Short Story: Arthur Machen (1863-1947) 

The Shining Pyramid

“I hate a mystery, and especially a mystery which is probably the veil of horror.”

Arthur Machen was a Welsh author and mystic who wrote short stories and short novels about the supernatural, fantasy, and horror. 

Most of his fiction beginning with the novella The Great God Pan (1890) is considered to be a classic. His reputation as one of the world’s most influential writers of horror has been confirmed by many who followed in his footsteps, including Stephen King, who is believed to have called The Great God Pan “Maybe the best (horror story) in the English language.” I have learned that this story, which I haven't as yet read, was criticised for its “decadent style” and “horrific and sexual content.” However, it didn’t stop Machen from writing more of the “degenerate” stuff.

Machen was quite prolific between 1890—when The Great God Pan first appeared in Whirlwind magazine before its publication as a book four years later—and 1936, the year he wrote at least one short story and a novella. He was then 73.

His short story, The Bowmen (1914), is widely believed to be the source of the ‘Angels of Mons’ myth during WWI. The myth pertains to a group of angels who protected British troops in the Battle of Mons at the start of the Great War. Later, this and other similar stories were published as The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915).

Most of Arthur Manchen’s leading stories and novellas have been compiled into two volumes titled Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Volume I & II have five and nine stories each. I have provided an index towards the end of this post.

I read just one story The Shining Pyramid (1895) in Volume 1. In this story, Dyson, a London-based writer and wannabe detective, accompanies his friend Vaughan to his country home surrounded by “ancient woods” to help investigate the sudden appearance of four mysterious objects and several eyes along the garden wall of the cottage.

The four objects made out of flints exhibit a curious pattern which, according to Dyson, represents the four signs of the Army, the Bowl, the Pyramid, and the Half-moon. Together, they make up an arrowhead and indicate something far sinister than meets the eye. Vaughan is scared. He realises that the signs are not the handiwork of school children passing by his house every day.

Dyson is convinced that the flint arrowhead is pointing toward something. His investigations take him and Vaughan into the deep and ancient woods, to a bowl in the earth, an infernal cauldron stirring and seething with horrors beyond imagination.

The Pyramid of Fire, as Dyson calls it, also solves the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful village girl called Annie Trevor who, a month before, had passed that way on her way to an aunt’s house and never came back.

“I don't regret our inability to rescue the wretched girl. You saw the appearance of those things that gathered thick and writhed in the Bowl; you may be sure that what lay bound in the midst of them was no longer fit for earth.”

Arthur Manchen writes in a style reminiscent of the period he lived in. The prose is smooth and uncomplicated but rich in substance. There is no urgency about the dialogue between Dyson and Vaughan: they might as well be conversing in a coffee house. Yet, neither the prose nor the dialogue diminishes the graveness of the horrific situation as it unfolds. The author’s description of the underworld in the bowl, the Pyramid of Fire, is not too explicit or macabre, but it’s enough to ignite your imagination. A sample:

“Then, it seemed done in an instant, the loathsome mass melted and fell away to the sides of the Bowl, and for a moment Vaughan saw in the middle of the hollow the tossing of human arms. But a spark gleamed beneath, a fire kindled, and as the voice of a woman cried out loud in a shrill scream of utter anguish and terror, a great pyramid of flame spired up like a bursting of a pent fountain, and threw a blaze of light upon the whole mountain. In that instant Vaughan saw the myriads beneath; the things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed, the faces with the almond eyes burning with evil and unspeakable lusts; the ghastly yellow of the mass of naked flesh; and then as if by magic the place was empty, while the fire roared and crackled, and the flames shone abroad.”

Verdict: highly readable and highly recommended.

