Dirda on Bierce

One free unlock from the NYRB later:

One of America's Best

Michael Dirda

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 issue

Reviewed:

The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs

by Ambrose Bierce, edited by S.T. Joshi

Library of America, 880 pp., $35.00

1.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) is arguably the finest not-quite-first-rate writer in nineteenth-century American literature. Civil War veteran, contrarian journalist, master of the short story, muckraker, epigrammatist, and versifier, he is today most widely known for that word hoard of cynical definitions, The Devil's Dictionary, and for a handful of shockingly cruel stories about the Civil War.

In those dozen or so "tales of soldiers," gathered in the collection eventually titled In the Midst of Life (1892, augmented in 1898 and 1909), a brother shoots his brother, a sniper is compelled to kill his father, and a cannoneer obeys the order to destroy his own house, where his wife and child await his return from battle. The best known of these contes cruels, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," has been called—by Kurt Vonnegut, himself a kinder, gentler Bierce—the greatest short story in American literature. Surely, no first-time reader ever forgets the shock of its final sentences.

Throughout these gruesome episodes of war, there is no armor against fate, as seeming coincidence assumes the character of tragic destiny. Bierce himself always insisted that most of his Civil War fiction was based on fact. As he wrote in a letter, "It commonly occurs that in my poor little battle-yarns the incidents that come in for special reprobation by the critics as 'improbable' and even 'impossible' are transcripts from memory—things that actually occurred before my eyes." The Battle of Shiloh, for instance, took place near Owl Creek.

While we associate Bierce primarily with California and with San Francisco in particular, he was, in fact, a widely traveled man. Born in Ohio, he turned out to be the youngest surviving child of a zealously Christian couple who gave their ten children names beginning with A: Abigail, Amelia, Addison, Aurelius… Growing up on a hardscrabble farm in Indiana, he gained most of his education from the books in his father's library (supposedly the finest in the area) but also managed to spend a year at the Kentucky Military Institute.

When the Civil War broke out, Bierce immediately enlisted with the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment and rose to become a brevet major. He fought all over the South—at Shiloh, Chicka- mauga, Missionary Ridge; he marched with Sherman through Georgia. Shot during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, he carried the bullet in his skull for the rest of his life. He was even captured by Confederates in Alabama, but managed to escape. While his stories and memoirs reveal war as hell, Bierce, the scout and topographical engineer, always looked back on his service as the most exhilarating time of his life.

Following Lee's surrender, Bierce's former commanding officer persuaded him to serve as the mapmaker and engineering attaché for a survey expedition of western military posts. Denied the rank he deserved, Bierce abandoned the army as a career and instead settled in San Francisco, where he met the author Bret Harte and began to write poetry and satirical prose for various newspapers, with increasing success and renown. After he married Mollie Day in 1871, his father-in-law underwrote a trip to England and there Bierce lived (in Bristol, London, and Bath) for three years, contributing squibs and satirical pieces to Fun, a rival to Punch. In England Mollie gave birth to two sons (both of whom would die young, one committing suicide in jealous despair at sixteen, the other succumbing to drink and pneumonia at age twenty-six) while her husband published his first three books, comprised of humorous sketches: The Fiend's Delight (1873), Nuggets and Dust (1873), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874). When Mollie traveled to California for a visit, she wrote to Bierce that she was pregnant with a third child, their daughter Helen, and so compelled her reluctant spouse to return to San Francisco.

Despite his success with his writing, in 1880 Bierce was readily lured to North Dakota, where he spent a year managing a mining company. When that enterprise began to fail, he headed home to Oakland—which he sometimes called "Terminopolis"—and settled into his most productive period as a writer, establishing himself during the next fifteen years as the leading journalist on the West Coast. In 1887, he was hired as chief editorial writer for the San Francisco Examiner. His first encounter with its owner, William Randolph Hearst, is worth quoting:

Many years ago I lived in Oakland, California. One day as I lounged in my lodging there was a gentle, hesitating tap at the door and, opening it, I found a young man, the youngest young man, it seemed to me, that I had ever confronted. His appearance, his attitude, his manner, his entire personality suggested extreme indifference. I did not ask him in, instate him in my better chair (I had two) and inquire how we could serve each other. If my memory is not at fault I merely said: "Well," and awaited the result.

"I am from the San Francisco Examiner," he explained in a voice like the fragrance of violets made audible, and backed a little away.

"O," I said, "you come from Mr. Hearst."

Then that unearthly child lifted its blue eyes and cooed: "I am Mr. Hearst."

In 1896 Hearst sent his best man to Washington, D.C., where Bierce's reporting helped sink Collis P. Huntington's attempt to wiggle out of immediate repayment of a huge government loan to his railroad empire. (This story—Bierce's greatest sheerly journalistic triumph—is the subject of a book to be published later this year, Dennis Drabelle's The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Central Pacific Railroad.) Having by this time separated from Mollie, Bierce stayed on in Washington, contributing to Hearst's various newspapers and magazines, dining at the Army-Navy Club, and regularly paddling a canoe out on the Potomac. An exceptionally handsome and attractive man, he also continued a series of discreet love affairs with older, experienced women. During the final half-dozen years of his life, Bierce turned his remaining energies to overseeing a twelve-volume edition of his Collected Works.

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Nothing, however, in a richly colorful life became Bierce like the leaving of it. In 1913 the old gringo—as he is called in a 1985 novel of that name by Carlos Fuentes—crossed the border into Mexico, ostensibly to view the war being conducted there by Pancho Villa. He was never heard from again. His last letter home ended: "I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." For years afterward, there were rumors that he had been sighted in Mexico or that he had surfaced in Britain as an aide to General Pershing or that he'd shot himself in the Grand Canyon. As his early biographer Carey McWilliams wrote: "Nothing so augmented the interest in Ambrose Bierce as his disappearance. Obscurity is obscurity, but disappearance is fame."

2.

