Catholic & Cosmic Horror

Last month I wrote about Christmas and cosmic horror, about Flannery O'Connor and H.P. Lovecraft. I quoted from a letter by Flannery O'Connor to her friend Betty Hester. The quotation I had is actually only an excerpt. Following is the full quotation, plus a part of the same letter that precedes it and may give it some added context:

     I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

     The notice in The New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

     I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man [Is Hard to Find] brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe there are many rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

From Flannery O'Connor's first letter to Betty Hester, dated July 20, 1955.

Betty Hester was still living when The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor was first published. She wished to remain anonymous and was called "A" in the book. The excerpt above is from page 90. There are further quotes and commentary on this and related letters, commentary written by Maria Popova and found on the website The Marginalian, here. By the way, chickens without wings makes me think of men without chests.

I concluded what I wrote last month as follows:

An atheist or materialist is certainly capable of apprehending horror on a cosmic scale, but can his apprehension compare to that of a Christian, or perhaps more specifically to that of a Roman Catholic? I don't know. But I would like to read more from Flannery O'Connor's letter and to learn more about her conception of horror, in other words, what in her view is the "right" horror. She may or may not have been writing about horror on a specifically cosmic scale, but in Christian teaching is there much space that separates personal from cosmic horror? Or does cosmic horror descend into our lives when given a chance, distilled from vastness into potent, earthly, personal horror?

Like I said, I don't know whether an atheist or materialist is capable of apprehending cosmic horror in the same way that a Christian can. I also don't know whether a Roman Catholic specifically is more attune to cosmic horror than are other Christians. But writing what I wrote got me thinking about related things. So here goes . . .

Catholicism stands alone or almost alone in Christianity as an ancient religion. It originated literally in the ancient world. It is connected by unbroken links to the life and time of Christ and to its origins in the Levant. Not only did Catholicism arise in the ancient world, it also arose in a pagan and pre-Christian world. In contrast, Protestant religions arose in an already civilized and thoroughly Christianized world, specifically in Europe, out of direct contact with ancient, Asiatic, pagan, and pre-Christian gods and ways. Owing to its time and place of origin, the Catholic Church was in direct contact with these gods and ways. I think that's an important point when it comes to cosmic horror, for the old gods of ancient Asia and Egypt were of a kind not encountered in Medieval or Modern times--at least until now, for, although they were banished in Ancient times, they have since returned.

Flannery O'Connor wrote to Betty Hester again on August 2, 1955. Among her words:

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for. (p. 92)

So again, she returned to the Nietzschean idea that God is dead. Nietzsche made his observation in 1882, near the end of a century of progress and science, also of skepticism about God, faith, and religion. Also during that century, Weird returned. (Weird, however, is not an old god and is in fact not a god at all.) By the way, looking for Nietzsche in Flannery O'Connor's letters is what led me to her first letter to Betty Hester, for I didn't know when I searched that Betty Hester was "A," and "Hester, Betty" is not in the index. It was only by happenstance (or maybe not) that Nietzsche's name is in the same letter as the excerpt I had previously found about the "wrong" horror." I don't know whether "A" refers to Betty Hester's anonymity or to her last name, which is the same as Hester Prynne's Christian name in The Scarlet Letter. The scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel (or romance) is of course "A."

After I wrote at Christmastime, Will Oliver left a comment explaining what Flannery meant when she mentioned the "right" horror. He concluded: "The cosmic horror is not that we are insignificant in a vast, indifferent universe, but that we are quite significant but too poor in faith to recognize that fact." Flannery O'Connor wrote: "nobody believes in the Incarnation" and "[m]y audience are the people who think God is dead." In his essay "It's All Cosmic Horror Without Christmas," Brandon Morse emphasizes God as our protector against "things more powerful and terrible than we can imagine. Things that would annihilate us if they weren't restrained." These are demons, terrible entities, dark forces. They are one possible source of our sense of cosmic horror. In his Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul wrote:

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

"heavenly places," meaning not heaven but the spiritual realm that exists above and outside of the mundane. Mr. Morse also writes about the Abyss "like a dimension of space-time so removed from God's love that going there is nightmarish even to the most evil of creatures." If we live in an ordered Cosmos, then the Abyss (or Void) exists outside of it. If demons and old gods dread going there, perhaps it's only because they originated in the Abyss and know what it's like to exist there, once and again in exile. Even they crave God's company. Absent from Cosmos, tenanting Chaos, perhaps they descend into gibbering madness, as with Lovecraft's old god Azathoth.

Ancient, Asiatic, pagan, and pre-Christian peoples worshipped and sacrificed to the principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness. These were the old gods--Baal, Asherah, Moloch, and so on--sent into exile by the advent of Christianity. But once "the people who think God is dead" began proliferating, the old gods found their way back. If we disbelieve in God and the Incarnation, then we no longer have a protector, and cosmic horrors once again impinge upon us. Old gods return. Atheists and materialists are correct in their apprehension of cosmic horror. What they fail to understand is that they have broken down the walls and thrown open the gates to such things by their disbelief. By their disbelief, they have forsaken the only power that can guard them from horrors and save them from insanity and despair. Maybe to Flannery O'Connor the "right" horror was her recognition that "nobody believes in the Incarnation," that they instead believe that "God is dead." By this formulation, No-God equates to horror.

