The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881) by John Cleland

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

John Cleland, immersed in the clutches of the law, under circumstances which would have extinguished the fire of genius in any ordinary man, wrote himself out of the poor debtor’s prison and into everlasting fame through his immortal romance The Memoirs of Fanny Hill.

Its extraordinary success brought the attention of the authorities to his work and while condemning it for distribution, they recognized its merit, by granting Cleland a pension, stipulating however that the payment of the pension would cease should he produce any other work of the free nature of Fanny Hill.

These circumstances being of common knowledge, few except the indefatigable bibliophile have attempted to seek out and preserve other works than the romance.

It is however a fact that he did write other works and one of his best The Amatory Adventures of a Surgeon has survived the vandalism of the censor.

In this work Cleland shows himself as the pioneer in the realms of psychology and his keen interpretation of the real impulses of the human mind, prompted all its actions as it is by the sex urge, was one of the early incentives which led to the dvelopment of the present school of writers on the sexual question.

He was one of the first to recognize the value of De Sade in the study of mental vagaries and his reference to Justine or the Misfortune of Virtue in this work, led to the first English translation and general interst afterwards awakened in Sadism.

The text in this edition follows exactly the edition of Rotterdam which is a precise reprint of the original.
A. Machen, “Introduction” in The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (undated edition)

John Cleland was the 18th century English novelist who famously wrote Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). The author of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, however, was James Campbell Reddie, a 19th-century Scottish writer of pornography, who used the pseudonym “James Campbell.” In the 1800s, the appetite for sexually-explicit media was no less than today, but the consequences of its production and sale were more severe; pseudonyms were not unknown, and doctoring up a pornographic work as by someone else far away was a reasonable effort to throw off the police.

So why is the book attributed to John Cleland?

While the title page says “experiences,” the actual cover of the book says “experience.” A quirk of this edition.

Cleland’s notoriety as the author of Fanny Hill would seem to be one reason why he was attributed as the author; presumably an ignorant buyer might recognize that name more readily than “James Campbell.” Likewise, Fanny Hill had at least a modicum of literary cachet, so attributing the work to Cleland might have been an obtuse effort to bypass censorship, at least for those who read no further than the introduction.

So who is “A. Machen,” who learnedly pretends that this is a genuine example of erotic art and literature, rather than a literary hoax-cum-masturbation fodder?

Who it is not is Arthur Machen, the Welsh journalist, thespian, and master of the weird tale who so influenced H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and generations of aficionados of the fantastic literature. Whoever wrote this—and it is not clear exactly when it became appended onto the many illicit reprints of The Amatory Experience of a Surgeon—was trying to do for a new generation what Readie was trying to for his original audience in the 1880s: convince them that some notable literary figure had blessed this work by association.

Arthur Machen, you see, had a reputation.

Before Machen made his name as a weird fictioneer proper, his primary fame lay in a series of translations of European slightly risque or ribald stories into English. These were not erotic works in any strict sense of the term; but classical novels and collections of short stories which were slightly more daring or concerns subjects slightly inappropriate for Victorian British society. In the late 19th century rising literacy rates, British classism, public prudery, and private decadence, combined to form discrete levels of erotic content.

Readers who wished to read the 1,001 Nights in English, for example, their options might include Edward William Lane’s expurgated and bowdlerized Arabian Nights Entertainment (1848/1853), suitable for all ages and available relatively cheaply in bookstores or through libraries, or Sir Richard Francis Burton’s uncensored, unexpurgated, scholarly translation A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night which was published in 10 volumes from 1885 to 1888 by private subscription, and to which Burton famously tacked on a 10,000-word essay on pederasty.

Scholarship and academic interest in subjects like medicine, psychology, anthropology, art, and history gave a veneer of acceptability to works about sexuality or the nude form; money for private editions gave access to works not fit for the hoi polloi. Yet these works were neither hardcore erotica or complete shams, though both abounded for the unwary buyer. Rather, there was an appetite at the time that wanted something that was both of literary quality and not censored and expurgated to death. A very fine line for a translator to walk, and the end product might be politely known as curiosa or gallantia.

