Editor Spotlight: Elinore Blaisdell

In literature, as in life, there are two motifs: love and death. Everything else is an offshoot of one or the other; and, Oscar Wilde to the contrary, death is surely stranger than love. All over the world the vampire legend—the sotry of the dead who will not die—is found, varied in setting and circumstances, but basically the same. This book is comprised, with a few exceptions, of tales of the dead who return, animated by an unnatural and unhallowed life. No mere apparition can chill in quite the same fashion as the very corpse itself, now an alien and a stranger, but continuing in its old habit, clinging to its old existence.

There are one or two vampires included herein not as yet of the undead. Montague Summers notes cases of the living vampire, and Hans Ewers writes of a vampire suffering from a disease of the blood whereby the victim is forced to seek living blood to sustain herself. One of these stories is, possibly, of such a case. There is included, also, a plant vampire. Other stories are of the dead who return with a definite purpose, a wrong to avenge, or a mission to fulfill.

Most of these stories satisfy the M. R. James condition that the apparition should be “purely malevolent and odious.”

Good night! Pleasant dreams!
Elinore Blaisdell, preface in Tales of the Undead: Vampires and Visitants (1947)

Elinore Blaisdell is not well-remembered today, and when she is recalled it is often as an artist and a poet. Douglas A. Anderson has put together a sketch of her life from genealogical sources, and there is little to add to the basic facts. Her apparent sole venture as an anthology editor is Tales of the Undead: Vampires and Visitants (1947), which at a glance appears to be a somewhat unremarkable theme anthology—but context is important.

Weird Tales had bad luck with anthologies. Their initial effort, The Moon Terror and Other Stories (1927), compiled by editor Farnsworth Wright from the execrable first years of the magazine, failed to sell and even now reading copies can be had quite affordably. The British firm of Selwyn & Blount began publishing the Not at Night series under editor Christine Campbell Thomson in 1925, with the contents largely culled from Weird Tales. The last volume (an omnibus) published in 1937, further volumes apparently cut off by World War II, though it inspired many imitators.

Weird Tales writers E. Hoffmann Price and W. Kirk Mashburn enlisted the aid of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and Henry S. Whitehead to pitch their own Weird Tales reprint anthology in the early 1930s, but this effort too came to naught. Arkham House began publishing collections and anthologies drawn from Weird Tales in 1939, and co-founder August Derleth found a niche as an anthologist of weird and science fiction as well, with collections like Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1946), Dark of the Moon (1947), The Night Side (1947), and The Sleeping and the Dead: Thirty Uncanny Tales (1947). Those anthologies have been printed and reprinted, often re-issued in affordable paperback editions, which themselves have become collectible.

By contrast, Tales of the Undead is a one-off. It came from nowhere, had a single edition, and apparently was never resurrected in paperback or in any cheap reprint edition. More than that, it was an early example of the themed anthology; Blaisdell’s preface is clear that she had chosen stories that were about vampires or vampirism in some fashion—and that is a different approach than either Thompson or Derleth, who may have been looking for creepiness or excellence, but were not trying to put together a book of just werewolf stories or the like. The closest one could get to that would be rather dry “non-fiction” books like Montague Summer’s The Vampire, His Kith and Kin (1928).

Contemporary readers noted the difference:

Her book features a special brand of supernatural horror, the vampire and the undead. Count Dracula might well be pleased at the advances his tribe has made in a few decades; for there are no less than 20 short stories, two longer tales, and one novelette on this single macabre theme. But the reader need not fear plot-limitations. Some striking variants have been made on the gruesome motif, and it is not every vampire that stalks the streets at night in a long black cape. For example, there is a tale of a vampire plant, Clark Ashton Smith’s “Seed from the Sepulchre,” which will cause more than one uneasy ripple up and down the spine, and others of rare additions to an unholy brotherhood we pray must always be confined to the realm of fiction.
Arthur F. Hillman, “A Volume of Vampires” in Fantasy Review #6 (1947)

Not everybody understood the advantages of a themed anthology. One contemporary newspaper account complained:

Miss Blaisdell has limited her subject too much. In doing this she has omitted the best horror stories of all. “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W. W. Jacobs belongs in a collection of this kind. Surprisingly enough, there is nothing by Poe or Hawthorne here, nor are there any contributions by the Romantic Gothic novelists, notably Mary Shelley and Mrs. Radcliffe.
Charles F. Feidelson, “The World of Books” in The Birmingham News, 28 Jun 1947

That the reviewer was probably not up to date on their weird anthologies is pretty clear; he was expecting a collection of old familiar horrors, not a themed selection.

