'Determined to Be Weird': British Weird Fiction Before Weird Tales
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Online Repository of Birkbeck Institutional Theses Birkbeck, University of London ‘Determined to be Weird’: British Weird Fiction before Weird Tales James Fabian Machin Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2016 1 Declaration I, James Fabian Machin, declare that this thesis is all my own work. Signature_______________________________________ Date____________________ 2 Abstract Weird fiction is a mode in the Gothic lineage, cognate with horror, particularly associated with the early twentieth-century pulp writing of H. P. Lovecraft and others for Weird Tales magazine. However, the roots of the weird lie earlier and late-Victorian British and Edwardian writers such as Arthur Machen, Count Stenbock, M. P. Shiel, and John Buchan created varyingly influential iterations of the mode. This thesis is predicated on an argument that Lovecraft’s recent rehabilitation into the western canon, together with his ongoing and arguably ever-increasing impact on popular culture, demands an examination of the earlier weird fiction that fed into and resulted in Lovecraft’s work. Although there is a focus on the literary fields of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century, by tracking the mutable reputations and critical regard of these early exponents of weird fiction, this thesis engages with broader contextual questions of cultural value and distinction; of notions of elitism and popularity, tensions between genre and literary fiction, and the high/low cultural divide allegedly precipitated by Modernism. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................... 5 Introduction .................................................................................................. 6 Chapter 1: The Wyrd, the Weird-like, and the Weird ............................... 30 Chapter 2: ‘Intensely lurid products of English Decadence’ ..................... 80 Chapter 3: John Buchan’s Weird Imperial Mind .................................... 157 Conclusion: Weird Tales and Pulp Decadence ......................................... 229 Works Cited .............................................................................................. 260 4 Acknowledgements I owe a debt of profound gratitude to my supervisor, Roger Luckhurst, who has been unstintingly generous with his time, expertise, and insight throughout the research and writing process. Sincere thanks are due to Timothy J. Jarvis: the impact on this thesis of our endless conversations concerning all things weird is unquantifiable. Myriad thanks are owed to Harold Billings, Godfrey Brangham, David Bunting, Douglas Cowie, Gwilym Games, Sebastian Groes, Matthew Harle, Hallvard Haug, Cato Marks, Ray Russell, and Mark Valentine. This thesis was funded by the Robert Gavron Charitable Trust and Birkbeck School of Arts and I would particularly like to thank Kate Gavron and Carol Watts for making this project possible. It saddens me that due to Lord Gavron’s death in 2015 I am unable to write to him to inform him of the completion of this thesis and thank him again for the incredible impact his generosity has had on my life. I am very grateful to both the Harry Ransom Center and Science Fiction Studies for fellowship awards that enabled travel to archives in Texas and California respectively, and also to the staff at the Ransom Center and the Eaton Collection, University of California Riverside, for being uniformly hospitable and generous with their expertise. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my mother Carole, my sister Rebecca Hamilton-Brown and brother-in-law John Hamilton-Brown, and also to Adrian and Judith Jones. I would like to offer innumerable thanks to my wife Lucy Jones. Although she has never troubled to disguise her disdain for my ‘goblin books’, there is no conceivable way I could have undertaken this work without her unstinting support and willingness to shoulder considerable burdens in order for me to do so. For this and much else besides, I will be ever grateful. Finally, I would like to thank my son, Arthur, whose arrival in 2014 absolutely ruined any hope of me completing this thesis to my original schedule, albeit in the most delightful way possible. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my father, Noel Machin. 