Machen’s first work was The Heptameron (1886), a 16th-century collection of stories from Marguerite of Navarre modeled on the 14th-century The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. As Machen later described his translation, which sought to preserve something of the style of the early modern prose:

A graceful book, but, as it strikes me now, a little faded. The Heptameron always reminds me of some embroidered, silken dress that has lain in a dark chest for many long years. It is still beautiful; but the embroidered roses have grown somewhat dim.
Arthur Machen in Arthur Machen: A Bibliography (1923) 6

An amended version of this book was issued a year later as The Fortunate Lovers (1887), and was followed up by The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), which was a collection of tales after the medieval pattern and strongly reminiscent of Balzac and Rabelais; and Fantastic Tales or The Way to Attain (1890), translated from Le Moyen de Parvenir (1617) of Béroalde de Verville. In 1894, the same year Machen published his infamous weird tale “The Great God Pan,” he also published the full twelve-volume Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (Giacomo Girolamo Casanova). If the association with the Yellow Book hadn’t sealed Machen’s reputation, Casanova probably did. Not because any of these works themselves were sexually explicit, but because they had the reputation of being books about sex—which they were, in a sense.

It’s easier to illustrate the point with an example:

In the harbour of Coulon, hard by Niort, there lived a boat-woman, who, by day and night, carried people across the ferry. And it came ot pass that two Grey Friars of the aforesaid Niort were crossing over by themselves in her boat, whereupon, seeing that the passage is one of the longest in France, they began to crave love-dalliance, to which entreaties she gave the answer that became her. But they, who for all their journeying were not aweary, nor by reason of the water were acold, nor by her rfusal ashamed, determined to have her by force, and if she made an outcry to throw her into the river. And she, whose wit was as good and sharp as their was gross and evil, said to them: “I have not so hard a heart as I seam to have, but I entreat you to grant me two things, and then you shall preceive that I am readier to obey than you to command.” So the two Grey Friars swore by St. Francis that she should ask nothing of them that they would not grant, so long as she did them the pleasure they desired. “In the first place, then,” said she, “I require of you that you advertise no man of this matter.” This they promised with great willingness. “And in second place,” she went on, “that you have your pleasure of me by turns, for this would be too great shame to have to do with the one before the face of the other. Determine, then, which shall first enjoy me.” This likewise they deemed a reasonable thing, and the younger of the two granted his companion the prerogative. So when they drew near a small island she said to the former: “Holy father, do you tell your beads and tarry here, while I am gone with your companion to yonder island, and if, when he returns, he gives a good account of me, we will lleave him, and you and I will go apart together.” The young friar leapt on to the island, and awaited there his comrade’s return, whom the baotwoman took off to another island. And when they had come alongside, the woman, making pretence to fasten her boat to a tree, said to him: “Do you go, sweetheart, and look for a place where we may dispose ourselves.” The holy man got on to the island and searched about for some nook fit for the purpose; but no sooner did she seem him on firm gorund than she pushed off, and made for open water, leaving these two holy fathers to their deservings, for all the clamour they made to her. “Wait patiently, good sirs,” said she, “for an angel to come and console you, for to-day you willhave of me no pleasuance.”
The Heptameron novel V, trans. Arthur Machen, 1924 edition.

The 1880s and 1890s editions of Machen’s translations were often issued by private subscription in small numbers; their more wider influence came during the “Machen Boom” of the 1920s, when Machen’s works were reprinted in the United States by Alfred Knopf and Vincent Starrett. While it is difficult to judge when exactly the “A. Machen” introduction was affixed onto reprints of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, it would not be strange if the resurgence of Machen’s popularity in the 1920s had something to do with it. The Ethnological and Cultural Studies of the Sex Life in England (1934) makes no mention of Machen’s introduction in discussing the text, but then it’s easy to miss clandestine editions.

