Deathblog: John le Carré (1931-2020)

To my shame, I’ve been a late-comer to John le Carré’s work. Scanning over his books (which have always been gifted by their publishers with singularly boring cover designs) in innumerable charity shops through my youth, I’d long assumed that they must be dry, procedural, unappealingly nationalistic affairs - the kind of spy novels read by grey-faced, commuter-belt dads, padded out with tedious detail about the firing rate of sniper rifles, the mechanics of phone-tapping and the precise dimensions of expensive suitcases. Not my bag man, especially in those relatively hopeful, paranoia-free years which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To his eternal credit, it was my brother who convinced me to think again, passing on a copy of ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ (1963), and solemnly instructing me that I needed to read it. He was right - I did need to read it. Not simply one of the best cold war thrillers, I’d class it as one of the best novels written in the second half of the 20th century, period.

Reportedly composed by the author in a kind of frantic fugue in the months following the Cuban Missile Crisis, ‘The Spy Who..’ turns the reader’s expectations of a ‘spy story’ inside out, obscuring the methodology and purported grander purpose of espionage and focusing instead upon the fragmenting identity of its protagonist and the ugly human cost of low level cold war brinksmanship.

Building to a suitably bleak crescendo of morally bankrupt existential absurdity, the novel is a match for any of Graham Greene’s tonally similar masterpieces, and the widespread acclaim with which it was received could easily have seen le Carré undertaking a similar leap toward the realm of literary fiction. The fact that he chose not to, instead remaining firmly ensconced within the more comfortable terrain of genre / ‘popular’ fiction across the decades as he eyed the critical establishment with suspicion, very much counts in his favour, I feel.

Though it veers a little more toward the kind of procedural detail I was initially dreading, ‘The Looking Glass War’ (1966) is a solid follow up, doubling down more directly on the earlier novel’s core theme of men and women being left to die ‘in the field’, solely in order to satisfy the petty, bureaucratic jealousies of London’s administrative hierarchies.

With those two under my belt, I took a step backwards and read le Carré’s second novel, ‘A Murder of Quality’ (1962). Noting that the author’s famed intelligence agent George Smiley was the protagonist, and aware of le Carré’s low key approach to his art, I began the book convinced that their must be some sort of nefarious international conspiracy underlying what initially seemed like a fairly benign whodunit, remaining alert for hidden inferences and code words which would blow the whole thing wide open.

At one point, I recall seizing upon a passing reference to a character’s wife collecting donations for an Eastern European refugee charity, thinking, “aha, finally, that must be the connection”, only to realise in the last few pages that I actually had just been reading the kind of innocuous Home Counties murder mystery which Inspector Morse might have sorted out of a Sunday evening a few decades later. Ho hum.

Back on safer ground, my next (and to date most recent) foray into le Carré’s world was what most people would probably consider his second masterpiece, 1974’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’. In stark contrast to his ‘60s spy novels, this labyrinthine tale of George Smiley’s quest to identify the Soviet double-agent operating within the highest echelons of British intelligence is at heart a genre potboiler, complete with clearly defined goodies and baddies, as the absent spectres of Control and Karla loom like a sainted elder and a red devil over the chessboard upon which le Carré’s grey-faced cast of inscrutable, tormented middle-aged men endlessly circle one another, seeking a momentary advantage.

You would not immediately grok this however from the dense lexicon of ministerial hierarchies, committee membership lists, coded filing systems and obscurely named internal departments through which the author tells his tale. I’ll be honest, the pointed avoidance of sensationalism or directly expressed emotion which characterises le Carré’s quote-unquote ‘mature’ style can take some getting used to.

If the idea of a thriller written by an administrator doesn’t sound like too much of an oxymoron though, ‘Tinker Tailor..’ embodies this idea beautifully, and as you allow yourself to sink into its quiet, judicious world of painstaking information gathering, and let the full scope and resonance of the author’s vision become clear, the eventual impact is staggering. 

(Well I remember sitting on a long haul flight a couple of years back, taking a brief break from reading and realising that I’d become breathlessly excited at the prospect of Smiley managing to remove a confidential file from a reading room without the necessary permission.)

Ideally I think, ‘Tinker Tailor..’ should probably be read in conjunction with watching the 1978 BBC TV series, directed by John Irvin - a brilliant adaptation which retains the core structure, characters and feel of the novel, whilst also finding time to depict some of the more conventionally exciting, action-packed diversions which le Carré decorously left off-page.

As much as tributes have naturally concentrated upon the plotting and realism of le Carré’s novels though, I’d also like to highlight what a fantastic prose stylist he was. Though his characters may initially seem like little more than surnames wearing old school ties, his knack for humanising and differentiating them through seemingly casual asides or tantalising suggestions of hidden depths, is often extraordinary.

Each one of the le Carré novels I’ve read thus far has contained indelible, seemingly random, references and descriptions which stay with me long after I’ve read them - from the protagonist of ‘The Looking Glass War’ somehow finding malign intent in a child’s toy as he idles at an airport en-route to his fatal mission, to the description in ‘Tinker Tailor..’ of a small-minded finishing school headmaster “beating the flanks of his dachshund like a drum” as he casts uncharitable aspersions in the direction of a supply teacher whose actual achievements and experiences he couldn’t even begin to imagine, or to Smiley’s instant dismissal of a rumour that Control has been seen alive and well in North Africa on the basis that “the only place he ever felt at home was Surrey, or the Lords Cricket Ground”.