* * *

Two more points:

First, one of the successes of Catholicism is that it has tied itself to reason, including to ancient Greek sources of knowledge and wisdom. Cosmos is ordered. It obeys laws. An understanding of it and its Creator is open to us through reason. The Abyss or Void is, in contrast, disordered, chaotic, irrational. It invites these selfsame things that are within us. To be drawn by disorder, chaos, and irrationality is to be drawn to the Abyss. To be drawn by order, law, and reason is to be drawn to God: Flannery O'Connor loved St. Thomas Aquinas and read his Summa Theologica every night before shutting her eyes. (p. 94)

Second, one of the great wonders of Medieval and early Renaissance art is its fantastic visions of hell and damnation. Call it Catholic horror art. I'm not sure that those who disbelieve in God are capable of such extraordinary and inspired visions, but the artists who created them lived in an age of faith. To them, these things were real and close at hand. They lived with hope, but they also lived with dread. All of that showed in their art.

A third point will wait until next time.

The Last Judgment, detail, by Giotto, a fresco executed in 1303-1305, in the Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.

Giotto's fresco makes me think of this cover of Weird Tales, created by Margaret Brundage for the issue of September 1941. The cover story is "Beyond the Threshold" by August Derleth, another Catholic author. I haven't read the story. I can't say that it's about judgment or damnation. I also can't say that Margaret Brundage was inspired by Giotto's image. (Even the color scheme is the same.) Instead, call this a case of artistic convergent evolution.

Original text and captions copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

"The Eyrie," November 1923

There are nineteen letters in Weird Tales for November 1923. It looks like the magazine was gaining pretty rapidly in popularity as 1923 went on. Beyond that, there were some very enthusiastic readers and fans aborning, people who praised and admired Weird Tales, passed issues around to their friends, looked for it on the newsstand every month, and began collecting and keeping issues instead of discarding them. (How many popular magazines went into the trash bin or incinerator in those days!)

One of the first Weird Tales controversies began in November 1924 when the editor, Edwin Baird, printed a letter by Mrs. D.M. Manzer, also known as Isa-belle Manzer, of Amarillo, Texas. The letter is practically illiterate. I can't imagine what the original manuscript would have looked like. Baird asked readers if he should publish the story based on Mrs. Manzer's letter and his brief description of her story. Evidently they said yes, for "The Transparent Ghost" was published as a three-part serial in February, March, and April 1924.

The writers of letters to "The Eyrie," November 1923:

• Mrs. D. M. Manzer (1872 or 1873-1944), aka Isa-belle Manzer, of Amarillo, Texas, who wrote a kind of cover letter for her story submission, "The Transparent Ghost."

• Eighteen-year-old Homer O(ldham) Peterson (b. June 12, 1905, Valparaiso, Indiana; d. Dec. 18, 1978, New Castle, Indiana) of Delaware, Ohio, who commented on several stories in previous issues. Peterson went on to become a high school teacher in Ohio and Indiana. He taught English, French, and journalism and was also a champion chess player.

• Twenty-year-old Cecil John Eustace (b. June 5, 1903, Walton-on-Thames, England; d. 1992) of the Bank of Montreal, St. Catherines, Ontario, who remarked that the August issue of Weird Tales was the first that he had seen in Canada. He was a recent arrival in Canada, having immigrated in August 1922 from his native England. Eustace was a writer of short stories and novels for popular and pulp magazines, including "Ten Days to Live" in Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1928. Later he was an editor at J.M. Dent and Sons in Canada, retiring in 1967. He wrote a dozen books, some of which are novels, others non-fiction. He also collaborated with his daughter, (Elizabeth) Mary Eustace, on a musical. Cecil John Eustace was a Catholic author by the way.

• Austin Hall (1880-1933), author of the recently published serial "The People of the Comet."

• Charles G(ilbert) Kidney (1892-1945) of Cleveland, Ohio, who greatly admired Hall's story. Born in Chicago and having died in Ohio, Kidney was buried in the in-between state of Indiana.

• Sidney E. Johnson of Joplin, Missouri, who predicted that "the fiction center of the United States is going to shift from New York to Chicago." Presumably this was Sidney Evans Johnson (1882-1963). Johnson was like Johnny Appleseed: in his letter he wrote that he scattered copies of the magazine in an effort to grow more readers. Johnson had a second letter in Weird Tales in March 1925.

• Mrs. Elizabeth Purington (dates uncertain--believe it or not, there were and are several Elizabeth Puringtons in America) of Santa Ana, California, who wrote about a dream she had had.

• Joseph Faus (1898-1966) of Miami, Florida, who, with James Bennett Wooding (1897-1954), had had a story called "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" in the March 1923 issue of Weird Tales.

• World War I veteran Ralph S. Happel (1892-1963) of Albany, New York.

• Thomas J. Harris (dates unknown) of Brooklyn, New York.

• Walter F. McCanless (1876-1965) of Wadesboro, North Carolina. He had a story, "The Phantom Violinist," in the same issue and would have two more letters in "The Eyrie" in 1924.

• Godfrey Lampert (1898-1968) of Jasper, Indiana, who wrote a letter full of questions. Lampert was an artist, druggist, and city councilman in Jasper, a city known as a maker of office furniture.

• Lee Andrews (1902-1977) of Indianapolis, Indiana.