As a writer, Ambrose Bierce holds multiple claims on our interest. His fragmentary Civil War memoirs are appalling and sickeningly vivid first-person accounts of various battles; "What I Saw at Shiloh" and "A Little of Chickamauga" are particularly strong. As a journalist in the 1880s and 1890s, Bierce's unrelenting iconoclasm earned him the nickname "the wickedest man in San Francisco" at a time when there was plenty of Bay Area competition. His snarky, blog-like "Town Cryer" and "Prattler" columns appeared three to six times a week in various newspapers and assailed the rich and respected, with particular attention to the politicians, business tycoons, and clergymen of the day. Bierce's lifetime work for The Argonaut, The Wasp, The San Francisco Examiner, and other papers has been reckoned to total five million words, not to overlook an additional 500,000 words of correspondence. While much of this material is dated, much of it also remains intensely readable, as in the following observations (taken from a 1968 selection of the journalism, The Ambrose Bierce Satanic Reader, compiled by Ernest Jerome Hopkins). Naturally, Bierce is frequently witty, at his best in a wry, understated way:

The newspapers are publishing a story of a man who lived a week with a knife-blade in his brain. Perhaps he did, but it must have been a mean, spiritless kind of existence, wholly unenjoyable and discouraging. We would almost as lief be dead as to have knives and forks in our brain.

And he can be surprisingly heartless:

Mr. Parton says Mrs. Stowe has lived a life of heroic virtue. With her face, a life of virtue is no very difficult matter. When Nature conferred upon her her peculiar charms, we imagine the operation might have been called, "Chastity made easy."

Yet his language is always pungent:

Ever since he [Mark Twain] left California there has been an undertone of despair running through all his letters like the subdued wail of a pig beneath a washtub.

Not least, Bierce can toss off epigrams and caustic observations with the dyspeptic exuberance of H.L. Mencken (who much admired the older writer's wit and vituperative mastery):

Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.

"Bitter Bierce" eventually made a comfortable living from his columns in the periodicals owned by William Randolph Hearst, but he always viewed himself as far more than a penny-a-line hack. His animosity for Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw (who, he claimed, stole witticisms from him), his disdain for the genteel William Dean Howells, and his sense of rivalry with Mark Twain make it clear that he longed to be viewed as their peer.

Today we sometimes think of Bierce as a kind of "regionalist," with that word's dismissive connotation of the folksy and second-rate. But the fastidious, even dandyish writer loathed the use of dialect in fiction, and championed purity of diction and grammatical correctness. (See his "little blacklist of literary errors, Write It Right—beastly title, chosen with a naked and unashamed commercial purpose.") He read the Bible through at least three times, all of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and much of the satirical work of Swift and Voltaire. In a letter he calls Alexander Pope's version of the Iliad his favorite English translation; he judged Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" to be "the most nearly perfect poem in the English language." His correspondence and journalism allude frequently to the work of Tolstoy, Hugo, Zola, Maupassant, and Poe, as well as to many American contemporaries, from Henry James down to Edwin Markham and Gertrude Atherton (who once rebuffed his advances).

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While never a literary essayist per se, Bierce could nonetheless be a shrewd critic. Writing to a friend about Jack London's The Sea Wolf, he says:

It is a most disagreeable book, as a whole. London has a pretty bad style and no sense of proportion. The story is a perfect welter of disagreeable incidents…. I confess to an overwhelming contempt for both the sexless lovers.

Now as to the merits. It is a rattling good story in one way; something is "going on" all the time—not always what one would wish, but something. One does not go to sleep over the book. But the great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen. If that is not a permanent addition to literature it is at least a permanent figure in the memory of the reader…. You may quarrel with the methods, but the result is almost incomparable.

Throughout his life Bierce also published verse—much of The Devil's Dictionary includes bits of illustrative poetry and doggerel—and it's been estimated that a fifth to a sixth of his total oeuvre is in rhyme. Imagery mattered most to him; hence his ardent championship of the California romantic George Sterling, whose "The Wine of Wizardry" he judged the "greatest poem in English since Keats and Coleridge." Bierce's own poetry—found mainly in Shapes of Clay (1910) and Black Beetles in Amber (1911)—is well summed up by its modern editor, Donald Sidney-Fryer:

The grim presence of Death stalks through most of his personal poems, even his love sonnets and other pieces. Bierce's verse at its best is austere, even angular, with an almost provincial sparseness; rather like a corpse whose bones have been clean-picked by some thoughtful scavenger. As always, there is something harsh and unyielding, and even cold, about Bierce and his best work.

In later years, Bierce readily accepted the position of artistic arbiter and guru to various literary aspirants, many of them young women. The youthful Ezra Pound (or his father Homer Pound) even sent him the manuscript for "The Ballad of the Goodly Fere," an early dialect poem about Christ. Still, the best known of Bierce's admirers and acolytes, apart from Sterling, are the weird-tale writers W.C. Morrow (The Ape, the Idiot and Other People) and the intensely reclusive Emma Dawson (An Itinerant House).

As the author of supernatural tales himself, particularly of those with a distinctly visceral gruesomeness, Bierce stands as the major American figure between Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. (The only rival claimant, Fitz James O'Brien, author of "The Diamond Lens," "What Was It?," and "The Wondersmith," was killed in 1862 during the Civil War.) Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and instead preferred a kind of Yankee Grand Guignol, setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns, or turning out deliciously tasteless tall tales that recall the black-humored excesses of Kind Hearts and Coronets or the novels of Bret Easton Ellis.

Take, for instance, the opening sentences from three of the four stories that make up a grouping called "The Parenticide Club"—the title echoing Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Suicide Club":

Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity….

("My Favorite Murder")

My name is Boffer Bings. I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babes.

("Oil of Dog")

Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father—an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.

("An Imperfect Conflagration")

In "The Hypnotist," the last of these tales of family homicide, we meet a young man with a powerful talent for hypnotism. While still a boy, our narrator starts off by hypnotizing a classmate into giving him her lunch, day after day after day. This eventually leads to unforeseen complications:

The plan that I finally adopted to free myself from the consequences of my own powers excited a wide and keen interest at the time, and that part of it which consisted in the death of the girl was severely condemned, but it is hardly pertinent to the scope of this narrative.