Whatever subject turned his attention to, le Carré was, above all else, an exceptionally gifted writer, and gradually acquainting myself with the rest of his extensive oeuvre is a task I’ve been greatly looking forward to over the coming years and decades.

On a personal note meanwhile (as if any of this has been anything but), I also can’t help but mention how much I’ve appreciated le Carré’s re-emergence as a public figure in the 21st century. Interviews such as those featured in the excellent 2000 documentary ‘The Secret Centre’ (which sadly doesn’t seem to be available to view on line, but can be found as an extra on the recent blu-ray reissue of the ‘Tinker, Tailor..’ series) left me with an impression of le Carré as a wise, compassionate and clear-headed thinker, and it has subsequently been gratifying to discover that, whilst a lifetime of opposition to communism lent him a distrust of the political left which I do not necessarily share, his views on many subjects closely echoed my own, and he expressed them with a directness and eloquence which I greatly appreciate. [In addition to the link above, I’d also refer you to the concluding paragraphs of this BBC online obituary.]

What le Carré referred to as “[his] England” is, I would hope, mine too, and as our nation continues to toil under the yoke of assorted bullies, bastards and dead-eyed incompetents, the loss of one of the all-too-few affirming flames who are able to make me feel proud, rather than ashamed, of my nationality has been especially keenly felt this week. RIP old chap - you will be much missed.

Random Paperbacks: The Alley God by Philip José Farmer (Sphere, 1970)

More so perhaps than any other classic-era science fiction author, Philip José Farmer’s work seems to have inspired a wealth of extraordinary and unusual paperback cover art across the decades, with this strikingly horror-ish joint from Sphere providing a case in point. [Previous posts featuring mind-bending examples of artwork used on Farmer’s books can be found here, here and here.]

In fact, as a direct result of the hellzapoppin’ imagery publishers seem to have used to sell his wares, I actually own no less than six Farmer books, but until recently had never read a word of any of them. Indeed, having never knowingly gone out of my way to learn anything about him, the sum total of my knowledge comprised the following:

1. He annoyed Kurt Vonnegut by writing ‘Venus on the Half-Shell’, an unauthorised collection of ersatz Kilgore Trout stories, which, in Vonnegut’s view, got it all wrong and were basically a load of shite (I paraphrase, you understand).

2. He wrote those ‘Riverworld’ books, in which a load of historical and fictional characters intermingle aboard a phantasmagorical riverboat and – as I recall some guy once telling me in A level college – have uproarious sex with each other.

3. His earlier SF work seems in fact to have been chiefly defined by his insistence upon adding SEX to proceedings – a development which, at the time, was considered about as welcome as, say, adding giant lobsters to a drawing room murder mystery.

So, yes – bawdy eroticism, intertextual post-modernism and annoying people. That seems to have been Philip José Farmer’s bag, but it’s high time I found out for myself, I reasoned, and the three early ‘50s novellas which make up ‘The Alley God’ seemed like a pretty good (by which I mean, entirely random, and short) place to start.

The first of the three, ‘The Alley Man’ (1959), appears to involve the discovery of a sole surviving Neanderthal man living in some rural American backwater. It actually won a Hugo award for Best Short Story in 1960, but…. flicking through this story’s pages, it seems to be written almost entirely in exaggerated/comedic hayseed argot (sample line: “Hey, li’l chick, you din’t know Old Man knew them big words like contamination, didja? Hor, Hor, Hor!”), so, I’m sorry, but – no. Maybe I’ll return to it if I really enjoy the other two stories, I reasoned, but no way am I starting off with fifty-three pages of that.

The second novella, ‘The Captain’s Daughter’ (originally published as ‘Strange Compulsion’ in 1953) concerns a doctor posted to a lunar colony who finds himself attempting to treat a mysterious illness afflicting the teenage daughter of a moody star-ship captain, and discovering she has become victim to a new kind of parasite, which latches onto the human nervous system and feeds off sexual energy. Naturally this concept isn’t explored in the kind of graphic, Cronenberg-esque fashion a modern reader might expect, but I daresay it must have still been pretty provocative stuff for an early ‘50s SF audience, especially as the story’s climactic image of father and daughter momentarily locked in some kind of sweaty, inhuman embrace merrily tramples across the boundaries of conventional good taste.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad little skiffy yarn, and included a few nice bits of hastily sketched in ‘world building’, such as the addition of a disgruntled lunar detective, discussion of different planetary colonies on which the gender balance has somehow been catastrophically knocked off balance, and some background concerning a colony on a remote planet established by a non-conformist religious sect (to which the captain and his daughter belong), like some kind of interstellar Jonestown.

Unfortuantely though, it also felt far too long, stretching a simple idea which might have worked well for a ten-page short story out of novella length, and is also marred by some questionable, ‘50s sit-com style humour and horrendously dated gender politics. Both of these traits are exemplified by the character of the nurse who assists our protagonist - a ‘ditzy’ walking stereotype whose every line of dialogue concerns her desperate need to find a husband, wishing aloud that her next patient may be a virile male who’ll take her up in his arms, and wondering why the hunky doctor refuses to fall for her charms etc etc. You get the picture I’m sure, and it’s a pretty tedious one.

These flaws are carried over wholesale into what is undoubtedly the most interesting of the three stories included here, ‘The God Business’ (1954), a frankly bizarre concoction of aberrant notions which plays in part like a sensualist / absurdist precursor to Boris & Arkady Strugatsky’s Russian SF classic, ‘The Roadside Picnic’ (1972), and in part like the weirdest reimagining of a ‘Heart of Darkness’-style journey narrative I’ve ever encountered.