Hillman also noted that there were “many gems from Weird Tales,” and this is true. Of the 23 tales in the book, 10 originally appeared in Weird Tales. A few others such as Washington Irving’s “The Adventure of the German Student” (1824) and “Amour Dure” (1887) by Vernon Lee were in the public domain and free to use without permission, so really more than half of the more recent tales in the book come directly from the pages of the Unique Magazine. Which is no doubt why in the acknowledgments Blaisdell added:

The editor wishes to thank Dorothy McIlwraith and Lamont Buchanan of Weird Tales for their gracious cooperation.

McIlwraith took over as editor of Weird Tales in 1940. Buchanan was associate editor under her. It’s worth considering whether either of those two had any influence on the story selection, but a glance at the table of contents notes that none of the stories were published in Weird Tales under McIlwraith. In truth, there was a bit of a changing of the guard at Weird Tales with the death of Robert E. Howard (1936), Lovecraft (1937), and then Farnsworth Wright (1940), and Weird Tales had difficulty attracting talent. In one letter dated 30 August 1946, Buchanan wrote to August Derleth:

Blaisdell must have dealt with August Derleth too, since several of the stories were reprinted by permission of Arkham House; unfortunately, those letters don’t appear to survive. Still, it goes to show the lengths that Blaisdell went to get good stories for her collection, including both prominent authors of an older generation (J. Sheridan LeFanu, Vernon Lee, Washington Irving, Theophile Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn, etc.) and masters of the early 20th century weird tale (M. R. James, Edith Wharton, H. R. Wakefield, E. F. Benson, H. P. Lovecraft, F. Marion Crawford, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, Seabury Quinn, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, etc.). Some of them, like Robert Bloch, have gone on to enduring fame, while others like Chandler W. Whipple have languished in relative obscurity.

Despite having a relatively formidable roster of authors and getting several newspaper reviews, I suspect that Tales of the Undead sank out of sight largely because the field of the hardbacked horror anthology was already getting crowded—three of Derleth’s anthologies were also published in 1947—and Tales was an all-reprint anthology, and at that not always the most notable reprints. While Blaisdell displayed excellent taste, it has to be wondered if picking some of the more prominent and popular vampire stories from Weird Tales like Edmond Hamilton’s “The Vampire Master” might have led to greater popularity. Then again, perhaps not.

The final thing that sets Blaisdell’s anthology apart is that she illustrated it herself—and many of these scratchboard illustrations are absolutely gorgeous, stark and detailed, similar in some ways to Lynd Ward’s illustrations for The Haunted Omnibus (1937) or Illustration Portfolio No. 1 (1925) by The Arthur Wesley Dow Association, and worth in many ways the price of Tales of the Undead. A few of these, just to give just a taste:

Tales of the Undead is ultimately a monument to both Elinore Blaisdell’s good taste in weird fiction, and her artistic skill and sensibility. She stepped away from the idea of a weird fiction collection as a kind of horrific miscellany and attempted to show the variety and depths of a particular theme—decades before we would get collections like Rivals of Dracula: A Century of Vampire Fiction (1978) or Weird Vampire Tales: 30 Blood-Chilling Stories From The Weird Fiction Puklps (1992). In an era when an avid reader could fill shelves with anthologies specifically about vampires or other specific flavors of the undead, it is important to recognize one of the innovators among the anthologists of her day.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Day of the Stranger” (1947) by Novalyne Price Ellis

A couple of years after Bob’s death, I was standing on a street corner in Houston and I saw a man coming across the street that looked exactly like Bob. The incident stayed with me for several years. Finally, it wrote itself when I needed to hand in a radio script at LSU. I like the script, and it has briefly, some of the things we talked about almost as we talked them.
Novalyne Price Ellis to L. Sprague & Catherine Crook de Camp, 8 Jun 1978

Every biography ends the same way. A person dies, and whatever is left of them in this world is in the memories of those who knew them. A very few, however, take the next step. From memory to myth, from reality to fiction. Today, Robert E. Howard is as much a literary character as his creations and has appeared as versions of himself in stories (“Far Babylon” (1976) by L. Sprague de Camp, “Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1986) by Robert Silverberg), novels (Lovecraft’s Book (1985) by Richard Lupoff, Shadows Bend (2000) by David Barbour), comic books & graphic novels (The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob (2007) by Jim & Ruth Keegan), and even films (The Whole Wide World (2006), portrayed by Vincent D’Onofrio)—and that only begins to scratch the surface of Robert E. Howard’s many posthumous incarnations.

Though those characters shared Howard’s name, their characters differed. None of the writers knew Bob Howard; they had to work from letters and memoirs, biographies and anecdotes. Yet one of the earliest, if not the first, fictional character based on Robert E. Howard was drawn from the memory of one who knew him well: the eponymous stranger in Novalyne Price Ellis’ radio play “The Day of the Stranger.”