The reason why it is difficult to say more with any certainty is simply the nature of the reprints of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon. Being an obscene work by the standards of the 1880s, it was never copyrighted, and relatively easy to pirate; the pirated editions were themselves often later pirated, so that anyone interested in owning a copy will find a delirious range of editions in everything from fine bindings to cheap stapled reprints to print-on-demand editions. Many editions bear fictitious information about their printing, claiming to have been published (in English!) in Moscow or Paris. Some are illustrated, and some are xeroxed and stapled together crudely.

All we know for absolute certain is that some copies of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon have an introduction by “A. Machen,” some do not. Those that have the introduction we might say are of the “Machenian textual tradition,” because obviously later publishers copied the text of the Machen introduction from an earlier work, to some hypothetical first publisher who thought it would be clever, or have retail value. In circumstances such as these, each book becomes an artifact. There are several hallmarks of this particular edition, besides the size and binding:

The introduction by “A. Machen” that attributes the book to John Cleland.
The pages are obviously photo-offset from a previous edition; the ornaments and font match photographs of a clandestine edition of the text attributed to 1925.
While that 1925 edition had three erotic engravings, this booklet is illustrated by black-and-white sexually explicit photos which are difficult to date, but probably from the 1940s or 50s.

So the surmise is that at some point in the 20s or 30s, a publisher printed a private edition of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon with a spurious introduction by the then-popular Machen and an attribution to John Cleland as a way to drum up sales. Sometime in the 40s or 50s, a clandestine publisher photo-offset the text of that edition, and added a few exciting pictures, resulting in the underground copy above.

The 40s and 50s make sense in context because in 1952 Odalisque Press released an edition of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon which was attributed to James Campbell, lacked the Machen introduction, and was clearly marked with Odalisque’s name and the date of publication. In other words, we now have the start of an actual datable, traceable series of publications from various publishers who decided to print this work, now in the public domain, for an audience eager for the now-scarce erotica and curiosa of yesteryear.

If there are professionally published copies of the book available, who needs cheaply-made, badly illustrated copies produced by some guy in his basement, or in a print shop after hours? As the end of Prohibition signaled the return of good liquor over bathtub gin, the loosening of obscenity standards as applied to literature made sexually explicit material more readily available through legal means. As more established publishers moved into this market, they pushed out the little guys producing crummy booklets to the edges of the marketplace.

Booklets like this, crudely conceived and executed, have become the target of collectors and scholars where once they might have been sold under-the-counter in bookstores or by shady mail-order catalogs, more important for their representation of an earlier time than their literary content. It took a certain cultural context to make it feasible and desirable to put a book like this together—and it is, if nothing else, a testament to a very odd reputation that haunted Arthur Machen, though his fantastic fiction has come to overshadow his earlier writings.

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.

El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales (1960)

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 wakest murderer is sure of a certain amount of respectful attention if he will take the trouble to dismember his subject.
Arthur Machen, “The Islington Mystery” (1927)

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.

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 Morales the 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.

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.

Ecstasy (1989)

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected passages involving sexually explicit activites will be included.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

Bellezza prorompente e maliziosa, biondo desiderio che esplode dalle copertine delle riviste, dalle locandine dei cinema, dai cartellon dei night club e anche (quando la censura lo permette…), dal piccolo chermo televisivo. Con Moana Pozzi, diventata ormai un “mito”, il cinema erotico italiano si è conquistto un posto d’onore accanto alle produzioni internazionali più importanti. Moana è sensualità, irruenza, genuinità. Moana è… ecstasy. Chi è sensibile alle sue grazie non dimenticherà faclmente questo concentrato di sogni…

Beauty, breathtaking and mischievous, blonde desire exploding from magazine covers, movie posters, night club billboards and even (when censorship allows…), from the small television screen. Starring Moana Pozzi, who has now become a “myth,” Italian erotic cinema has won a place of honor next to the most important international productions. Moana is sensual, impetuous, genuine. Moana is… ecstasy. Those who are sensitive to her graces will not easily forget this concentrate of dreams….