A challenging tale to try to summarise to say the least, the idea behind this novella essentially concerns an Illinois college professor named Bill Durham known for his unhealthy fixation with the Olympian Gods. Using powers left unspecified in the text, he seems to have turned a souvenir beer bottle bearing the image of a bull into a magical fountain, spewing some kind of potent elixir known only as ‘the brew’, with which he proceeds to spike his town’s water supply, transforming the local populace into naked, uninhibited revellers, untroubled by the usual human weaknesses of pain, hunger, aging etc.

Reigning over his subjects in the guise of a bull-god named ‘Mahrud’, Durham turns the area surrounding the town into into a kind of anarchic and constantly mutating ‘forbidden zone’, ruled over by his assigned demi-gods, who also take on cartoon-ish, animal identities, and using brew-filled water pistols to rout the platoon of U.S. Marines who are naturally dispatched to contain this unwarranted outbreak of craziness.

Into this mess steps our hero, Daniel Temper, a former student of Durham, who is afflicted by crippling self-esteem issues as a result of his bald head, stammering and false teeth. Accompanied by a stern yet beautiful young female army Major (?!), Temper is sent to infiltrate Durham’s ‘zone’. He and his companion travel naked, carrying nothing but a heavy canister of purified water, their assigned mission being to kill Durham and locate and neutralise the source of his miraculous ‘brew’.

Frankly, this is all just as weird as it sounds, rendered all the more so by Farmer’s insistence upon loading the thing with rib-tickling bad jokes and low level misogyny, and on trying to present Temper’s episodic encounters with assorted oddball characters as some kind of grand, all-encompassing allegory which I didn’t really understand even after Durham – when he finally makes his Kurtz-like appearance – had spent several entire pages painstakingly explaining it all.

Overall, I really wasn’t sure what to make of all this really, but I certainly appreciated the almost Jodorowsky-esque head-spinning surrealism of the whole affair, and there was a certain fascination which kept me reading, despite the unctuous, all-over-the-map tone of Farmer’s writing.

In fact, reading these two novellas, my ill-informed preconceptions about Farmer seem to have been entirely borne out. Both of these stories go out of their way to poke fun at uptight, 1950s attitudes to human sexuality, instead positing a kind of earthy, let-it-all-hang-out openness to the subject. ‘The God Business’ at least is also loaded with eye-watering literary puns and complex references to everything from Greco-Roman mythology to newspaper cartoon strips, and the overall authorial persona which emerges from these works is indeed pretty annoying, in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

I’d be tempted to conclude that these feel like stories written by someone’s creepy, loud-mouthed uncle, but…. when we reach a certain age, aren’t we all essentially someone’s creepy uncle (or aunt)? It would seem harsh to dismiss Farmer simply on that basis, and heaven knows, these stories certainly proved sufficiently peculiar to merit my adding a few more volumes bearing his name to my ‘to read’ pile, in order to see how things panned out later in his career.

Deathblog: Brian Aldiss (1925 – 2017)

This is a somewhat belated Deathblog I’m afraid, but I actually recently learned of the death of Brian Aldiss, who passed away last month, one day after his 92nd birthday.

Although I don’t currently know enough about Aldiss’s personality, private life or beliefs to discuss him on that level, or to really miss his presence on earth in an emotional sense, I have nonetheless been in the process of familiarising myself with his core science fiction novels over the past couple of years, and have been enjoying them immensely.

Of course, ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ (1973) was always one of my favourite time/reality-bending ‘headfuck’ novels from back in my teenage years, and I’ve always enjoyed Aldiss’s short stories here and there, but, more recently, I’ve caught up with ‘Non-Stop’ (1958), ‘Hothouse’ (1962) and ‘Greybeard’ (1964), and can recommend all three in the highest possible terms; in fact I think you’d be hard-pressed to find as excellent a trio of SF books completed by any author within a five year period. Needless to say, I have a small pile of other Aldiss’s lined up to read in the near future, beginning with 1969’s presumably somewhat psychedelically-inclined ‘Barefoot in the Head’.

Though Aldiss never really crossed over into mainstream success or cult legend in the manner of Dick, Ballard, Kneale or Moorcock, his combination of wildly unhinged imagination, rich aesthetic vision and genuine literary chops increasingly make me feel that he really deserved to.

Frankly, I can only assume it was only the highly varied and profligate nature of his output – combined perhaps with the square/low key nature of his public persona – that keeps him confined to the dusty hearts of the hardcore SF crowd, rather than filtering through to Penguin Classics lists, student bookshelves and conferences about what it means to be “Aldiss-esque”.

Seemingly a veritable writing machine throughout his life, Aldiss’s work also encompasses vast quantities of literary fiction, criticism, essays, auto-biography and miscellaneous non-fiction, not to mention his successful trilogy of saucy, quasi-autobiographical ‘Horatio Biggs’ novels – all of which I am, again, not currently well placed to comment upon, but I can at least point you in the direction of Christopher Priest’s excellent obituary for The Guardian to fill in the gaps.

For the lack of anything else to add, I’ll simply treat you to a quick gallery of various Aldiss paperbacks that I currently have scattered around my shelves. They’re not necessarily always the most attractive designs that graced his books (although I love the Four-Square ‘Earthworks’ cover), and they’re definitely not in the best condition for the most part, but I hope they might at least give newcomers a feel for the breadth of his SF writing and the challenges it posed to cover designers.

(Dates given below are for the edition pictured, not the dates of original publication. Cover artists are all unknown/unaccredited, sadly.)

