History in a vintage ad

I don’t remember posting vintage advertisements on this blog before. I usually hop over to noted author Bill Crider’s blog Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine for a regular dose of vintage ads that tell their own story.

There are always exceptions to the rule, though, and I am making an exception with the above advertisement I came across in Weird Tales: Isle of the Dead, Vol.28 No.31, 1936. 

In this ad titled Let Me Tell You (finger-wagging) astrologer Pundit Tabore guarantees a solution to most of life’s problems that include relief from your enemies. I couldn’t think of putting it any other way.

The ad intrigued me for two reasons: one, it’s a nondescript ad placed by an Indian in an American pulp magazine, and two, the address at the bottom of the ad, Upper Forjett Street. I suppose astral readings and fantasy and horror have something in common.

Now Forjett Street, located in the upmarket neighbourhood of south Bombay (not very far from where I work), and Forjett Hill on which the road sits, is named after Charles Forjett who was commissioner of police in British India from 1856 to 1864. According to a report in The Times of India, Forjett was a genial and excellent officer who wore native clothes, spoke the local languages fluently, and cracked down on criminal rings. He was also credited with creating the first formal police structure for Bombay (now Mumbai).

There is nothing amiss about the advertisement itself for Pundit Tabore’s “descendants” are thriving in India even today, conning the gullible and the illiterate.

Short Story: Charlotte Bronte

Napoleon and the Spectre

Charlotte Brontë, the celebrated English novelist and poet, has written a ghost story — yes, you read that correctly — and a very witty one too. 

In Napoleon and the Spectre, the Emperor of France is about to fall asleep when he hears a rustling sound near his bed. Unnerved, Napoleon drinks a glass of lemonade to quench his thirst and, I suspect, to quell his fear. Soon he hears a "deep groan" coming from the closet in his apartment (I thought he lived in a palace). 

"Who's there?" cried the Emperor, seizing his pistols. "Speak, or I'll blow your brains out." (Does that sound like Charlotte Bronte?)

This threat produced no other effect than a short, sharp laugh, and a dead silence followed.

Napoleon jumps off the couch and, with sword in hand, steps toward the closet only to discover that the rustling sound was made by his cloak which had fallen from the peg. Then, just as he is about to drop off to sleep, he perceives shadows which he attributes to lit candles.

"Pooh!" exclaimed Napoleon, "it was but an ocular delusion."

"Was it?" whispered a hollow voice, in deep mysterious tones, close to his ear.

The emperor loses his sleep and his senses when he suddenly comes face to face with the apparition that has a powerful hold on him. Napoleon follows the spectre, hideous in appearance, through the streets of Paris and to a lofty house on the banks of the Seine.

He enters the house and finds himself standing before Marie Louise, the Empress of France. Napoleon is flummoxed.

"What! Are you in this infernal place, too?" said he. "What has brought you here?"

"Will your Majesty permit me to ask the same question of yourself?" said the Empress, smiling.

Apparently, the emperor, wearing his night dress, has sleepwalked right into his wife's drawing room where her guests are having a ball. Napoleon suffers a fit of catalepsy and falls to the ground.

My first thought upon reading this short story was: did Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre, really write this haunting tale? Looks like she did. Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks tells us that Napoleon and the Spectre is from the manuscript of The Green Dwarf dated July 10, 1833-September 2, 1833. It was republished in The Twelve Adventurers and Other Stories in 1925.

The story is brilliantly well written, both prose and substance evoking instant laughter as you read through it and imagine the look on Napoleon's face, the poor devil. Though, frankly, I can't imagine what made the eldest of the Bronte sisters poke fun at the French emperor. She must have had good reason.

But, did Charlotte Bronte really write this story? Here's the link. What do you think?


Dr. Hale's rules for writing 

By William Henry Hills Robert Luce, Editor, The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892, a monthly magazine to interest and help all literary workers.