• Mrs. F. Wickman (1885-1942) of Duluth, Minnesota. Mrs. Wickman, aka Rosella (Cole) Wickman, really liked "The Gorilla" by Horatio V. Ellis, as well she should have, for the author, Horatio Vernon Ellis (1895-1945), was her son. And so we have an answer to the question of "Who was  . . ?" so commonly encountered when it comes to tellers of weird tales. 

• Thirteen-year-old Ralph Fingle (dates unknown; his name may have been misspelled in print) of Long Beach, California, who took a quarter from "a very nearly empty bank" so that he could buy a copy of Weird Tales and read "The People of the Comet."

• Mrs. Thomas Earl Davison (dates unknown) of Chicago, Illinois, who commented on stories from way back in the first issue. She thought of "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967) as "rotten." Believing she could do better, she submitted a story with her letter. I assume that her story is lost forever.

• Edith Lyle Ragsdale (ca. 1878-?) of Centralia, Illinois, who liked weird stories and went on to write three of her own published in Weird Tales in 1924-1926.

• E. B. (dates unknown) of West Point, Maine.

• Gertrude (Carey) Strauss (1866-1929) of Puyallup, Washington, an artist and poet.

Writers of letters were real people who lived real lives. They were not just ghosts with addresses. Maybe we forget that. Isa-belle Manzer notwithstanding, many of the readers of Weird Tales read and wrote at a high level, evidence that pulp magazines were not necessarily trash. And of course many of those readers knew what is weird fiction or a weird tale, and they sought out that genre. Many also liked what they called "the scientific story," or what we would call science fiction, or at least science fantasy. There wasn't yet a name for that type a story--science fiction as a term did not appear in print until 1929--but they sought out that type of story, too, and asked for more.

I have read only a few of the stories published in Weird Tales in 1923, but I sense that in a brief eight months, from March to November of that first year, their average quality improved, while authors were reaching towards just what makes weird fiction, science fiction, and science fantasy. And of course in that first year, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Otis Adelbert Kline, Frank Owen, Anthony M. Rud, and other returning authors made their debut in the magazine. Weird Tales could have died in its first year or two. But there were enough people who believed in it and wanted it to go on--readers included--that it was able to survive. And again, here we are one hundred years later and able to hold in our hands a newly printed issue of "The Unique Magazine," the magazine that never dies.

Homer O. Peterson (1905-1978), far right, in a photograph from the Indianapolis Star Magazine, November 9, 1958, whole page number 153.

Cecil John Eustace (1903-1992), from an article called "New Novel Written as Short Stories" in the Toronto Star, March 9, 1929, page 32.

Forty-five years later, Cecil Eustace with his daughter Mary in the same newspaper, the Toronto Star, November 23, 1974, whole page number 119. Photograph by Dick Darrell.

Godfrey Lampert (1898-1968), third from the left (in the dark suit), from the Jasper, Indiana, Herald, December 31, 1955, page 1.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Hamilton Craigie (1880-1956)-The First Detective Story

Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie
Author, Editor, Poet, Teacher, Amateur Historian
Born July 22, 1880, Round Hill, Greenwich, Connecticut
Died August 9, 1956, Brooksville, Florida

Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie, known as Hamilton Craigie, was born on July 22, 1880, in Round Hill, Greenwich, Connecticut. I haven't found anything on Craigie from before 1918, when he was already on the cusp of middle age. It was in 1918 that his career as a professional writer began, if the list of his stories in The FictionMags Index has captured his first credits. That career was bracketed by Aprils: from April 6, 1918 (in The Argosy), to April 1956 (in Famous Detective Stories), Craigie had scores of stories in Action Stories, Adventure Novels and Short Stories, The Argosy and its successors, The Black Cat, Detective Story Magazine, Jungle Stories, Mystery Magazine, Short Stories, Western Novels and Short Stories, Western Story Magazine, and other genre titles. In addition, Craigie had stories in Collier's, The International, Metropolitan, and Woman's Home Companion. He also wrote nonfiction articles and items about writing and the writing business.

Hamilton Craigie had five stories in Weird Tales, beginning with his crime/detective story "The Chain" in the first issue, March 1923. He also had three stories in the Weird Tales companion magazine Detective Tales in its first year, culminating with "Derring-Do," also in March 1923. Craigie continued to have stories in the successors to Detective Tales after it had gone to another publisher. He and Otis Adelbert Kline were the only authors to have a story in each of the first four issues of Weird Tales.

Craigie's five stories for Weird Tales include one called "The Jailer of Souls" (June 1923). It's a story of the American West, perhaps an early weird Western. There is mention of Java and other places in the Far East, but it is not set in the jungle and there aren't any flashbacks to a jungle setting. Nonetheless, Craigie had a story called "Jailer of Souls" in Jungle Stories in the Winter issue, 1952/1953. I can't say that these were the same story, as I have not read the Jungle Stories version. As for the Weird Tales version, it looks as though Craigie was working towards a fictional milieu inhabited by smart, able, and powerful heroes, almost like superheroes. In both "The Chain" and "The Jailer of Souls," he used an expression, Criminopolis, as a kind of shorthand to represent the world of crime against which his heroes operated. By the way, there is a book called Criminopolis, written by the French author Paul Mimande (1847-1913) and published in Paris in 1897.