(1967)

(1974)

(1976)

(1965)

(1968)

(1982)

Japan Photo Spectacular: A Visit to Edogawa Rampo’s House.

Within easy walking distance of Tokyo’s Ikebukuro transport hub, on the corner of one of the spotlessly clean boulevards surrounding the prestigious Rikkyo University campus, markings affixed a nest of stone owls beckon passersby down a side street. Follow, and you will soon find yourself outside the Edogawa Ranpo Memorial Centre for Popular Culture Studies, a small research centre affixed to the equally modest family home of its namesake, which is now preserved as a small museum and archive.

We previously touched upon the work of Tarō Hirai, aka Edogawa Rampo (1894 - 1965) in these pages when I reviewed Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men back in 2013, but for the uninitiated, Rampo might best be summed up as the godfather of Japanese crime, mystery and horror fiction.(1)

As a keen scholar of English popular writing, Rampo did a great deal to familiarise the Japanese public with the history and legacy of Western mystery fiction, and was one of the first writers to find success writing such stories in Japanese. When it comes to getting a handle on his own literary endeavours however, such inherited genre tags prove woefully inadequate.

Taking inspiration both from the logical detection of Conan Doyle and the morbid preoccupations and high concept vignettes of his other primary influence (and if you’re wondering who that was, just try saying his pen-name out loud a few times in a Japanese accent and see what emerges), Rampo added a far stronger strain of eroticism to the mix, along with a perverse sense of the absurd that was entirely his own. Soaking the results in the richly decadent atmosphere of Taishō era Tokyo and the weird imagery of Edwardian pulp magazines, Rampo created a unique literary aesthetic whose essence was succinctly encapsulated by the handy genre tag of ero-guro-nansensu – ‘erotic grotesque nonsense’.(2)

Framed in the entrance-way of the Rampo house, visitors can see a roughly scribbled manuscript in which the author attempted to list and categorise his favourite Western detective stories, isolating the elements and formulas that he fed into his own work. On the opposite wall, a beguiling modern painting inspired by Rampo’s writing can also be seen. [UPDATE: this is likely the work of Masayuki Miyata - see comments.]

Although most of the house itself is off-limits to casual visitors, numerous windows are packed with displays of Rampo memorabilia, including many rare editions of his work.

The books seen in the final photo above help to remind us that, despite his fixation with weird sex and death, Rampo also enjoyed a parallel career as a highly successful children’s author, concocting numerous adventures for his Shōnen Tantei-Dan (“Boys Detective Club”) – a set of stories beloved of generations of Japanese children, and still widely read to this day.

The French windows at the rear of the Rampo house allows visitors to see directly into Rampo’s living room / study, which is preserved in exactly the manner in which he left it following his death in 1964. A finely appointed room, no doubt about it, and I got a particular kick out of seeing the dusty boxes of Japanese and Scotch whisky displayed side by side on his writing desk – a nice visual metaphor for the East-meets-West nature of his writing, not to mention it’s combination of aesthetic refinement and primitve shock.

As we were gawping at this living room, a young archivist appeared from within, clad in a light-weight kimono with slicked back hair and old fashioned glasses, looking as if he could have stepped straight out of one of Rampo’s stories. Offering us tea, he asked us whether there was any particular aspect of the master’s work we would like to discuss, or any documents we would like to consult. It was with great sadness that, due to our tight schedule of tourist-y business and my extremely minimal comprehension of spoken Japanese, we were forced to decline his offer on this occasion.

We did of course though find a few minutes to venture further into the grounds to have a look at Rampo’s purpose-built library / warehouse. Described by the author as his “illusory castle”, the walls of this unique structure are reinforced with layers of earth and, apparently, recycled Edo Period literature. According to Rampo’s Wikipedia page, the building even survived the allied firebombing that destroyed much of the surrounding area in 1945.

An obsessive bibliophile by anyone’s standards, Rampo’s library is said to comprise some 20,000 volumes in both Japanese and English, presumably including his legendary collection of homoerotic literature. Again, public access is strictly limited, but peering through the viewing window in the front door did at least give us an idea of the kind of riches housed within.

Happily, English editions of Rampo are widely available (Tuttles’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Kurodahan Press’s Black Lizard & Beast in the Shadows both look like good bets), and those seeking an easy way into the spirit of his work are also advised to check out some of many excellent and somewhat disturbing movies extrapolated from his stories (the aforementioned ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’, Kinji Kukasaku’s Black Lizard and Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic all come highly recommended). You could also seek out Suehiro Maruo’s sumptuous manga adaptation ‘The Strange Tale of Panorama Island’ (published in translation by Last Gasp), or, for a somewhat quicker fix, try hitting play on the following cheery credits sequences for two different TV iterations of the much-loved Boys Detective Club.

--------------------------------

(1) As you may have noted, Edogawa’s name can be romanised either as ‘Ranpo’ or ‘Rampo’ – both are used seemingly interchangeably, but I think I’ll go for the latter, just because it sounds more fun.

(2)Officially defined as spanning the years 1912 to 1926 (the reign of the Emperor Taishō), culture during the Taishō period is often characterised in a manner that seems reminiscent of Weimar Germany, as art and literature became increasingly introspective, imaginative and transgressive, displaying an aesthetic elegance and sense of escapism that often sits uncomfortably alongside the period’s political turmoil and the rise of the fanatical nationalism that would eventually drive Japan into the Second World War.

Old New Worlds: January 1965.