Index to Tales of Horror and the Supernatural: Volume 1 & 2

Volume 1

1. Introduction by Philip Van Doren Stern

2. Arthur Machen by Robert Hillyer

3. The Great God Pan (1894), novella

4. The White People (1904,) novelette

5. The Inmost Light (1894), novelette

6. The Shining Pyramid (1895), novelette

7. The Great Return (1915), novelette

Volume 2

1. The Novel of the Black Seal (1895), novelette

2. The Novel of the White Powder (1895), short story

3. The Bowmen (1914), short story

4. The Happy Children (1920), short story

5. The Bright Boy (1936), novelette

6. Out of the Earth (1915), short story

7. N (1936), novelette

8. Children of the Pool (1936), short story

9. The Terror aka The Terror: A Mystery (1916), novel

Most of these stories are available online.

BOOK REVIEW

The Trojan Horse by Hammond Innes (1940)

This week Evan Lewis at Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West is doing the Friday’s Forgotten Books honours usually handled by Patti Abbott at Pattinase or Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom.

“Deed-boxes make good coffins.”

A replica of my book.

There are two kinds of WWII stories: those about the actual war between the Allies and Germany and those revolving around it. The Trojan Horse falls in the second category and, while it does so, its outcome—were it to succeed—would have been no less significant than an open conflict on the battlefield.

In his fifth novel, British author Hammond Innes creates a peripheral war that is as frightening as the real thing.

Franz Schmidt is a shabby old Austrian Jew and a brilliant engineer. He discovers a special light alloy and decides to build a prototype of a new diesel engine that will give any air force vast superiority in the air and a sure-fire way to win the war.

When Hitler invades Austria, Schmidt flees to England on a false passport and with the engine design in his head.

In England, Schmidt lives with his dead wife’s family at Swansea, Wales. His brother-in-law Evan Llewellin, an undercover British agent, offers him money and a workshop where he builds his diesel engine. What he does not know is that the Nazis are already hot on his trail. Llewellin is killed and Schmidt is framed for the brutal crime. 

On the run from Scotland Yard, Schmidt approaches Andrew Kilmartin, a famous criminal lawyer of London, and pleads for help. The 42-year old barrister is initially reluctant to believe Schmidt’s story till he reads about Llewellin’s murder in the papers. He decides to defend Schmidt but the old man vanishes without a trace.

This is where the story begins.

Kilmartin is a combination of a legal eagle and a private eye—his sense of justice evenly matched by his thirst for reckless adventure. With nothing more than a mysterious sealed envelope left with him by Schmidt, the attorney starts investigating the engineer's disappearance and his fantastic claim that the Nazis are after his invention.

Over the next 100-odd pages Kilmartin, with the help of his close friend and studio photographer David Shiel, unearths a sinister conspiracy involving a powerful banker and shadow minister, Baron Ferdinand Marburg, who connives with the Nazi-controlled Calboyds Diesel Company to steal Schmidt’s diesel engine from under the nose of the British government. He also meets Schmidt’s beautiful daughter Freya, also an engineer, and falls in love with her. The novel ends in a high-octane drama on the high seas. 

British author Hammond Innes

The Trojan Horse is a page-turner in spite of the author’s obsession with the details. In fact, it is the details that make this 190-page thriller gripping.

For instance, in a 19-page chapter titled Lead on, Sewer Rat, Hammond Innes takes you through London’s filthy rat-infested underground sewer system that Kilmartin uses to escape from the vault of Marburg’s bank where he has been imprisoned by Nazi gangster Max Sedel. Just before that, the attorney has spent agonising hours lying in a foetal position in a deed-box that nearly becomes his coffin.

The author’s description of Andrew Kilmartin’s claustrophobic and nauseating experience, with Nazi agents in hot pursuit, is so vivid as to make the reader relive it. The book owes its unsparing details to the author’s proclivity for six months of travel and research and six months of writing.

The conspiratorial and anti-establishment tone of the novel, with its Nazi sympathisers and collaborators in Britain (and in America), is reminiscent of many fictional and non-fictional books that came out during and after World War II. Hammond Innes, an ex-artillery major and a yachtsman, gives the reader an unusual insight into one such anti-national plot which, in real time, could have had serious implications for Britain's war against Germany. 

“Once I nearly panicked. Only the dial of my wrist-watch saved me. It was a friendly face and gave me courage.” 

