Clark Ashton Smith – { feuilleton }

Intégrale Howard Phillips Lovecraft

More Lovecraft book covers. Blame the season for this although depictions of Lovecraft’s cosmos have been occupying my thoughts for a while now, as I explain below.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the weird-fiction collections that Mnémos had been publishing in France, all of which used for their cover art paintings by the Polish “anti-symbolist” Zdzislaw Beksinski. I like Beksinski’s paintings very much, and thought they were a good match for most of the covers that Mnémos had produced, being sufficiently weird and evocative without being directly illustrative. (The sole exception was the peculiar dog-like creature on the cover of a Frank Belknap Long collection, The Hounds of Tindalos. Long’s “hounds” are malevolent extra-dimensional entities whose name shouldn’t be taken literally.) I mentioned that Mnémos had also announced a seven-volume collection of HP Lovecraft’s fiction and non-fiction, but at the time of writing there were no pictures of the books available, and I’d forgotten all about the collection until a few days ago. All the books in the set, which are translated by David Camus, have since been reprinted as standalone volumes.

Intégrale Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a little deceptive as a title for a Lovecraft collection when the word “intégrale” is often applied to complete editions of something. The Mnémos set looks like it contains all of the fiction in the first few volumes plus a quantity of essays, but Lovecraft famously wrote more letters than he did stories; the letters here are a small selection inside volume 6. In addition to the books, the collection also contains a map of the Dreamlands, together with cards and bookmarks embellished with details from Beksinski’s paintings.

As with the Mnémos covers for Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith, you could use many different Beksinski paintings for these editions, all of which would work to some degree. Even if some of them seem mismatched they offer a change of direction away from those varieties of fantasy art which have become very mannered in recent years when applied to weird fiction in general and Lovecraft’s stories in particular. This is partly a result of over-production: the huge success of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game drove a demand for more and more Lovecraftian artwork, with the result that clichés emerged sooner than they would have done if the available imagery was limited to book illustrations and comic strips. I’ve contributed to the situation as much as most although I’ve also kept trying to find directions away from the stereotypes; my Cthulhoid picture was one such attempt even it still leans on the tentacular. I’ve been thinking recently of following the King in Yellow portrait with more poster-size art that explores other possibilities in this area. I’d encourage other artists to do the same when they can (commercial constraints often force your hand). Beksinski’s paintings show one route out of the mannerist cul-de-sac.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The fantastic art archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beksinski on film
• Beksinski at Mnémos

The Return of the Sorcerer

The story’s first appearance in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931. No illustrator credited.

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery is a series I’d have happily watched if one of the UK channels had rebroadcast it in the 1980s, the way that Channel 4 did with the original Twilight Zone. This weekend I watched for the first time the opening episode of Night Gallery‘s third and final season, an adaptation by Halsted Welles of Clark Ashton Smith’s The Return of the Sorcerer. Smith is a writer whose works are still mostly neglected by film and television but he was in good company in Night Gallery, a series which featured adaptations of stories by a number of fellow Weird Tales writers including HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch. The story is one of Smith’s modern-day horror tales in which a poverty-stricken translator is offered a lucrative position at an old and sinister house, a place where a fearful occultist requires translations of an ancient volume. The Arabic text turns out to be passages from an early edition of everybody’s favourite forbidden tome, the Necronomicon, and Smith’s story, which was published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in 1931, is the first outside Lovecraft’s own to mention the book, thus beginning the expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos by other hands.

The Night Gallery adaptation was broadcast in 1972. Unlike the first two seasons, where episodes ran for an hour, the third season reduced the running time to under 30 minutes which doesn’t give director Jeannot Szwarc (credited as Jean Szwarc) any time to build up the suspense, if he was capable of such a thing. If you’ve ever seen any of Swarc’s feature films you know not to raise your expectations. As a compensation for the absense of atmosphere we get some striking set designs and a decent cast. The fearful magus, John Carnby, is played by Vincent Price, encountering the Necronomicon for the second time in his career after he’d earlier used the book to summon an eldritch monstrosity in Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. Bill Bixby plays the wary translator, while Patricia Sterling is Carnby’s toad-loving partner in Satanism, an addition to the story by Halstead Welles, whose presence adds an extra dimension to the proceedings. The episode could never be considered a lost classic but I enjoy seeing stories by the Weird Tales writers making their first infiltrations into the wider culture. This one is worth watching for Vincent Price and the magical decor alone. I think I ought to go looking for more Night Gallery episodes.