 With a new year beginning, and the magazine evidently pulling in enough sales to see itself returned to a monthly schedule, the editorial of New Worlds # 146 finds Michael Moorcock in a buoyant mood, judging 1964 to have been “..another boom year in the field of SF publishing”, and singling out in particular four “brilliant books” published in the past twelve months: Ballard’s ‘The Terminal Beach’, Aldiss’s ‘Greybeard’, Charles Harness’s ‘The Paradox Men’, and – notably – William Burroughs’ ‘Dead Fingers Talk’ (a sort of “remix” of his ‘Naked Lunch’ texts if I remember correctly?), qualified here as “a book which can’t strictly be called SF, yet which deals in all the ideas found in SF”.

After the numerous thrilling and thought-provoking yarns illustrated above (disappointingly, this, and indeed most of the subsequent issues of NW I own, entirely fail to credit their illustrators and cover designers), this issue’s review & commentary section kicks off with a jaunty ‘background’ piece by Gordon Walters, examining the history of the ubiquitous ‘hyper-space drive’ in SF, and swiftly digressing into a discussion of the dilemmas faced by skiffy writers trying to keep pace with real world scientific discoveries:

“Before the first World War, heroic adventures on Mars ala E. R. Burroughs were quite plausible in light of what was known about Mars. Today, the science fiction writer moans softly: ‘I mustn’t dream of cream princesses enthroned on Mars because the astronomers insist that mammalian life is impossible. So I have to find an outlet for my sexual fantasies among a bunch of nasty green lichens!’”

Sex rears its inquisitive head once again on the letters pages, which this month are largely concerned with the aftermath of a Langdon Jones story entitled ‘I Remember Anita’, which was published in NW # 144, and which apparently took a more frank approach to mammalian life than many SF readers were used to.

“I’m not a prude, far from it!,” insists Louis E. Van Gastel of Alost, Belgium. “I enjoy pepper on my meat but I don’t eat a lot of pepper with a little meat if you see what I mean. […] But why must Mr. Jones express the feelings of a young, sensitive artist so crudely! It isn’t sex anymore, it’s downright pornography! What youngster, with refined artist’s feelings, would so blatantly overstress his sexual relation with an adored and respected mistress! No, sir, it should have had a more delicate touch!”

“Am I mistaken if I take your editorials as a warning for shocks to come?,” Mr. Van Gastel continues, “All right, shocks it will be, but please note the difference between shock and disgust!”

A curt response from our editor simply clarifies that NW’s staff “are not publishing a magazine for schoolboys”.

Ivor Latto of Merryton Avenue, Glasgow takes a rather more measured approach, but emerges equally unimpressed:

“One of 1964’s most controversial tales you call it; by that I hope to God you don’t mean because of its sexual content, for I don’t think I could take another bout of Should There be more Sex in SF? Mr. Jones has as much right to employ blunt sexual realism as any non-sf writer… if he thinks it justified for his purpose […] The sweaty realism of love and death has been employed to advantage by many writers, most notably by the Existentialists. But when Sartre or Camus do this they use the language of realism.”

With the air suitably cleared, it is left to Tony Walsh of Bridgwater, Sussex (both he and his wife enjoyed the story, he notes), to address the real burning issue here;

“Could not the emotional impact be made just as effectively in another context (substitute an earthquake or nuclear explosion, say)? In other words: Is it SF?”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Elizabeth French Briscoe of Brighton Road, Dublin reveals herself as no friend of ours, calling as she does for an all-out ban on illustrations in Science Fiction;

“Illustration has given SF a bad name. […] it is only recently that I have ‘discovered’ SF, having been put off by garish covers depicting bug-eyed monsters: I took the accompanying reading matter to be a decadent genre slanted toward sadistic boys, until I chanced upon a novel by Arthur C. Clarke.”

Following the lead of Moorcock’s editorial, this month’s review features seem more positive than usual, with MM (under his own name) offering  up extensive praise for the aforementioned ‘Greybeard’ and ‘The Paradox Men’, whilst Langton Jones undertakes an affirmative reappraisal of the work of this issue’s lead contributor, Arthur Selling.

Later on though, our editor’s alter ego James Colvin has the knives out once more, passing acidic comment on the ‘juvenile’ approach taken to SF by publishers, and those among his peers who are willing to pander to it (brave words perhaps from the creator of Elric?), finding time to take at least a few of his contemporaries down a peg or two along the way;

“I’ve had the feeling recently that I’m being cheated all round. Poul Anderson’s ‘Time and Stars’ (Gollancz, 16s.) shows us a writer who, in all his working life, seems not to have developed at all. His best current stuff is as good as his best stuff of ten to fifteen years ago, his worst is as bad as ever. […] This pulp Western dressed up as an SF story [is] badly written, highly reactionary and embarrassingly sentimental – and it won this year’s Hugo Award for best short fiction. […] I’m still bewildered – can it mean that the Hugo has become valueless as an indication of what is good? I’m equally bewildered at Gollancz for selecting it. I always had the impression that he was a left-wing publisher. Not any more, it seems.”

“Damon Knight’s reputation is good, yet surely he can’t have gained it from his fiction? I hoped his latest novel might be an improvement on his short stories, but no such luck.”

And so on.

‘Colvin’ does at least conclude with a mention of one notable volume that might have slipped beneath readers’ radars;

“Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (Pan, 3/6) is a wonderful study of a run-down society of the future, told in the first person by a latter-day Teddy Boy in his own weird patois. It is powerful and horrifying – and spoiled by a hurried, rather sentimental ending. Still much better than most of the stuff being produced inside the field at the moment.”

So much for those ‘encouraging signs’ then.

Old New Worlds: Nov-Dec 1964.