When he is finally released from prison, the hypnotist turns his piercing eyes on the warden, saying, "You are an ostrich." Bierce then pauses and begins a new paragraph:

At the post-mortem examination the stomach was found to contain a great quantity of indigestible articles mostly of wood or metal. Stuck fast in the oesophagus and constituting, according to the Coroner's jury, the immediate cause of death, one door-knob.

The story ends with the narrator using his mesmeric power to convince his parents that they are rival wild stallions: the old man and woman kick and bite each other to pieces. But the last deadpan paragraph of "The Hypnotist" runs:

Such are a few of my principal experiments in the mysterious force or agency known as hypnotic suggestion. Whether or not it could be employed by a bad man for an unworthy purpose I am unable to say.

Bierce's obsession with intrafamily murder is obviously played for sick laughs here, but in the disturbing supernatural tales gathered in the "Civilians" section of In the Midst of Life and throughout Can Such Things Be? (1893), there are no laughs, at best only the rictus of the corpse's smile. Here the dead don't know that they are dead. A husband returns to his abandoned house, where the wife and children he has slain await him. An invisible creature tears a hunter to pieces. A beautiful young woman may actually be a ravenous were-panther. An automaton goes berserk and destroys its inventor.

In "The Suitable Surroundings"—not as well known as "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," "The Damned Thing," "The Eyes of the Panther," or "Moxon's Master"—a man reads a ghost story so powerful that it kills him. This chiller was a particular favorite of H.P. Lovecraft, who may have used its premise to create his own accursed book, The Necronomicon. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft notes, with a master's insight, that many of Bierce's stories

are obviously mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived from journalistic models; but the grim malevolence stalking through all of them is unmistakeable, and several stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing.

The Everest of these mountain peaks is "The Death of Halpin Frayser." A hundred years ago in 1911, the literary critic Frederic Taber Cooper was already writing that "in all imaginative literature it would be difficult to find a parallel for this story in sheer, unadulterated hideousness." What precisely happens, however, and why is left deliberately ambiguous. It opens, like many of Bierce's tales, with a man alone in the woods. Before long, the narrative deliberately disorders our senses, as Halpin Frayser first imagines that the trees sweat blood, then remembers his virtually incestuous relationship with his beautiful mother, and eventually encounters a belle dame sans merci in a dream.

Or is it a dream? Just as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" may be viewed as a variant on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "The Torture by Hope," in which a condemned man is allowed to think he is escaping from prison but is recaptured at the last moment, so "The Death of Halpin Frayser" possesses something of the sickly sweet atmosphere and power of the story Bierce himself judged the greatest in American literature, "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe, he emphasized, "wrote tragic tales of the supernatural; so do I."

Like Poe, Bierce also practiced a compact unity of effect in all his fiction: nightmarish intensity is his watchword. He famously dismissed the novel as

a short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before.

In the greatest tales, shrewdly notes the editor of Bierce's letters, Bertha Clark Pope, "his unit of time is the minute, not the month."

Bierce's most sustained narrative is the Swiftian future history "Ashes of the Beacon." While much admired by S.T. Joshi, the editor of the recently issued Library of America collection, this satire strikes me as a tedious lambasting of the author's bugbears, chiefly democratic government, suffragism, insurance, the labor movement, and religion. "For the Ahkoond" is shorter and more amusing. In the year 4591 the explorer-narrator departs alone from Sanf Rachisco, crosses the Ultimate Hills (the Rocky Mountains), and uncovers traces of various early inhabitants of North America, including "a partly civilized race of people known as Galoots." No doubt for reasons of space, Joshi's Library of America compilation leaves out "The Land Beyond the Blow," which further lampoons American culture and includes a section in which the nominees for president and vice-president consist of an idiot and a corpse. (This story can be found in The Fall of the Republic and Other Political Satires, edited by Joshi and David E. Schultz, 2000).

Still, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)—originally published as The Cynic's Word Book (1906)—remains Bierce's most diverting book, allowing him to be sardonic, abusive, witty, politically incorrect, and shocking, as he pleases. Here are some of the entries under A:

Academe, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

Academy, n. (from academe). A modern school where football is taught.

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.

Affianced, pp. Fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.

Ambidextrous, adj. Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.

Many of the entries are "enriched" with bits of verse from Bierce's several heteronyms, including Jorrock Womley, Polydore Smith, Ambat Delaso, Jum Coople, Offenbach Stutz, and, his favorite, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J. While some definitions are heavy-handed and obvious, others display a subtlety that a French courtier would envy, as when Bierce defines beauty as "the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband" and marriage as "the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two."

Then again, some of Bierce's wordplay in The Devil's Dictionary is rather winningly juvenile: "Hydra, n. A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads"; and "Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary." The entry "Regalia" inspires a long list of fictionalized sodalities and secret societies, including "the Oriental Order of Sons of the West," the "Polite Federation of Gents-Consequential," and "the Mysterious Order of the Undecipherable Scroll."

No one-volume collection of Ambrose Bierce's writing is entirely satisfying, but the Library of America omnibus comprises nearly all the important works, under the editorship of our leading Bierce scholar. Nevertheless, this edition doesn't wholly supersede the 1946 Collected Writings edited by Clifton Fadiman, which managed to include the Fantastic Fables, all the "Parenticide Club" tales, and "The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter," a long story written with G.A. Danziger (though fundamentally an adaptation of a German original). Fadiman does, however, leave out the Swiftian political satires, and neither his book nor the Library of America volume reprints any letters or journalism.

The best course is to draw on the Joshi and Fadiman compilations, then supplement them with A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce (edited by Joshi and Schultz, 2003) and the journalism gathered in The Satanic Ambrose Bierce. While four books may seem like a lot of Bierce, if you enjoy his derisive wit you'll want them all.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/05/10/ambrose-bierce-one-americas-best/

Pseudopoddities : 6 stories from A Mountain Walked

A Mountain Walked

Edited by S. T. Joshi

(2015, Dark Regions Press)

❖

Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson

Way leads unto way for the easily distracted reader. Prior to yesterday I'd never heard of "Far Below" by Robert Barbour Johnson, even though I have an anthology in which it is collected. My thanks to Tor dot com for shining a light on it. 