It is hard to believe that Dr. Edward Everett Hale (Edward Everett Hale [1822–1909], American author, historian and Unitarian clergyman) will be seventy years old April 3, but it will not do to contradict the birth record and the arithmetic, in spite of all his unfailing energy and youthful activity in many different undertakings. Dr. Hale is one of the men who will be always young, and it may be in consequence of this that he has written so many things that will never lose their freshness. One of the best of them is the chapter in "How to Do It" on "How to Write," which is full of crisp and practical suggestions. Dr. Hale's rules for writing are evidently those which have always governed his own literary work; and while others may not be able to follow them with equal success, they are worth remembering by every writer. The rules are:

"First, Know what you want to say; second, Say it; third, Use your own language; fourth, Leave out all the fine passages; fifth, A short word is better than a long one; sixth, The fewer words, other things being equal, the better; finally, Cut it to pieces. Any writer who will make these rules his guide in daily work will find in them an important help to literary success."

Courtesy: Project Gutenberg EBook

BOOK REVIEW

The Haunted Hour: An Anthology
by Margaret Widdemer (1920)

This book review is offered as part of Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the eclectic mix of reviews by other bloggers. It will be worth your while.

While I read poetry whenever I am in the mood for it, I have never read ghostly poetry, at least not in an anthology of poems and verses by more than sixty poets.

The Haunted Hour: An Anthology edited by Margaret Widdemer, the American poet and novelist (1884–1978), is a compilation of some very imaginative ghost-poems that are divided into eleven categories — The Nicht Atween the Sancts an' Souls, All the Little Sighing Souls, Shadowy Heroes, Rank on Rank of Ghostly Soldiers, Sea Ghosts, Cheerful Spirits, Haunted Places, You Know the Old, While I Know the New, My Love That Was So True, Shapes of Doom, and Legends and Ballads of the Dead.

Several names in the anthology are familiar to me. These include Rudyard Kipling, H.W. Longfellow, Walter by De La Mare, Christina Rossetti, Sir Edwin Arnold, Katharine Tynan, William Butler Yeats, and Sir Walter Scott.

Bret Harte, whom I know to be a writer and not a poet (my ignorance), chips in with A Newport Romance, a rather longish but quite an enjoyable poem.

Then there are six poems by Theodosia Garrison, American poet and author, whose poem The Neighbours I liked very much. It goes... 

At first cock-crow
The ghosts must go
Back to their quiet graves below.

I have read Garrison's poetry before but not her prose. More than anything else, I remember Garrison for her very quotable quote — "The hardest habit of all to break is the terrible habit of happiness." Never break that habit.

A few more poets ring a distant bell and I might have read their poems in passing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading their long and short verses, at least the ones I could comprehend. It’s not always easy to understand poetry.

Coming back to Margaret Widdemer, there isn't a lot about her on the internet. According to Wikipedia, in 1919, she won the Columbia University Prize for Poetry (now the Pulitzer Prize) for her collection The Old Road to Paradise (1918), a prize she shared with Carl Sandburg, fellow writer, editor and poet, for his collection of poems titled Corn Huskers.

Widdemer established her credentials as a poet with her first poem The Factories (1917) that looked at the sensitive issue of child labour. In her memoir Golden Years I Had (1964), she recounts her friendships with Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her essay Message and Middlebrow, published in Review of Literature in 1933, apparently popularised the term "middlebrow" which means "Someone who is neither a highbrow nor a lowbrow."

Margaret Widdemer, who lived until 94, was a prolific writer as is evident from her forty novels that included The Rose-Garden Husband and Why Not?, nine poetry collections, nine children's fiction, two books on writing titled Do You Want to Write? and Basic Principles of Fiction Writing, and three memoirs, namely Golden Friends I Had, Summers at the Colony, and Jessie Rittenhouse: A Centenary Memoir-Anthology.

Her first two novels, The Rose-Garden Husband (1915) and Why Not? (1916), were made into films — the 1917-film A Wife on Trial and the 1918-film A Dream Lady, respectively. 

I am no critic of poetry. I only enjoy reading poems. The purpose of writing about this (forgotten) book is to bring it to the reader's notice. I will, therefore, leave you with Margaret Widdemer’s brief preface to The Haunted Hour: An Anthology. It reads as follows... 

“This does not attempt to be an inclusive anthology. The ghostly poetry of the late war alone would have made a book as large as this; and an inclusive scheme would have ended as a six-volume Encyclopedia of Ghostly Verse. I hope that this may be called for some day. The present book has been held to the conventional limits of the type of small anthology which may be read without weariness (I hope) by the exclusion not only of many long and dreary ghost-poems, but many others which it was very hard to leave out.