 (Cover Design: Robert Tilley)

An unexpected treasure awaited me whilst mooching about in Blackheath’s charity shops last month: a stack of Moorcock-era New Worlds issues. Lacking either the money and storage capacity to pick up the lot, I merely grabbed a selection, which I now intend to present to you in chronological order in a monthly-ish series of posts, thus to give us an insight into the unique position the magazine occupied in the mid/late 1960s, and to help illustrate the process by which it eventually became a prime meeting point between old school SF fandom and the literary counter-culture… or something like that. It’ll pass the time, anyway.

(Illustration: J. Cawthorn)

In April 1964, a letter from 25-year-old Michael Moorcock appeared in issue 141 of New Worlds SF, lamenting both the planned cancellation of the magazine, and the recent departure of its editor, John Carnell. To say that penning this letter was a good career move on Moorcock's part is something of an understatement. Apparently Carnell was impressed with what he had to say, and behind the scenes, things obviously moved quickly. In May 1964, New Worlds # 142 appeared on schedule, now under the auspices of new publishers Roberts & Vinters, with Michael Moorcock installed as editor.

The first issue we’re looking at in this series finds Moorcock only six months into his editorship, and, whilst you wouldn’t know it from the defiantly trad illustrations and cover design accompanying his own ‘The Shores of Death’, the battle lines between the old schoolers and the new wave are already being drawn.

In a rather po-faced editorial, Moorcock laments the poor quality of SF on film, radio and television, directing particular ire in the direction of The First Men in the Moon, a now largely forgotten British adaptation of the HG Wells story of the same name (although he did think George Pal’s ‘The Time Machine' was quite good, “..save that it replaced Wells’ socialistic message with a fuzzy humanistic one”). Point made, he then moves on to recommend the first issue of the SF criticism zine ‘Epilogue’, which amongst other things apparently includes L. Sprague de Camp outlining his belief that too many contemporary writers are simply “re-hashing the work of the old masters” – a pretty ballsy claim if you take a minute or two to google Mr. de Camp’s own literary legacy. Finally, our editor reminds London SF readers that “..many writers and readers meet regularly on the first Thursday of every month at The Globe Tavern, Hatten Garden (near Gamages). The atmosphere is completely informal and all are welcome.” Thanks Mike.

One of the things that has most surprised me whilst perusing these old New Worlds is the sheer amount of venom included in the magazine’s critical writing. I’m not sure whether this was simply representative of the discourse in SF fandom at the time, or whether Moorcock and his pals (assistant editor Langdon Jones and staff writer James Colvin) are deliberately trying to take their elders down a peg or two, but either way, though it seems somewhat at odds with a culture built entirely on fan-boy enthusiasm, it certainly makes for more lively reading than a bunch of back-slapping.

In his book review column, Colvin bestows some reluctant praise upon Robert Heinlein’s ‘The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag’, before, predictably, tearing him a new one for the majority of his other recent output (“Here we get a good glimpse of Heinlein in his cosy reactionary mood (just as insidious as his more often noted violent reactionary mood.)”). Colvin’s writing style here is concise, acidic and often very funny, as is aptly demonstrated by the following page, which I thought I’d scan in its entirety for the purposes of Strong Truth:


On the letters page meanwhile, Mrs Ellen Channon of Nettleham, Lincoln declares New Worlds a “..jolly good magazine, once you get past the covers!”, and demands to see more Moorcock in its pages (I’m not even going to go there).

Elsewhere, Mr. Arthur Selling of Uckfield, Sussex expresses his reluctance to get behind new up-and-comer J.G. Ballard:

“I don't know who acclaimed Ballard the ‘finest modern SF writer’ but his ideas are too thin – like those other admirable lads Sturgeon and Aldiss. Give him the title of the best writer writing SF, which is a bit different. It’s probably the main problem today. Critics both in and out of SF plead for better writing and characterisation in SF, but they carp when, as it inevitably must, it crowds out the old SF elements.”

“On the other hand,” Selling concludes following his assessment of the magazine’s new approach, “it’ll have me developing some of the ideas that I’ve kept in a drawer this many years for the knowledge that none of the other editors would smile on them.”

"We look forward to seeing them!" the NW editors respond, and, in a turnaround that makes even Moorcock’s assumption of editorship seem slow, the following page announces that New Worlds # 146 will lead with “the first part of Arthur Selling’s new satirical novel ‘The Power of Y’”, with supporting stories from Ballard, Brunner and E.C. Tubb amongst others – and that indeed is the issue we’ll be looking at in the next thrilling instalment of this series. Bet you can’t wait.

Weird Tales: Frank Belknap Long

At an impressionable age, my brother and I both developed an unhealthy interest in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft (an obsession that persists to this day, in my case at least). With assorted anthologies of the master's work duly acquired and consumed, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves scouring second hand bookshops for the even more obscure, night-haunted outpourings of the numerous other writers (influences, acquaintances and Weird Tales-affiliated contemporaries) who are generally thought of as constituting Lovecraft’s ‘circle’.

Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994) was high on the list, and the enticing 1975 Panther anthology you see above was soon in our hands. THE BLACK DRUID. Yeah, that’s the stuff. And what a cover!

A few pages into the title story however, and Frank Belknap Long was very much off the list. You’d have thought that exposure to HPL’s more fragrant meanderings might have already prepared us for what was in store, but all the same, Long’s particular brand of bizarre, artless prose and rambling, hackneyed storytelling provoked such a strong negative reaction that until recently I’d pretty much written the guy off completely, consigning this book to the shelf, leaving most of the other stories unread.

