Weird Authors from my Dictionary of the Damned (c) 2006 G. Callaghan

Weird Author for the week of Sun 2/26/06
-Congdon, Caroline M. (American) Poet, invalid. (b. 1842-d.1860)

Cataleptic/narcoleptic, perennially feverish and no doubt consumptive, Congdon died at the age of eighteen, leaving behind a book of poems, entitled The Guardian Angel and Other Poems, (1856), published at age fifteen. The poems include "Let Me Weep", "The Complaint", "Resignation", "The Dying Girl", "I Am All Alone", "Autumn", "There Are No Flowers Now", "Catalepsy" (a sonnet), "Returning Consciousness" (a sequel sonnet), "Where Shall be My Last Resting Place", "On the Death of a Friend", "O, Should I die in Winter", "Night", and "My Dream of Death".

Her poems range from short works like those listed above, to long narrative romances, (like "Hermann" and "The Guardian Angel"), to a Longfellowesque Native American adventure story ("Meame"), to a political poem which closes the volume, lamenting America's blighting policy on slavery ("My Country, Oh, My Country"), --Congdon saying that she sees a crimson tide of blood flowing from the American flag when she "think(s) of Afric's children" (250). In many poems, a vivid, youthful imagination is evident, a genius seemingly both tormented and stimulated by her illness. There is a strange feeling in most of the poems, even when she is speaking of far off stars and angels circling high above the Earth, as of things seen from the fixed perspective of a bed, of sunrises watched and thoughts all dreamt within a single room, --a room which is variously disguised in the poems as a sickroom, a coffin, a tomb, a rustic cabin, or a nameless chamber lengthening with the shadows of fading life, and which is, perhaps, the same room that Gwen John and Romaine Brooks later pictured in their muted, dark, and morbidly neurotic portraits and still lifes of young girls.

Congdon was the youngest daughter of a poor widowed mother and lived in Amber, Onandaga County, New York (the same territory later captured so vividly by Arkham House and Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye, and near where, at the turn of the twentieth century, Lee Roy J. Tappan had earlier his brief and sorrowful life). Caroline's poetry was undoubtedly influenced by the pioneer experiences of her mother on Otisco Lake, and her stories of wild animals and Indians. Her book is prefaced by a highly affecting "Sketch of the Authoress", written by her brother-in-law, newspaper writer T.K. Frisbee, which says:

"In her fourteenth year, when her young heart beat highest, and her future looked most fair, Disease laid its heavy hand upon her, and she sunk beneath its weight! Such is the nature of her affliction, that it renders her entirely helpless, --except the use of her hands, --and confines her constantly upon her back. In this sad condition she has lain, day and night, for many weary
months, without even a pillow beneath her head; and, owing to the unnatural heat of her system, unable to bear any covering but a sheet, and to have little or no fire in her room in coldest weather.
"Thus deprived of health, and shut in from sweet communion with the things in Nature, she has given voice to the silent musings of her mind, in sweet poetic numbers.
"She writes with a pencil, on a little frame which stands across her breast; and so arranged with small wires passing horizontally across the under side, and fastened at each end, as to hold her paper, slipped in between the wires and the board, at an angle of about thirty degrees over her face:--thus making her writing desk lean over her, instead of her over it.
"...Still calm, peaceful and serene,...she lies without a murmur--without a word of complaint! And when first I visited her lowly couch, and saw her eye shining with such unearthly brightness, and listened to the rich and heavenly melody of her voice, my soul became filled with deepest
emotions..." (Congdon vii)


This bizarre picture is confirmed by the authoress, both in her preface to her work, and in her poems themselves, which have a strange, languid, stationary viewpoint, as of life viewed from a sickroom window. Reading these poems, one is tempted, at times, to think they might have been revised or even partially written by T.K. Frisbee, given the strange self-consciousness and preciousness of some of the poems. Given the claim made by feminist critics, like Diane Herndl in her "Invalid Women" (1993), that the aesthetic of female death so promoted in the 19th-century was a means of dominating, marginalizing and invalidating women, it would be interesting to know how aware Congdon was of the roots of such an aesthetic, and how much it was manipulated by her editor, ---Frisbee perhaps intending for her work to compete with other such books as Margaret Miller Davidson's posthumous 1841 biography, which was written by Washington Irving and favourably reviewed by Poe, --Miller likewise being a tubercular invalid and poetess, who died at age 15.

In her own preface to her work, Congdon says:

"I scarcely know how I have been prevailed upon to submit my unskilled productions to the eye of the public. But so it is; and although I am well aware, that my attempts at verse are weak and imperfect, I have some hope, that the knowledge of my slight age and helpless condition, will not be entirely powerless to shield me from criticism.
"Begging the Critic, therefore, to spare my little book, and the tender-hearted Reader to drop a tear of sympathy for its afflicted Authoress, I close, by acknowledging my indebtedness to friends for preparing my manuscript for the Press: I could not do it myself, as I was obliged to write with a pencil."

In the first poem in her book, dedicated to her brother George, Congdon traces, as W. N. P. Barbellion was later to do in his "A Disappointed Man", and Emmanuel Carbevali in his "A Hurried Man", the onset and general progress of her disease, vividly recalling the first moments when "first her languid form laid its strength aside". At first, she writes, she had thought it would only be temporary, but "as the days passed by", Congdon writes,she "grew weaker--almost unto death."

"When they raised me, all my willful blood
Would straight refuse to keep its wonted course
And seek, with sudden flow, my throbbing heart,
Which vainly struggled to repress the tide;
And in the quarrel, all my strength would die,
And leave me silent as the tongue of Death--
And cold, and white; although my wakeful mind
Kept watch of all that passed. (...)
Strange sleep* my eyelids closed;
They would not open at the call of day...
---Five days I wore the chains of sleep...
*referring to an attack of Catalepsy. (Editor's note)"

Although, like a Poe heroine, she soon awoke, like someone rising from the grave, she quickly "submitted" to her weakness, as she puts it, once again, so that now, at the time she writes, she has been in bed for many months. "My hand is feeble still," she writes; "My forehead burns with heat unnatural. The crimson on my cheek, tells not of health." (9-13)

In "The Complaint", she writes: "Doth the morn wake in beauty, while I lie,/Weary and weak, shut from the reddening sky?" She concludes the poem:

"Still, still I lie upon a couch of pain,
Wild forms of fancy filling up my brain;
And strange and misty shapes are flitting 'round
In the deep silence, broken by no sound." (83-85)

From "The Dying Girl": "I'm growing weaker, sister/And shorter grows my breath,/While on my forehead gather,/The chilling damps of death." (100), this "'death'-'breath' rhyme scheme showing up in several other poems. In "To E.B." she writes of being "Bound to a couch of restless pain,/By fell disease--a loathesome chain!--". She then speaks of how her thoughts "with darker visions blend", Congdon forced to "wait in fev'rish pain", unable to "follow out the wand'ring will/Of
my most restless brain." (162-163)

In the "Should I die in Winter", she contrasts the flowers of spring and summer with the ice of winter dangling on a branch above a pond, saying: "Place them within my coffin,/Around my sleeping head;/Let something bright go with me/When I am with the dead." (183) In "Where Shall be My Resting Place", like the young girl she was, she makes a game of quizzing the future, trying to guess where she will die and be buried: "But grant, one moment, thy inspiring breath--/Let me but know where I shall lie in death!" (174) The poem, closes, however, with her realizing it would better not to know. In "On the Death of a Friend", she writes: "Oh, she hath gone/To the cold tomb/All dark and lone/In silent gloom!" (177)

Even in those poems not dealing directly with death, the threat of the tomb is implicit. In "Meame": "For there is peace, When life shall cease, In the cold and lonely grave." (67) From "Let Me Weep": "A little while, and I shall go/To the dark tomb, which all must know" (80). From "The Broken Heart's Request": "'Neath the shadow of the willow,/Let me calmly lie and sleep;/Let me find a welcome pillow,/In the grave so dark and deep." (159) In "Dream", a beautiful vision vanishes, the narrator suddenly "with the gloomy night alone/A list'ning to the wind's unceasing
moan." (160) In "I Am All Alone", she contrasts each progressive, increasingly menacing season with her loneliness, ending each stanza with the line, "I am all alone" (150-151). In "Life", she writes, describing the winds of Autumn, "Sad we hear Death's tempest moan,/When all we ever lov'd hath flown". (186) In "There Are No Flowers Now", she writes: "Oh, for sweet blossoms now,/To wreath my burning brow,/And bid the thoughts which crowd my brain depart!" (169) In "To Mrs. B", just to show these troubles are not confined to herself, Congdon writes: "Each earthly
hope has crumbled to the tomb,/And left thy lonely heart in deeper gloom,..." (172) Despite the everpresent menace of death and illness throughout all these poems, she also reveals her deep faith in the redeeming power of heaven and the angels, often in lines which contrast with the gloomier beginnings of the poems. In her final long poem, "My Dream of Death", she combines the sentimental structure of her longer poems with the morbid aspects of her shorter lyrics, although with the same reassuring moral uplift at the end.







Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 26 Feb 06 | 07:06PM by Gavin Callaghan.

from my Dictionary of the Damned (c)2006 G. Callaghan
Weird Authors for the week of Sun. 3/5/06

Ringelborg, Joachim Forz. (Swiss).
This unusual philosopher is described in vivid terms by Thomas deQuincey in a footnote to his Essays on Style, Rhetoric, and Language:

"Not for the sake of any exception in its favor from the censure here pronounced on this body of essays, but for its extraordinary tone of passion and frantic energy, and at times of noble sentiment eloquently expressed, I must notice, as by far the most memorable of these essays of the 17th century, that of Joachim Forz Ringleborg, On the Method of Study (De Ratione Studii). It is one of those books which have been written most evidently not merely by a madman (as many thousands have), but by a madman under a high paroxysm of his malady; and, omitting a few instances of affectation and puerility, it is highly affecting. It appears that the author, though not thirty years of age at the date of his book, was afflicted with the gravel [kidney stones]--according to his belief, incurably; and much of the work was actually written in darkness (on waxen tablets, or on wooden tablets, with a stylus formed of charred bones), during the sleepless nights of pain consequent upon his disease. "Aetas abiit', says he, 'reditura nunquam--Ah! Nunquam reditura! Tametsi annum nunc solum trapezium ago, spem tamen ademit calculi morbus.' And again: 'Sic interim meditantem calculi premunt, ut gravi ipsa dolore moereat mens, et plerumque noctes aducat insomnes angor.' Towards the end it is that he states the remarkable circumstances under which the book was composed. 'Bonam partem libri hujus in tenebrous scripsi, quando somnus me ob calculi dolorem reliquerat; idque quum sol adversa nobis figeret vestigial, nocte vagante in medio coelo. Decrat lumen; verum tabulas habco, quibis etiam in tenebrous utor.' It is singular that so interesting a book should nowhere have been noticed to my knowledge in English literature, except, indeed, in a slight and inaccurate way, by Dr. Vicesimus Knox, in his winter evening lucubrations." ( 89-90)

-Campbell, William Wilfred. (Canadian) Poet. (b.1861)
Apparently the author of a few specimens of weird verse in the late 1890's. From a contemporary essay in The Sewanee Review, entitled "A Canadian Poet", p.429(425-431):

"While Mr. Campbell's reputation rests mainly on his work in verse, he has also produced some very creditable prose, chiefly in the nature of short stories. These, however, are buried in forgotten numbers of departed Canadian magazines, and space will not permit of their present resurrection.
Before proceeding to consider Mr. Campbell as a lyrist, it may be convenient here to refer somewhat briefly to his dramatic work. In this he is less well-known than as a lyrical poet, only two of his dramas having as yet been published in book form. These are 'Mordred' and 'Hildebrand'….
(…)
"In 1893 Mr. Campbell published his second book of verse: The Dread Voyage. ...it may be said that the fascination of the weird and mystical side of humanity has laid perhaps too great hold on him, and gives a certain obscurity to some of his poems--such as Dread Voyage and Were-Wolves. Though perfectly legitimate, and possessing many technical fine qualities, these hardly constitute the highest type of verse, and certainly do not represent Mr. Campbell at his best."