Back cover text on the 2009 Minerva Video DVD

English translation

In the mid-1980s, Italian actress Moana Pozzi became a sensation for her adult films, brazen nudity on television, and her intelligence and outspokenness on sex and sexuality. In the 1990s she became a published author and political candidate, co-founding the Partito dell’Amore (“Party of Love”), which campaigned on a platform that included better sex education and legalization of brothels. While Pozzi never achieved any real political power, it added to her growing status as an Italian icon of the adult film industry. In 1994, Pozzi would die relatively young from liver cancer, leaving behind an enduring legacy—including inspiring the 1999 film Guardami and being the subject of the 2009 biographical docudrama Moana. Her name recognition was such that even in 2016, the Disney animated film Moana had to be marketed under the alternate title Oceanica in Italy.

Buried in Moana’s filmography is an odd gem: the relatively obscure Ecstasy (1989), which was very loosely adapted on Welsh author Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder,” one of the episodes in his picaresque weird novel The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895). Machen, for all his fame as a writer of the weird and an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft and others, has very rarely been adapted to film or television. Yet in the late 1980s, Moana Pozzi and director Luca Ronchi gave it a shot:

la storia è liberamente ispirata al racconto “Polvere biance” di ARTHUR MACHEN (1984)	the story is loosely based on the short story “White Powder” by ARTHUR MACHEN (1984)
From opening credits of Ecstasy	English translation

It isn’t exactly clear which text/translation that the filmmakers were drawing from but it seems likely to be Giuseppe Lippi’s translation in Il gran Dio Pan e altre storie soprannaturali (1982). Whatever the case, the approach to adapting Machen’s story was very “liberamente,” taking broad inspiration but telling its own story:

[…] con Ecstasy di Luch Ronchi (’90) nel cui cast figura anche il pornodivo Rocco Siffredi (vero nome Rocco Tano), qui in veste soft. Storia onirica, molto liberamente tratta dal racconto “Polvere bianca” di Arthur Machen, scrittore inglese di fine Ottocentro, basata sui poteri di una misteriosa droga che esalta, ma allo stesso tempo uccide, Ecstasy offre a Moana Pozzi una chance che lei non riesce a sfruttare appieno. Del resto la Pozzi dichiarava allora, in un sussulto di autocoscienza: « Sia chiaro, io non sono un’attrice sono una che cerca di interpretare se stessa in tante situazioni diverse».

[…] with Ecstasy by Luch Ronchi (’90) whose cast also includes porn star Rocco Siffredi (real name Rocco Tano), here in a soft role. A dreamlike story, very loosely based on the short story “White Powder” by Arthur Machen, a late 19th-century English writer, based on the powers of a mysterious drug that enhances but at the same time kills, Ecstasy offers Moana Pozzi a chance that she fails to take full advantage of. After all, Pozzi declared at the time, in a jolt of self-consciousness: ” Let it be clear, I am not an actress I am someone who tries to play herself in many different situations.”

Moana e le altre: il cinema pornografico in Italia 39-40

English translation

In Machen’s original, the scene is 19th-century England, where a sister worries about her brother’s ascetic habits. The family physician suggests a medicine—an innocuous white powder—and at first it seems to have positive effects, making her brother more social, outgoing, and forgetting his cares. Too soon, however, things take a turn for the worse; the drug had deleterious effects, yet the brother cannot cease taking it—and a trifle wound on the hand becomes something profoundly worse. The physician discovers it was not what he had prescribed at all, and its effects finally lead to a fate worse than death for the poor, afflicted brother.

Keeping in mind that Machen was writing a little less than ninety years before D.A.R.E., the parallels with drug addiction and “scared straight” drug literature may seem overly obvious in hindsight, but “The Novel of the White Powder” isn’t really an anti-drug story. The Victorians were well aware of the addictive possibilities of drugs like opium in the 1890s, but the white powder that the brother takes isn’t just a chemical pick-me-up:

By the power of that Sabbath wine, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder, and the human trinity dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of flesh. And then in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and represented, and the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew.
Arthur Machen, “The Novel of the White Powder”

This is how Machen took a familiar story and turned it from a familiar tale of dissolution into something infinitely more suggestive and supernatural.