The opening paragraphs were questionable enough:

“Mr Stephen Benefield entered the library and hung his black Chesterfield overcoat on the rack which the trustees had grudgingly provided for the accommodation of inclement and cold weather accessories. There were seven other overcoats on the rack. Mr Benefield paused to count them – he was a methodical and observing man – and passed to the reference desk. When the librarian approached him he nodded amiably.
‘I wish to peruse, please, Lucian Brown’s The Cromlech Jeelos. It is No. 3268 A. I looked it up yesterday in the catalogue.’
[…]
Closing the book Mr Benefield smiled and passed it back over the desk. ‘That is the passage I was looking for,’ he explained. ‘I do not believe I shall need a copy of it. I thought it might be a very long passage, but it is so brief that I can remember enough to paraphrase it without the aid of a written copy. Thank you very much. I am Stephen Benefield, an archaeologist. I use such passages in my books.’”

But I recall that it was the author’s subsequent description of his protagonist that particularly aroused our derision:

“It is true that Mr Benefield was, in some respects, an odd looking man. His hair was absurdly long and it descended upon his forehead in a circular, antiquated bang; his hat was two sizes too small for his immoderately large head – a brachycephalic head, although he boasted twenty generations of Saxon forebears – and his socks, which his wife had purchased for him, were of heavy wool, and unsupported by garters they bulged above his shoes like the elephantine folds on the torso of an Abyssinian eunuch.”

Needless to say, reading these passages again as an adult, I can’t help but feel that we were missing the point somewhat. Although Long’s prose is certainly somewhat peculiar, I think I’m now more able to appreciate the quasi-tongue in cheek, knowingly antiquated pulp style that he was going for. Rather than laughing AT him, perhaps we should have been laughing WITH him, so to speak. Lacking the more ‘refined’ literary affectations of his fellow Weird Tales writers, Long instead writes with a kind of woolly, bellowing gusto - somewhat like the prose equivalent of Brian Blessed’s speaking voice - and most of his stories give the impression of having been hammered out at break-neck speed to reach the next issue’s deadline… which was more than likely the case I suppose, given his position as an aspirant full-time writer struggling to support a family through the worst years of the great depression.

Perhaps as a result of these pressures, the bulk of the innumerable weird tales Long cranked out through the ‘20s and 30s are indeed somewhat less than inspired. But when he did hit on something good, he hit it HARD, as is demonstrated by the handful of his more celebrated efforts compiled in the Arkham House anthology ‘Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos’, which I finally got around to reading last month.

‘The Hounds of Tindalos’ (1929) is probably his best-known tale, and indeed, it is an absolute corker. Mixing up half-understood quantum physics, medieval occultism, ‘House On The Borderland’-esque cosmic awe, proto-psychedelic indigestion of “strange drugs” and good old fashioned nameless evil into a compressed ten page dose of boggle-eyed, metaphysical madness, it is perhaps the most archetypically perfect ‘weird tale’ ever written… with the emphasis kept very much on the WEIRD.

Read it as I did, bleary-eyed after a few drinks in the final half hour before sleep, and it’s pretty wild stuff, whether in 1929, 2013, or in the dark, curved spaces before the dawn of recorded time:

“Chalmers lay stretched out upon his back in the centre of the room. He was starkly nude, and his chest and arms were covered with a peculiar bluish pus or ichor. His head lay grotesquely upon his chest. It had been completely severed from his body, and the features were twisted and torn and horribly mangled. Nowhere was there a trace of blood.

The room presented a most astonishing appearance. The intersections of the walls, ceiling and floor had been thickly smeared with plaster of paris, but at intervals fragments had cracked and fallen off, and someone had grouped these upon the floor around the murdered man so as to form a perfect triangle.

Beside the body were several sheets of charred yellow paper. These bore fantastic geometric designs and symbols and several hastily scrawled sentences. The sentences were almost illegible and so absurd in content that they furnished no possible clue to the perpetrator of the crime. ‘I am waiting and watching,’ Chalmers wrote. ‘I sit by the window and watch the walls and ceiling. I do not believe they can reach me, but I must be aware of the Doels. Perhaps they can help them break through. The satyrs will help, and they can advance through the scarlet circles. The Greeks knew a way of preventing that. It is a great pity that we have forgotten so much.’

On another sheet of paper, the badly charred remains of seven or eight fragments found by Detective-Sergeant Douglas (of the Partridgeville Reserve), was scrawled the following: ‘Good god, the plaster is falling! A terrific shock has loosened the plaster and it is falling. An earthquake perhaps! I could never have anticipated this. It is glowing dark in the room. I must phone Frank. But can he get here in time? I will try. I will recite the Einstein formula. I will - God, they are breaking through! They are breaking through! Smoke is pouring from the corners of the wall. Their tongues – aghhh –’”

Perhaps not quite as far-out, but equally entertaining, ‘The Space Eaters’ (1928) not only opens with one of the greatest non-sequitur, one sentence paragraphs of all-time (I defy you to beat “The horror came to Partridgeville in a blind fog.”), but also adopts an in-joke filled, fourth wall-breaking format that lends it a particular resonance for fans of H.P. Lovecraft and the world he inhabited.

More than just another correspondent or contemporary, Frank Belknap Long was one of the few people who could actually claim to have been a close personal friend of Lovecraft, getting to know him not merely through the voluminous exchanges of correspondence with which Lovecraft managed most of his personal relationships, but in person too. Lovecraft regularly stayed with Long’s family in Brooklyn whilst visiting New York, and the pair spent a great deal of time together during HPL’s ill-fated sojourn in the city in the mid-‘20s.