"The Chain" is a crime/detective story, while "The Jailer of Souls" is a Western. It looks as though most of Hamilton Craigie's output was in those two genres. I have found ten books by Hamilton Craigie, all of which, judging by their titles, are Westerns:

• The Longhorn Trail (1931)
• Southwest of the Law (1932)
• Nevada Jones (1935)
• Hair-Trigger Hombre (1946)
• Trigger Trails (1946)
• Feudal Range (British edition, 1948)
• Thunder in the Dust (1952)
• The Longride (1954)
• Rim Rock Range (1955)
• The Ranch of the Raven (British edition, date unknown)

In addition to being an author, Hamilton Craigie also worked as a magazine editor. In 1918, when he filled out his draft card, Craigie was living in Summit, New Jersey, and working as an associate editor for the Frank A. Munsey Company, publisher of The Argosy. He was also on the editorial staff of The Black Cat and Metropolitan.

Hamilton Craigie was born in Connecticut and lived for a time in New York City. I suspect this was in the 1910s and/or 1920s. He appears to have spent most of the 1930s in Chatham, New Jersey. In 1942, when he filled out his second draft card, Craigie was in Essex, New Jersey.

I believe Craigie was married twice, first to Mary A. Melia (1884-1938), and, after her death, to Edith Fulton Martini (1893-1978). They were married in Hernando County, Florida, on December 12, 1944. It looks as though Craigie lived in Florida from the early to mid 1940s until his death in 1956. He taught short story writing at the University of Tampa Adult Education Center as early as 1948.

Craigie's daughter by his first marriage, (Mary) Virginia Craigie, was also a writer. She graduated from Eden Hall Convent of the Sacred Heart Boarding School in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, in 1933, having won the Louise Imogen Cuiney prize for highest average in literary work during her high school career. She had already by that time contributed articles to children's magazines. Afterwards she studied at the College of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan. She married John V.E. Zink.

Craigie's second wife, Edith Fulton, was a writer, too. She had poems in Bozart, Florida Magazine of Verse, Kaleidograph, The Literary Digest, the Tampa Tribune, and other publications. These were collected in Disturbing the Stars, published in 1949. Edith Fulton was also a columnist for the Brooksville Sun newspaper.

Hamilton Craigie died on August 9, 1956, in Brooksville, Florida. He was seventy-six years old.

Hamilton Craigie's Stories in Weird Tales and Detective Tales

Weird Tales

• "The Chain" (1923; reprinted Nov. 1952)
• "The Incubus" (Apr. 1923)
• "Midnight Black" (May 1923)
• "The Jailer of Souls" (June 1923)
• "The Man-Trap" (Nov. 1925)

Detective Tales

• "The Mirror" (Nov. 16/Dec. 15, 1922)
• "The Symbol of Authority" (Feb. 1923)
• "Derring-Do" (Mar. 1923)

Hamilton Craigie's Other Stories Listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• "The Vengeance of Hanuman" in Strange Stories (June 1940)
• "Swamp of Dread Mist" in Jungle Stories (Spring 1950)
• "Jailer of Souls" in Jungle Stories (Winter 1952/1953)

Craigie also had a story called "The House Without a Door" in Real Detective Tales in June 1924, as well as stories in Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. Finally, I found a story by Craigie called "Roundup of Reno Red," which was syndicated in newspapers in 1930.

Further Reading
"Today in Tampa" by Leo Stalnaker in the Tampa Times, November 22, 1948, page 2.

Hamilton Craigie's Story:

"The Chain" is a short story in six chapters. It tells of one harrowing evening in the life of a private detective named Quarrier. Although a quarrier is a man who works in a quarry, you can also look at the name as a pun on the word quarry, as an animal that is hunted. In other words, a quarrier might be a man who hunts other men.

I was hoping for a more sustained work in "The Chain." After all, it's fairly long. Instead, all of the events in the story take place in a single evening, beginning with a ride in a New York taxicab and ending at Quarrier's very elaborately made offices. Although Quarrier and all of his attributes are described in detail, Craigie's tale hinges on a physical place and the minute details of that place. Describing a complex physical environment can be a challenge for a writer. I would advise against it if that's at all possible. Fortunately for the reader, Craigie included in his story a map, a floor plan of Quarrier's offices. Even so, it's not quite enough. You still have to read closely if you're going to understand just what has happened and in what way. In any event, that floor plan is the first drawing (not counting decorations) to appear in Weird Tales. I'm not sure that we can call it an illustration, though, as it does not depict a scene from "The Chain." It's there just so that we can understand better what is happening. Call it a graphic version of Craigie's prose, an example of the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.

There aren't any elements of horror, fantasy, or pseudo-science (i.e., science fiction) in "The Chain." Quarrier has a weird experience, though, when he senses an invisible presence in his office, or recently departed from his office. Craigie's story would seem out of place in Weird Tales. However, I detect a nascent genre or sub-genre here, namely, the weird-hero genre of the pulps, later the superhero genre of comic books. Quarrier is obviously a superior man, almost like a Conan of the city. Nothing can stop him, including a mob of gangsters who attacks him in the street, or an armed guard, whom Quarrier knocks out and disarms, even though he's bound by a kind of Gordian's knot. Nothing eludes him, either, including the lightly swinging electrolier chain of the title. It is by that swinging chain that his enemy the Big Gun's scheme is undone. (That's the Big Gun, not the Big Guy. The Big Guy's crime career began much later.)

I can't say that "The Chain" is a very good story. My main complaint is against Craigie's prose, that awful purple prose so common in pulp magazines. Here is but one egregious example:

Now Quarrier, his mouth a grim line, was reaching with the butt of his automatic to break that glass when, with a grinding of brakes the taxi whirled suddenly to a groaning halt.

