, should have been lost when the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was burnt down by the Nazis in 1933, however, her semi-autobiographical book, Man Into Woman (now titled Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change), received an English publication in that same year. Along with this, her story featured heavily in German and Dutch Newspapers. Lili Elbe was no unknown figure; she had become quite the public idea by the time of her death in 1931.
There is currently no evidence to suggest this novel came into Howard’s hands, importantly, he does not mention it in his letters. That being said, I still find the existence of Lili Elbe and others like her at the time to be incredibly interesting. It is as though they are surrounding each letter of the page without needing to be there at all. Our society has been incredibly queer for a lot longer than it has often been thought to be, and stories such as this, alongside real-life events, help highlight that fact. Perhaps it is no wonder then that “Sword Woman” was so open to pushing the boundaries of what gender really is.
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“Sword Woman” surprised me in ways I never would have thought it could. Often it is difficult to engage with literature from times past when so much of it constructs walls to keep ‘people like me’ on the outskirts. It is refreshing to encounter this story and leave with so few negative thoughts.
Howard’s exploration of gender is one of incredible nuance, never seeming to worry all that much about the perception of others. Instead, gender in Howard’s “Sword Woman” is an experience wholly for the individual, a definition that aligns itself so well with our current. Rather than ask the reader to question, “what is a woman?” Howard rejects the idea entirely, and states, in blood-red ink: gender is created only from the thread one chooses to sew.
While written by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s, “Sword Woman” was not published until 1975, and is still in copyright in the United States. This and other tales of Dark Agnes may be read in the Robert E. Howard collection Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures (2011).
Works Cited
Allen, P. G. (1986). The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. 2015 reprint: Open Road Media.
Folk, J. (Director). (2022). What is a Woman? [Motion Picture].
Haley, F. (1966). Satan Was a Lesbian. 2018 reprint: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Howard, R. E. (1979). Sword Woman. Berkley Books.
Lili Elbe, N. H. (2015). Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change. Canelo.
Shakespeare, W. (2015). The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Barnes & Noble Inc.
Sapphire Lazuli (she/they) is a writer of weird horror and perverted desires based in Australia. She draws on thier experiences as a trans woman of colour and a lesbian, often doing their part to bring more queer voices into the worlds she crafts.
Their prose is often described as beautifully poetic, and adjacent to the writer, Sapphire does not write stories that will hold your hand. Though, be it cosmic entities appearing as places, gross and erotic explorations of the boundaries of form, or deep dives into the darkest ridges of the mind and desire, their horror is bound to allure you.
A note about pronoun usage: I will be using a mix of “he” and “they” for the character of Rolf Chapvet because the original uses “he” (or more accurately, uses the masculine in the original French) and I don’t want to be misleading.
“Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (“That Which Arouses Fear…”) (1958) contains two twists that occur one after the other. The first is that the protagonist, Rolf Chapvet, has been sacrificing young men to Yog-Shoggoth [sic] in order to transform himself into a ‘Dark Lady’ by night. The second is that the narrator, who admits early on to killing Rolf, is his mother.
I knew something trans was going to happen, because I picked “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi”out of a list of weird fiction with transgender themes, but it took until very close to the end for me to realize how exactly that transness would manifest. I was distracted by noting how close of a pastiche the text is, and by the uncanny valley New Englandness of the names. “Jommy,” one of the disappeared men, is one that stuck especially in my thoughts. It’s like “Johnny” but not, just this side of the sort of nickname a real New Englander would acquire over his lifetime. This is New England as written by someone who has only ever seen New England filtered through a Lovecraftian eye.
The almost rote way the authors approached their pastiche meant I was genuinely surprised when it turned out that Rolf was feeding men to a cauldron to fuel their male-to-female transformations. I fell for the woman narrator twist because women, much less mothers, rarely feature at the center of Lovecraft’s stories, nor did they tend to be the protagonists of Robinsonades, or of Flash Gordon, the other two inspirations cited in Jacques Bergier’s introduction. The genre walked me down the garden path and there I stood, shocked at the transness I knew would occur because never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted this particular deployment.