5 Introduction This thesis is, in part, a reaction to the view that the story of weird fiction is ‘the story of the rise of the tentacle’ and ‘the group of writers surrounding Lovecraft’ that ‘represented a revolution of sorts against old ideas about supernatural fiction’.1 This account effectively puts the output of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the 1920s and 1930s — especially the work of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961), and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) — at the centre of our understanding of the mode and its history. The following discussion is not meant to rebut this account, but rather blur the periodic boundaries put in place that serve to co-opt weird fiction for a ‘modern’ era and imbue it with a sheen of modernist respectability. Since the term ‘pulp modernism’ was coined by Paula Rabinowitz (in relation to Noir), refracting popular culture through the prism of modernism has been a source of productive and insightful scholarship.2 However, making such associations with what is understood as high culture inevitably, even if only inadvertently, involves some animus to legitimize texts that have traditionally been seen as outside the purview of scholarship. China Miéville, for example, achieves both with his comment that weird fiction and high modernism are ‘exactly linked’ and are ‘a differently inflected statement of the same concerns, the same anxieties, the same attempted solutions.’3 In their introduction to The Weird: a Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012), Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer contrast this ‘modern era’ of weird fiction to ‘prior eras’ and aver that a break took place: ‘The best and most unique supernatural writers from prior eras, like Arthur Machen (his best short fiction written before 1910), would leave their mark on this newer weird, but not a boot print’ (p. xvi). The 1 Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, ‘Introduction’, in The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories (London: Tor, 2012), pp. xv–xx (p. xvi). 2 Paula Rabinowitz, Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 3 Tony Venezia, ‘Weird Fiction: Dandelion Meets China Miéville’, Dandelion, 1.1 (2010), 1–9 (p. 5). 6 parenthetical remark is a necessary one to the argument: Machen (1863– 1947) outlived Lovecraft by a decade. It is also indicative of the refusal of lives and texts to conform to our desire to retroactively impose order on, and identify process in, the teeming jumble and babel of culture and history. However, the point of disagreement elaborated upon in what follows is the specific claim that Machen, and his generation of writers, did not leave a ‘boot print’ on ensuing weird fiction. It is my attempt to reinsert weird fiction back into its wider continuum, taking as my starting point the nineteenth century, and as my end point the iterations of the nineteenth century still very much present and persistent in the ‘modernist’ Weird Tales of the 1920s and 1930s. Reviewing Machen’s 1895 novel The Three Impostors, H. G. Wells lamented that Machen was ‘determined to be weird’.4 My argument below is that he was not alone. In Lovecraft’s influential survey, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), he defined the weird tale as one consisting of: […] something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.5 The ongoing durability of this delineation is perhaps as indicative of Lovecraft’s impact on the mode as it is on the perspicacity of his analysis. It seems doubtful that there is any credible definition of weird fiction which is not in some respects a permutation or elaboration of Lovecraft’s conceit here. It has certainly been reiterated regularly ever since, and has become (as here) a formula from which most if not all discussions of weird fiction ensue, and with good reason: it manages to limn the mode while 4 H. G. Wells, ‘The Three Impostors’, Saturday Review, 11 January 1896, pp. 48–49 (p. 48); for the attribution to Wells see: Robert M. Philmus, ‘H. G. Wells as Literary Critic for the Saturday Review’, Science Fiction Studies, 4.2 (1977), 166–193 (p. 172). 5 H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Granada, 1985), pp. 423–512, p. 426. 7 deftly avoiding any inaccurately reductive rendering of weird fiction as a rigidly prescribed genre.6 Attempting the latter seems necessarily self- defeating when dealing with a mode of writing that is so determined to resist just such ossification into formula. An ensuing challenge of undertaking a study such as this is, therefore, to resist overstating the case. The following should not be construed as either any particular advocacy of the term ‘weird fiction’ or a promotion of its use, or an implied criticism of related terms such as Gothic, uncanny, supernatural, horror, strange, and so on. In what follows I will discuss ‘weird fiction’ in relation to some of these terms but the objective is simply to understand why people use the word ‘weird’ in relation to fiction at all, and if its deployment can implicitly tell us something about the sort of fiction that provokes such use. I hope, therefore, that (subsequent to this Introduction) repeated use of the term ‘weird fiction’ without cautiously reiterating acknowledgements of its difficulties will be tolerated.