I don't know about you, but that reads like an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Fortunately we have to endure only one -ly word in that awful sentence. Pulp fiction authors loved their -ly words, non-words, too, such as "blackly" and "oilily." And this is my continuing complaint against pulp fiction and pulp magazines, both old and new: it and they can never be taken seriously (except by fanboys) and will never gain any purchase in the wider realms of literature (except with fanboys) for as long as the prose is so bad. Quarrier has the makings of an interesting character, but he's mostly two-dimensional. And that gets to a second complaint I have against pulp fiction, one that lies with bad characters, especially with characters who are not recognizably human. Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters, for example, are not human, and so his stories will never rise to the level of literature. In contrast, characters created by Raymond Chandler, who also wrote for pulp magazines, are recognizably human, and so Chandler's stories have attained a higher level of both quality and art.

From the Tampa Times, 1948.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part Six

Brennan & Derleth

Joseph Payne Brennan was younger than August W. Derleth (1909-1971) by a little more than eight years. Derleth had his first story in Weird Tales in 1926 when he was just seventeen years old. Brennan waited until 1952 when he was nearly twice that age. Although both men were Roman Catholics, both were also admirers and followers of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), a strict (on the surface at least) materialist. Brennan seems to have been solitary, possibly unhappy or even morose. He worked for most of his life in a library, that inner sanctum of the introvert. By all accounts, Derleth was his opposite--big and burly and outgoing, an energetic man and one full of appetites. Brennan and Derleth had some things in common. Both were not only authors and poets but also editors and publishers. And though Brennan was apparently never in touch with Lovecraft, he and Derleth corresponded. Derleth did for Brennan what he had also done for Lovecraft: under his Arkham House and other imprints, Derleth published Brennan's works.

I guess Derleth would have first approached Brennan rather than the other way around. If that's how it happened, I can imagine Derleth's reading "The Green Parrot" in the July 1952 issue of Weird Tales, Brennan's first story for the magazine. By then, Derleth had spent more than half of his life as a published author and more than a dozen years as publisher of Arkham House books. Maybe he was a leading figure in weird fiction, certainly in the publishing of weird fiction. Here in front of him, then, was a new and promising author in the field. Maybe he first wrote to Brennan. Maybe Brennan was happy to receive a letter and to write back. However it happened, I suspect that the two men began corresponding around 1952. Unfortunately, I don't have any direct sources or information on that. I hope that someone can lead the way.

In 1958, under his Arkham House imprint, Derleth issued Nine Horrors and a Dream by Joseph Payne Brennan in an edition of 1,336 copies. The cover art was by Frank Utpatel (1905-1980) (see below). Nine Horrors and a Dream collects four of Brennan's five stories for Weird Tales, plus five others. I recently came across a copy of this book in the collection of the late Margaret B. Nicholas of Bartlett and Marietta, Ohio. Mrs. Nicholas was a wallpaper hanger. She had a fine eye and good taste, not only for books and magazine fiction but also for decorative items. I thank her for what she did in her life, which lasted all of ninety-seven years.

August Derleth published Brennan's poetry as well. Brennan had fourteen poems in Fire and Sleet and Candlelight: New Poems of the Macabre, issued by Arkham House in 1961. Under his Hawk & Whippoorwill Press imprint, Derleth also published The Wind of Time (1961), a slim volume of Brennan's verse. Nightmare Need, again with cover art by Utpatel, followed in 1964, again under Arkham House. Brennan returned the favor in his own journal, entitled Macabre. For example, Derleth's poem "Revenants" was in the Summer 1959 issue of that small magazine.

Of course Brennan and Derleth were also writers of prose. Both wrote weird fiction. Both also created their own occult detectives modeled after Sherlock Holmes. Derleth's detective is Solar Pons. Brennan's goes by the more mundane appellation Lucius Leffing. (Both given names refer to light or sources of light.) Derleth cast his characters and situations into a place he had never been when he began writing. This was London. Brennan kept his detective close to home, in his own native Connecticut. Brennan himself is Leffing's sidekick and Dr. Watson. Brennan and Derleth had stories together in just one issue of Weird Tales before its demise in 1954. That was in July 1953.

August Derleth died suddenly in 1971. We can only imagine what another loss would have meant to Joseph Payne Brennan. Although both men had endured ill health in the previous few years, Brennan survived Derleth by almost two decades. Fortunately for us, Brennan and Derleth put their own works and those of so many other authors into print. Again, we can say thank you to them both.

To be concluded . . .

Further Reading

"Hawk & Whippoorwill: Derleth’s Overlooked Imprint" by Allied Authors, on the blog Allied Authors at the following URL:

https://allied-authors.org/2016/11/01/hawk-whippoorwill-derleths-overlooked-imprint/

In addition to his many other duties, August Derleth was a newspaper columnist. He wrote "Wisconsin Diary" for The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin. On January 31, 1963, Joseph Payne Brennan wrote to Derleth on the death of fellow poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Derleth quoted Brennan's letter in his own column of February 11, 1963 (page 2).