In Ecstasy, the setting is moved from the 19th-century United Kingdom to Italy in the 1980s. Moana Pozzi plays a version of herself, an outgoing adult film actress named Moana. Her younger sister Anna (Carrie Janisse), is the opposite of her outgoing sister: reclusive and given to watching horror movies, living in the shadow of her more glamorous sister. Moana provides Anna with a strange drug (ironically, a grey powder). Moana narrates as her sister Anna slowly comes out of her shell…and then spirals into drug abuse and degradation. Despite a brief flirtation with witchcraft imagery at the beginning and the end, and Anna suffering a similar hand injury, there isn’t much in the way of Machen’s original idea for the drug or its effects….and it is these brief flourishes that are as near as the film ever approaches to horror in the traditional sense.

Ecstasy was evidently never intended as a straight adaptation of Machen’s story, but even so, it feels like there’s a lot of missed opportunity here. The film neither draws on the rise of cocaine or club drugs like MDMA (popularized with the street name ecstasy) in the 1980s, nor on the more overtly supernatural dissolution in “The Novel of the White Powder.” As such, there’s no explicit social commentary, and no horrific spectacle at the end. We’re left instead with a film that hovers between hardcore adult film and erotic thriller, never quite being one or the other. Sexually explicit, and yet not simply a succession of sexual encounters; being more dreamlike in tone, dominated by an overarching narration.

As a work of cinema, Ecstasy is hard to pin down. A good deal of European horror during the period was heavy on blood, nudity, and atmosphere, but there were often lines that still weren’t crossed—explicit sex and genitalia, for example, were not common features of anything except the sleaziest of the Eurosleaze during the 1970s and 80s. By the same contrast, adult films, even when they had a plot (this was not long after the Golden Age of Porn in the United States), rarely addressed anything like a drug theme in a serious way. Ultimately, the film is almost narcissistically focused on Moana herself; even her sister’s suffering is a story that happens within the context of Moana’s life, work, and her sexual encounters. Anna’s story lives in the shadow of Moana’s throughout the film, and that feels like a deliberate choice.

Ecstasy seems to walk this tightrope, being more restrained, artistic, and plot-driven than the typical adult film, and yet more sexually explicit than more overtly transgressive European horror films of the period. From the moment that Moana rubs a piece of banana on her bare vagina and offers it to the man she’s having a conversation with, you know that you’re watching a film that is transgressive in ways that your typical 1980s horror film couldn’t be, for fear of never getting distribution.

While working with a relatively small cast, and presumably a small budget, the film makes the most of what it has. The cinematography is surprisingly solid, especially the night shots of Rome. The film’s quasi-biographical aspect is an asset as well, taking advantage of Moana’s widespread publicity in showing magazine covers, glamour shots, fumetti, and pinups. The soundtrack is nothing special but doesn’t detract from the overall atmosphere either; simple synth-and-drum-machine pieces, neither corny nor overly dramatic, but oddly fitting the overall 80s aesthetic.

If there’s a charm to the film, it is how so very 1980s it is, from the teased hair to the technology, all instant film cameras, walkmans, telephone booths, and CRT televisions; the utter ubiquity of trash and cigarettes, the boxy Italian cars on the roads and the discotheque. So too, there’s something oddly endearing about how utterly blasé the adult film actors are in their skimpy outfits on the sets, the utter ambivalence they express to casual nudity and even foreplay. The conscious artifice of it all is at once a glamourization of the lifestyle, and highlights how fundamentally silly a lot of adult filmmaking really is, looking at it from the outside.

Ecstasy has never received an English-language release. The 2009 DVD is out of print, which makes this a relatively scarce and obscure film, especially for those obsessively interested in Machen’s rather limited filmography.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

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

The White People (2015) by Ibrahim R. Ineke

I agree with what you say about suggestion as the highest form of horror-presentation. The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. In Machen, the subtlest story—”The White People”—is undoubtedly the greatest, even though it hasn’t the tangible, visible terrors of “The Great God Pan” or “The White Powder”. But the mob—including Farnsworth Wright—can never be made to see this; hence W.T. will always reject work of the finest and most delicate sort.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 4 Oct 1930, A Means to Freedom 1.52

Comics and graphic novels (and increasingly film and television shows) which seek to adapt Lovecraftian concepts onto the page often face an immediate difficulty: not just how to balance the words and pictures, but how much not to show and not to tell. It isn’t just the question of whether the entity should appear, or only be glimpsed in part, or revealed in full. It’s a question of how far do you admit that there is an entity at all, how and when do you bring up the concept. How far can you get the reader’s imagination to run, and in which direction? How do you establish and maintain that horror-mood which pervades such stories as Arthur Machen’s “The White People”?