The twist that is more interesting to me narratively is that the narrator is the protagonist’s mother. Mothers are generally not portrayed as so personally violent as to strangle their own child, and that capacity for intimate violence hangs over the entire piece. The narrator tells the reader how exactly Rolf died from the beginning; she only obfuscates her relationship, making it more shocking. Otherwise, she has no regrets. “Yet I attest that it was my fingers that left their marks on his pale skin during the dreadful night in the Shadmeth vault. It was my hands that gripped his frozen neck and it was in my mind, guided by the absolute certainty of ridding the Earth of the most abominable monster it had ever borne, that I drew the courage necessary to go as far as at the end of this hideous contact and to strangle without remorse this creature which should never have been called to life.” (Emphasis mine.)
The work by Lovecraft that comes to my mind when I think about this twist is not “The Outsider,” which concerns more personal, internalized horror, but “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.” There, the titular character realizes that he is the product of literal bestiality and metaphorical “race-mixing,” cannot bear the horror of this revelation, and kills himself. In “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi,” the horror that cannot be borne is the protagonist’s “son” existing in a female body. The narrator finds this feminine form even more shocking than the serial murder.
It is difficult not to read the bestiality in “Arthur Jermyn” as a metaphor for mixed-race couples, especially knowing anything about Lovecraft’s prejudices. There is no real metaphor in “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi,” which bluntly makes cross-gender transformation the result of murder, depravity, and evil gods. But as in “Arthur Jermyn” it is that crossing of an inviolable category that makes the protagonist worthy of death, although Arthur Jermyn at least has the opportunity to choose his end. Rolf’s mother chooses for him.
Transsexual, transgender, and transvestic behavior was not necessarily unknown to the authors of this story. In 1954, Claude Marais published J’ai choisi mon sexe, confidence du peintre Michel-Marie Poulain (I chose my sex, confessions of the painter (masculine form)). As the title suggests, this was the biography of the painter Michel-Marie Poulain, a World War II veteran who medically transitioned in 1946 and died in 1991. She was a relatively high-profile expressionist and was notorious in her time for living openly as a woman.
That Jacques Bergier and his unnamed collaborator decided to tackle transsexual themes in their 1958 short story “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi (That Which Arouses Fear…),” only four years after Claude Marais’s publication, is possibly a coincidence, but it is clear that transsexuality was in the air. I bring up Michel-Marie’s story specifically not because I think it is the definite source of ‘Janus’s’ interest in changing sex, but to show that people in France in the 1950s had ample opportunity to learn about the idea. Ed Wood’s notorious picture Glen or Glenda (I Changed My Sex!) had come out even earlier, in 1953, and transvestite performers were a frequent sight in French cabaret shows. Transsexuality has frequently been an object of fascination, revulsion, desire, all things that can become “too much” to the point that someone “can’t help themselves.” The protagonist is intrigued and repulsed by her child in equal measure, like an audience member driven to a frenzy by an unusual show.
Bergier does not mention the gender element in his introduction. This would spoil his story, and the twist he is excited to share with his reader. All he says is that it is a “black” story, and it is difficult to tell if he means that in a dark sense, or simply that the contents discussed are too horrible for the sensitive soul. All the introduction really tells the reader is that he and his unnamed collaborator like adventure stories, and they want to share their neat tale with their audience. Did he think trans people deserved death at the hands of their own parents? It is impossible to know, because that would be reading too deeply into his work. He certainly considers their existence unusual and unexpected, the kind of twist one does not guess.
Jacques Janus was (were?) right, however, about one element of their story. The introduction of a transsexual element to this story changes a fairly rote pastiche to something a little odder, something that is even a little bit charming. It does not evoke revulsion like ”Arthur Jermyn”, at least not in me. Instead the twist lodges this story in my head so that I return to it over time, a bit like how I am writing this essay. I am thus interested in Rolf because of their ambiguous gender issues, as vague as those turn out to be.