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part Three

Brennan's Weird Fiction in Print & on Film

Joseph Payne Brennan wrote about 500 short stories and more than 2,000 poems. His earliest short story listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) is "The Green Parrot," from 1952. That was also his first story in Weird Tales. Brennan's late arrival in the magazine is just one bit of evidence that he was something of an anachronism. He knew that about himself and admitted as much about himself. Born in 1918, Brennan was old enough to have corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft and others in Lovecraft's circle. Living in Connecticut, he could easily have made a trip by train to visit with that gentleman of Providence. Instead Brennan seems to have been alone in his youth and in his early writing and work, at least in terms of his weird fiction. (1) A contemporary or near contemporary of Henry Kuttner (1915-1958), Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), and others, Brennan was accepted into the pages of Weird Tales only after they had gone. In his introduction to "Levitation" in Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre (1976), Les Daniels wrote: "Joseph Payne Brennan is the last major author of supernatural stories to have been associated with Weird Tales." (p. 267). John Pelan called him "the last of the great Weird Tales authors." (2) Yes, an anachronism, and maybe great, too, and one of the last. Brennan considered himself a failure. (3)

There is a very Irish sense of doom or fate in Brennan's stories. His lack of self-esteem--that feeling that one is special, even if one is especially bad--is very Irish, too. (We have been dealing with the same kinds of feelings in our very Irish family for years.) Brennan was a nature poet. His stories are often about the encroachment of the natural--or supernatural--world or forces upon civilization, conversely about people becoming bewildered, engulfed by, or overpowered by natural or supernatural forces after going beyond the edge of town or away from the road, into swamps or hemlock woods, or even into the overgrown backyard of a suburban home. Doom or fate await them--men die not for anything they might do but because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should remember that Brennan was admirer of Maurice Level (1875-1926) and the conte cruel.

Brennan had at least three of his stories adapted to film, four if you count "Slime" as the original source for the 1958 theatrical release The Blob. Two of his stories were adapted to the television series Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff and broadcast on April 16, 1962. "The Lethal Ladies" was the overall title for two stories with the same theme, "Murder on the Rocks" (originally "The Pool" in The Dark Returners, 1959) and "Goodbye, Dr. Bliss" (originally "Goodbye, Mr. Bliss" in The Dark Returners). Brennan's story "Levitation" (originally in Nine Horrors and a Dream, Arkham House, 1958) was adapted to an episode of the same name in Tales from the Dark Side in 1985.

Most of Brennan's stories were printed or reprinted in small-press collections or in small magazines, in his own Macabre (from 1957 to 1976) or in similar titles such as The Arkham Collector (from 1967 to 1971), Weirdbook (from 1968 to 1990), and Whispers (from 1973 to 1997). One prominent exception to all of that is "The Feaster from Afar," published in the paperbound anthology The Disciples of Cthulhu (DAW Books, 1976). But then tales of the Cthulhu Mythos often find their way into print without much problem. The last of his works that I have found to have been published in Brennan's own lifetime is the poem "Necrophiliac," from Grue #10, Fall 1989. What a terrible and ironic title for a final poem.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Brennan was fortunate enough early on to know and work with Jack Schaefer (1907-1991), but Schaefer was a writer of Westerns, not of supernatural horror and fantasy stories.

(2) From Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, Centipede Press, p. 329.

(3) "I'm attracted to the Victorian period [. . . ]. I also have a feeling that probably as an individual I would have been less of a failure then than I am now." From "Etchings & Odysseys Interview: Joseph Payne Brennan," Etchings & Odysseys #7 (1985), page 58. 

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part Two

Brennan: Double Life and In Weird Tales

Joseph Payne Brennan lived a double life as a writer. His short stories were mostly in the pulp genres, Westerns in the period 1948 to 1956, supernatural horror and fantasy from 1952 onward. He began his writing career, however, as a poet, primarily a nature poet, and it was as a poet that he wished to be remembered. His first published work was a poem, "When Snow Was Hung," which appeared in 1940 in the Christian Science Monitor. About two thousand more poems flowed from his pen over the next five decades. These were published in the New York Times, the University of Kansas City Review, and Voices, among other titles, including many newspapers. In living his double life, Brennan edited and published his own periodicals, Macabre (23 issues, 1957-1976), in which he compiled tales of supernatural horror and fantasy, and Essence (47 issues, 1950-1977), a journal of straight poetry.

Brennan was a latecomer to Weird Tales. Though he had read the magazine since his teenaged years and had made submissions from time to time, Brennan did not have a story published in "The Unique Magazine" until "The Green Parrot" in July 1952. Three more stories followed: "Slime," the cover story for the March 1953 issue; "On the Elevator," published in July 1953; and the "The Calamander Chest," one of Brennan's own favorites, published in January 1954. Then, disaster struck: in September 1954, after thirty-one years in print, Weird Tales came to an end. "I felt as if my world had come apart," Brennan later wrote. "I was depressed for months." It was probably no coincidence that just three years later Brennan launched his own magazine of weird fiction, Macabre.