"Far Below" is a spectacular weird story mixing folk and urban horror. It is far richer than my favorite NYC Lovecraft work, "The Horror at Red Hook." The narrator records the words of Gordon Craig, head of the NYPD special detail in the subway tunnels under Manhattan. Craig commands a hi-tech unit keeping subway riders safe from gory death.

....And yet I flatter myself that it's been rather a socially useful career at that; perhaps more so than stuffing animals for dusty museum cases, or writing monstrous textbooks that no one ever bothers to read. For I've a science of my own down here, you know: the science of keeping millions of dollars' worth of subway tunnels swept clean of horror, and of safeguarding the lives of half the population of the world's largest city.

"And then, too, I've opportunities for research here which most of my colleagues above ground would give their right arms for, the opportunity to study an absolutely unknown form of life; a grotesquerie so monstrous that even after all these years of contact with it I sometimes doubt my own senses even now, although the horror is authentic enough, if you come right down to it. It's been attested in every country in the world, and by every people. Why, even the Bible has references to the 'ghouls that burrow in the earth', and even today in modern Persia they hunt down with dogs and guns, like beasts, strange tomb-dwelling creatures neither quite human nor quite beast; and in Syria and Palestine and parts of Russia …

"But as for this particular place—well, you'd be surprised how many records we've found, how many actual evidences of the Things we've uncovered from Manhattan Island's earliest history, even before the white men settled here. Ask the curator of the Aborigines Museum out on Riverside Drive about the burial customs of Island Indians a thousand years ago—customs perfectly inexplicable unless you take into consideration what they were guarding against. And ask him to show you that skull, half human and half canine, that came out of an Indian mound as far away as Albany, and those ceremonial robes of aboriginal shamans plainly traced with drawings of whitish spidery Things burrowing through conventionalized tunnels; and doing other things, too, that show the Indian artists must have known Them and Their habits. Oh yes, it's all down there in black and white, once we had the sense to read it!

"And even after white men came—what about the early writings of the old Dutch settlers, what about Jan Van der Rhees and Woulter Van Twiller? Even some of Washington Irving's writings have a nasty twist to them, if you once realize it! And there are some mighty queer passages in 'The History of the City of New York'—mention of guard patrols kept for no rational purpose in early streets at night, particularly in the region of cemeteries; of forays and excursions in the lightless dark, and flintlocks popping, and graves hastily dug and filed in before dawn woke the city to life …

"And then the modern writers—Lord! There's a whole library of them on the subject. One of them, a great student of the subject, had almost as much data on Them from his reading as I'd gleaned from my years of study down here. Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft—and he got a lot from me, too! That's where the—well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it—just as you're going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings! But even with the worst played down, there's still enough horror and nightmare in it to blast a man's soul, if he lets himself think on what goes on down there, below the blessed sanity of the earth's mercifully concealing crust. Far below...

[I'm reminded of Dick O'Neil's character in The Taking of Pelham 123 when he says "What do the riders want for their lousy ten cents?" or something to that effect.]

Barbour tells the story with a slick and gratifying swiftness. He mercifully keeps the Lovecrafting to two nods and the Jim Crow-era racism to one.

***

Only the End of the World Again by Neil Gaiman

An overly clever and self-indulgent pastiche, with keywords like Innsmouth, Marsh, and "The Opener" all checked-off.

There needs to be a moratorium on execrable mashups of Hammett and Chandler with fannish caricatures of Lovecraftian form and content. Cast a Deadly Spell has been done (and all the way back in 1991!).

***

The Phantom of Beguilement by W. H. Pugmire

....The older woman smiled with thick mauve lips and lightly swept thin fingers through thick hair. "Mothers are such a wonderful invention," cooed the phlegmatic voice. "With some exceptions. His didn't understand him at all." She pointed a tattered nail to the painting.

"You told me his name was Jeremy Blond."

"Aye, that it was. Poor sod. A nervous young artist, with dark wounded eyes and pale lifeless hair. We get the type in Kingsport, but I've never known one to look so hunted, poor lad."

"And this is the only work of his that you have?"

"It is, love. His mum collected the rest after his vanishment. Aye, she had a lonesome look about her as well. She hated that her only child had chosen to be a painter and poet, but when his body was never found, well, his art was all she had to remember him by. But this piece she never saw, for he gave it to me. I found the wee photo frame and popped it in there, nice as you please. So, you'll be taking it off my hands?"

"Yes, please," Katherine answered, reluctantly surrendering the painting. "It's almost like an experimental photograph, so indistinct and surreal. Is it a woman on a raft, surrounded by shadow and eerie mists of light? And those things that float above her, like a flock of primeval psychopomps—are they gulls, and if so, why so disfigured? He had a wonderfully unique style. How old was he?"

"Little more than a child, miss. But bright. Very preoccupied with them strange books...."

Is all Pugmire pitched at this level? I ask because I haven't read him before, and I'm surprised a story of no more than fan-fiction quality has been professionally published. The world of Lovecraft pastichists, I suspect, is fueled by logrolling.

This story cannot be dismissed as a narrator's "pastel in prose" written in first person. This is authorial third person:

....Katherine pressed her palms onto damp wood and leaned toward the apparition that stopped just inches from where she trembled. The figure bent to her. Its ropy hair writhed and reached for her, then wove into her own. Spectral claws wrapped around her shaking hands as stagnant shadow filled her pores and sank into her soul. With phantasmagorical motion she shivered with mutation, stretching a tingling mouth so as to sing new sounds that writhed within her throat....

***

...Hungry...Rats by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Clichéd first-person tight-lipped tough-guy argot, mixing Spillane, Carver, Gordon Lish, and an MFA seminar free-write. Mixed with a soupçon of horrors-of-"the 'Nam." 