Weird Author for the week of 3/12/06

-Clarke, "Mad" MacDonald. (aka M'Donald Clarke, ). Poet. (American). (b.1798-d. 1842)

A bohemian poet of the mid 1800's, Clarke seems to have etched out a place for himself in the New York City of the 1800's similar to that later eked out by Greenwich Village poet Maxwell Bodenheim in the 1930's scene over 100 years later.
Clarke was first eulogized by fellow-poet Walt Whitman, during Whitman's dandyish stint as editor of the New York Aurora in 1843, a "small fashionable Manhattan daily". (ZWEIG 46) According to Whitman biographer Paul Zweig, Whitman identified himself closely with Clarke, perhaps realizing that "Were it not for the enthusiastic letter that Emerson wrote him in 1855, Whitman might have become just another New York eccentric like McDonald Clarke, the mad street poet of the 1830's whom he had written about years before." (220)

According to historical writer Carl Carmer in his essay "The Mad Poet of Broadway", Clarke was "a lion of the pavement by day, of the literary taverns after dark." (205) Homeless for long periods, Clarke told tales of having for three months "found nightly lodgings in the decorative interior of a hearse and that, evicted, his bed was now a grassy spot between two graves in Trinity Churchyard" (206), while in his youth, having nowhere to stay in Philadelphia, "he had slept nightly on the cold stone that lay above the remains of Benjamin Franklin". (204)

According Carmer, the grammar of Clarke's poems were taken by his more staid friends and contemporaries, such as Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, and Fitz-Greene Halleck, as evidence of his mental instability, his books having titles such as "The Elixir of Moonshine and Afara or the Belles of Broadway." (206) Appointing himself the unofficial "poet laureate of Broadway", he recorded with great fervor, and amid numerous digressions, the city as it was at that time: semi-rural, divided between the rich few and the numerous poor, and fractured between numerous ethnic clans. In his poem "Dutch Dignity" Clarke attacks the Dutch millionaire John G. Coster, writing:

"And did he think I valued his high rank
Among the gilded drudges of a street
Where his three millions and a certain bank
Buy him a bow from all he there may meet." (CARMER 209)

In his striking poem "Broadway", meanwhile, written in September 1835, and published by J. W. Bell in his Poems of M'Donald Clarke of 1836, Clarke celebrates the beauties of that street, writing:

"They, whose hearts are bolstered, with doctor's bills
Who shoot at death with a box of pills,
In their prancing prisons, drive,
Are never quite sure, they're alive,
Would they only give the feet
A fair chance in the stirring street,
On one of these sweet September days,
When Noon is in its azure blaze,
The rust of Time they'll surely soften,
And never tumble in their coffin." (CLARKE, 37)

Most of his poetry seems to have centered on the beauty of young girls, Carmer observing that, "Most numerous of the street's inspirations, however, were its pretty girls and he wrote poems to nearly all of them--Margaret, Eliza, Orva, Agnes, Caroline, Ellen, 'My Dear Little Pie Girl', and 'A Young Female I Saw at the Window of Mrs. ---'s Boarding House.'" (206) Clarke's first love, "an innocent young girl whose trust he had betrayed" (CARMER, 204), had died when he was young. After that, his affections had centered on two particular girls, seventeen year-old Mary Brundage, whose marriage to him when he was twenty-one was broken by her parents in 1821, and later Mary Coster, the young daughter of the same millionaire living on Barclay and Broadway whom Clarke was to attack both in verses and in long drunken diatribes delivered in bars. (CARMER 209) First seeing Mary in the window of her mansion, he described her as: "One of those pale and pretty little girls/Who looks as if of sifted moonlight made." (CARMER 207), Clarke soon becoming a stalker of the girl, for two years following every move she made, his love becoming a local joke, while his lurking person became the bane of the mansions along Broadway.

The erotic fantasies centered on these heroines charge his poems, Clarke writing:

"There's beauty in Broadway, beside
The dangerous beauty of flesh and blood,
Come--for a moment, step aside,
And let our imaginations bud,
Just think what blooming thoughts arise
In hearts, that can't keep from our eyes.
The less'ning leaves with sunshine bright,
Are withering in Autumn's waning light,
But there's a girl glowing thro' her teens..." (CLARKE, 38)

Clarke's crowning disgrace came when millionaire Coster tossed him down the front steps of his mansion, Clarke returning home where, according to Carmer, "he dreamed of old Coster cringing before a jury of love-crazed poets who sentenced him to a never-sleeping hankering for the girls." (209) At the end of his poem "Broadway", Clarke sadly writes:

"Chaps, with white bosom's for a pillow,
Will steal to bed by nine o'clock,
While I must, 'neath the weeping-willow,
Shroud comfort, in an empty frock."

Wildly improvident with money, giving away all his money for food and shelter to street urchins, beggars, organ grinders, and derelicts, Clarke quickly began to fail in mind and body. Carmer records that Walt Whitman, meeting Clarke on Christmas Eve "in a public house eating apples and milk", found him very incoherent indeed, Clarke claiming,

"You think I am MacDonald Clarke,… but I am not. The Mad Poet dashed out his brains last Thursday night at the foot of Emmet's monument. The storm that night was the tears Heaven wept over him. God animated the body again. I am not MacDonald Clarke but Afara, an archangel of the Almighty." (CARMER 209)

In early March 1842, a night watchman found Clarke on his knees in the snow, interviewing a beggar. According to Carmer, "The watchman found the poet's talk so incoherent that he took him to the Tombs." (209) Clarke was then transferred to the insane asylum at Blackwell's Island, New York, where according to authorities he died of brain fever. His remains were buried in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. (CARMER 210)

WORKS CITED
Carmer, Carl. My Kind of Country. David McKay Company, Inc. New York. 1966.

Clarke, M'Donald. Poems of M'Donald Clarke. J.W. Bell, New York. 1836

Zweig, Paul. The Making of the Poet. Basic Books, Inc. New York. 1984.

from my Dictionary of the Damned (c)2006 G. Callaghan
Weird Authors for the week of 3/19/06

-Barlas, John. (Pseudonym, Evelyn Douglas) (English) Poet. (b.1860-d.1914

According to Richard Ellman's 1988 biography Oscar Wilde, Barlas was a "half-demented poet" at New College, Oxford, who had been arrested in 1891 due to religious delusions and threatening to blow up Parliament. According to an anonymous writer describing the incident in a 1914 issue of the Book Lover, this anonymous author accompanied Oscar Wilde to the Westminster Police Court on this occasion and succeeded in securing Barlas's release from prison. Barlas was financially supported in his writing by radical H.S. Salt, who also financially assisted atheistic/nihilistic poet James Thomson (B.V.) (q.v.). Jerusha McCormick, in her rather repetitive biography of poet/priest John Gray, The Man Who Was Dorian Gray, describes Barlas as a young "poet-anarchist" (6) and "poor mad John Barlas" (54), and quotes from a typescript manuscript by pianist Frank Liebich, a friend of Barlas, who writes that Barlas introduced him to both Oscar Wilde and John Gray in autumn of 1889, chatting with Wilde and hinting to Liebich that there was an intimate relationship between Gray and Wilde. Elsewhere in her book, McCormack contradicts Ellman's account and says that Barlas merely fired off his gun in front of Parliament, rather than trying to set it on fire, in an attempt to express his contempt for that body.

Barlas's sonnets (1888-89), as published online in The Victorian Sonnet at //www.sonnets.org/love-sonnets.htm, reveal him to have been a great, inspired, and haunting sonneteer, while the small number of his regular-verse poems on that site show him to be one of the great Decadent poets writing in English, with an intensity rivaling B.V. and Francis Thompson. Of "Beauty", Barlas writes:

"…through battle's bloody swarm
That youth with smiling face sees but thy form:
And, 'mid the shrieks of the fast sinking wreck,
A poet, standing on the wave-washed deck,
Stares awe-struck at the beauty of the storm."

His sonnets are both religious and erotic, and are filled with those fleeting images which we all notice in life, but which Barlas notes and then extrapolates into powerful and significant passages.

In Sonnet IV, he writes of "the silence of the moon/The paradisal distance of the dawn,/The depth of eve mysteriously withdrawn,", and the "green trees waving in the depths of noon".

In Sonnet VII., Barlas describes "The love within a kiss, the spiritual counterpart/Of the swift meaning motion of the eye,/Or lights that on the lips are born and die,/Named smiles…"

In Sonnet X., Barlas describes those shadows one sees in the forest: "…lights that cross and shift/And dancing shadows, where birch and beech/High up their leaning loving boughs impleach,…", then asks in Sonnet XII. that we "…(Mark how each/Of those translucent delicate purple shades/Flutters and trembles/deepens and then fades/Along the silver bark of the smooth beech,…")

Elsewhere, Barlas writes: "Hope like a half-healed wound begins to ache." In Sonnet XXXV., Barlas likens the feeling of his lover's absence to being "as one reading in a volume sage/With thoughts that wander, starts at length to find/No meaning enter his vacant mind". In Sonnet XXXVII., Barlas describes the sound of "the shiver of her dress" in his lover's home.

The erotic co-exists with nature for Barlas. In Sonnet XXXVII., Barlas contrasts the reality of his own existence with the reality which surrounds his beloved at all times:

"…thy beloved rises every morn,
And in the holy stillness of her room
Dresses her dainty beauty at the glass;
And, while thy tears divide the night forlorn,
Her soft light heart-beats in the breathing gloom
Record the maiden moments as they pass."

Barlas is also unexcelled in his description of lovers' pain, as when he contrasts his love's pity for animals or her sorrows over the fictional plot of a romance novel, with her blatant disregard for his own torment, conjuring up pictures of torment like those in a Munch painting. Barlach writes of how he and his love are like:

"…famished mariners on a wreck,
And sit and stare into each other's eyes,
Helpless to give the draught they dumbly crave;
Beneath us but the dry and sapless deck,
Above us the bare and burning skies,
And all the while we drift towards the grave."

Two other diabolical poems of Barlas', from http://www.sonnets.org/barlas.htm, are worth quoting in full:

Beauty's Anadems

A dagger-hilt crusted with flaming gems:
A queen's rich girdle clasped with tiger's claws;
A lady's glove or a cat's velvet paws;
The whisper of a judge when he condemns;
Fierce night-shade berries purple on their stems
Among the rose's healthsome scarlet haws;
A rainbow-sheathed snake with jagged jaws:
Such are queen Beauty's sovran anadems.
For she caresses with a poisoned hand,
And venom hangs about her moistened lips,
And plots of murder lurk with her eyes
She loves lewd girls dancing a saraband
The murderer stabbing till all his body drips,
And thee, my gentle lady, and thy soft sighs.