August W. Derleth (1909-1971) also lived a double life as a writer. Like Brennan, he published in the fields of weird fiction and straight poetry, especially nature poetry. Under his Arkham House imprint, Derleth issued hardbound volumes of weird fiction from 1939 to 1971. One of these was Joseph Payne Brennan's Nine Horrors and a Dream, published in 1958 in an edition of 1,336 copies with a dust jacket design by Frank Utpatel (1905-1980). Ballantine Books reprinted Nine Horrors and a Dream in 1962. The cover artist was Richard M. Powers (1921-1996). The contents of Brennan's book: 

• "Slime" (originally in Weird Tales, Mar. 1953)
• "Levitation" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)
• "The Calamander Chest" (originally in Weird Tales, Jan. 1954)
• "Death in Peru" (originally in Mystic Magazine, Jan. 1954)
• "On the Elevator" (originally in Weird Tales, July 1953)
• "The Green Parrot" (originally in Weird Tales, July 1952)
• "Canavan's Back Yard" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)
• "I'm Murdering Mr. Massington" (originally in Esquire, Feb. 1954)
• "The Hunt" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)
• "The Mail for Juniper Hill" (original to Nine Horrors and a Dream)

Brennan's dedication reads: "To the Memory of Weird Tales 1923-1954," as if the magazine were a departed loved one. But as editor Marvin Kaye (1938-2021) later called it, Weird Tales is the magazine that never dies. It has come back again and again. And Joseph Payne Brennan may have been the only author to have had something published in the first incarnation of 1923-1954 and in the revivals of the 1970s and '80s and in the second-longest run of the magazine under editors John Gregory Betancourt, Darrell Schweitzer, and George H. Scithers. Here are his credits for Weird Tales:

• "The Green Parrot" (short story, July 1952)
• "Slime" (novella, Mar. 1953)
• "On the Elevator" (short story, July 1953)
• "The Calamander Chest" (short story, Jan. 1954)
• "Orchids from Author" (Letter to "The Eyrie") (Summer 1974)
• "Fear" (novella, No. 2, Spring 1981)
• "John Mason Sidd" (poem, Spring 1988)
• "Because" (poem, Summer 1988)
• "Haunted House" (poem, Summer 1988)
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Summer 1988)

Thirty-six years--did any author in his own lifetime have a longer career in the pages of Weird Tales?

To be continued . . .

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part One

Author, Poet, Essayist, Bibliographer, Editor, Publisher, Newspaper Staff Worker, Librarian
Born December 20, 1918, Bridgeport, Connecticut
Died January 28, 1990, New Haven, Connecticut

Brennan: Young Life, Young Writer

Joseph Payne Brennan, Jr., was born on December 20, 1918, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Joseph Payne Brennan, Sr., (1868-1938) and Nellie Wilkerson Holborn Brennan (1895-1992). He had one older sister, Loetta Mary Brennan (1916-2011), who long outlived him. As you can see by their dates, the Brennan men lived their allotted threescore and ten, while the women made it into their nineties. Nellie Brennan lived long enough in fact to bury her only son. There is a certain sadness and an ineffable sense of something lost and irretrievable in the life of that son, the author Joseph Payne Brennan. He saw it and knew it himself, and it showed in the poems, stories, and interviews he left for us after he died.

Brennan's career as a writer began when he was a freshman in high school and first fell under what he called "the all-powerful spell of [Edgar Allan] Poe." That spell set him off on a quest for everything he could find in the field of supernatural horror and fantasy. His quest led him in about 1934 or 1935 to Weird Tales, then edited by Farnsworth Wright and dominated by the magazine's Big Three authors, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Brennan read every issue of Weird Tales--every issue he could find anyway--from front cover to back, over and over again. "I think my life's goal at that time," he recalled, "was to become a Weird Tales contributor." Money was tight in the Great Depression, though, and gathering enough to pay for a typewriter was out of the question. Instead, Brennan the teenaged author hand wrote his stories (one of which he had entitled "The White Wolf"), and that's how he submitted them to Weird Tales. Not surprisingly, Farnsworth Wright showed no interest. Even Lovecraft had a hard time marketing his handwritten stories and was usually persuaded to type them or let someone else do it for him.

Joseph Payne Brennan attended St. Boniface School and New Haven High School (then or now called James Hillhouse High School) in his hometown. In his senior yearbook, he stated his simple plan for the future for all to see: "Intend to write." In 1936, without anything to show up until then for his freelance efforts, Brennan entered Junior College of Commerce, now Quinnipiac University, in Hamden, Connecticut. His college career was cut short, though, with the death of his father in 1938. Brennan went to work to support himself, his mother, and his sister Loetta. He landed a job as an $11-a-week office boy, often working late and always six days a week. That left little time for writing, but he finally made a sale in the form of a poem, "When Snow Was Hung," published in 1940 in the Christian Science Monitor. By then he was working on a New Haven newspaper as a steno clerk.

In late 1942, when he registered for the draft, Brennan was employed by Jack W. Schaefer (1907-1991), the editor and publisher of Theatre News, also at one time the associate editor of the New Haven Journal-Courier. Schaefer and Brennan were both from the eastern half of the country, yet both broke into the business of writing for story magazines with tales of the Old West. Schaefer blazed the trail with "Rider from Nowhere," a serial published in Argosy beginning in July 1946. (1) His stories appeared not only in Argosy but also in slick magazines such as Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and finally Boys' Life. Schaefer's biggest success was Shane, published in 1949 and adapted to film in 1953 with Alan Ladd in the title role. That success, coupled with Schaefer's continued devotion to writing Westerns, led him to move to New Mexico in 1955. Brennan's writing career on the other hand was interrupted by three years' service in the U.S. Army, from January 20, 1943, to January 2, 1946. Brennan's first published Western arrived more than two years after Schaefer's with "Fast-Gun Freedom," published in Western Short Stories in December 1948. (2) In all, Brennan had about two dozen stories in Western magazines from 1948 to 1956.