"I have not considered as ghost-poems anything but poems which related to the return of spirits to earth. Thus, ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ a poem of spirits in heaven, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ whose heroine may be a fairy or witch, and whose ghosts are presented in dream only, do not belong in this classification; nor do such poems as Mathilde Blind's lovely sonnet, ‘The Dead Are Ever with Us,’ class as ghost-poems; for in these the dead are living in ourselves in a half-metaphorical sense. If a poem would be a ghost-story, in short, I have considered it a ghost-poem, not otherwise. In this connection I wish to thank Mabel Cleland Ludlum for her unwearied and intelligent assistance with the selection and compilation of the book; and Aline Kilmer for help in its revision and arrangement."

Margaret Widdemer

If you want to learn more about Margaret Widdemer, you can read the short essay titled Asbury Park Life: Stimulus for Author by Peter Lucia.

Note: The preface is courtesy Project Gutenberg Ebook

FILM REVIEW

The Circus (1928)

This week Charlie Chaplin's The Circus is my contribution to Tuesday’s Overlooked/Forgotten films and television over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to check out the other interesting reviews over there. 

The ending of The Circus, the silent film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin in 1928, reminded me of the ending of a typical Bollywood film where the hero sacrifices his love for the sake of his best friend.

In this film the Tramp steps aside so that Rex (Harry Crocker), a tight rope walker in the circus where they are both employed, can marry the girl of his dreams, played by Merna Kennedy.

As Rex and his new wife, a circus rider and the stepdaughter of the mustachioed owner and ringmaster (Al Ernest Garcia), depart with the caravan of clowns and animals for a new town, the Tramp replaces his bowler hat and walks away, his little suited frame moving from side to side in that familiar manner we know so well. 

The film is funny right from the start when policemen chase the broke and hungry Tramp because they suspect him for a pickpocket. The Tramp seeks refuge in the circus and finds himself in the ring, smack in the middle of an act that fails to excite the restless spectators. The Tramp, inadvertently so, brings the circus alive with his mad dash in and out of the big tent with the cop hot on his heels. The audience thinks it is all part of the show: they jump out of their seats, throw their hats into the ring and burst into uproarious laughter, demanding more buffoonery from the Tramp who clearly has more pressing matters on his mind, like saving his skin.

It’s not long before the ringmaster, a mean taskmaster, realises that the fortunes of his loss-making circus lie with the Tramp and exploits the situation to his advantage. However, it takes the ringmaster a while to realise that the Tramp is funny without appearing or meaning to be so. He can't be trained as a clown.

There are many tender moments in this film, like the time when the Tramp, reluctant at first, gives away his single boiled egg and sliced bread to the horse-riding girl who is prohibited, by her overbearing stepfather, from eating for the rest of the day. 

 
As the Tramp turns the circus around, unwittingly, he uses it as a clever leverage to demand better treatment of the girl he has fallen in love with. Later, he overhears the girl tell a fortuneteller of her love for the tight rope walker. This breaks his heart and he begins to under-perform till the ringmaster kicks him out of the circus. In the end he unites Rex and the girl and walks away, as he usually does in his inimitable style.

The most memorable scene in the film is when the Tramp, while running away from the ringmaster (I think), accidently enters the lion’s cage and gets locked in. This scene, captured in the presence of a real lion, or so I read, runs for nearly ten minutes and is an absolute stand-out. It’s an edge-of-the-seat comic scene, if there’s ever one, especially in a silent movie. 

The Circus, one of two of my favourite Chaplin films, the other being The Kid (1921), won the Tramp his first Academy Award. I am not surprised it did for The Circus is one of the most hilarious and entertaining films I have seen from Chaplin’s portfolio. Not all Chaplin films succeed in making you laugh, but this one does and all the way through its 71-minute run.

I have always rated Charlie Chaplin a few notches lower than Laurel and Hardy who will always rank first, for me at least, followed by Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers and the rest of a fine class of comedians that include The Three Stooges, Mel Brooks, and George Burns. 