Terrible Love

The marriage of two murderers in the gloom
Of a dark fane to hymns of blackest night;
Before a priest who keeps his hands from sight
Hidden away beneath his robe of doom,
Lest any see the flowers of blood that bloom
For gems upon the fingers, red on white;
The while far up in domes of dizzy height
The trumpets of the organ peal and boom:
Such is our love. Oh sweet delicious lips
From which I fancy all the world's blood drips!
Oh supple waist, pale cheek, and eyes of fire,
Hard little breasts and white gigantic hips,
And blue-black hair with serpent coils that slips
Out of my hand in hours of red desire.

A forthcoming biography of Barlas, John Barlas: A Biographical Sketch, has been announced by The 1890's Society as being written by a Mr. Steven Halliwell, with a bibliography by Alan Anderson.





-Barnitz, (David) Park. Decadent poet, orientalist scholar. (American) (b.1878-d.1901)

Barnitz seems to be the embodiment of one of those "strange and bizarre artists" described by Holbrook Jackson, "who lived tragic lives and made tragic end of their lives", --"mad priests" who died before and yet predicted the ascendancy of the modern. (71) Barnitz died at age 23, a short time after the publication of his first book of poems, the anonymously-published The Book of Jade. A work of extreme Decadent verse of the "Oblivionist/Nihilistic" school, (q.v. Beddoes, Thomson [B.V.], Stenbock, Bonaventura), and dedicated to Charles Baudelaire, ("These paltry rhymes, which loftier shall pursue/Than aught America of high or great/ Hath seen since first began her world-wide state/I dedicate, my brother, unto you" [Barnitz 129]), both it and its author seem to typify the crisis in literature and the arts at the end of the 1890's, --the "trembling of the veil", as Mallarme put it.

Barnitz was raised in a Lutheran household prominent in the church, and was well schooled in biblical history, philosophy, Latin and Greek. In his 1901 essay, "The Art of the Future", Barnitz would speak bitterly of those "Protestant clergymen of America", who would seek to remedy the erosion of faith in God by "wholesale reading of the bible!" (Poet Lore 364), while his book has the ending prayer "Ite Missa Est", "the prayer is done". In the 1890's Barnitz studied Sanskrit and other languages under Prof. Carl Belser, well known for his studies of biblical history and the history of the near east, and in 1897 Barnitz graduated from Midland College's Classical Course, going then on to Harvard. There he was entered into the American Oriental Society by Professor Charles Lanman, prominent scholar and later the teacher of writers like Irving Babbitt, Paul More, and T.S. Eliot, Barnitz being at that time "the youngest person ever admitted" to the society. Barnitz's contemporaries at Harvard included Wallace Stevens and Walter Arsenberg, both of whom later made the transition from literary decadence to the modern avant-garde.

In Barnitz's obituary, it was written that he was "a student so intense in his application" that Professor William James of Harvard "pronounced him brilliant." According to Linda Simon, biographer of William James, James "was energized by his connection with students who thrived under his mentorship", the "undisciplinables" and "neurotic pragmatists". (272-273) Barnitz's firm grounding in the newest researches into philosophy and science are evident in his 1901 essay on art, where he says that literature is lagging far behind religion and philosophy, where "not only the old is seen to be dying, but the new has already appeared." (364) Barnitz's poem "Harvard: On His Twenty-First Year" was written while still at school:

"...I gaze through sad-shap'd eyelids langorous,
Far off from Ipsahan where roses blow.
Professors sit on lofty stools upcurl'd,
Through Yankee noses drolling all day long;
I find all these things quite ridiculous." (28)

After leaving his "Cantabrigian divan" in 1899, graduating with an A.M. (equivalent to a PhD), Barnitz returned home to Des Moines, Iowa, where, according to his later obituary notices, he "has been at home, ...doing literary work," --presumably arranging via correspondence for The Book of Jade's publication with Doxey's in New York, in a limited edition of 600 copies.

Sometime in the 1940's, New England poet and horror writer Joseph Payne Brennan came upon a significant copy of The Book of Jade during his work at the Yale Beinicke Library, the book (lucky number 13) containing a portrait of Barnitz, the proof of an unpublished poem cut from the final edition of The Book of Jade entitled "danse Macabre", a letter written by Barnitz to his publisher, and several significant annotations to the text evidently made by a friend of Barnitz, identifiable only by his initials in the margins, "H.V.S." According to an article written by Brennan in 1959, the photograph "which must have been taken not long before the poet's death reveals a serious-appearing young man with large, brilliant, dark eyes, a generous mouth, and a somewhat prominent nose. He wears spectacles and a high starched collar; his long hair is middle-parted, very precisely. He might be a firm accountant or a young mathematics professor. The strident melodrama and dedicated decadence of his verses is nowhere apparent." (Fresco 15) According to "H.V.S.", Barnitz originally wanted to entitle his volume "The Book of Gold; then The Divan of Park Barnitz". Perhaps Barnitz's final choice, "The Book of Jade", was based on Judith Gautier's Le Livre de Jade (1867), a book of adaptations from the Chinese which Enid Starkie likens to the later prose poems of Rimbaud, and of which Barnitz would have been aware due to his Oriental and French studies.

In his letter to William Doxey, Barnitz writes:

"Sir--
I have the impression of having seen somewhere a
metrical translation of Les Trophees of Heredia, with the
name of your firm on the title page. Kindly let me know if
this is so, and if so whether the book is yet to be had. I
have received the twelve copies of my book and I have to say
that I am very much pleased with the care you have given to
its printing, and with the result. The result is entirely
admirable, the square form, the title-page, and the cover
are particularly novel and happy.
I shall be glad to hear from you whenever desirable of
the impression made by the book; but I do not care to
subscribe to a clipping agency, as I shall see all the
magazines, and I do not want to see the newspapers.
It is not necessary to remind you that I wish my
anonymity strictly preserved for the present.
Very truly yours,
Park Barnitz"

His statement above that "I shall see all the magazines" (no doubt, during his daily visits to the library), echoes similar passages from The Book of Jade: "with all the sciences I am acquainted", "I know all the languages, all the philosophies" (15, 31), and perhaps derives from Mallarme's "The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books" (Flores 147) and other of the arch-symboliste's weary, despairing passages. Certainly, Barnitz absorbed Decadence as his natural idiom. The last statement regarding the preservation of his anonymity, meanwhile, perhaps reflects something of the climate of fear, or at least of precaution, which affected literature in the period during and for a long while after the Wilde trials on both sides of the Atlantic, although Douglas Shand-Tucci in his book Boston Bohemia describes how this cautious prudence was affected by authors even before Wilde's trial. Decadent writer-architect Ralph Adams Cram likewise published his manifesto The Decadent (1893) anonymously, and friends at the time of its publication, including its publisher publisher/photographer Frederick Holland Day, could only observe that Cram "will probably not put his name to it, but no persuasion of Herbert's or mine has had the least effect to leave it in M.S." (SHAND-TUCCI 368), while Cram's volume of decadent horror stories Spirits Black and White (1895), was allowed by its author to lapse into oblivion after the Wilde trials. Indeed, in later life, according to his friend Dr. Henry S. Whitehead, Cram no longer even possessed a personal copy of the work. (Lovecraft, SL IV 15)

Writing in pencil on a proof in the Beinicke volume, "H.V.S." states how "At my suggestion, but only after some argument, the following verses, entitled 'Danse Macabre', were omitted from the collection (The Book of Jade)." The poem itself is extremely grotesque, a morbid fantasy in the
vein of Beddoes, and since it is unpublished I quote it in full:

"Danse Macabre
I saw a line of corpses old,
Dead with diseases manifold,
Solemnly dancing'neath the moon.
Their perish'd limbs moved to the tune
Of some worm-orchestra unheard--
A sight enormously absurd.
First in the valse, with fishy eye
Tripped something dead of leprosy,
All silvery like a virgin's breast.
A buried glutton danced with zest,
All greenish and all dropsical,
Like a deform'd and vital ball.
The third was very beautiful,
Of charming small-pox sorelets full;
A small-pox ending, corpse, was thine.
There danced one in that naked line
Whose corpse was rotten with much love;
I wish the white worms joy thereof.
A suicidal corpse came next,
Who wish'd to illustrate the text:
--better to be chewed than to chew;
So he became a worm-ragout
And cholera-corpses weirdly black
Carrying their dead flesh like a sack,
Vals'd graceful beneath the sun.
Blue fever, and Consumption,
And hollow-pated lunacy.
Bowed, in that dance with courtesy
Cover'd with sores from foot to head,
Like flowers in a flower-bed,
Strange plagues all beautifully green
Went pirouetting through the scene;
And shrunken corpses dead of Age.--
These things went dancing o'er the stage.
Smelling of graves and worm-tooth scars,--
Death's musty-meated avatars."

Barnitz later had two poems published under the name of Park Barnitz in Overland Monthly in January and March 1901, respectively, the first, a new poem entitled "After-Life", seeming to predict his approaching death:

"I leave the sound, the sorrow, and the strife;
Long long ago
I lived within the hopeless world of life;
Now on my heart forever stilled from strife
Slow falls the snow.
My heart is still at last, mine eyes no more
Their lids unclose;
I lie low in the house without a door;
While I forever sleep, my spirit sore
Grows in a rose." (595)

The second poem, "To the Mona Lisa of da Vinci", is actually a poem from The Book of Jade, where it was entitled "Madonna", --Barnitz taking a cue here from Walter Pater, whose decadent description of the Mona Lisa in the 1880's is very similar. According to Barnitz's obituary, it was assumed that a new version of his book would soon be brought out under his own name, but this was not to be.