Howard & Frank, Flatbush, Brooklyn, 1931

With this in mind, little is left to the imagination when ‘The Space Eaters’ introduces us to ‘Frank’, a practical, rambunctious sort of fellow who is currently ensconced in a remote farmhouse with his good friend ‘Howard’, an intense, haunted author of sanity-shaking macabre tales;

“My friend wrote short stories. He wrote to please himself, in defiance of contemporary taste, and his tales were unusual. They would have delighted Poe; they would have delighted Hawthorne, or Ambrose Bierce, or Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. They were studies of abnormal men, abnormal beasts, abnormal plants. He wrote of remote relams of imagination and horror, and the colors, sounds and odors which he dared to evoke were never seen, heard or smelt on the familiar side of the moon. He projected his creations against mind-chilling backgrounds. They stalked through still and lonely forests, over ragged mountains, and slithered down the stairs of ancient houses, and between the piles of rotting black wharves.”

Indulgent as such self-referential blather may seem to us now, I’m sure that at the time of writing neither man had any idea that their stories – confined to the pages of marginal, cheaply printed pulps – would still be being pored over by readers nearly a century later. And despite the injokey tone, I find it interesting that, whilst clearly not short on praise for his friend’s writing, Long’s actual characterisation of Lovecraft in the story is somewhat less than wholly complimentary.

“As I continued to stare at him he suddenly stopped writing and shook his head. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I should have to invent a new language. And yet I can comprehend the thing emotionally, intuitively, if you will. If I could only convey it in a sentence somehow – the strange crawling of its fleshless spirit!’
‘Is it some new horror?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘It is not new to me. I have known and felt it for years – a horror utterly beyond anything your prosaic brain can conceive.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.”

Whilst I’m sure it was all in good fun, ‘Howard’ is nonetheless revealed to be a rather callous and unstable individual, his behaviour quickly becoming slightly unhinged as the brain-eating horrors lurking within that ‘blind fog’ descend:

“Slowly we became aware that the wails came from far away. As far away, perhaps, as Mulligan Wood.
‘A soul in torture,’ muttered Howard. ‘A poor, damned soul in the grip of the horror I’ve been telling you about – the horror I’ve known and felt for years.’
He rose unsteadily to his feet. His eyes were shining and he was breathing heavily.
I seized his shoulders and shook him. ‘You shouldn’t project yourself into your stories that way,’ I exclaimed. ‘Some poor chap is in distress. I don’t know what’s happened. Perhaps a ship foundered. I’m going to put on a slicker and find out what it’s all about. I have an idea we may be needed.’
‘We may be needed,’ repeated Howard slowly. ‘We may be needed indeed. It will not be satisfied with a single victim. Think of that great journey through space, the thirst and dreadful hungers it must have known! It is preposterous to imagine it will be content with one victim!’
Then, suddenly, a change came over him. The light went out of his eyes and his voice lost its quiver. He shivered.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll think I’m as mad as the yokel who was here a few minutes ago. But I can’t help identifying myself with my characters when I write. I’d described something very evil, and those yells – well they are exactly like the yells a man would make if – if..’”

Despite such ruminations on the perils of confusing fantasy with reality however, Long’s usual jaunty, good-natured tone continues to predominate, and overall ‘The Space Eaters’ emerges as another rampantly weird pulp outing, playing out like some sweaty, chronically twisted Boy’s Own adventure, as our dynamic duo of macabre scribblers don their ‘slickers’ to take on brain-sucking vampires in the dark woods and come under siege from telepathic alien evils and trepanned zombie rednecks in their cabin (shades of ‘The Evil Dead’ perhaps?), eventually making their escape via motorboat, throwing magically-charged cross gestures at the demonic apparition rising above the ill-starred forest… a poorly judged intrusion of Christianity into the bleak Lovecraftian cosmos that seems likely to have enraged HPL far more than any perceived slight on his character.

As with ‘The Hounds of Tindalos’, ‘The Space Eaters’ ends with an epilogue that sees the good-natured Frank arriving too late to prevent the powers of alien-occult damnation returning to claim his more obsessive friend, thus furnishing both stories with conclusions which could possibly be read as not-too-deeply-coded warnings re: a certain someone’s propensity to take all this abyss-gazing just a bit too seriously.

Unlike his ill-fated friend, Frank Belknap Long never seems to have much troubled the thoughts of critics, academics or high-falutin’ pop culture weirdos, but one gets the impression he probably didn’t object to relative anonymity that much, spending the remainder of life thoroughly immersed in the world of commercial pulp fiction, and earning his living as a working writer right up to the early ‘80s. Through the ‘30s and ‘40s he continued to contribute to Weird Tales and other pulps, also finding time to ghost-write several Ellery Queen mysteries alongside scripts for numerous comic books, including DC’s Superman and Green Lantern. From the late ‘50s onward he followed several of his fellow Weird Tales scribes into the lucrative(?) realm of paperback sci-fi, penning such bluntly titled epics as ‘Woman From Another Planet’ (1959) and ‘It Was The Day of the Robot’ (1963), before paying the bills into the mid ‘70s with a series of gothic mysteries, written under the name of his wife Lyda.

By this point, retirement must surely have beckoned, but Long’s connection to the by-now-legendary Lovecraft still kept his name on (a few) people’s lips, and his bibliography is rounded out with a steady stream of reminiscences, book introductions, convention appearances and fan-published chapbooks of Lovecraftian verse, all harking back to those few years he spent knocking about with that long-faced geezer from Providence.