For Machen, much of the success of his “The White People” was in being very specific in many details, and very circumspect in others. He avoided proper names; gave few physical descriptions; yet the diary entries are detailed, vivid. The discussions around them are weighty and philosophical, the people discussing what has happened see more in what is going on than the individual who purportedly wrote them. There is more going on than it seems…

In print, an author might write out “indescribable.” How does an artist actually draw or paint that? Ibrahim R. Ineke in the 48-pages of this graphic novel shifts presentation and technique in a very Machenesque way. Stark blacks give great detail, except where they disappear into shadow; white gives terrific definition, until they became great blank swathes where bright sunlight has blinded the reader to all detail. The chiaroscuro gives way to color, kaleidoscopic in intensity and combination; pen-and-ink linework gives way to xerography. Style and medium both work to conceal many things, while throwing others in sharp relief. Like Machen, Ineke is feeding the reader details, while letting our imagination fill in the blanks, both light and dark.

It is all in service to the story. Not a pleasant story, but a disturbing one, laid out with all the care of a detective story. Ineke’s “The White People” is not a straight adaptation of Machen’s “The White People,” it inspired by, it carries some of the same energy, the same ideas, but it isn’t a retread of any particular story. It stands as a testament to what an artist can do in the medium—something between Bruce Jones and Berni Wrightson’s “Jenifer” and Jeffrey Jones’ Idyl I’m Age, and comparing very favorably to Black Stars Above (2019) by Lonnie Nadler & Jenna Cha.

Yet what makes Ineke’s “The White People” really effective is that like with Machen’s “The White People” it is essentially a kids story. Not a story for kids by any means (due to some graphic nudity), but about kids. Innocent, playful, not knowing what horrors are out there. That’s the essence of “The White People” as Machen wrote it, and it is in essence what Lovecraftian horror is like for all readers. To look where you shouldn’t, and have a bit of innocence stripped away.

Wherever there is horror, secrets are revealed. Ineke states this most directly when he writes “It’s always the woods, isn’t it?” Despite our continuous advances in science and reason, education and culture, the woods remain an untamable place—a site that is the very definition of nature, yet which continuously unleashes “unnatural” evidences. Despite Machen’s warnings, Ineke has found it necessary to re-enter this territory and present his findings to us.
—Amelia Ishmael, introduction to The White People (2015)

Ibrahim R. Ineke’s The White People (2015) was published in regular hardcover and deluxe hardcover editions by Sherpa. A preview of the contents can be seen on Issuu.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Helen’s Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz

Helen Vaughan did well to bind the cord about her neck and die, though the death was horrible. The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witness, surprises me but little. What you say the doctor whom you sent for saw and shuddered at I noticed long ago; I knew what I had done the moment the child was born, and when it was scarcely five years old I surprised it, not once or twice but several times with a playmate, you may guess of what kind. It was for me a constant, an incarnate horror, and after a few years I felt I could bear it no more, and I sent Helen Vaughan away. You know now what frightened the boy in the wood. The rest of the strange story, and all else that you tell me, as discovered by your friend, I have contrived to learn from time to time, almost to the last chapter. And now Helen is with her companions…
—Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1890)

There had been an unfounded report of my own death many years ago. However, I continue to survive and thrive. I’ve gone by other names—Herbert, Raymond and Beaumont among them. Now there’s no reason I can’t call myself Helen Vaughan again.
—Rosanne Rabinowitz, Helen’s Story (2013) 11