In his obituary, it states that "Mr. Barnitz was very reticent, went into company but little, but was a daily prominent figure at the libraries. He detested shams of any kind, and in some of his criticisms would have been regarded severe." In The Book of Jade, this disposition finds expression in such epic chants as "Prayer/In Time of Plague":

"Holy Pestilence, holy pestilence, gird thee with
might,
Holy Pestilence, come thou upon them, come thou at
night,
Holy Pestilence, put on thy mantle, put on thy crown,
Holy Pestilence, come on the cities, come and strike
down,..." (80)


In "Mad Sonnet", he writes:

"Lo, in the night I cry out, in the night,
God! and my voice shall howl into the sky!
I am weary of seeing shapeless things that fly,
And flap into my face in their vile flight;

I am weary of dead things that crowd into my sight,
I am weary of hearing horrible corpses that cry,
God! I am weary of the lidless Eye
That comes and stares at me, O God of light!" (75)

This weariness that Barnitz describes pervades all his poems, creating an airtight atmosphere which is quite disturbing: an aura of languor, of ennui, carried to the point of perfection, of no escape. Yet, where Barnitz writes above of the "dead things that crowd into my sight", it is not merely a Gothic conceit; he is actually describing, in coded fashion, the misanthropy he feels toward the men and women he sees everyday, causing Barnitz to "crouch in the dark corners", where "he dare not stir". In "Hegel", a poem of four lines, Barnitz describes his own despairing loneliness:

"Because my hope is dead, my heart a stone,
I read the words that Hegel once did write--
An idiot gibbering in the dark alone--
Till on my heart and vision fell the night." (87)

Barnitz's ennui and languor show him to have been intimately familiar with most of the productions of French and English decadent poetry, just as his frequent rhymes with "nevermore" dip into the same black inkwell used by Poe. In his works Barnitz mentions such names as Bocklin, Beerbohm, Wilde, Peladan, Mallarme, Verlaine, D'Annunzio, Pierre Loti. In his 1901 essay, "The Art of the Future", Barnitz writes,

"An obvious exception to the statement that there is
nothing new in Paris is the existence of that school who are
not recognized at all by their recognized fraternity, who do
not lecture at Harvard, and who, seen from my far-off
Cantabrigian divan, seem to me the most delightful of
contemporary French writers. I allude to the decadents, to
the symbolistes, to the hydropaths, to the trombonistes, to
M. Gustave Kahn, to M. Jean Moreas, and the one hundred
poets of Paris. (...) All these slaves of the opal, as one
of their obscurest members proclaims them, with their one
great man and their hundred pathetic poets, it is surely a
fitting thing to admire. 'How nice of them', one feels like
saying, 'to be so dear!' They have not produced a new art,
but they have amused." (361)

The intimation, here, is that Barnitz was himself writing in the decadent poetic idiom because it was "current", and therefore best able to embody his message, that of the disintegration of the arts. In the "Prelude" to The Book of Jade, he writes:

"Then with philosophy I bor'd me duly;
And since I could not slumber all the time,
I, in sweet golden rhyme,
On white papyrus scented with patchouli
Wrote masterpieces starry-beautiful." (13)

This sentiment is echoed in his essay, where he writes of the "dullness and petty triviality about fin-de-siecle art":

"Were it not better to write masterpieces one's self
than to review things which are not masterpieces....? (...)
The word art is become canting and trivial. The reason for
this triviality of art has been found in many things... But
the plain reason is just that art has fallen into trivial
hands, that the exponents of it are trivial persons, persons
who strive to be chic, who exist to be talked about. They
call themselves naturalist, impressionist, symbolist, and a
score of other things. These words produce oceans of drool
in the newspapers and bore one in parlors; but the bearers
of them fail to remark that the important thing is not to
belong to a school, but to produce a masterpiece." (363-364)

However, as we have seen in his letter to Doxey, Barnitz was aiming to make an impression on the literary world. And his persistence in writing in such a macabre, grotesque idiom, --his exulting, in fact, in the morbid and horrific, whose images melded with his stern aesthetic and literary mindset like a glove, despite the obituaries' description of Barnitz as "a noble hearted man"--, shows
that the decadent mindset was either more than a mere affectation, or that Barnitz had already made up his mind to die, and was simply arranging his final place in literature, the way he would be ultimately viewed by the world. Certainly, it was the impression of later readers of Barnitz, like Wandrei and Lovecraft, that Barnitz had killed himself. If so, however, his family and the newspapers were not playing along with the message, --although Barnitz's death in any case was very abrupt and strange. According to his obituary:

"Young Barnitz has been affected with enlargement of
the heart, but the family had no idea of his condition being
serious. He has been unusually well this autumn, up to last
Saturday night when he complained of severe pain. Tuesday
he was much better and Wednesday feeling so well that he
told his mother to accompany Dr. Barnitz to the synod and
missionary convention at Iowa City. Wednesday evening he
read for several hours, and Thursday breakfasted and lunched
with his sisters, seemingly quite better. After lunch he
decided to rest, but after reaching the second story fell
and in an instant life was extinct. Medical aid was
summoned at once, but to no avail.... Mr. Barnitz was
devoted to his parents, sisters, and brother, and was what
is often termed a home boy. His tall, erect presence will
be missed at the libraries and on the streets... Vases of
autumn leaves, of which he was very fond, were placed about
the parlor..."

Barnitz's father, Dr. Samuel Barnitz, for over 20 years Western Secretary of Home Missions for the Lutheran Synod, died a year after his son, and the family left Des Moines. Barnitz's writings became a little known pleasure for connoisseurs of the macabre. Barnitz had a huge influence on Donald Wandrei's macabre-erotic poetry, Wandrei often affecting Barnitz's tone of nihilism and despair. Wandrei also mentions Barnitz in his essay "Lotus and Poppy" as a peer of Poe and Baudelaire, and later introduced his works to the weird writers H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, Wandrei accompanying Lovecraft to the John Hay Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, to view the volume of The Book of Jade in their possession, as well as loaning his own copy of the book to Ashton Smith via the mails. "You are right about the mortuary poems being the best…", wrote Smith. "(…)Ennui and sheer corruption are both extremely difficult subjects to handle. If I am ever in a position to edit an anthology, I will certainly include at least half a dozen of these poems." (SMITH, 78) Joseph Payne Brennan, another contributor to Weird Tales and a fine macabre poet in his own right, discovered Barnitz in the forties, and, in a strange coincidence, on October 10th, 1947, acquired his own copy of The Book of Jade on the 40th anniversary of Barnitz's death. The Book of Jade was republished in an expensive limited edition by occult/horror publisher Durto Press in 1998, with an intro. by Mark Valentine and an afterward by Thomas Ligotti.

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Mr. Kevin Darren Shields, author of a very fine unpublished bibliography of Joseph Payne Brennan, for bringing the materials relating to Joseph Payne Brennan to my attention.

No "damned" author this time-- just a story, "The Stone That Liked Company" by A. L. Rowse, which ranks with two other weird stories, "Origin Undetermined" by Robert H. Barlow and "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" by H. P. Lovecraft and Brian Lumley, as one of my favorite weird stories. The only place I've ever seen this story is in Rowse's anthology of Cornwell-inspired essays and fiction, "West Country Stories" (1944), so I don't think I'm violating any fair-use clause to re-type it here. Hope everyone likes it as much as I do.

"The Stone That Liked Company"
by
A. L. Rowse

It was the Christmas vacation: and those Fellows who were still up-- happy to see the backs of their undergraduates and to be quit of the dreary routine of lectures and tutorials for a blessed five weeks-- had foregathered that evening, after a quiet common-room dinner, in the rooms of the Dean. The Dean, in spite of his name, was a secular, a very secular person; his inclinations were hospitable, indeed he was rather overmuch given to entertaining. Though he had the cold, wary eyes of an intelligent fish, he was in fact a jovial person, not happy unless he had one or two of his friends in after dinner to sip his admirable port.

Tonight there were five: four of them drinking port and one--the wisest of them-- with his glass of burgundy. This last was just raising his glass to his lips, when suddenly the lights went out. In itself not remarkable, nor that winter infrequent, circumstance; for it had happened several times of late that there had been a breakdown at the electric light works from which the college current came. The winter was a severe one; floods had broken out by the river and the works flooded. There was no knowing how long before the light would come on again.

Patient men, sitting heavily after a substantial meal, they sat there for a moment, their faces lit up momentarily by the gleams from the oak-log burning in the grate. Then the Dean rose, fetched out of the corner cupboard two pleasant little candlesticks, lit them and placed them on the mantelpiece: their flame, when it caught up, revealed their pretty regency pattern, a single column with a wreath of foliage running round the stem.

"Hadn't somebody better tell a story?" said the Economics don: a hearty man with a rubicund face and a white sweater to match. He had a knack of saying what everybody thought.

"Yes, let's tell sad stories of the death of kings," said the English don, a young man who had only recently joined the college.

"Well, who's got a story to tell?" said the Dean.

The general opinion was that he had; indeed he was well known for his stories. As host he couldn't very well have declined, even if he had wanted to. It was a situation he loved, for his inclination was all in favour of a story-- his own story, and himself telling it.

"Well, since you will have it--" he began, settling himself well into the back of his chair, his head between the two side flaps in deep shadow, looking more than ever like some queer extinct animal with large flapping ears, while from the depths gleamed those intelligent eyes behind the spectacles. "There's a house in Cornwall that I know--" he went on.

"Oh! Come, Mr. Dean," said the Economics don, who knew well the Dean's penchant for old houses in Cornwall haunted by ghosts.

"Well, as a matter of fact, it's not that kind of house at all," said the Dean, quite unperturbed. "It's a modern house, built after the war. In fact, it's a bungalow, or what I believe is called a semi-bungalow. Some friends of mine took it for a bit some years ago, perhaps as much as fifteen years ago-- how time flies! Pereunt et imputantur. They took it for a bit. They didn't stay there long." He paused, dug further into the back of his chair, hugging himself, then resumed.

"I said 'friends of mine': but really it was the widow of a friend of mine and her son, a delicate lad, liable to asthma and bronchitis, and that sort of thing. He was very highly strung, I gather, but intelligent and extremely sensitive-- at any rate, he was as a child, the only time that I saw him. The mother took this house in Cornwall for the benefit of his health because of the climate. The climate agreed with him; it wasn't the climate that------"

"What was it?" said the eager young English lecturer, not used to the Dean's roundabout way of telling a story.

"Just you wait, young man," said he, not at all put out. "The house was ideal from their point of view: not too large, very convenient, and could be run with one servant and a man in occasionally to look after the garden. My friend, Mrs. Wilford, took a great deal of interest in it. Not so the boy: perhaps it would have been better for him if he had.

"His hobby was antiquities. He was just about the age when boys are mad about archeology, would go chasing off on his bicycle to take rubbings of brasses in Cornish churches and all that sort of thing. Probably did him no good: he was a restless, inquiring sort of lad who could never take things easily. There was always an element of overstrain about him. I suppose he must have been eighteen or nineteen: he would have been up here if it hadn't been for his health. I'm not sure that he wasn't a good deal spoiled by his mother: her only child, and he being rather an invalid. He was good-looking, too, like his father: I saw a photograph of him after-- well, after what happened. He had that striking combination of jet-black hair with deep-blue eyes which you sometimes come across in Scots people. He was tall and rather overgrown. There was a curious fanatic look in his eyes. He had another passion, too, besides archeology--- music. He would sit for hours listening to concerts on the wireless-- in those early days of wireless. He was beginning to compose, too: not very professional, perhaps, but he certainly had a streak of something, more than talent.

"It so happened that a couple of fields away from the house was a longstone: one of those megaliths which you get in Cornwall and Ireland--this was a particularly fine specimen. The Devil's Walking Stick, the local people called it: they have some story about how it came to be there--you know the kind of thing. It is there no longer. After what happened---"

There was a kind of movement of impatience on the part of the eager young man. The Dean poured himself out a second glass of burgundy in leisurely fashion.

"Well--some of the young miners thereabouts got together one night and blew it up."

"What?" said the Classics don in a tone of horror: he was himself interested in archeology in a mild way. "An interesting megalithic monument like that, destroyed by these vandals only a few years ago? I've never heard of such a thing. How did it come to happen? Of course, we all know that in previous centuries when people didn't value these things, didn't know what they were, they sometimes broke them up and used them for gate-posts on their farms, or for road-stone."

"How do you know that they didn't know what they were doing?" said the Dean, with an odd tone in his voice. His eyes had a curious intense look in them. "That they meant to break it up, and did it deliberately? They might have been afraid" --he underlined the word significantly with his smooth voice-- "and even though they were afraid, they nevertheless went through with it. I call that courage of a sort.

"You wouldn't have heard of it," he resumed in his ordinary speaking voice, with no suggestion in it. "Nothing was said about it in public. All the local people were in it: they knew who had done it all right. But they would never say; for they all wanted it done. And I think," he said, fixing the Classics don with his eyes, "after you have heard what I am going to tell you, you will agree that they were not without reason.