Hammond Innes, author of some thirty novels, has a clean and imaginative style of writing. He does not confuse you with too many characters. The main ones have names and faces, the rest are nondescript. The emphasis is on the plot and suspense on every page. It builds up slowly and, like a locomotive, gathers speed and then races towards the climax, one that I did not quite anticipate.

The world through a View-Master

On July 23, 2012, I did a small post on the century-old stereoscopic viewer, the “modern version” of which, Ron Scheer of Buddies in the Saddle reminded me, was the View-Master which came with circular picture discs, each containing over a dozen colourful images of animals, cartoons, and other themes. The pictures were sharp and clear and gave out a 3D effect. You went click, click, click…till you went full circle and returned to the first slide. 

© Andrew Hazelden

I thought of the View-Master again while writing about Beautiful People yesterday. The animals in the documentary reminded me of the picture disc of animals that I used to look at through my View-Master. The colour of most of the View-Masters I saw in childhood, including my own, was red while others were in blue.

The View-Master, which belonged to the family of special-format stereoscopes, was introduced by Sawyer's Photo Services in 1939, a few years after Kodachrome colour film which gave us small high-quality photographic colour images. The View-Master reels, as they were known, were thin cardboard disks containing seven stereoscopic 3D pairs of small colour photographs on film. You can read more about it here.

The View-Master held a strange fascination for me then, as the Samsung Galaxy Note does now. One was a simple and satisfying childhood indulgence, the other is an extravagance I can do without.

FILM REVIEW

Beautiful People (1974)

How many of you remember this beautiful film? It's my choice for Overlooked Films, Audio and Video at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom where you’ll find many other entries.

Some folks call them animals.

I have rarely seen an animal programme on television without humans in it. There is always an intrepid wildlife adventurer or photographer in close pursuit or lurking somewhere. I find this rather annoying. Just “shoot” the animals doing whatever they are doing. Keep the narrator and the music on but, for goat’s sake, keep off the savannah!

That’s why I liked Beautiful People (originally known as Animals Are Beautiful People) made by Jamie Uys, a South African filmmaker. There isn't a soul in sight on the Namib Desert where the animal documentary is shot. Only lots of beautiful animals on a vast and picturesque landscape exposed to the four elements of nature. 

I saw this film a few years after it was released in 1974 and again in the nineties, but I don’t remember much. There are all kinds of animals, small and big, including a tiny dung beetle that doesn't seem tiny when it rolls a ball of dung all the way into its hideout, though not without hilarity.

As I read about Beautiful People on the internet, I rediscovered that it is, in fact, a funny documentary. In one scene around a watering hole animals quench their thirst and end up intoxicated, only to wake up with a hangover the next morning. The water gets fermented every time the fruit from the surrounding trees falls into the water hole. 

Beautiful People, narrated by radio icon Paddy O'Byrne, is largely a one-man show: Jamie Uys not only wrote, directed and produced the film, he also took care of the editing, cinematography, and the music score. The cinematography is quite something as Uys captures the naked beauty of the desert land whose only inhabitants are the animals and the trees. Like the painstakingly shot wildlife scenes you see on television, Uys had to wait long hours to get the right footage of the animals and the way they cope with the harsh and unpredictable conditions of nature. In the end the sun rises, as it always does, and everything is back to normal.

Beautiful People earned Jamie Uys (below) the Hollywood Foreign Press Association award for best documentary. He deserved it. I would have given him another one for The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), one of the finest slapstick comedies of the 20th century I have seen (my review). He plays the Reverend in a cameo role. He also made The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1989) which didn't hold as well. Sequels rarely do. 

What makes this film extraordinary is the complete absence of special visual and sound effects and human encroachment, not counting Uys behind the camera. He did well to leave the animals alone.

BOOK REVIEW

The Man Without a Country 

by Edward Everett Hale (1863)

Here’s an amazing story for Patti Abbott’s Friday’s Forgotten Books at her blog Pattinase, not to be confused with A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut (2005).

“He cried out, in a fit of frenzy, ‘Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!’” 