“The Great God Pan” was first published in The Whirlwind in 1890. This was the beginning of the Yellow Nineties; the Decadent movement was gaining ground in literature and art, and to the Victorians of the day, the serialized story was condemned. Many years later, Arthur Machen would collect some of his favorite unfavorable reviews in a volume title Precious Balms (1924), and some of the critiques will be familiar to fans of Lovecraftian literature:

His art has been hampered by the limitations imposed upon it through his having to leave his ingenious horror “indescribable” and “unutterable” from first to last. (2)

There are nameless horrors hinted at in every other page, which make other people turn green and sick, but it is beyond the power of the most susceptible reader to shudder at the shudders of these fictional people. (3-4)

If we may believe Mr Machen, those doings are of the most horrible character; but as he omits to tell us what they are, and leaves us merely with the impression that she is “a bold, bad woman” of a very ordinary description, we are compelled to take her special horrors upon trust. (5)

But note the sex-mania in it all. It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained. (10)

So on and so forth. Time has been kinder to Machen’s weird fiction than to his critics, in no small part because “The Great God Pan” was reprinted and anthologized, and provided inspiration for both H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” and Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Nameless Offspring.” Mary became the archetype for Lavinia Whateley, and all the Lavinias that followed her; Helen Vaughan the model for Wilbur Whateley, and Hester Sawyer of “The Devil’s Hop Yard” (1978).

It took a century and change for Helen Vaughan’s side of the story to be told.

Though she appears on the page in “The Great God Pan” only briefly, Machen’s story is focused on Helen Vaughan, her whole life from conception in sin to taking her own life. Read as a serial, we can only imagine what the turn-of-the-century Victorians took of the many unspoken horrors at play…because the supernatural in the story is very implicit, until the end. It’s not a story to titillate, exactly. Helen’s mother Mary is an orphan with a too-intimate relationship with the scientist who “adopted her.” There are direct parallels to the conception of Christ, with a diabolic turn. As a child her features are “of a somewhat foreign character,” and plays strange games. Then as an adult Helen Vaughan is the femme fatale, the model for the mad artist, the wife that ruins her husband. All in one Helen Vaughan is layer on layer all these Victorian taboos, and is at last realized as a sexual woman who is not fixed in class, who exists outside the control of any male family member or husband.

…then she dies. Which is the probably the weakest part of the plot:

“No. I shall offer a choice, and leave Helen Vaughan alone with this cord in a locked room for fifteen minutes. If when we go in it is not done, I shall call the nearest policeman. That is all.”
—Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1890)

It is a very weird build-up to the final climax of the novel because throughout the story, Machen has given no indication that Helen Vaughan is bound by conventional Victorian ideas of morality and propriety and reputation. Why should she fear the police? Why would she commit suicide?

Well, in Rosanne Rabinowitz’ Helen’s Story, she doesn’t. While Rabinowitz keeps most of the essential plot details of Machen’s tale, she also doesn’t attempt to copy his prose. Machen was borrowing the style of Robert Louis Stevenson, with Dr. Raymond made in the mold of Dr. Henry Jekyll of “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886). The chain of evidence style works for the atmosphere that Machen was building, the moralities and assumptions that he was building to. Yet Helen Vaughan in Rabinowitz’ depiction is the embodiment of that Victorian horror of the independent, sexually confident woman. It’s her story, told in her words, and told in later days. It shouldn’t be told in as a Machen pastiche, so it isn’t.

Which is really part of what makes the story work so well. Helen Vaughan becomes something beyond the Victorian imagination’s ability to classify; she doesn’t fit into the roles assigned for her as monster, succubus, or slut. Helen’s Story is that of an artist, an outsider that looks for family, that tries to achieve a particular effect through her work. The kind of individual whose spirituality cannot be contained by any church, whose morality is too fluid for any system of law, who flits in between the systems of the world. Which is very much in the spirit of what Machen sought to convey to his Victorian readers, but done in a way which Machen because of the conventions of the time could not, except through hint and intimation (cf. “Unseen” (2020) by Claire Leslie).