"Of course it was an enormous attraction to the house in young Christopher's eyes when he first discovered the stone. He took it as if he were its first discoverer-- 'silent upon a peak in Darien' and that sort of thing ---would he had been, poor lad!

"As a matter of fact, he could get nothing out of the local inhabitants about the stone or its history. They knew nothing about it--- or said they knew nothing about it. In itself sufficiently curious when you come to think of it, for it was an exceedingly fine one. Young Christopher himself took its measurements. He found that it was over nine feet above ground: that meant that there must have been at least four or five feet more buried in its socket underground. At its broadest it was about two feet nine inches; it had a curious shape, for beneath the head the stone was, of course, unhewn; it had not, so far as one could tell, been shaped by human hands---all the same it gave the impression, a very strong one, of having a head slender and pointed. But beneath the head it broadened out noticeably on one side like a huge misshapen shoulder, rather threatening in appearance.

"Christopher was wildly anxious to dig round it, expose the socket if possible, and see what he could find. He never mentioned it to anyone--nobody seemed to be interested. It never occurred to him to ask permission of anyone-- least of all the stone," the Dean added quietly.

"One autumn afternoon--there was nobody about much on that part of the coast--- he started operations upon the socket. It was all very enthusiastic and unwise: if he had been successful and got on far enough with it he might have loosened the stone sufficiently for it to have toppled over-- perhaps onto him. But he didn't get so far as that. He had no experience of digging or of professional archeology: he was just the enthusiastic amateur. You will agree, my dear Done," he said, addressing the historian among them, who had so far not spoken, was in fact struck by the story, which touched a chord in his experience-- "you will agree that there is no more dangerous person--even though the danger is more to himself than to others." The Dead leaned forward, took up his glass from the little mahogany wine-bracket by the fireside, sipped two mouthfuls of burgundy, and went on.

"Young Christopher didn't as a matter of fact get very far with his digging operations. It was a pleasant enough day when he set out across the intervening fields, with their magnificent view of the bay spread out beneath a kind of shelving curve; for the stone stands-- or rather stood-- in a splendid natural situation overlooking the bay. In primitive days before the coppices and plantations thereabouts had been laid out, and when all the fields were open downs, an uncultivated moor, it must have been a dominating object on the skyline from the coast below: a long forefinger pointing heavenwards, perhaps a propitiary object, no doubt the centre of the religious cult of the primitive people round about, almost certainly the scene of human sacrifice with its attendant rites.

"The boy had not been long at work, heaving up the earth feverishly, in a frantic state of excitement-- very bad for him-- when there came on, as happens in Cornwall at that time of year, a sudden change in the weather. The sky was quickly filled with lowering grey cloud, which cast a cold uncomfortable atmosphere upon the scene-- you know that sinister grey half-light than which there is nothing more cheerless in the world, or more sinking to the spirits. You might have felt a sensation of well-being and contentment a moment before, and then this dark cloud comes down upon you like a weight of lead. From being a warm afternoon it became suddenly cold; and very soon there followed a stiff shower of hail, for shelter from which Christopher ran to the heavy stone hedge, such as you have in the West Country. While sheltering there he was struck by the changed appearance of the stone. Whether it was that he was cowering down for shelter from the blast, it seemed to him that the stone had grown enormously larger. He noticed how it looked exactly to the west and the setting sun, and the thought of primitive sacrifice came into his mind. He almost fancied that he could see the blood running into the groove that he had exposed, hear the demented shrieks of the gibbering throng in that

Home of the silent vanished races,

like the innumerable mammering of bats' voices in the air. There was something horrible in the threatening headlessness of the stone, the shapelessness that was yet suggestive of power, of a ruthless force imprisoned in it incapable of expressing itself, or of any release. Suddenly terrified, he could bear it no longer. But he was a lad of courage and he was too proud to take to his heels. He withdrew in good order, even going so far as to retrieve his pick and shovel, but having the feeling that he was fighting a rear-guard action all the way out of the field and over the hedge. It was the end of his digging operations. He had had a scare--even if it had been possible to resume, which it was not; for the hail shower was the prelude to a blizzard, which very unwontedly snowed them up for a week or two. It was the stone that resumed operations, in its own way, in its own time."

There was a pause. A coal fell from the fire into the grate. The Dean leaned forward and put another log on, which burned up brightly, lighting up the intent faces of his colleagues. He sank back into the shadows. You could hear the soft ticking of his tiny clock in its Chippendale case, with the little lion's head handles, on the mantelpiece.

"The scare that he had had did not put the boy off. It might have been better if it had. I repeat that he was a lad of courage, like his father: though very excitable and nervous, he had spirit. The scare only increased his fascination for the stone: he longed to know more about it, to get to the bottom of it. He was determined to go on-- you know the way such boys have of never letting sleeping dogs lie, they won't let a thing alone when it's better it should be-- even if that stone had been a sleeping dog and prepared to be left alone.

"During those weeks of snow and sleet and slush"--

(Fire and fleet and candle-lighte
And Christe receive thy saule

--the words ran through the mind of the young English don) --"very exceptional for Cornwall," commented the prosaic mind of the Dean, "Christopher got to work to read everything he could lay hand on that might give him some information. He began naturally with Carew's Survey of Cornwall-- his father had had a copy of the very pleasant 1769 edition. He drew a blank: nothing whatever about the stone. He went on to all the other old histories of Cornwall, Polwhele, Borlase, Davies Gilbert. Borlase's Natural Antiquities of Cornwall did mention the stone and its position, but gave no further particulars.

"However, his reading was not without some effect, for he gathered two bits of information which enabled him to piece together a picture of the district in primitive times in his mind. Less than a mile away, towards the other end of the bay, was a farm called Castle Dennis. There was a stile-field just above the farm, with a path leading across it which cut off a roundabout corner going by the road. After you left the field by a second stile, you found yourself deep in a little lane leading to the third. It was a favourite walk of his. For some reason the field had got the name 'the Field of the Dead' in his mind. It always had a curious intimate feeling for him: 'Campo dei Morti' he would say over to himself crossing it, and one day he wrote a poem about it in which occurred the line--

So many dead men have made this their home.

But it had never occurred to him, what now he learned from these old authorities, that the field actually was the inside of a primitive camp, that the little lane into which you descended was the deep ditch or foss outside the rampart; that the name Castle Dennis was a corruption of the old Celtic dinas, meaning fortress. He learned, too, that at the other end of the bay, not far from the longstone, there had been a series of barrows which had been broken into in the eighteenth century and robbed of their funeral urns with their contents of charred human bones.

"The whole picture of the district as it was in primitive times came clear in his mind. There at the other end of the bay had been their encampment, their town, for centuries: there was even a little cliff castle down upon the headland for refuge in time of danger, in those dangerous days when life was so precarious. At the opposite end of the bay was the town of the dead, the cemetery with its barrows where they buried the burned bones of their chieftains. Near the latter was the longstone, the centre of their worship with its fearful barbarous rites.

"In a fever of excitement he read on and on in those weeks. From works on Cornwall he turned to books on stone-age Britain, on the megalithic period, on megalithic religion, on Avebury and Stonehenge. It a made a strong, an unforgettable impression when he read that when the altar-stone at Stonehenge was excavated they had found the cleft skull of an infant, evidently a dedicatory sacrifice. He could not forget it. Still his mind raced on and on, forgetting everything else, putting on one side his music, poetry--- neglecting everything for the sake of this passion, this morbid fascination.

"At the same time his reading had made him very knowledgeable about the history of the locality. When some local female society-- I think it was a Women's Institute-- kept badgering his mother to go and lecture to them, his mother, who was a very shy and timid woman, let him go and take her place. He promised he would give them a lecture on the history of their parish-- very bold of him, but he had the temperament for it, and what with his enthusiasm and good looks it was a great success. Of course it was all, or mainly, about the longstone and the portrait of the district in primitive times that he had constructed in his mind. He told them that here was one of the finest megalithic monuments in the county-- by far the oldest historical monument in the district-- and nobody seemed the least proud of its possession or even interested in it. One had never even heard of its existence. Oughtn't it to be put on the map, etc.? He ended by asking them for any information they had about it, any stories connected with it. The audience did not seem to take the subject up with any enthusiasm; they were more interested in him. He was too young to note that in fact they rather sheered off it, and quite deftly-- though in the manner of Cornish people purely instinctively-- they succeeded in deflecting him from it.

"But a day or two later when walking in the vicinity he ran into a woman who stopped him and talked to him about the subject. She was an odd sort of woman, rather masculine in type with a way of swinging to and fro on her hips as if she were a sailor. She was, as a matter of fact, the wife of the captain of a vessel, and prided herself on the fact: so perhaps she got the gait from him. She came up to the young man, putting her face into his-- he stepped down off the pavement unobtrusively into the gutter to give her room.

"'By the way, Mr. Wilford,' she said, 'you won't know me. My name is Mrs. Chynoweth. But I was very interested in the lecture you gave to our institute the other day. You spoke of the old longstone over there in the field. Well, I remember Mr. Coombe who used to live in the farm just below, and his family before him for a hundred years back; and he used to say that there was a tradition that somebody had been executed there-- oh, a hundred years ago. I don't mean executed just like that, you know---"

"'You mean-- human sacrifice?' said Christopher; somehow there flashed across his mind what he had read of somewhere, the picture of some poor creature left out on a last outpost of rock facing the setting sun, with a loaf of bread and a pitcher, the tide around those islands rising higher and higher.

"'Yes, that's it,' she said, rolling her fine dark eyes at him and revealing her powerful dentures in a broad smile. 'And I remember,' she went on, 'when we were children in the village we never used to play in that field. Nobody ever did, or went into it if they could help it.' She moved nearer to him, like an old man of the sea whom he couldn't shake off even if he would; though he was in fact fascinated. 'Have you ever noticed how threatening it looks with that great heavy shoulder, crouching like somebody ready to lurch out at you?' She made the motion expressively with her heavy body. Christopher moved a shade further away. 'Just as if they were waiting to attack you,' she said.

"Christopher did not encourage these suppositions; they made all the greater impression upon him.

"'Are you interested in spiritualism?' she said, and without waiting for an answer continued, 'Well, I am. And once in London when I went to a spiritualist church and they asked for questions, I thought I'd ask about this old longstone and whether it had any influence upon peoples' lives round about. The answer came that I was psychic, and should keep away from such things: they are liable to exert a sinister influence on you.'

"Deviating into egoism, released and unashamed, she ceased to be interesting. Christopher found some halting excuse, took his leave, and went on his way.

"His way took him back along the coast by the path that skirted the field where the stone was. From the shelter of the hedge he could observe the figure, as it were without being observed. There was no doubt it bore an extraordinary resemblance to the figure of a hooded and shrouded woman. The great bulging shoulder might be a child it was carrying, that it had taken in its arms for some purpose, draped and veiled. But it was the very formlessness of it, the shaped shapelessness, the fact that headless it seemed to have a head, shoulderless and armless it seemed to have shoulders and arms, or at least on this side shoulder and arm; the blankness of it, standing there through the centuries looking to the west with unseeing eyes, a blind face to the setting sun, that made it at once so terrible and so pathetic. For tonight he could see its pathos, its loneliness, the embodiment of grey despair, deserted for centuries by its votaries, living its own terrible secret life, the embodiment of imprisoned force.

