Black Gate

I observed the other day that the end of October’s a good time for reading classic weird fiction. This morning, as young ghosts and goblins of all sorts are preparing their evening’s depredations, I’m writing about a subject I’ve wanted to deal with for a while: the novels of Charles Williams. Williams was born in 1886, and died in 1945; a scholar, poet, editor, and theologian as well as a novelist, he’s probably the third-best-known of the informal group of Oxford Christians called the Inklings, behind C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. A Christian fascinated with the occult, his novels are tales of the supernatural and the numinous at play in the ‘real’ world. He wrote of ghosts, magi, and the Holy Grail, among other things, and his stories, laboured and profound, are some of the strangest fantasies I know.

I’ll start with some biographical detail (much of which I found in Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Inklings). Williams was hired by the Oxford University Press in 1908, and soon rose to become an editor. His first book of poems was published in 1912. In 1917 Williams was married, and in the same year was initiated into the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a successor organisation to the faction-ridden occult group called the Order of the Golden Dawn. He continued to write poetry through the 1920s, and in 1927 wrote two masques, a kind of ceremonial drama. He’d begun lecturing at local institutes, and soon after the masques wrote his first novel, Shadows of Ecstasy. He couldn’t find a publisher for it at first, but his second book, War in Heaven, made it to print in 1930. Three more novels followed: Many Dimensions in 1931, then The Place of the Lion and The Greater Trumps in 1932. Shadows of Ecstasy was finally published in 1933.

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October draws to a close and so it’s time to turn to horror and the supernatural, to the weird tale and the things that cannot be known. Today, I want to look at one of the founding classics of the weird, Robert W. Chambers’s collection of linked short stories, The King in Yellow. Published in 1895, it was celebrated by H.P. Lovecraft, who used some of the book’s ideas in his Cthulhu mythos; in fact, the book’s inspired a mythos of its own, complete with a wiki site, as well as any amount of further fiction, music, and games. You can find it for yourself online.

The book’s made up of ten short stories, plus a poem supposedly extracted from a play called The King in Yellow. The first five tales mention the play to varying extents, and all have other fantastic elements, as well as a horrific or weird tone. The sixth story is a set of brief prose poems, while the final four stories are basically mimetic and seem to have nothing to do on a plot level with the first five — though they have certain motifs and themes in common. The play which links the first five stories, the group I’ll call here the ‘mythos stories,’ is said to drive mad anyone who reads it; it’s not clear if it has ever been performed. The first tale’s clearly set in the ‘future’ of 1920, so by extension the following four must be as well (a sculptor mentioned in the first story turns up in the second). The second story features an odd fluid that can turn anything immersed in it to stone. The third and fourth seem to have characters from the play crossing into the real world, while the fifth deals with a timeslip — a blurring of past and present — and also has a character who seems at least tangentially related to the play.

But the primary interest in these stories is the play itself, and the strange things it contains. We never get a plot summary, or character list, or even a description of its themes. Only hints and names. Hastur. The Yellow Sign. The Pallid Mask. “Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali.” The sinister King in Yellow himself. What does it all add up to?

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Of the many useful terms suggested by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, perhaps the most useful is the idea of ‘thinning.’ Clute sees certain archetypal patterns frequently recurring in fantastic fiction and thinning’s a part of that. It is the lessening that afflicts threatened fantasylands, a type of diminishment. It’s the fading of magic, the passing of the great old order. Sometimes, eventually, the greatness of the past is restored, though perhaps in a different form.

Archetypes by their nature are constantly taking on new guises. I found an intriguing example of the thinning-and-recovery motif of fantasy in Susan Palwick’s 2005 YA-ish novel, The Necessary Beggar. Her second novel, it won an Alex Award, awarded by the American Library Association to books written for adults, but with “special appeal” to teens; her first novel, 1993’s Flying in Place, won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel. In 2007, Palwick published her third novel, Shelter, as well as a collection of short fiction, The Fate of Mice. 2013 saw the publication of her most recent book, Mending the Moon.

The Necessary Beggar is an interesting exploration of thinning because it literalises and inverts the whole idea. It follows a family exiled from their home in the (relatively) magical land of Gandiffri after one of them is convicted of murder. They’re sent through a dimensional portal, ending up in this world, in Nevada in the not-too-distant future. They’re held in a refugee camp for a while, but eventually manage to leave the camp and try to make a new life in America.

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Somehow, when I was growing up, I missed Witch World. Some of the books in the series were always around, as I remember it, in my local libraries and bookstores, but I don’t think I ever read one — if only because I always try to read a series in order, and finding Witch World itself was not always easy. Somewhere along the line, though, I picked up a used copy, and set it aside to be read later. As it happens, there’s been a certain amount of talk about Andre Norton lately, here and elsewhere, and that prompted me to finally turn to the original Witch World novel, and see what I could make of it.

The book was first published in 1963 and ultimately gave rise to well over two dozen sequels, some of them collaborations and some written by other hands. That’s an incredible commercial success, particularly given that this was before the real establishment of fantasy as a well-defined commercial genre. Reading the book now, you can see in it much of what came later; but then also elements of what came before. So to me it feels like a kind of transitional or perhaps transformational work, a significant influence on the development of the genre as a genre.