Laurel and Hardy are as jobless, penniless and hungry as the Tramp, but it is the sheer innocence and cheerful disposition of the duo, in spite of the unending troubles they find themselves in, which endears them to my comic senses. Laurel and Hardy is slapstick in its truest form which often seems contrived in Chaplin’s films: their stark portrayal of life’s realities often overshadows the absurd hilarities I expect from comedy films. With Laurel and Hardy you have no such worries — you sit back and soak up the humour. 

Short Stories: William F. Nolan

This weekend I read two sf short stories by William F. Nolan, the 84-year old American writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror stories, who I discovered for the first time while searching the internet for something specific. Both the stories are well written and were featured in the Fantastic Universe Science Fiction magazine. 

William F. Nolan (© Bluewater Productions) 

Of Time and Texas

“A groundless fear, boy,” assured Ohms. "I have seen to it that the Time Door can never be closed. And now, good-bye, gentlemen. Or, to use the proper colloquialism — so long, hombres!”

The first story, Of Time and Texas, is just 595 words, far short of the Gutenberg legal text of over 3,000 words.

In this hilarious story, written by Nolan in November 1956, Prof. C. Cydwick Ohms unveils the C. Cydwick Ohms Time Door with a grand flourish before a group of reporters and photographers. The Time Door — and not a Time Machine which the professor dismisses as “wild fancy” — will transport people from their world of 2057 to the past, Texas of 1957, and solve mankind’s greatest problem — overpopulation. The professor is confident that his Time Door will succeed where colonising the Polar wastes and birth control programmes didn’t. 

The professor chooses Texas in the southwest because it has vast lands to absorb people from the future. The only hitch is that the Time Door is a one-way ride: you can re-enter the past but you cannot return to your present.

Prof. Ohms, draped in "an ancient and bizarre costume," steps into the Time Door and prepares to vanish into the past but nothing happens. He is still inside the contraption, blinking. Just as the professor bemoans his failure, the assembled journalists hear a slow rumbling coming from within the Time Door. As the sounds grow louder and closer, the terrified reporters and photographers run for the stairs, and Prof. Ohms finds himself straddling one of the 3,000 Texas steers charging into his laboratory.

I had a strong feeling that the Time Door would work in the reverse direction. I couldn’t imagine the story ending any other way. It was fun to read, especially the part where one reporter asks Prof. Ohms in earnest, “What if the Texans object?” He says, "They don’t have a choice." 

Small World

He was running, running down the long tunnels, the shadows hunting him, claws clutching at him, nearer...

Nolan wrote Small World (also known as The Underdweller and The Small World of Lewis Stillman) in August 1957. It’s much longer at nearly 3,700 words and, unlike Of Time and Texas, is a grim tale that reads more like horror than sf.

Lewis Stillman is, or rather was, a construction worker and the lone survivor of an alien invasion that has destroyed all human beings above the age of six. He has been living in the storm water tunnels beneath the city of Los Angeles for three years — living in hope that he will one day find another like himself; living in fear of the hideous “creatures” that prowl the ground above. Only hunger forces him out of the drains and even then he never risks going anywhere without his trusted gun, for he has been pursued by the aliens more than once. 

One day, Lewis, whose father wanted him to be a doctor, has a sudden desire to read a particular set of medical books — Erickson's monumental three-volume text on surgery — which he had read in pre-med school. Armed with the small gun and a .30-calibre Savage rifle, two of several arms he took from the LA police arsenal, Lewis sets out for Pickwick’s bookstore in Hollywood where he finds the “richly bound and stamped in gold” volumes. His luck finally runs out as he steps out of the store with the carton of books.

“The entire lower floor was alive with them! Rustling like a mass of great insects, gliding toward him, eyes gleaming in the half-light, they converged upon the stairs. They had been waiting for him.”

Lewis drops the carton and makes a dash for the street, firing, running, firing, running, firing, till he finds himself encircled by the aliens, the tiny claws reaching for him… You might guess who those claws belong to.

William F. Nolan, who co-authored the novel Logan's Run with fellow science fiction writer George Clayton Johnson, has a clear style of writing and his prose flows smoothly across the page. Also, the first thing I noticed about Nolan’s writing is that he doesn’t confound you with big words and keeps his plots and characters simple. I can’t judge his writing on the basis of just two short stories and I am looking forward to reading his various series of novels. 