"Greatly affected by the spectacle and his own teeming imaginings, he hurried by. Yet when he crossed the gap of the gate, from which he could be observed, he could not but feel a distinct tremor run through his nerves. Greatly daring, he turned back for a last look. The stone looked quite different: a bar of angry light from the west rested upon its upper face: it looked blank, impersonal, menacing.

"Christopher had been pestering his mother for days to come and visit the stone with him, wanted to have the name of the house changed to Longstone House, so great was his mania on the subject. At last, not in the least interested, she went along with him to pacify him. That same evening he quarreled bitterly with her. It was their first (and last) quarrel: they had never so much as bickered before. But that night Christopher, led on by what impulse, uttered things to his mother-- about his father, for example, whom he scarcely remembered-- such as had never even entered his head before. It was as if a preternaturally old experience of life had suddenly been injected into his veins.

"From that moment everything began to go wrong. As if he had some presentiment of this and how things would end, he began to keep secretly a journal of the terrible experience that he was to undergo. Later, his mother sent it to me, and after her death it remained in my possession.

"Rarely can a lad of his years have endured such hallucinations-- if hallucinations they were that led to such an indubitable result.

"From the eastern windows of the house, where Christopher's bedroom was on the second floor, the longstone was visible, as I have said, across a couple of intervening fields. It seems that the lad got the sense that he was being ceaselessly watched. One night as he was going to bed late, as his habit was, his nerves on edge, he drew back the curtains to peer out. What he saw there in the moonlight, very lovely and unearthly upon the snow, made him draw back in terror. There was no sleep for him that night; he fancied that he had seen the stone-- which, as you know, was a couple of fields away-- as large as life, as if it were on watch outside his window.

"Of course, it was just the disordered fancy of a child. He said not a word of what he suffered, but wrote down what he at any rate was convinced of in the journal he kept. But he never slept in that room again. It was shut up. He moved upstairs to a little attic room under the roof, with a dormer window that looked to the west.

"Nothing happened any more for a few days. He fancied he was safe. He took his mind off his obsession and turned to his music. He began to forget the scare he had had. It is dangerous to forget.

"One night he went to have a bath before going up to bed. The bath-room was at the back of the house and looked to the north. There was just enough light for him to see, and he was lying full length humming some theme that had occurred to him that evening, trying it out various ways in his head, when he looked up casually to see a long gaunt finger of shadow resting upon the window from outside. He turned cold with horror. Grabbing his dressing gown he fled upstairs to the safety of his room.

"But now he knew that he was no longer safe wherever he was. The bath-room looked to the north; the longstone stood in the fields to the east of the house. He could no longer console himself with the thought that it was an hallucination. He longed to leave the house; he hated the thought of the shadow that lay upon it and about it, that lay siege to it on every side. But he was afraid-- afraid to confess that he was afraid, and so held on.

"The very next day he ran into Mrs. Chynoweth out walking again.

"'You don't seem to look very well,' she said in her breezy, familiar way. She was dressed as usual in dark heavy tweed with a man's soft felt hat worn slightly on one side. She carried a walking-stick with which she executed little cuts in the air; she was jauntier than ever. 'Cornwall not agreeing with you, perhaps? I shouldn't wonder not in that house of your with the name it's got with people here.'

"'What name?' said Christopher, surprised into indiscretion. So far as he was aware it was simply known as 'The Bungalow'.

"'Oh, people here call it "Longstone House". Didn't you know what happened there a year or two ago with the last tenants who had the house? They didn't tell you when you took it? No, of course not. People are so secretive about things; I can never understand why. Now, I'm different; I'm open; I believe in being candid.'

"She certainly did. She didn't need Christopher's apprehensive invitation to tell him what happened before plunging into her story.

"'Well, it was very nasty for the time,' she said, 'and that was why the house stood empty until you came. There was a very nice couple that built the house just after the war. They came down here from London with their little girl. She was about ten or eleven-- yes, eleven, the same age as my little girl. One evening just as it was getting dark she went down the drive to the gate-- you know, where the path leads out into the road that comes from the longstone. She was found there a little later. They missed her from the house, and when they went down the drive there she was lying just outside her own gate. It was supposed that she had been knocked down by a passing lorry. But nobody had seen one. Nobody here believed that it was a lorry that was responsible. When they picked the poor little thing up, her right shoulder was shattered and there was a fracture of the right temple: just as if she had been lurched into by something very heavy. And believe me, it wasn't a car that did it.

"'Now I don't know if you are interested in spiritualism, Mr. Wilford---'

"Christopher did not need her assurance, and the thought of her philosophizing on the subject after what he had been through was more than he could bear. He took to his heels and unashamedly fled back to the house.

"That night he sat up late to listen to a concert he particularly wanted to hear, for it included the Fourth Symphony of Sibelius, the most monolithic of them all. He shut himself up in the dining-room of the house, a room with heavy brocade curtains across the big window that looked due south. He had his journal out before him, into which he poured his soul: all his fears, agonies, all the things he felt he could share with no one: all written in pell-mell as if he had no time to spare-- nor had he, poor lad!-- mixed up with musical themes jotted down, which he was trying out for some work that he wanted to compose-- there was the title, 'Campo die Morti'.

"As he listened, everything seemed to become unnaturally clear to him; there was the inevitability of fate in the great marching strides of the basses in the first movement, very low, menacing steps coming nearer and nearer, which nothing could stop. In all this stony waste of sound, no tenderness, no sweetness, until at the moment of sacrifice the flutes sounded clear like human voices, wringing a certain sweetness out of the very stone, the heart of stone. Then there came the shrill insistent lament of violins, that pathetic motif of protest against the menacing rhythm of those monolithic steps. As he listened and wrote, his nerves on edge, a sixth sense rather than any reason told him that the moment had come, that the long striding steps of the basses in the music led in the world of space out through the window, that beyond the curtains there was that waiting for him to which all his brief life had been a pilgrimage. In short, if he tore open the curtains there would be the stone waiting for him.

"He could bear the suspense no longer, but flung back the curtains, threw open the window--at least, that's the way it seems he must have gone-- rushed down the drive to the gate, the way the little girl had gone before him, and along the path to where the stone awaited him. It would seem that that stone had a hunger for what was young and innocent.

"It was not until the early hours of the morning that they found him, lying like a sacrificial offering at the foot of the socket that he had ventured to uncover. His right shoulder was crushed and the whole right side of his face was bruised and grazed as if in some embrace that had been too strong for him. They found him in the grey light of a morning moon: an old moon, a rind of a moon upon its back in the west, which turned the whole landscape into death's kingdom and lit his face with a strange glimmer there where it lay at the stone's foot."

The Dean's story had come to an end. His eyes shone with an unusual intensity, as if he were more concerned by it than he cared to admit. Just before the end the electric light had come on again, with something of a shock; so that the end of the story had been told in the hard glitter of unaccustomed light in their eyes, while the candles wavered their rather ghostly light on the mantelpiece. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the young English don recited half aloud, half to himself:

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
---Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

Shortly afterwards, with a few brief words and Christmas greetings, they dispersed severally to their beds.







Edited 11 time(s). Last edit at 26 Mar 06 | 05:09PM by Gavin Callaghan.

weird artists for the week of 4/2/06

-Martin, Jonathan ("Mad"). (English) Artist. (b.1782-d.1838)
Not to be confused with his younger brother John Martin, the English Romantic painter (q.v.). According to Simon Houfe in his Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators, this elder Martin was "unbalanced and was responsible for sitting York Minster on fire in 1829, for which offence he was confined in St. Luke's Hospital, London, as insane. He was responsible for producing numerous strange caricature drawings." (HOUFE 224)


-Reed, Ethel. (American) Decadent artist, illustrator. (b.1876-d.unknown)
Reed was born in Newburyport, and came to Boston with her family in 1890. She spent part of 1893 in New York, but preferred to work in Boston where she went to Cowles Art School for two years, being taught by aesthete and architect Bertram Goodhue, the close friend of Ralph Adams Cram and co-editor with him of the "Knight Errant" magazine. Her art career began in February 1894, when the Boston Herald published a self-portrait of Reed in poster size, thus leading to a career of making posters. From 1896 to 1897 Reed concentrated on doing illustrations for books, as well as writing and drawing her own literary works, which she described as being more "ambitious" and "dignified" than her posters. Critics at the time noted both the Japanese and French influences on her art.

A December 1895 interview with Reed in The Bookman gives a hint of Reed's keen sense of humor. Upon the interviewer seeing some burned out cigars in her studio, Reed slyly described them as "artistic properties". (277) Leaving her studio at the end of the article, The Bookman's interviewer comments that while Reed had not "in all probability 'found' herself", "the beautiful mystery and reserve of youth still hangs about her like the quivering light of dawn with its eloquent promise". Describing her mixed ancestry: Irish, French, English, and New England-American, nationalities "favourable to the fostering of genius", the writer predicted that Reed was destined to "achieve something that is not merely ephemeral, but worth sending down to posterity." (281) This "strong individuality" which the interviewer detected, "not yet fully ripened or matured", was destined, however, for a tragic end.

The one sour note of the interview, perhaps indicative of this eventuality, is supplied when the interviewer in The Bookman article, --in all likelihood a friend of Reed's, and therefore "in the know" about her interests and habits--, spies a copy of Max Nordau's "Degeneracy" (q.v.) in Reed's studio, next to copies of Keats and Omar Khayyam "which bore evidences of frequent reading", --as well as a sagging shelf piled high with "what looked like French novels." Acknowledging the presence of Nordau's book, Reed laughed, "but with such laughter in her voice as showed obviously enough that the trail of the cynical serpent had left no smirch on her healthy young mind."

A few months later, Reed was writing to architect/aesthete Ralph Adams Cram from Paris, which she was visiting with her mother, saying, "Only a line or two tonight--to say...that I love ya lots and lots dear...I've been drinking Absinthe..." (Shand-Tucci 347) Elsewhere to Cram, she refers to Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, writing "Fancy my forgetting my Bible--my Omar!!", --referring to the decadent/aesthetic Rubaiyat cult of the period. Her letters give evidence of numerous love affairs with various men, and perhaps one of her romantic entanglements led to her final disappearance.

Reed took over as art editor at The Yellow Book for a short stint in 1897, after Aubrey Beardsley was fired due to the Wilde scandal, and after Patten Wilson, who replaced Beardsley in 1895, also left. After Beardsley's dismissal, the stodginess and propriety of The Yellow Book, "always", according to Holbrook Jackson, "inclined to compromise in matters of editorial policy", "became more pronounced" (48), Norman Denny likewise describing what he called a "lessening of exuberance" in the latter days of its publication (3). Reed vanished on a visit to Ireland. According to Douglass Shand-Tucci in his biography of Ralph Adams Cram, "Boston Bohemia", "The mystery of Ethel Reed remains unsolved. When she died and where are not known". (348) Perhaps she met up with the artist Walter Sickert and died at the hands of "Jack the Ripper"? The closest thing to a biography of Reed would appear to be Jessica Todd Smith's senior thesis "Ethel Reed: The Girl in the Poster", Harvard (1991).