In 1947, my husband [William W. Ellis] and I were attending LSU, and my professor in radio assigned a script to be written and handed in for a semester’s grade. While I was trying to think what to write about, I remembered that incident (seeing Bob Howard get on the bus in Houston, when he’d been dead two years […]). I wrote it up as if it happened in New Orleans, got my grade, directed it for the school radio program, and sold it to a group producing amateur radio scripts.

It was copyrighted in 1949 by J. Weston Walch—Publisher of Portland, aine. I’m not sure he’s still publishing things. He published it in a book called Radio Player’s Scriptbook. It was for amateurs looking for scripts to produce. . . . The Stranger is Bob and it was as much of his regular talk as I could get it. The cry in Jeanne’s heart for a second chance was my cry. Jerry was Truett [Vinson]. The girls in the drug store were just necessary character to help put the story across.

THey changed my original title, which I thought was good. However, at that time, they were afraid that to say ‘New Orleans’ would be to give it a regional slant, and so they changed ‘New Orleans’ to ‘This.’ I’m sure they wouldn’t change it now, and I prefer the use of the city’s name.
Novalyne Price Ellis to Rusty Burke, Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 31

In 1936 when Robert E. Howard died, his sometime girlfriend Novalyne Price was attending school at Louisiana State University. She returned to Cross Plains to teach school, and for much of the next decade she continued teaching and attending courses in Texas and Louisiana. Novalyne had planned to write about Howard’s life, using her journals as material for the book—but life always got in the way. By the time of her marriage to William W. Ellis in 1947, Novalyne had extensive experience with drama, and even radio plays (“Daniel Baker College To Offer Enlarged Speech Program,” The Commanche Chief, 24 Aug 1945). “The Day of the Stranger” would be, in a sense, an early effort to capture some of the words and tone of Robert E. Howard’s character, decades before she could complete her book One Who Walked Alone (1986).

In an interview with Howard scholar Rusty Burke, she went into more detail about the play and the experience that inspired it:

BURKE: A lot of people who may read this interview may not know that there are other things you’ve written about Bob. In fact, a number [of] years ago you wrote a play in which Bob is a character, called “Day of the Stranger”. One of the things the stranger does is that, when he sees someone, he begins telling you what the person is like, what’s on his mind as he sits on the streetcar, and what he’s thinking about. Did Bob do that kind of thing?

ELLIS: All the time. That was his interest in people. Oh, ys. Fantastic stories. I remember very vividly one time, we passed a man—there was a very cold norther blowing—and we passed a man on a horse, riding along, and the man was all humped up over the saddle, trying to get away from the cold—you can imagine sitting ona saddle in a Texas norther—(shivers)—cold, yes—well, I don’t remember the story, but I remember that it was a fantastic story—pretty soon I knew everything that man thought. “Day of the Stranger” was the first thing that I had been able to write about him. I had to hand in a radio script, and all of a sudden it occurred to me. It came from an incident that had happened to me in Houston about two years after Bob’s death. It was a cold, rainy, drizzly day, and I had gone to Houston with some of my teacher friends. I was supposed to meet them somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, but it was in downtown Houston. It was time to go meet my friends. I was standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross a street, ready to step down off the crub. I looked up and there came Bob! Dressed in his brown suit with that tan hat—big man, heavy-set—and I couldn’t cross the street. There was Bob coming toward me! I’m sure, from the way people looked at me, that I made some kind of sound. But I backed up all the way across the sidewalk against a store window, and stood there until the man crossed the street. He stood on the edge of the sidewalk about 8 or 10 feet from me, and I still couldn’t get away from the fact that this was Bob. He turned around and looked at me, and I told myself I could see differences, but I couldn’t. That was Bob. He looked at me for a few minutes—I don’t know whether I was making a sound or not. Then he turned around, turned his back on me, and looked down the street. In just a moment his bus came down the street. Came down, stopped at the corner, and he got on the bus. I watched it. I watched as it went on, and I saw him take his money out and put it in the slot for the fare, and start toward the back of the bus. Then the bus moved on further. I watched it till it was out of sight. I stood there for a few minutes until I could get myself together. Then I went over and met my friends. That was a very vivid incident!

BURKE: That would certainly shock a person.

ELLIS: It shocked me! As I think about it now, I’m shocked by it, I can remember the strange feeling I had. TO see somebody coming across the street that you know has been dead about two years! When I got ready to write my play, I thought about that. I wrote “Day of the Stranger” in order to say some of the things I was still worried about—in order to get some of the old frustrations out of my mind. You say, “Now, in 1947 you were happily married and you had one beautiful child”—I just hadn’t gotten over the feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling that I think everybody who knows a friend or a family member who commits suicide feels. The feeling of guilt has this to do with it—you say, “If I hadn’t said thus-and-so, if i’d been more sympathetic, if I hadn’t sent that book back to Bob, if I’d gone by that morning, if I’d answered his letter”—all these things that you say. It doesn’t matter that maybe your reasoning mind can tell you “Oh, well, this would not have done it”—you still think it. I wrote that play to relieve my own heart. I used that play myself. It was produced a good many places, but after writing it, I felt better. After you were here earlier I read it again, while making the copy; I hadn’t written nearly as much about his Egyptian beliefs as I thought it had.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 19-20