     Rats.

     Scabs and scars. Matted fur, skin blistered with pox and bites. Teeth needle-sharp. Shit right outta nightmares. Evil shit those teeth. Blades, ravenous blades to rend and tear prey. Rip it to shreds and devour it. Teeth. Needle-razors. Fast and hungry. Always hungry. Always at war with its own stomach and the horde. Slinking, leaping, running. Fast and fast and faster. Eat first or starve, the law of the horde. Eat first and be strong. Grow. Or be eaten....

***

Sigma Octantis by Rhys Hughes

A vigorous exercise in scientific romance. 

In 1928 a translator of arcane documents is hired by a Patagonian magnate to sort through his library of lore. First-rate, and a merciful breather after the finger-exercises of Pugmire and Pulver.

....I borrowed a horse and rode off into the wilderness to relax.

A few peons dug irrigation canals outside the grounds of the palace, a motley collection of sulky individuals, hired workers from the forests on the far side of the Andes, tough and silent; and they barely acknowledged my presence as I cantered past. Usually placid, they were known to burst suddenly with long-repressed fury. The first overseer employed by Jones ended his last working day with his head on an improvised pike, nodding slowly to the saraband steps of his murderers.

Deep down I sympathised with these oppressed vassals.

But in those times, those callow and vicious days, open prejudice was regarded as normal behaviour and nobody else voiced support for natives, whether local or imported, and so I kept quiet. To rant against justice and fair play was considered good manners. Jones regarded it as the height of learning to quote Gobineau or Bismarck on the natural inequalities of the various races; but to whisper a word expressing approval of diversity was an offence that would earn instant exile....

***

The Wreck of the Aurora by Patrick McGrath

A mature and compelling story. Though barely more than an anecdote, it is miles ahead of some of the stories in this collection.

The adult daughter of a lighthouse keeper visits the rock where the old man's sanity deserted him. McGrath tells the story with an obsessive attention to physical sensation in very few pages.  It is a fine achievement on a subject of historic sublimity.

….I hauled myself into the lighthouse and lay a few moments gasping on the stones. Then I scrambled to my feet and was at once overwhelmed by the stench of stale dank air and, too, by a kind of sudden mental shock from which I recoiled as though struck in the face by a bucket of cold water: Doc was here. My father was here. This was where he worked, where he lived. Where he went mad. But it was a sad place now, that tower, intact but derelict because uninhabited and reeking not only of old seaweed and birdshit but neglect and a kind of moral death. There was a lantern up top, operated by electrical circuitry under the control of automatic timers, but the tower was a dying body on life support with its quiet buzz, its discreet blinking lights on gunmetal boxes attached to the wall, tangled cable spilling out; it was a structure that crackled with electricity but had no life of its own. I was astonished at the thickness of the wall. It aroused an idea of the force and strength of the storms it was built to withstand....

❖

Jay

10 June 2020

Poe: Joshi

As well as starting on the Tartarus Press edition of The Macabre Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (2018), I have been reading some scholarly material on Poe. Joshi, while sometimes goring my own oxen, is reliable and holds to aesthetic criteria for judgments.

My underlinings from the Poe chapter of Unutterable Horror by S. T. Joshi:

....the genre, as a serious contribution to literature, only began with him. In this sense, the entire Gothic movement could be considered a kind of "anticipation" of the true commencement of the field.

....a figure unsurpassed in the breadth and scope of his work.

....What is striking about Poe's literary career is its relative brevity: even counting his early poetic work, beginning with Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), it extended scarcely twenty years, while his career as a fiction writer lasted not much more than fifteen.

....launched a new era in supernatural and psychological horror that, while drawing to some degree upon its predecessors, was forward-looking in its psychological acuity and aesthetic finish. His work signaled the definitive collapse of attenuated Gothicism.

i. Poe and the Gothics

....the extent to which Poe was influenced—as a poet, short story writer, and critical theorist—by the work of Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Hoffmann, Irving, and many lesser figures of the generations preceding his own is by no means clear and perhaps, by the nature of the existing evidence, can never be clear.

....As a practising critic and reviewer....

....the entire Gothic movement was regarded as utterly passé, to the degree that Poe's own (very different) work in this approximate vein was frequently criticised by reviewers, and even some of his own colleagues, as embarrassingly outmoded.

....Poe sees as a fundamental improbability in the very construction of Melmoth the Wanderer: "I should no doubt be tempted to think of the devil in Melmoth, who labors indefatigably through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand" (ER 7).

ii. Theory and Practice

....Talk: "the great thing in poetry is, quocunque modo, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can't connect them. There is no fusion,—just as it is in Seneca" (quoted in Stovall 145). In some of his critical writings Poe sometimes uses the phrase "unity of interest," which he explicitly states is derived from the critical theory of August Wilhelm von Schlegel; but Stovall has convincingly argued that all Poe's borrowings of Schlegel are likely to have been made through Coleridge.

...."the ordinary novel is objectionable" chiefly because "it cannot be read at one sitting" and therefore "deprives itself . . . of the immense force derivable from totality,"

....having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents....

....Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided....

....a lamentable tendency to engage in what Lovecraft quite accurately labelled "his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour" (S 43).

....The pure imagination chooses, from either beauty or deformity [the emphasis is Poe's], only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined; the compound, as a general rule, partaking in character of sublimity or beauty in the ratio of the respective sublimity or beauty of the things combined, which are themselves still to be considered as atomic—that is to say, as previous combinations. . . . The range of imagination is thus unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe. Even out of deformities it fabricates that beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test. (ER 1126–27)

....Germanism is 'the vein' for the time being. To morrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else. . . . But the truth is that, with a single exception ["Metzengerstein"], there is no one of these stories in which the scholar should recognise the distinctive features of that species of pseudo-horror which we are taught to call German.

....That pregnant line "I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul" is as precise an indication as anyone could want that Poe was seeking to explore the psychology of fear in his tales of terror, and his ability to do so with the most consummate skill and emotive power is what distinguishes his work from all that went before and a great proportion of what came after.