More of those Cocteau hands-through-the-wall. Bixby’s character doesn’t seem very perturbed that the scarlet hall is filled with mysterious vapours.

Mystical decor: on the left, Frieda Harris’s Ace of Discs from the Thoth Tarot deck; on the right, The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

Mystical/Satanic decor: the painting in the background is Frieda Harris’s Ace of Cups from the Thoth Tarot deck.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps
• Illustrating Zothique
• The Plutonian Drug
• More trip texts
• Yuggoth details
• The Garden of Adompha
• The City of the Singing Flame
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

Weekend links 720

The Poet and the Siren (1893) by Gustave Moreau.

• “Some books become talismans. Because they are strange, wildly different to the common run of literature; because they are scarce, and only a few precious copies are known to exist; because, perhaps, they liberate by transgressing the moral limits of the day; because their authors are lonely, elusive visionaries; because, sometimes, there is an inexplicable glamour about the book, so that its readers seem to be lured into a preternatural reverie. This book possesses all those attributes.” Mark Valentine in an introduction he wrote for a 1997 reprint of The Book of Jade (1901) by David Park Barnitz. The book’s author was an American writer who died at the age of 23 after publishing this single volume, a collection of poetry inspired by his favourite Decadent writers. Praise from HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti has since helped maintain the book’s reputation. The Book of Jade turned up recently at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts. Also the home of an increasingly eclectic list of publications.

• At n+1: The Dam and the Bomb by Walker Mimms, a fascinating essay about the entangling of Cormac McCarthy’s personal history with his novels which makes a few connections I didn’t expect to see. Also a reminder that I’ve yet to read McCarthy’s last two books. Soon…

• The latest installation from teamLab is Resonating Life which Continues to Stand, an avenue of illuminated eggs on the Hong Kong waterfront.

• At The Wire: Symphony of sirens: an interview with Aura Satz, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Evelyn Glennie and Raven Chacon.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Darkness presents The Sleeper May Awaken: Stephen Mackey’s Unrestful Realms.

• RIP Marian Zazeela. There’s a page here with a selection of her beautiful calligraphic poster designs.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tomona Matsukawa’s realistic paintings reconstruct fragments of everyday life.

• At Public Domain Review: Thom Sliwowski on The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997).

• Trinity (2024), a short film by Thomas Blanchard. There’s a lot more at his YouTube channel.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lotte Reiniger’s Day.

• Sirens (1984) by Michael Stearns | Sirens (1988) by Daniel Lanois & Brian Eno | Siren Song (2009) by Bat For Lashes

Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

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

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

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

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

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

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

First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

As I was saying a couple of weeks ago, Surrealism will be 100 years old this year, if you mark the movement’s birth from the first manifestoes (there were two different ones) published in October 1924. Surrealism doesn’t really have a definite beginning, however, either in 1924 or earlier on; the movement evolved over several years, with different factions competing for followers while squabbling over intentions. After a great deal of ferment the manifestoes from the opposed groups led by Yvan Goll and André Breton were a declaration that something substantial had been happening that required definition. I’m not sure why all of this interests me as much as it does just now, but I’m looking forward to seeing where the interest leads. Don’t be surprised to see more posts on the subject in the coming months.

So, then… Fast-forward to 1942 and First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition of paintings staged in New York City by the Coordination Council of French Relief Societies in October of that year. The exhibition was curated by André Breton with the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, Breton having recently arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi-occupied France together with a small group of Surrealist artists, some of whom were represented in the show. Duchamp’s main contribution was His Twine, an installation of a large quantity of string threaded around the exhibition space through which the visitors had to peer in order to see the paintings. Duchamp also invited a group of children to play ball games inside the gallery on the opening night. This wasn’t the first Surrealist exhibition to be held in New York—Julien Levy had introduced the city to the latest art movement at his own gallery in 1933, and had been showing Surrealist paintings and Joseph Cornell’s artworks in the years that followed—but First Papers on Surrealism was an important event, with many major artists represented.

What you see here are pages from the exhibition catalogue, a publication which is more like one of the smaller Surrealist magazines than a mere list of the pictures on display. Marcel Duchamp designed the die-cut cover (those holes make me wonder whether these were also originally threaded with string), while the catalogue interior contains an intriguing collection of quotes, captions, photographs and illustrations. Breton’s “Great Transparent Ones” raise their invisible heads again, while the artists and curators are all depicted in a series of “compensation portraits” which stand in for an absence of suitable photos.

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