At least by 1956, Novalyne had adapted the radio play into a script for a one-act play or dramatic reading suitable for high school dramatics:

Lafayette High School’s Dramatics department has been experimenting with the “Readers’ Theatre” technique since the 1956-57 school year. That year they presented a drama quartet called “The Day of the Stranger,” a radio play written and adapted to the new medium by Novalyne Price Ellis. The quartet, composed of Celia Guilbeaux, Marilyn Montgomery, Gerald Hernandez, and Pauline Harding, performed for the Louisiana State University Workshop in drama and interpretation and at the Northwestern Theatre Festival at Natchitoches.
“Lafayette Drama Class To Present Five Readings,” The Daily Advertizer, Lafeyette, LA, 15 Nov 1966

At least one dramatic reading was directed by her husband William Ellis (The Daily Iberian, New Iberia, LA, 18 Nov 1957), and it it is likely there were several more, either carried out by the Ellises over the years or various amateur groups using the script in Walch’s book.

The script itself is very brief, for five characters with some bit parts and direction for music, appropriate for dramatic radio production. The crux of Novalyne’s eerie experience is retained, but the scene was shifted to a drug store on Canal Street in New Orleans. The character based on Novalyne was named Jeanne, the Robert E. Howard equivalent in the story was named Craig Blair…although it is only the Stranger who gives his voice.

MARY: Why, early this morning when there weren’t many customers in here, I was getting a chocolate malt ready for a fellow. I had my back to the bar. (SOMEWHAT DRAMATIC) Then all of a sudden a voice said: “Hey, my little bunch of onion tops, give me a cup of black coffee, the blacker and stronger the better.” (POINTED) WEll, you know who’d say it like that, don’t you?

JEANNE: (SUDDENLY ALARMED) No. No. I don’t.(t)

MARY: Well, honey, you could have knocked me over with your little finger because when I turned around…well, Craig Blair was sitting in that chair.

JEANNE: (EMOTIONAL) That’s not true. You know that’s not true.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 34

The real Robert E. Howard didn’t drink coffee, generally; but the line about “my little bunch of onion tops” could have come straight from his letters to Novalyne Price. Fact and fiction are thus mixed together in this scenario, but readers familiar with Novalyne’s later One Who Walked Alone or the film The Whole Wide World based on it can see many parallels between things the Stranger says in the play. For another example:

JEANNE: (WONDERINGLY) So you still think people live more than one life?(t)

STRANGER: (LAUGHS) Oh, well, I’ve always thought it was possible, if that’s what you mean. Who knows for sure? NOw, I didn’t go to school much—just to the eighth grade, but I’ve read a lot. The Egyptians used to believe you kept being born over and over until you got all your hopes and desires attended to. Pretty confusing thought, I think.

JEANNE: That’s a crazy thing to think, and you don’t really believe. You used… (CONFUSED) …that is… Craig Blair used to say the same thing, but he didn’t believe it. People talk and talk, and they never believe half of the things they say. I think—
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 36

Robert E. Howard wrote many stories about reincarnation and past lives, from the James Allison tales like “The Valley of the Worm” and “The Garden of Fear” to the Conan the Reaver story “The People of the Dark.” How much he himself believed in reincarnation has always been and probably always shall be an open question. Novalyne Price Ellis would interpret such ideas through her own experiences.

ELLIS: TO me, what Bob said about that was just a fascinating idea. Just another fantastic story to weave. I was down in the dumps. So he says, “Now here I was in Brownwood. I met this man, and we disliked each other the minute we saw each other. Maybe way back yonder somewhere, maybe he stole my woman or the bear I’d killed for food”—which was the most important to him I don’t remember. How could anybody take him seriously? I mean, that was spur-of-the-moment.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 21

Whether or not the Stranger is the ghost or reincarnation of Robert E. Howard—or Craig Blair in the setting of the play—it is indubitably an effort to capture something of Howard’s character and mannerisms.

As a piece of drama, “The Day of the Stranger” has legs: the identity of the “stranger” is never revealed, and all of the conflict is in Jeanne’s head, the tumult of emotions as she is torn between the memory of a dead man and the more unimaginative man she’s dating now. Yet on another level, for those familiar with the outlines of Novalyne and Bob’s relationship, it reads as a kind of catharsis—a way for her to work out many of the lingering emotions she might have had, to put a sense of closure on a relationship which ended on an unresolved chord.

*The Trail*, yearbook of Daniel Baker College, 1947

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.