....Poe himself observed, in his review of Twice-Told Tales, that the emotions of "terror, or passion, or horror" are best treated in prose rather than verse, and that "many fine examples" of such tales "were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood" (ER 573). Of course, Poe was clearly led by temperament to write the kind of supernatural and psychological horror fiction that he wrote; but to the extent that he found suitable models in the "sensational" fiction that Blackwood's occasionally published, he radically improved upon them by emphasising the "unity of effect" and, to put it simply, by writing infinitely better—more cogently, more skilfully, and with a greater understanding of the psychological effects of the bizarre and the supernatural—than his predecessors or contemporaries.

....the Gothic influence is manifested largely in the stage properties rather than in the underlying theme.

....To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its poisition. The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his sepulchral and disgusting teeth. (CW 2.22–23)

....no analysis of the plot or even of the underlying theme of "The Fall of the House of Usher" can begin to convey its masterful collocation of words, images, and scenes to create a cumulative horror unlike anything that had ever been seen in supernatural literature before and has rarely been seen in the nearly two centuries that have followed.

...."The Pit and the Pendulum" (The Gift, 1842) may be the ultimate refinement of the dungeon motif of Gothic fiction; in spite of its non-supernaturalism it is one of Poe's masterworks in the maintenance of an unrelenting atmosphere of terror and its meticulous attention to the shifting moods and sensations of its hapless protagonist.

....remarkable thing about Poe's work, in fact, is the very lack of substantive connexions with the Gothic movement. "Metzengerstein" was published only twelve years after Melmoth the Wanderer, but we are already in another world. It is not merely that Gothic fiction was, in Poe's day, entirely dead as a popular literary fashion; it is that Poe felt the need to draw inspiration both from the world around him and from the wells of his own fevered imagination, and he did so in a way that permanently rendered Gothicism of the Walpole-Radcliffe-Lewis-Maturin sort a thing of the past.

iii. Death as Threshold

....he appears to have contemplated the threshold between life and death with something approaching wonder and horror.

....As for "Ligeia" (Baltimore American Museum, September 1838), it is difficult to speak of it save with superlatives. Poe recognized that it was a triumph; in a letter of early 1846 he states unequivocally that it was "undoubtedly the best story I have written" (L 309)

....Mabbott maintains that the poem—a magnificent exposition of the omnipresence of death and the futility of human effort—is "a plain indication that the human will was too feeble to enable Ligeia to win" (CW 2.307); but, as a matter of fact, Ligeia does "win" by reanimating Rowena's corpse—an event that constitutes (once again) the climax and the conclusion of the story.

....The identity of the names of the two Morellas somewhat telegraphs the punch; but Poe again ingeniously manages to delay the final confirmation of the supernaturalism of the story (the first Morella's empty tomb) until the final line.

...."The Oval Portrait" (Graham's Magazine, April 1842). Here a man who paints his wife's portrait finds that she is gradually weakening while the painting is taking shape under his hands. In the end we are led to believe that in some inexplicable process the wife's life-force has been transmitted into the painting, as the painter cries in the final line: "This [the portrait] is indeed Life itself!' [and] turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead!" (CW 2.666).

.....The protagonist/narrator opens the tale by convicting himself of perverseness ("this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong's sake only" [CW 3.852]), and the entire tale is an instantiation of this trait. Why else would he kill (by the particularly brutal means of hanging) a cat who loves him? Why else would he take in another black cat—also missing an eye, thereby duplicating its predecessor, one of whose eyes the protagonist had viciously cut out of its socket in a drunken fit? Why else would he seek to kill the new cat with an axe when it so clearly has affection for him, and why would he end up killing his wife with that axe when she strives to stop the protagonist from committing his act?

....metempsychosis implied by the anomalous similarity of the second cat to the first is the core supernatural phenomenon of the tale; and Poe adds a skilful touch by having a splotch of white fur on the second cat slowly turn into the shape of a gallows—an anticipation of the protagonist's ultimate fate.

....His ultimate self-betrayal is, however, a result of the perverseness he noted at the outset, for he would have escaped capture if, in the presence of the police, he had not tapped the wall with his cane in a "phrenzy of bravado" (CW 3.858).

....succulent grisliness [Valdemar]

....we need look no further than Eureka—however arid and outmoded its scientific and philosophical speculations may be—to realise that Poe encompassed the universe, and not merely the earth, within his imaginative range.

....One of Poe's earliest tales, "MS. Found in a Bottle" (Baltimore Saturday Visiter, 19 October 1833), is powerfully cosmic. It may well be the case, as Floyd Stovall has maintained (132–33), that the tale is heavily indebted, in numerous aspects of its plot and imagery, to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it is in no sense merely a prose exposition of that ballad. The supernaturalism of the tale extends in two directions. In the first place is the chilling suggestion that the ship, Discovery, upon which the narrator finds himself is somehow animate. Is it possible that it has grown over the years and centuries as it continues along its seemingly aimless course? The narrator thinks of a Dutch apothegm: "It is as sure . . . as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman" (CW 2.143). And this leads to the second phase of the tale's supernaturalism; for it is plain that the ship has been at sea, with possibly the same hapless and appallingly aged crew, for centuries. It is here that the cosmicism of the tale truly manifests itself, as the narrator declares toward the end:

The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their figures fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. (CW 2.144–45)

Superficially similar, but really quite different in its focus, is "A Descent into the Maelström" (Graham's Magazine, May 1841). Far more realistic than the half-fantastic "MS. Found in a Bottle," the story might perhaps be said to display a more restrained and disciplined use of the topographical imagination, but for that very reason it seems to have a somewhat weaker emotive impact than its predecessor.

Several of Poe's most "cosmic" narratives are his prose-poems, in which he imbued natural forces with a kind of philosophical awe by embodying them in pseudo-allegorical figures....