And Lieutenant Philip Nolan, the young and intelligent Union army United States Army officer, never does hear a written or spoken word of the country of his birth until his ignominious death.

To be sentenced to spend the rest of your life, a little over a period of fifty years, on the high seas, is a fate worse than life in prison. To spend it without hearing the name of America even once during all those years at sea is doubly cruel.

It was the price Nolan paid for his impulsive outburst against his country before Colonel Morgan, the president of the court, who was trying him and a close acquaintance, Governor Aaron Burr, for treason during the Civil War. In a fit of rage Nolan wished he never heard of America again, a wish Morgan granted him without hesitation, if only to teach him, and other American citizens, the lesson of a lifetime—love and cherish your country. The harsh sentence, we are told, has President Jefferson’s consent. 

The author in 1988. © Project Gutenberg

Edward Everett Hale, American writer and minister, has naval officer Frederic Ingham narrate Philip Nolan’s remarkable story, the 56 years he spent at sea, hopping from one ship to another, boarding up with new commanders and sailors who carry out the judge’s order in letter and spirit.

Nolan’s life aboard the naval ships are filled with many a poignant moment. For example, the “inmate” is treated well and has access to everything that a normal prisoner does except for one thing—the word ‘United States’ or any reference to the country is not to figure anywhere, in writing or in conversations. Thus, just as Nolan is reading an interesting piece of news, he suddenly finds a gaping hole in the paper. The officer assigned to him has cut it out because of a reference to America on the other side of the page. There is no end to the levels of censorship.

The young officer, however, endears himself to the sailing crew by making himself useful on board, by showing them how to handle a gun or use artillery, reading Shakespeare, teaching them dance steps, explaining mathematics, inculcating a love for reading books and, in one instance, serving as a Portuguese interpreter aboard a dirty little schooner filled with slaves.

As Nolan grows old and sick, the magnitude of his sentence begins to sink in and he pines for information about his country, even grows to love the land he once hated so much. Then, one day, he repents in total surrender, crying out aloud before his last commanding officer, Danforth, who takes pity on the sick old man and tells him all that has happened during the course of a half a century.

“Pray, what has become of Texas?” 

As Frederic Ingham, the narrator, tells us: “The reason he had never heard of Texas was that Texas and her affairs had been painfully cut out of his newspapers.”

Nolan dies a hero, his father's badge of the Order of the Cincinnati pressed to his smiling lips. Before he goes, Nolan tells Danforth to bury him at sea for “it has been my home, and I love it” and requests a tombstone either at Fort Adams or at Orleans, his epitaph reading:

“In Memory of PHILIP NOLAN, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States. He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.”

I am sorry if I have given away more than I should have. It’s that kind of a story where you say more in spite of saying little. But fear not, there is much more to this 30-odd page account that could pass off as a short story or short fiction. For instance, the speculation whether Edward Everett Hale is telling a true story, whether the inspiration for it was the exiled anti-war pro-Confederate Ohio Democrat, Clement Vallandingham, whether the characters including that of Nolan are real, whether the events immediately preceding Nolan’s trial and sentencing actually happened, whether narrator Frederic Ingham really was a retired officer of the United States Navy, and whether The Levant, the last ship Nolan sailed on, was the same corvette that sailed from the Port of Honolulu in 1860 and was never heard of since. 

Hale keeps you guessing on all these aspects though there are several other interesting elements of the Civil War that you will enjoy reading and as you do, you will learn much about that tumultuous period in American history.

The Man Without a Country, which was first published anonymously in The Atlantic in December 1863, the year Philip Nolan died, has been adapted for films several times including a silent movie in 1917 and a three-act radio play in 1977. The story, now termed as a classic, made a big impact on America, in the sense that it influenced Americans into supporting Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Preserve the Union’ declaration and turned many against the secessionist Southern states. Apparently, Hale intended for the story to swing the tide in favour of the Union.

VINTAGE ADS

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises, the first full novel by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, the pioneers of publishing in America. In the second half of the 20th century, Scribner was taken over by Alfred A. Knopf, Jr's Atheneum Books in 1978, merged into Macmillan in 1984, and was finally bought by Simon & Schuster in 1994. The latter has retained the Scribner imprint.