Note: For earlier reviews of short stories, click Anton Chekhov and Sundance Western Comic-Book

BOOK REVIEW

A Fine Night for Dying by Jack Higgins (1969)

This book review is offered as part of Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the eclectic mix of reviews by other bloggers. It will be worth your while.

A Fine Night for Dying, in spite of the arresting title, is not one of the best novels of British author Harry Patterson who wrote it in 1969 under his most famous pseudonym, Jack Higgins. The story is predictable, the plot is hackneyed, and the secondary characters are uninteresting. But then, it’s a Jack Higgins and if you are a fan of his, like I am, then you overlook the negative aspects and enjoy the novel, as I do.

Not every Jack Higgins novel can be like The Eagle Has Landed or The Last Place God Made or The Savage Day or Storm Warning or A Prayer for the Dying. If you’d like to dig into Higgins, these are some of the novels you ought to read. 

In A Fine Night for Dying, Jack Higgins resurrects Paul Chavasse in his sixth and final avatar as special agent for the Bureau, the little-known branch of British Intelligence that handles all the delicate assignments, read dirty work.

Chavasse, a master of languages (he even knows Urdu), must investigate the cold-blooded murder of Harvey Preston from Jamaica. The body of the former Royal Army Service Corps officer turned black marketer and smuggler is washed up ashore on the English side of the Channel, with seventy pounds of chain wrapped around him. As Chavasse discovers later, Preston was alive when his enemies drowned him. A horrible way to die.

The trail leads Chavasse to a passage-by-night racket where illegal immigrants from all over the world are promised safe passage across the Channel in the dead of night, except they all turn up dead before they can set eyes on the English coast. And eventually to the brain behind the shady business, Leonard Rossiter, a Jesuit priest who lost his faith during his incarceration and subsequent indoctrination by the Chinese during the Korean War. A man with a “tortured, aesthetic face” who couldn’t possibly be the murderer of innocents and yet that’s what he is.

However, Rossiter, himself, is a pawn in the hands of the Chinese who have few friends and allies on the continent and use his second-rate organisation to run the immigration racket and advance their political goals. 

Predictably, Chavasse, the agent with a heart (as all Jack Higgins’ agents are), goes out of his way to help the mostly poor and unsuspecting immigrants, including an Indian girl who falls for Rossiter, and on a couple of occasions lets his guard down, enough to allow his enemies to capture him. In the end Chavasse, with a lot of help from the revenge-seeking Darcy Preston, Harvey’s brother, hunts down Rossiter and kills him.

A Fine Night for Dying is a mediocre thriller because there are too many gaps in the story. For instance, Chavasse’s trail leads him directly to millionaire Enrico Montefiore, a recluse who hides on his island stronghold, at least that’s what the blurb on the back cover tells us. Inside, Montefiore has been driven to drugs by Rossiter who is after his wealth. Montefiore, himself, has very little role in the story, save for begging Rossiter for his lethal dose. If the blurb is meant to sell the book to the reader, it doesn’t.

Jack Higgins’ heroes (there are at least seven of them, Liam Devlin and Sean Dillon being the more popular ones) are a lot like Mack Bolan, the Executioner — they rarely come to harm and when they do, they manage to get out of the most difficult situations. It’s a miracle they live to tell another story. All said and done, Jack Higgins is a pure entertainer — treat him as such.

Note: I gave Jack Higgins’ The Keys of Hell, another Paul Chavasse adventure, a more or less similar verdict. You can read it here.

Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012: A pictorial tribute

© Creative Commons

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about."

[This quote is not from the insightful interview Bradbury gave The Paris Review in 2010. You can read that interview here.]

In 1939, Ray Bradbury published Hollerbochen's Dilemma, one of his first short stories, in the magazine Imagination and launches his own magazine called Futuria Fantasia.

Dark Carnival, his first collection of short stories, was published in 1947.

The Concrete Mixer, a short story, was published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1949.

The Martian Chronicles, 1950, and Fahrenheit 451, 1953. During these four years, Bradbury released The Illustrated Man, a collection of 18 short stories, in 1951, and followed it up with The Golden Apples of the Sun, an anthology of 22 short stories, in 1953.

Bradbury's last published novel was Farewell Summer, 2006, a sequel to Dandelion Wine, 1957.

A look at a few assorted covers and pages of magazines and comic-books that featured Ray Bradbury's short stories.