....when we turn to "The Masque of the Red Death" (Graham's Magazine, May 1842), we are in a very different realm altogether. Although the notion of personifying the plague would not seem the most promising of methodologies, Poe's execution of this conception results in one of his great tales, a sustained prose-poem that somehow transfigures the hapless attendants of Prince Prospero's ball, furiously seeking merriment while death encompasses them in an increasingly tight vise-grip, into symbols of the fragility of the entire human race when faced with overwhelming power of incurable disease. In this instance, the embodiment of a natural force—the plague—in the figure of a humanlike individual is itself generative of cosmic awe; for Prospero's attempt to subdue it with a dagger is emblematic of the futility of our race's flailing attempts to come to terms with the inexorable.

iv. Supernatural and Non-Supernatural Revenge

....notion of supernatural revenge is perhaps the oldest topos in the realm of supernatural horror, and we have already seen that it animates any number of Gothic novels, as it would animate an incalculable number of novels and tales in the subsequent two centuries. As a means of linking the use of the supernatural to a satisfying moral outcome, the theme has undeniable appeal, however much it may contradict the actual workings of human society, where the guilty all too often escape the punishment that is their due. A substantial number of Poe's tales utilise this topos, and at least a few of them do so in a way that infuses them with a novel moral and aesthetic element. But what really saves these stories is the high artistry and emotive power with which he expresses the idea in tale after tale.

....A far more ingenious, perhaps even paradoxical, use of the supernatural revenge motif can be found in "William Wilson" (The Gift, 1839), for of course the revenge in this imperishable tale of a doppelgänger is effected by the protagonist upon himself—if we assume that the double he encounters throughout his life is merely an aspect of himself.

...."You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me thou didst exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!" (CW 2.448). Now it appears that the protagonist is the double rather than the converse; and his "death" is not literal (for he is still there to tell us the tale of his "unpardonable crime" [CW 2.426]) but, as the second sentence makes clear, moral and social.

....a masterwork in its ambiguity, its dancing on either side of the boundary separating supernatural from psychological horror, and in its unwavering progression from beginning to cataclysmic conclusion. Aside from "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," it would be difficult to find a better instance of the "unity of effect" than this tale.

...."The Tell-Tale Heart" (Boston Pioneer, January 1843)

....root question in this well-known narrative is: Is this tale psychological or supernatural?

....I think we are obliged to believe that the beating of the heart is in fact in the protagonist's mind, and that this tale is one of pyschological horror. In this sense, it too—like "William Wilson," although in a very different manner—is a case of (non-supernatural) revenge perpetrated by the victim upon himself.

....The symbolism here is very obvious: since the king and his men treated Hop-Frog as somehow subhuman because of his dwarfism and other physical deformities, Hop-Frog has now returned the favour by reducing them to the level of apes, so that (in Hop-Frog's mind, at any rate) there is less moral culpability in killing them.

v. Fantasy and Science

....Poe sharpens the horror of his tales is by the very imprecision of their physical and temporal settings.

....a cultivated vagueness, so that the reader's attention becomes fixated almost exclusively upon the incidents of the tale and, perhaps most importantly, upon the effects of those incidents upon the psyches of its protagonists.

...."The Haunted Palace" (American Museum, April 1839), with its superb transition from happiness to horror in the last two stanzas; "The Conqueror Worm," the epitome of pessimism and of the futility of human striving; "For Annie" (Flag of Our Union, 28 April 1849), another encapsulation of pessimism with its doleful threnody on "The fever called 'Living'" (l. 5)—all these and others gain much of their strength from indefiniteness of setting. This lack of specificity is tied indirectly to Poe's theory of poetry (and, hence, short fiction writing), in the sense that the paring away of such mundane details of locale clears the way for the intense focus on the literal and symbolic action of the poems.

....Entire narratives are essaylike in construction and tone; but here too there are some oddities. Two of the three stories to be considered here—"The Man of the Crowd" (Casket, December 1840) and "The Premature Burial" (Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, 31 July 1844)—partly, and no doubt deliberately, subvert their messages by the skilful introduction of anomalies and ambiguities. Both tales deal with what would come to be regarded as one of Poe's signature achievements as a writer, and specifically as a writer of horror (not necessarily supernatural) fiction—the psychology of fear. While there is no doubt that Poe's searching examination of this topos is one of his great contributions to the literature of terror, and one that wellnigh revolutionised the subsequent history of the field, these two stories treat the matter in peculiar ways. In "The Man of the Crowd," the first-person narrator finds himself fascinated by observing, from a comfortable seat in a coffeehouse in London, a man—"a decrepid [sic] old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age" (CW 2.511)—who continually appears in the crowds of passersby and appears to be afraid to be alone.

...."The Premature Burial," the fact that it appeared in a newspaper, and that for the great proportion of its narrative it reads like a sober essay, replete with actual instances of premature inhumation, has apparently led many to believe that Poe is speaking of his own fears. But in fact a (presumably) fictional narrative, and narrator, do emerge toward the end of the story—one in which the narrator, although professing that he took "elaborate precautions" (CW 3.965) against premature burial while travelling, appears to find himself in just such a predicament, only to discover that he is in a very narrow bed on a boat.

....delicious self-dynamating of his own narrative makes one strongly suspect parody.

....that self-refuting ending shows Poe stepping back from the horrors of his own creation with a knowing wink and nod.

...."The Imp of the Perverse" (Graham's Magazine, July 1845)

....Poe's psychological acuity in identifying this trait—the fact that we "perpetrate [certain actions] merely because we feel that we should not" (CW 3.1223)—is undeniable.

....subversion of his protagonists' psyches by a manner of story construction whereby the climax of the tale occurs simultaneously with the protagonists' psychological collapse, a feature that renders both his supernatural tales and his tales of psychological terror the more powerful and credible. It is facile to say that Poe drew his portraits of disturbed psyches chiefly or even largely from his own mental instability—an assumption that perhaps deliberately seeks to minimise the manifest artistry of Poe's analysis of the conclave of eccentrics he puts on stage.