To Janus’s credit, Rolf is not the typical transsexual serial killer stereotype. They are no Buffalo Bill, skinning women out of a frantic desire to take possession of their femaleness. Instead, Rolf’s method of changing sex is killing men, a bizarre take on the trope I do not think I have seen before. It is also this cross-gender sacrifice that makes me think that even if the authors were aware of transsexuality, they were working under the older idea that transfeminity and cis male homosexuality were two sides of the same coin. Rolf has no interest in women before his mother sees him in front of his bubbling cauldron: “I knew perfectly well that Rolf lived alone up there. He had never been interested in women, moreover, whom he considered unworthy of sharing the life of a man such as himself.” He appropriates something he scorns into himself.
Then again, he does not fill these stereotypes because they were still being developed; Buffalo Bill is the product of a similar instinct on Thomas Harris’s part, who openly admits seeking out the sensational and weird for inspiration in his thrillers. Transsexuality is a weird spice in a weird dish, much like Dr. Hannibal’s cannibalism; these are taboo topics which only the bold dare exploit for thrills.
Buffalo Bill is not, as they say, ideal trans rep. He’s a violent serial killer who funnels his gender dysphoria into murderous urges, and the narrative’s clumsy attempt to separate him off from “real” transsexuals only serves to legitimize the weird gatekeeping of the era’s “best practice.” Yet, I love him, and so do many of my trans friends. “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me,” he says, blending transfeminity and stereotypical camp homosexuality in a scene played for horror but easy to take as empowering instead. He’s well-acted, charismatic, insane, obsessed with bugs. He’s camp. He’s got a personality you can latch on to, and actualizes an ache that many trans people feel. Am I attracted to this person, or do I want to walk around inside their skin?
Rolf isn’t really a midcentury French Buffalo Bill. There just isn’t much to them, just as there isn’t much to the story. He is absent from his own story. The work tells his life story, but his mother is the Lovecraftian protagonist, driven insane by that which can neither be revealed nor understood. There just isn’t enough of Rolf to hold on to. The outsider looking in has no sympathy for his desire to be a woman; he might as well be sacrificing men to the cauldron so he can grow bat wings.
The thing that turns Rolf into a woman is “a body, a whole infamous parody of being alive.” It “surround[s] Rolf in a caressing and monstrous embrace.” The narrator has walked in on her son having pseudo-sex with a freaky creature and changing sex, but the transformation is considered just as hideous as the catalyst. This final moment before his death is also the only time Rolf’s mother uses feminine pronouns. “His features trembled, the fog seemed to seep through all his skin. An imperceptible modification began to draw a feminine mask of diabolical perversity on the contours of her face: the atrocious reality of the Dark Lady and her bloody sacrifices…”
Transsexual bodies are still used as cheap shock, but it’s less common than it used to be. While some series like Lovecraft Country still do that thing where a non-cis body flashes nude on the screen for the shock and titillation of the audience, other works like the multiplayer FPS Destiny 2 contain a nonbinary character who simply exists in the world, and have stories only partially related to their gender identity. But for many people, the transsexual body still remains an object of horror. This piece feels like the halfway point between terfs posting out of context post-top surgery pics and the old newspaper headlines about Catherine Jorgensen: “The Girl Who Used to be Boy Isn’t Quite Ready For Dates.”
“Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” is an odd story. It feels silly to say that it’s not an accurate reflection of transition, because of course it isn’t. You don’t become a girl by sacrificing boys to Yog-Shoggoth, but that objection sort of misses the point. The authors behind Jacques Janus were seemingly not interested in accurately depicting trans people, but instead in frightening their audience. The sex-change cauldron follows a very Lovecraftian passage in which the narrator confronts “a kind of rough table on which were placed a dozen statuettes. In the middle of the statuettes shone an unknown object: a sort of green polyhedron with blood-red carvings that immediately caught my eye.” It takes all her power for her to tear her gaze away, only for her eyes to catch her son doing something even worse.
Sex-change is “that which arouses fear,” something unimaginable and horrifying. The authors want to evoke strong emotion; did they think a reader would agree the mother’s actions were justified? Or were they simply looking to shock?
An English translation of “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi” can be found at the Internet Archive.
Leonid “Wes” West (he/him) is a grad student residing in various parts of the American North East. He likes horror, classics, and writing too much.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 