Weird Authors for the week of Sun. 4/9/6

-Ritter, Johann Wilhelm. (German) Romantic philosopher and scientist. (b.1777-d.1810)

Described as "a highly gifted scientist, who died after "a life of poverty, neglect, suffering, and hopeless disorder." (Prawer 224) In Jena in 1802, Ritter discovered the ultra-violet band of the spectrum, and later conducted experiments with electricity. (Chambers 1087) Wrote bizarre philosophical fragments, published under the title Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers (1810). Ritter, a friend of Novalis, took Novalis's stricture that "the World must be made Romantic" (Stoljar 6) to the hilt, insisting on interpreting his scientific results "in the most fantastic, arbitrary, a priori way", (Prawer 224) often in line with alchemical and mystical thought. Some of Ritter's aphorisms include: "Each stone comes into existence anew each moment, continuing to generate itself through all eternity"; "The light appearing in processes of combustion is, as it were, a hole through into another world"; "Light is the external contemplation of gravitation, love the internal" (Prawer 225-226), and, from a letter to Franz von Baader: "Everyone bears within himself his own somnambulist of which he is the magnetizer". (Blackhall 145) Died at age 33, after a time of great controversy with other scientists, his illness perhaps exacerbated by the use of his own body parts in electrical experiments

-Reece, Byron Herbert. (American) Poet, farmer, lecturer, teacher. (b.1917-d.1958)

Rural Georgia writer, known for his melancholy poems. Best known for "Song of the Bones". Killed himself on Young College Campus in 1958. Reece's life presents many similarities with that of Clark Ashton Smith, --both men responsible for taking care of ailing parents and living mainly by physical, manual labor, although Reece's works are not genre-influenced or macabre.

Reece's biography on the Byron Herbert Reece Digital Library(http://www.yhc.edu/external/dwlib/WebReece/Biography.html) reads:

"Byron Herbert Reece's health began to fail and with it went much of his desire to write. The farm that was so central to him when he was younger became a burden, and he became ill with the tuberculosis that plagued his parents. He entered a sanitorium in 1954 to control the TB, creating additional financial and emotional hardships. He relied on Guggenheim Fellowships and other grants to writers to cover his expenses rather than farming. He turned to teaching as well, spending terms at Emory, UCLA and finally returning to Young Harris College, too ill to continue to support himself by farming.
On June 3, 1958, with his final papers graded and neatly stacked and Mozart's Piano Sonata in D playing on the phonograph, Reece shot himself in the diseased lung. He was not yet 41 years old."

An appreciation society for Reece exists at: www.byronherbertreecesociety.org

-Robbins, Sallie E. (American)

A young girl with whom Maria Clemm, Edgar Allan Poe's aunt, stayed briefly in 1861 during her declining years. According to Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman, Robbins intended to write a biography of Poe, using Mrs. Clemm as a source iof information while Clemm was provided room and board in return, but unfortunately Robbins went insane and was committed. According to Clemm's letters, Robbins "had to be carried away to an asylum, "with little hope of a permanent recovery'", much to Mrs. Clemm's chagrin. (Silverman 445)





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 9 Apr 06 | 07:32PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Weird Author for 4/16/06

-Amory, Thomas. (Irish) (b.1691-d.1788) Pre-Romantic novelist and eccentric.
Author of The Life of John Buncle, Esq., (1756) (rep. by Garland Pub., NY, 1975), a long, surreal work with weird, heterogenous digressions in the manner of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, and the later German Romantic novelists. In this book, the ficticious Buncle advocates a Utopia based upon polygamy, and digresses for pages about the joys of tea, bread, and butter. According to Birnbaum, Amory writes about English country hills "as if they had the altitude and grandeur of mountains" (p. 15), his writing showing evidence of "mental unbalance" and "incoherence".

"The author, who was probably more or less insane, is described as having a very peculiar aspect, with the manner of a gentleman, scarcely ever stirring abroad except at dusk." (Cousin, p. 10) This description of Amory was later disputed by one of Amory's heirs, who wrote to a newspaper with a more flattering description of his relative, --but, alas, supplied no portrait, written or otherwise. Mentioned in Some Literary Eccentrics, by John Fyvie, London, 1906.

Weird Author for the week of 4/25/06

Carnevali, Emanuel. (Italian-American) (b. 1897- d. 1942) Writer.

A friend of William Carlos Williams and a stylistic precursor of Henry Miller, Carnevali came to America in the early teens of the 20th century in a blaze of hope, only to have all his dreams extinguished. His first book, entitled A Hurried Man, published by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, gives an adequate representation of his prematurely-curtailed life. His writing is surreal, egocentric, full of the love of life. In his autobiography, William Carlos Williams described Carnevali as one of the two great "one-book men about New York", someone with "the highest potential which you saw there with a catch in your throat, knowing it was almost certainly doomed to destruction." (266) Williams described A Hurried Man, a book "which no one remembers", as "a book that is all of a man, a young man, superbly alive. Doomed. When I think of what gets published and what gets read and praised and rewarded regularly with prizes, when such a book as that get shoved under the heap of corpses, I swear never to be successful, I am disgusted, the old lusts revive." (267)

In 1921 Carnevali came down with a terminal case of encephilitis, which confined him to the hospital for the remainder of his life, first in Chicago then in Italy, --his body shaking, his brain in a fever, unable to walk upright, his spine bent, as William Carlos Williams said, "almost double." His letters and other fragments were posthumously published in a second volume, The Autobiography of Emmanuel Carnevali, edited by Kay Boyle in 1967. For a long time, and at the time of Boyle's editing of his letters, Carnevali's fate remained unknown, but it has now been revealed in a recent of biography of Kay Boyle by Sandra Whipple Spanier that Carnevali died choking on a piece of bread in the sanitarium. A posthumous collection of his letters, poems, and stories was pub. in Italian by La Casa Usher: Voglio Disturbare l'America: lettere a Benedetto Croce e Giovanni Papini ed altro, Firenze, 1981.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 25 Apr 06 | 05:23PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Weird Writer for the week of 5/1/6

-Hamann, Johann Georg. (German) (b.1730-d.1788) Bizarre, proto-surrealist philosopher.

Described by Isaiah Berlin as the first true critic of rationalist/Enlightenment thought, Hamann embodied his Christian views in long, surreal, digressive works, whose various methods: puns, satire, irrationality, etc., all prefigure, according to Berlin, ALL OF the later means and methods used by anti-rationalist and conservative/romantic writers and movements which followed, including Blake, Kant, Novalis and the other Romantics, Dada, Surrealism, etc. Berlin writes in "The Magus of the North",

"[Hamman's] style is appalling: twisted, dark, allusive, filled with digressions, untraceable references, private jokes, puns within puns and invented words, cryptograms, secret names for persons in the past or present, for ideas, for the inexpressible contents of visions of the truth; where the spirit cannot be conveyed by the verbal flesh he attempts at once to imittate and emulate the cabbalistic utterances, justly forgotten, of mystagogues of the past, in phrases where it is impossible to tell where imitation ceases and parody begins."

Like Blake, although without Blake's revistory instincts, Hamann regarded the Bible as Divine Truth, Herder describing Hamann's "aesthetics as Mosaic" [ie like that of Moses]. Hamann believed that church and state should be one, and that language is an instrument of the divine. His works, --most of which, unfortunately, seem to never have never been translated into English, --save for short works and fragments in various studies and anthologies--, (although I notice that both Dante and Homer have just been re-translated into English for the billionth time), include Flying Letter to Nobody, the Notorious (1786), The Last Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rose-Cross concerning the Divine and Human Origin of Language (1772), Fragments of an Apocryphal Sybil on Apocalyptic mysteries (1779), New Apology and Golgotha and Scheblimini (1784). A biography of Hamann by James C. O'Flaherty has been published by Twayne. According to O'Flaherty,

"Hamann was always concerned with the format, the physical makeup, of his publications, and as a result gave detailed, often eccentric, instructions to his printers. Of primary importance to him was the title page. 'For me,'he wrote to Jacobi, 'the title is not simply a sign to hang out, but the nucleus in nuce, the mustard seed of the whole growth'. On another occasion, he speaks of the title as 'a microscopic seed, an orphic egg'. This does not mean, however, that the title is so conceived and expressed that the content of the pages which follow can be readily inferred from it. For the most part, Hamann's titles, in fact, pose a riddle and thus from the very beginning he challenges the reader."

Hamann is mentioned by Kierkegaard, Schelling, and Neitzche as an influence, an "enormous genius", and as an unknowing precusor who pre-figured their own works.




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 1 May 06 | 05:23PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Weird Artist for the week of 5/9/6

-Von Holst, Theodore. (English) Pre-romantic, Early-Romantic artist.

Von Holst is described in Gilchrist's biography of William Blake as a sort of "the Edgar Poe of painting", although he adds that Holst, "it is to be feared, has hardly transmitted such complete record of his naturally great gifts as can secure them from oblivion." (p. 399) Gilchrist's account goes on, "Among Holst's pictures, the best are nearly always partaking of the fantastic or supernatural, which, however dubious a ground to take in art, was the true bent of his genius." (p. 400)

Holst was a friend of murderer/artist Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and Sturm und Drang artist Henry Fuseli. Reproductions of Holst's works in biographies of Wainewright and Fuseli, respectively, show a great talent at pornographic work, Holst's drawing style virtually indistinguishable from those of his two friends. Portraits of Holst, too, show a man who looks almost exactly like Wainewright.

Weird Author for the week of 5/5/6

-Warton, Thomas. Pre-Romantic poet and scholar. (b.1728-d.1790) English.

Author of Pleasures of Melancholy (1747), a poem written at the age of nineteen, and deriving from Akenside's "The Pleasures of Imagination." (Beers 142) From The Pleasures of Melancholy:

"O lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms
Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades,
To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers,
Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse,
Her favorite midnight haunts...
Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles
Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve..." (Beers 157)

Elsewhere in the poem, Warton depicts the discovery of the babe "Contemplation" in the woods by a Druid, an example of how Romanticism and Antiquarianism, ---the latter of which was actually a return to Pagan folklore and spiritual ideas---, were interrelated as part of a revival of nativist-vulgate thought in opposition to previous and suffocating Latin influences, with their concomittant and ornmental Classicism. (See Antiquities)

Warton also wrote an important study of Spencer (1754) and was an editor of the early poems of Milton, his Pre-Romantic opinions leading to literary sparring with arch-conservative Dr. Johnson. (Oxford Companion to English Lit 872) His essential History of English Poetry (1781) is a mine of "often curious and recondite" (Cousin) information on old, pre- and early Elizabethan poetry. (See Graveyard School and Pre-Romantics.) "The Pleasures of Imagination" was parodied in Pearch's 1768 Collection by "Ode to Horror", which is written in "the allegoric, descriptive, alliterative, epithetical, hyperbolical, and diabolical style of our modern ode-wrights", and which mentions "...Gothic solitude,/Mid prospects
sublimely rude,/ Beneath a rough rock's gloomy chasm". (Beers 161)

Thomas Warton was the younger brother of English Pre-Romantic critic Joseph Warton. (qv)




Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 15 May 06 | 04:59PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Dictionary of the Damned (c)2006 G. Callaghan

-Bigg, John Stanyan. (English) Spasmodic Poet. (b. 1828-d.1865)

An extreme exponent of the so-called Spasmodic school (q.v.) of the mid-19th century, Bigg's poems are filled with brilliant, weird, violent, energetic, and morbid images. According to Edwin Markham, writing in his 1926 all-inclusive Anthology of the World's Best Poems, in Bigg we come to "a poet of strange chaotic power, an English poet...utterly forgotten by the world, and even by the anthologists." According to Spasmodic critic George Gilfillan, Biggs' "poetry has not yet gathered into firm sun-like shape, but rather resembles what Dr. Whewell in his Plurality of Worlds supposes many of the stars to be-- fiery matter unconsolidated, and having hitherto cast off no worlds. Yet the light and the fire are genuine…." Like most Spasmodic poets, including Poe, Alexander Smith, and certain poems of Mrs. Browning and Tennyson's "Maud", Bigg's works exhibit several traits typical of the Spasmodic school, including a tendency toward fragmentation; epic, grandiose language; Byronic heroes; and apocalyptic imagery.