The story begins with ex-colonel Simon Tregarth on the run from a criminal organisation. He escapes them through the Siege Perilous, a gateway which, Tregarth is promised, will lead him to a new world that will perfectly suit his abilities and desires. He ends up in the Witch World. Largely medieval in its social structure and technology — though there are elements of super-science present as well — it’s also home to magic, psychic powers controlled by the witches of the land of Estcarp, who’re seeking to maintain their realm against their aggressive neighbours. Most aggressive are the mysterious folk of Kolder, who have conquered the nearby island of Gorm with unknowable powers of their own. Tregarth signs on with Estcarp and the book follows him as he and the witches go to war with Kolder, throw their enemies back, and learn something about who it is they fight.

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I’ve always had a fascination with Frtiz Lang’s Metropolis that I’ve never been able to explain. Obviously, it’s a visually powerful film and a tremendous influence on later films and later sf. But that imaginative magnificence seemed almost disconnected from the actual story of the movie. To a large extent, that’s because the Metropolis I knew for most of my life was a greatly-reduced version of Lang’s film. On its premiere in 1927, the movie was 4189 metres (13,823 feet) long, and ran 153 minutes; it was subsequently edited heavily, down to about 3100 to 3200 metres, without the input of husband-and-wife team of director Fritz Lang and scriptwriter Thea von Harbou. For decades, only short versions of Metropolis were believed to have survived, with major subplots and characters missing from the movie. A 2002 re-edit from rediscovered footage recreated something close to the original 1927 film and a 2010 version, based on a newly-recovered negative of the film, finally returned Metropolis to Lang and von Harbou’s original vision. Still, even seeing the whole thing, I have that sense of a kind of gap between the literal content of the film and what might be called its latent content — the mythic feel of the world it imagines.

I didn’t entirely understand that gap until I read Thea von Harbou’s novel of the story. Published in 1925, the book clarifies a number of things: elements of the plot, the character motivation, and the symbolism. The use of the pentacle, the presence of a cathedral, the imagery of Babel and Apocalypse, the vision of Moloch superimposed over Metropolis’s machines, and especially the seemingly self-destructive urge of Joh Frederson, “the Master of Metropolis,” all become clearer. At the same time, I was conscious that I was reading the book with memory of the film always present. It seems to me that the two things, book and movie, work together to make a rich and full experience out of a distinctive fusing of science fiction and the gothic.

It has to be said that there’s been some difference of opinions about the book. Critic Holger Bachmann describes the novel as “a disparate, trivialized collection of motifs from various literary sources,” and refers to its “trivial romanticism.” John Clute, in the entry on von Harbou in the SF Encyclopedia, states that novel doesn’t have much of the film’s “symbolic force.” Personally, I tend to agree with Gary Westfahl, who stated that “von Harbou excelled in the one aspect of literary craftsmanship that critics tend to ignore because it is utterly beyond their ability to comprehend: the power of myth-making.” The sense of latent power I felt in the film of Metropolis has to do with its evocation of myth, both old and new, and I think that’s more clearly present in the book. It’s not a technical triumph like the film, but it’s not to be overlooked.

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It’s not uncommon for writers of fictions called ‘literary’ to use science-fictional or fantastic elements in their work. And it’s not uncommon for sf readers to suggest that they’re using those elements wrongly, with a lack of understanding of the material they’re working with — usually, depending on the specific case, either because the writer didn’t understand the history of the way the element in question has been treated in prior (genre) works, or simply because they haven’t thought the logic of what they’re doing through in a rigorous way. Personally, I find this is rarely a problem in the fantastic ‘literary’ works that I read. And, intriguingly, when it is a problem, it’s not necessarily a significant problem.

I recently read Lydia Millet’s 2005 novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Published and promoted as mainstream ‘literary’ fiction, it also contains speculative elements, and was nominated for the Clarke award. It’s an example of what I mean. It’s not an unflawed novel. And perhaps some of the flaws are the kinds that a writer used to genre fiction would naturally avoid. But I don’t think they’re actually critical flaws in the framework of this particular book, which has its interests elsewhere. And, ultimately, the flaws of the book are far outweighed by its successes.

The novel tells a story about Ann and Ben, a librarian and a gardener, who meet three men mysteriously reborn into the year 2003: Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard — three men who were behind the creation of the atomic bomb. The first quarter of the book brings the cast together, and if it doesn’t explain why the scientists have manifested in the world (just as they were at the moment of the first nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in 1945, and with no memory of anything after that point) it at least establishes that we’re not likely to get any answers. The second quarter of the book follows Ann, Ben, and the scientists as the three physicists travel to Hiroshima, trying to understand the world of the future. In the third quarter of the book, the physicists, having met an eccentric millionaire in Tokyo, begin a crusade for nuclear disarmament. The last quarter sees the crusade reach a climax with a march and violent conclusion in Washington. Although to say all this in this way shortchanges the strangeness of the book: it’s an often-wonderful piece of extravagance, that lives in a heady mix of symbolism and humanity.

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