...."The Haunted Palace" (American Museum, April 1839), with its superb transition from happiness to horror in the last two stanzas; "The Conqueror Worm," the epitome of pessimism and of the futility of human striving; "For Annie" (Flag of Our Union, 28 April 1849), another encapsulation of pessimism with its doleful threnody on "The fever called 'Living'" (l. 5)—all these and others gain much of their strength from indefiniteness of setting. This lack of specificity is tied indirectly to Poe's theory of poetry (and, hence, short fiction writing), in the sense that the paring away of such mundane details of locale clears the way for the intense focus on the literal and symbolic action of the poems.

....Entire narratives are essaylike in construction and tone; but here too there are some oddities. Two of the three stories to be considered here—"The Man of the Crowd" (Casket, December 1840) and "The Premature Burial" (Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, 31 July 1844)—partly, and no doubt deliberately, subvert their messages by the skilful introduction of anomalies and ambiguities. Both tales deal with what would come to be regarded as one of Poe's signature achievements as a writer, and specifically as a writer of horror (not necessarily supernatural) fiction—the psychology of fear. While there is no doubt that Poe's searching examination of this topos is one of his great contributions to the literature of terror, and one that wellnigh revolutionised the subsequent history of the field, these two stories treat the matter in peculiar ways. In "The Man of the Crowd," the first-person narrator finds himself fascinated by observing, from a comfortable seat in a coffeehouse in London, a man—"a decrepid [sic] old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age" (CW 2.511)—who continually appears in the crowds of passersby and appears to be afraid to be alone.

...."The Premature Burial," the fact that it appeared in a newspaper, and that for the great proportion of its narrative it reads like a sober essay, replete with actual instances of premature inhumation, has apparently led many to believe that Poe is speaking of his own fears. But in fact a (presumably) fictional narrative, and narrator, do emerge toward the end of the story—one in which the narrator, although professing that he took "elaborate precautions" (CW 3.965) against premature burial while travelling, appears to find himself in just such a predicament, only to discover that he is in a very narrow bed on a boat.

vi. The Longer Tales

...."The Journal of Julius Rodman"

....it seeks merely to capitalise on the interest in western exploration by maintaining that Rodman had travelled across the Rocky Mountains in 1791–94, years before the Lewis and Clark expedition. But what Rodman saw on his travels is unremarkable—not surprisingly, since Poe himself never travelled west of the Mississippi River and was heavily reliant on earlier travel accounts for the details of the Rodman expedition.

....Arthur Gordon Pym. This work certainly has its devotees and has inspired a substantial amount of analysis from critics who continue to be drawn to its "enigmatic" features, but it is difficult to declare it anything but an aesthetic failure. Although it is tangential to our study because it contains no explicit elements of the supernatural (except perhaps toward the end)

....If assessed as a straightforward adventure story, Pym has numerous flaws. First and foremost is the fundamentally incomplete nature of the narrative. Not only does the novel end abruptly, but no explanation is provided as to how Pym managed to get out of the clutches of the vicious natives and return to civilisation.

....lacking in thematic focus.

....Some commentators have maintained that the concluding portions, where Pym and Peters first encounter a realm where everything is black, then one where everything is white, is meant to reflect on the issue of slavery; but even if this is the case, what position we are to assume Poe takes on the question, and what bearing this has on the overall thematic coherence of the novel, are by no means clear.

vii. Conclusion

....enjoyment of or displeasure in this kind of Asianic style is largely a matter of temperament.

....the style is meant to suit the subject-matter, and this it does flawlessly, even triumphantly. All Poe's critical writing on the craft of poetry or fiction indicates that his prime goal was to create a powerful emotional impact upon his readers; and his manipulation of language was his chief means of effecting that end. The gradual accretion of cumulative power is one of the hallmarks of his prose narratives; Poe early mastered the ability to modulate the emotional cadence of his prose to create an overwhelming crescendo of horror.

....The prose rhythms of such tales as "Morella," "The Oval Portrait," "Silence—A Fable," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" are unsurpassed in their aesthetic polish.

....such narratives as "The Descent into the Maelström," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and even "The Tell-Tale Heart" are written with something approaching the spareness of Swift or Hemingway. Poe was possibly responding to criticisms of his earlier prose manner; but whatever the case, the evolution of his style from flamboyance to concision should be noted.

...."Imagination, fancy, fantasy and humour, have in common the elements combination and novelty" (ER 1126).

....The novelty of Poe's restricting supernatural (and psychological) horror to the intense and condensed mode of the short story; his virtual invention of the genre of the detective story; his radical departure from the thematic and tonal conventions of Gothicism—all these and other elements justify Poe's self-praise for novelty and originality.

....concepts of imagination, strangeness, and humour are fused

....his harsh condemnations of plagiarism, verbosity, triteness, and the many other literary flaws he found, or thought he found, in the books that crossed his desk. In employing the element of "novelty" he strove to avoid these gaffes, even at the risk of producing work whose unprecedented intensity of horror and gruesomeness evoked criticism of its own from the squeamish.

....I repeat that Poe's work is the true beginning of weird literature. In his day most of the Gothic novels had already become hopelessly passé, and by the end of his creative life he had given them a fitting burial by showing that horror can be conveyed with infinitely greater force and impact by a careful analysis of the psychology of terror, a structure that leads inexorably from the first word to the cataclysmic conclusion, and a "novelty" of subject-matter that puts in the shade the stilted Gothic villains or chain-clanking ghosts or hackneyed devils of Gothicism.

....Poe should also be given credit for avoiding what were by then the already hackneyed ghosts, vampires, and demons of the earlier Gothic movement. The tales of psychological terror are no less original—the bizarre monomania of "Berenice" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," the mental aberrations hinted at in "The Man of the Crowd," "The Imp of the Perverse," and "The Premature Burial," the paradox of revenge in "The Cask of Amondillado."

....excellence of his output. His greatest tales are imperishable contributions to the literature of the world as they are towering landmarks in the literature of terror. The psychological acuity of his stories and their impeccable concision and unity set a model and a standard that few have equalled and none have surpassed. In their totality they constitute all that is needed to justify the tale of terror as a distinctive and viable branch of literature.

Jay

31 August 2019