Biggs made his living as a journalist, living in Ulverston in Wordworth's Lake Country. Bigg's long poem Night and the Soul, described by Gilfillan as "a heap of fine and beautiful things, with no dramatic skill in dialogue", was first published in fragments in the magazine The Critic. Though I myself have not yet read Night and the Soul in its entirety, critic Gilfillan gives some wonderful extracts of the poem in his literary portrait of Biggs in his Gallery of Literary Portraits, ---including all of the same extracts which Markham likewise includes, in shortened form, in his later anthology. According to Gilfillan, Biggs' poem deals with a Manfred-like hero named Alexis, who, unlike Byron's character, eventually finds the "saving" grace of Christian consolation: "Could reason scale the battlements of heaven,/Religion were a vain and futile thing,/And Faith a toy for childhood or the mad." "The nature of his [Biggs'] theme ['Night']", Gilfillan writes, "leads him to select many [aspects] from the scenery of that season-- its stars, its wailing winds, the many mysterious sights and sounds which haunt its solitudes".

Bigg's passage from Night and the Soul regarding the end of the universe is perhaps one of the most striking passages of poetry ever written, treading abysses which had earlier been glimpsed by Blake, and which would only, much, much later, be treaded again, in a more indirect way, by Symbolistes like Mallarme in his A Coup de Des:

"Were all nature void, one human thought,
Self-utter'd and evolved in act, left like
A white bone on the brink of the abyss,
As the sole relic of what once had been:
Thou, who perceives at a glance the all
In one, who scannest all relationships,
In whom all issues meet concentrative---
Couldst from this puny fragment of thy works
Recall, and re-arrange, and re-construct
The mighty mammoth-skeleton of things,
And fold it once more in its spotted skin,
And bid the Bright Beast live."

Some of the poem's more cosmic passages clearly reflect a reading of Edward Young and Beddoes, and anticipate the later work of California's Clark Ashton Smith:

"The night is lovely, and I love her with
A passionate devotion, for she stirs
Feelings too deep for utterance within me.
She thrills me with an influence and a power,
A sadden'd kind of joy I cannot name,
So that I meet her brightest smile with tears.
She seemeth like a prophetess, too wise,
Knowing, ah! All too much for happiness;
As though she had tried all things, and had found
All vain and wanting, and was thenceforth steep'd
Up to the very dark, tear-lidded eyes
In a mysterious gloom, a holy calm!
Doth she not look now just as if she knew
All that had been, and all that is to come?
With one of her all-prescient glances turn'd
Towards those kindred depths which slept for aye--
The sable robe which God threw round himself,
And where, pavilion'd in glooms, he dwelt
In brooding night for ages, perfecting
The glorious dream of past eternities,
The fabric of creation, running adown
The long time-avenues, and gazing out
Into those blanks which slept before time was;
And with another searching glance, turn'd up
Towards unknown futurities--the book
Of unborn wonders--till she hath perused
The chapter of its doom; and with an eye
Made vague by the dim vastness of its vision,
Watching unmoved the fall of burning worlds,
Rolling along the steeps sides of the Infinite,
All ripe, like apples dropping from their stems;
Till the wide fields of space, like orchards stripp'd,
Have yielded up their treasures to the garner,
And the last star hath fallen from the crown
Of the high heavens into utter night,
Like a bright moment swallow'd up and lost
In hours of after-anguish; and all things
Are as they were in the beginning, ere
The mighty pageant trail'd its golden skirts
Along the glittering pathway of its God.
Save that the spacious halls of heaven are fill'd
With countless multitudes of finite souls,
With germ-like infinite capacities,
As if to prove all had not been a dream.
'Tis this that Night seems always thinking of;
Linking the void past to future void,
And typifying present times in stars,
To show that all is not quite issueless,
But that the blanks have yielded starlike ones
To cluster round the sapphire throne of God
In bliss for ever and for evermore!
O, yes! I love the Night, who ever standeth
With her gemm'd finger on her rich ripe lip,
As if in attitude of deep attention,
Catching the mighty echoes of the words
Which God had utter'd ere the earth was form'd,
Or ere yon Infinite blush'd like a bride
With all her jewels: and I love the flowers,
And their soft slumber as they lie around
In the sweet starlight, bathed in love-like dew,
And looking like young sisters, orphans too,
Left to our watchful care and guardianship,
To keep them from the rough-voiced, burly winds,
And see that nought invades their soul-like sleep.
Thou canst not tell me what I do not love,
In all this dark-robed family of peace:
The temporary hush of the low winds,
And their uprising wail; ---the shadows there
Cast from the long dark shrubberies, that move
And rest again on the greensward, and nod
Their hearse like plumage to the passing winds; ---
The deep, unclouded light, half glow, half gloom,
Dark, and yet lustrous, gleaming with a fire
Whose source seems unfathomable; ….."

Like Bret Harte, who wrote some poems on the topic of fossils, and like many later weird authors such as Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, Bigg drew great inspiration from the latest discoveries in paleontology, contrasting the "cold lone moors" of Scotland with the "cycles of the past", when:

"Instead of valleys, sedgy swamps, and fens,
With grim, unwieldy reptiles trailing through,
And in the place of singing, bellowings
And the wild roar of monsters on the hills."

and speaking of the volcanoes lifting up their voices like "Olden Isaiahs in the wilderness---", telling "unto the incredulous wastes wild tales/Of the great after time---the age of flowers,/Of songs and blossoms, MAN, and grassy graves."

Although Biggs was attracted, his critic Gilfillan cautions us, to both "the beautiful and the sublime", he was, unfortunately, according to Gilfillan, attracted to "a good deal of the hideous", too, ---a pose, Gilfillan supposed, which he had apparently imitated from Spasmodic school-founder Philip Bailey's Festus, and in connection to which Gilfillan quotes the following passage from Stanza IV of Biggs' poem:

"Last night I dreamed the universe was mad,
And that the sun its Cyclopean eye
Rolled glaring like a maniac's in the heavens;
And moons and comets, linked together, screamed
Like bands of witches at their carnivals,
And streamed like wandering hell along the sky;
And that the awful stars, through the red light,
Glinted at one another wickedly,
Throbbing and chilling with intensest hate,
While through the whole a nameless horror ran;
And worlds dropped from their place in the shuddering,
Like leaves in autumn, when a mighty wind
Makes the trees shiver through their thickest robes.
Great spheres cracked in the midst, and belched out flame,
And sputtering fires went crackling over heaven;
And space yawned blazing stars; and Time shrieked out,
That hungry fire was eating everything!
And scorched fiends, down in the nether hell,
Cried out, 'The universe is mad--is mad!'
And the great thing in its convulsions flung
System on system, till the caldron boiled
(Space was the caldron, and all hell the fire)
And every giant limb of the universe
Dilated and collapsed, till it grew wan
Beating like panting fire--and I awoke.

--Twas not all dream; such is the world to me."

In response to this, George Gilfillan writes simply, "This will never do."
Gilfillan also quotes from some gorgeous lyrics to be found within the larger precincts of Night and the Soul, including the lovely "poem on Childhood":

"Always lightest was her laughter,
There was dream-land in its tone;
Though she mingled with the children,
Yet she always seem'd alone.
And her prattle--'twas but child's talk--
Yet it always sparkled o'er
With a strange and shadowy wisdom,
With a bird-like fairy lore,
Which you could not help but fancy
You had somewhere heard before,
In some old-world happy version
By a bright Elysian shore.

All the little children loved her---
None so joyous in their play;
And yet ever there was something
Which seem'd---ah! So far away
From the joyance and the laughter,
And the streamlet's crisping foam---
'Twas as if some little song-bird
Had dropp'd down from yon blue dome,
Warbling with them where they roam,
And yet hallowing remembrance
With low gushes about home!

Oh, the glory of those child-eyes!
Oh, the music of her feet!
Oh, those peals of spirit-laughter
Coming up the village street!
Shall we never hear her knocking
At the little ivied door?
Will she never run to kiss us,
Bounding o'er the oaken floor?
Has that music gone for ever?
Are those tender lispings o'er?
Oh, the terror! Oh, the anguish,
Of that one word-- evermore!

Ever was she but a stranger
Among the sublunary things:
All her life was but the folding
Of her gorgeous spirit-wings---
Nothing more than a forgetting---
Still she gave more than she took
From the sunlight or the starlight,
From the meadow or the brook:---
There was music in her silence,
There was wisdom in her look;
There was raying out of beauty
As from some transcendent book;
She was wonderful as grottoes
With strange gods in every nook!

And at night, amid the silence,
With her little prayer-clasp'd hands,
She look'd holy as the Christ-church
Rising white in pagan lands:---
Seem'd she but the faltering prelude
To a great tale of God's throne---
As a flower dropp'd out of heaven
Telling whither it has grown.
But she left us--- she, our angel---
Without murmur, without moan;
And we woke and found it starlight---
Found that we were all alone,
And as desolate as birds' nests,
When the fledglings have all flown!

But our house has been made sacred---
Sacred every spot she trod;
For she came a starry preacher,
Dedicating all to God.
Render thanks unto the Giver,
Though his gift be out of sight,
For a jubilant to-morrow
Shall come after this to-night!
She hath left a spirit-glory
Blending with the grosser light,
Oh, the earth to us is holy!
Oh, the other world is bright!"

Bigg was apparently rabidly anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, a bigotted fancy which he gave vent to in some of his works, such as the poem "An Irish Picture" from his later Shifting Scenes and Other Poems (1862):

A smoking swamp before a cottage door;
A drowned dog bobbing to a soleless shoe;
A broken wash-tub, with its ragged staves
Swimming and ducking to a battered hat,
Whenever the wind stirs the reedy slime;
A tumbled peat-stack, dripping in the rain;
A long, lank pig, with dissipated eyes,
Leading a vagrant life among the moors;
A rotting paling, and a plot of ground,
With fifteen cabbage-stalks among lush weeds;
A moss-grown pathway, and a worn-out gate,
Its broken bars down-dangling from the nails;
A windy cottage, with a leaky thatch,
And two dim windows set like eyes asquint;
A bulging doorway, with a drunken lean;
Two half-nude children dabbling in the mire,
And scrambling eagerly for bottle-necks;
A man akimbo at the open door,
His battered hat slouched o'er his sottish eyes,

Smoking contented in the falling rain......

Also the author of The Sea-King; A Metrical romance, in Six Cantos (1848).





Edited 14 time(s). Last edit at 11 Jul 06 | 07:22PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11 Jul 06 | 07:09PM by Gavin Callaghan.