“Ah, mother, mother, why did you let me go to the forest with Helen?” Mrs. M. was astonished at so strange a question, and proceeded to make inquiries. Rachel told her a wild story. She said—
—Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1890)

Of course I got into trouble. After Rachel left, there was an almighty row in the village.
—Rosanne Rabinowitz, Helen’s Story (2013) 11

There is a lot to be said for how women are often depicted (or not depicted) in both fiction and real life. In some cases, they can give their own accounts, set the record straight. In Lovecraft studies we remember The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis and One Who Walked Alone (1986) by Novalyne Price Ellis; readers of wider literature might recognize a precursor to Helen’s Story in Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) by Gregory Maguire. In all these cases, the accounts of the women have to be taken together with and against that of the other narrative which they are responding to. They tell their stories, but in telling those stories they are instinctively or intentionally shaping them around the stories that are already out there.

Which raises the question: how reliable is Helen Vaughan as a narrator?

The mere existence of Helen’s Story sheds a bit of doubt on Machen’s “The Great God Pan.” If you accept the narrative conceit that Helen Vaughan is alive and well, then the ending at least is a fabrication. That calls into question the events of the rest of Machen’s story: how much of this “really happened” versus being a narrative construction by the people telling the story—Clarke and Raymond. How much is Helen being honest, in painting herself as this misunderstood woman, raised by an uncaring scientist and constantly discriminated against for being different?

This is the kind of textual complexity which is shared by H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys. The conflicts and correlations between the stories force the reader out of the passive role of just absorbing information; now with two conflicting narratives to keep track of, the reader has to decide for themselves how much of each is “true” or accurate. The real story is neither the one or the other, but somewhere in between. The effect is not unlike a historian dealing with different accounts of a battle, or a Bible scholar who has to evaluate a canonical gospel and a newly-uncovered apocryphal gospel.

It’s the kind of approach that the Cthulhu Mythos is built on. Stories written not just as sequels, but as commentary and expansion, to correct old ideas and add new ones. In the case of Helen’s Story, the effect is especially appropriate as Helen’s narrative in Machen’s “The Great God Pan” is always told in someone else’s words. It’s the kind of historical narrative that is built around scraps of evidence and hearsay, and represents the prejudices of the man who compiled and presented the facts of the story to the audience, who were also presumed to be mainly men and to share the same prejudices. Helen’s Story is like a female scholar came along a century later, dug up an account of the woman herself that all the other scholars had overlooked, and presented it to explode the orthodoxy.

The combination of re-examining the essential gender bias in Machen’s “The Great God Pan” and the textual questions that can be raised by this kind of narrative is great. Rabinowitz knocks it out of the park in how she interweaves flashbacks that reflect on the narrative of events in “The Great God Pan” (and another Machen story, “The White People”) with the continuing narrative of what Helen Vaughan is doing in the present day. However, in basing Helen’s Story on “The Great God Pan” in this way, Rabinowitz does inherent a particular narrative necessity: how to end it.

Helen’s Story starts off by negating the ending of “The Great God Pan,” that means that this story has to provide a new conclusion. The ending which Arthur Machen wrote contains the only blatant supernatural elements in the entire story; there are hints and intimations, but nothing like the sudden appearance of “a mountain walked, or stumbled” in “The Call of Cthulhu.” Readers up until that point could have considered that Dr. Raymond had molested Mary, that Helen Vaughan was his child, that “seeing the Great God Pan” was cover for the terrible failure of his experiment that lobotomized his adopted-daughter-in-all-but-name. So without that ending…Rosanne Rabinowitz not only needs to find a fitting conclusion, but a fitting revelation.

What is the Great God Pan in Helen’s Story?

The final sentiment, the last revelation, the apotheosis or ipsissimus that Helen experiences…is utterly apt. It is both an homage to ending in “The Great God Pan” and a negation of it; because it is not an ending at all but a beginning. The crux of possibilities that bridges dream and reality in works like Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), Lord Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann” (1910), and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” (1929). Sex without guilt, art without compromise, love without jealousy, freedom without boundaries…but with still those roads back to the old fields we know.

Helen’s Story by Rosanne Rabinowitz was first published as a hardback by PS Publishing in 2013, and reprinted as a paperback by Aqueduct Press in 2017, it is also available as an ebook.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).