The advertisement is simple but spot on about Hemingway's literary career. It says: "— and with this book Mr. Hemingway's sun also will rise, for this is a novel able to command the sharpest attention even in a season so crowded with good fiction. The publishers advise you to be very much aware of this book from the start."

According to Wikipedia, the dust jacket of the first edition of The Sun Also Rises was illustrated by Cleonike Damianakes who used a Hellenistic design (characteristic of the classical Greek civilisation) intended to tastefully suggest a quasi-sexual theme. 

The novel is about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the bullfights. Hemingway was a keen bullfighter himself and there is a nice black-and-white picture of his fighting one in Pamplona, Spain. The first edition consisted of 5,090 copies and sold at $2.00 per copy.

On Cleonike Damianakes, the illustrator, I have drawn a blank so far. And I haven't read the book yet.

FILM REVIEW

Batman (1989)

Todd Mason has all the links to Tuesday’s Overlooked Films, Audio and Video at his blog Sweet Freedom. Recommended: Movies: The Amazing Spider-Man by James Reasoner

Batman is often not pictured without his costume in comic-books unlike other superheroes like Superman or Spider-Man. The caped crusader is usually lying in wait above the dark and foreboding shadows of Gotham City’s crime-infested streets and buildings. The man behind the mask is a different picture: he is a young handsome and reclusive billionaire with thick wavy hair. This is my image of Bruce Wayne, at least in the Batman comics from the 70s onward.

I, therefore, did a double take when I first saw Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton’s first movie adaptation of Batman. Everything about the big-budget film was right—the bat-suit, the bat-mobile, the bat-cave, the bat-butler, the Joker, except for Wayne himself. As an actor, Michael Keaton did well; as Bruce Wayne, he stood out like a sore thumb. He looked nothing like he did in the comics.

Michael Keaton and Kim Bassinger in Batman

A lot of people liked Keaton (born Michael Douglas) in the first technically brilliant superhero movie since Richard Donner created magic with Superman in 1978. A part of that magic lay in the fact that the twin roles of Clark Kent, the bumbling and bespectacled reporter, and his alter ego, Kal-El or Superman, fit Christopher Reeve perfectly. A more suitable actor has not been born to play the Man of Steel. Brandon Routh was unconvincing in Superman Returns (2006) because, as Clark Kent and Superman, he looked the same. 

But this is about Batman… 

Michael Keaton in Batman

Six years later, in 1995, Joel Schumacher hit the right note by casting Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever, a perfect match. Why Schumacher did not persist with Kilmer in Batman & Robin (1997), I have no idea. The role went to George Clooney, of all the people in Hollywood.

The Michael Keaton-Bruce Wayne mismatch can, in fact, be likened to the Tobey Maguire-Spider-Man disconnect. Check out the 70s and 80s Spider-Man comics. 

Fortunately, Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne is not as significant as Michael Keaton the Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film. The caped crusader is quite awesome in his snazzy bat-suit and bat-mobile as he takes on Gotham City’s nemesis, the Joker or Jack Napier, essayed brilliantly by Jack Nicholson. The Joker—the result of a chemical accident and looking nothing less than a freak—shoots the crime boss and takes over the crime syndicate, threatening the citizens of Gotham with a dubious chemical called ‘Smilex’ that causes anyone who uses it to die of laughter and a permanent grin on his or her face. 

Val Kilmer in Batman Forever

Jack ‘The Joker’ Nicholson is the redeeming feature in an otherwise ordinary plot revolving around Batman’s fight against injustice and keeping Gotham City and his girlfriend, Vicky Vale (Kim Bassinger), safe from the likes of Jack Napier and his freak show.

Over the years the Batman films have evolved, both artistically and technically, with Christopher Nolan’s 21st century offering of Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) starring Christian Bale who, in my opinion, is second-best to Kilmer’s Batman.

All in all, an enjoyable series but I still like the comics more.