Here is a poem by Joseph Payne Brennan, Jr., from 1948:

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) "Rider from Nowhere" is the first story by Schaefer listed in the online The FictionMags Index.

(2) Brennan actually sold his first Western in 1948, but that story, "Endurance," wasn't published until February 1950 in the magazine Masked Rider Western.

Joseph Payne Brennan, Jr., nicknamed "Jo," from the New Haven High School yearbook, The Elm Tree, 1936. It's fitting that Brennan, a nature poet, would first be pictured in a book named for a tree and that his war poem would be about poppies and clover, creepers, grasses, roots, and leaves.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Back Again

I'm back again after several weeks with my family. My uncle died while I was away. He had lived a long life and was a veteran of the Korean War and a teacher in the Indianapolis Public Schools for thirty years. He specialized in American history but claimed to have known more about its Irish counterpart. He was also a devoted Catholic.

I don't think my uncle was especially interested in science fiction and fantasy, but he was a great fan of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. It's no coincidence as far as my uncle went that Arthur Conan Doyle was of Irish-Catholic descent and that G.K. Chesterton, though falling short of Irishness, became, nevertheless, a Catholic. While Conan Doyle went in for nonsense in the Cottingley Fairies affair, Chesterton was, by virtue of his faith, more well grounded. We have him to thank for an idea that has been paraphrased thusly: "When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything." The American Chesterton Society traces that paraphrased idea to the research and conclusions of Chestertonian Robin Rader of  Zambia, who believes it came from two quotes found in the Father Brown stories:

"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." (From "The Oracle of the Dog," 1923.)

and

"You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief--of belief in almost anything." (From "The Miracle of Moon Crescent," 1924.)

I have written before about weird fiction against materialism. I think you could make an argument that weird fiction is against other kinds of belief as well, those that have displaced a belief in God, or at least in the supernatural. Many of these beliefs are based, I think, in Scientism, that bastard-child of science and religion. In my view, Scientism is not about science but of the perceived supremacy and worship of what some people call science, or what has lately sometimes been called "settled science," that is, an unquestioned and unquestionable dogma more characteristic of religion. One bit of "settled science" is that the world is overpopulated, in other words, that there are too many of us and that it would be better off with some us--meaning you--gone. (Have you ever noticed how people who believe in overpopulation never talk about getting rid of themselves?)

As a supposedly scientific idea, overpopulation would have entered science fiction at some point, perhaps not long after it had become a concern in the real world. I'm not sure when that was. The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction suggests that the starting point was in the 1950s, but that overpopulation as a theme in science fiction really took off in the 1960s. That's my sense, too. Here's a quote from the Encyclopedia:

The most powerful attempt to confront the issue squarely and in some detail was Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966), a novel whose thrust was entirely lost when it was filmed as Soylent Green (1973). 

I don't agree so much with the comment about Soylent Green, but it's clear to me that overpopulation as a theme was pretty well established in science fiction by the end of the 1960s. Witness "The Mark of Gideon," an episode from the final season of Star Trek, broadcast on January 17, 1969. Witness also the publication in 1970 of The World Outside by Robert Silverberg.

Overpopulation was big in the 1970s. Even otherwise sensible people believed that the world was or soon would be crawling with humanity and that, as a result, there would be disaster, or, alternatively, dystopia (as in Soylent Green [1973] or Logan's Run [1976]), which is only another kind of disaster. If anyone foresaw that we would actually face in the twenty-first century a different kind of disaster, that of demographic collapse, I don't know who that would have been.

Implicit in all of the talk of overpopulation is an anti-human sentiment. But in giving up on a belief in God, and in transferring our most fervent religious beliefs to materialism, atheism, Darwinism, socialism, and so on, many in the world today have become so thoroughly anti-human that they despise humanity and wish for us to be extinguished. My sense is that they despise themselves, but that, because self-hatred is a psychically unbearable condition, they transfer their hatred to the rest of the world. They also, I think, transfer it to God. (My question is, why are they so angry at somebody they don't even believe in?)

Another variation on this anti-human attitude is expressed by people who have elevated animals to the level of people (or have demoted people to the level of animals), in the process casting their pets into the roles of surrogate children and lovers. How long will it be before we can mate with genetically modified pets to produce hybrid dog-people who love us as dogs love us, without reserve, unconditionally, and beyond the imperfect love of our fellow human beings? I suspect it will happen, sooner rather than later. Who in science fiction, as unquestioning of the dogma of overpopulation as the writers of the genre have been, foresaw that we would do these things? Who, in or out of science fiction, envisioned that we would face not overpopulation but demographic collapse partly because we love only our animals and no longer our fellow human beings? 

A perfect and indestructible love--where have we found that before? We seem to remember something like it in the far-distant past, before Scientism became the faith of choice. What was its Source? Who offered it? The difference is that the love offered by a hybrid dog-child is perfectly manipulable. We are its masters. We need not be humble or submit to Anyone's will, because it is our will that is being expressed. Our dog-children will come from our own image of ourselves--those will be our genes in there after all. In other words, our dog-children will be perfect, three-dimensional, organic, hybrid-human-canine selfies.

My uncle understood the anti-human attitude of the believers in overpopulation, and he understood it decades ago, shortly after the theme had entered science fiction but before it had taken off in the 1960s. I doubt that he was aware of these developments, but he knew of parallel developments in the real world, for in a long letter to the Indianapolis Star, published on August 26, 1961 (p. 10) and in response to a previous newspaper item, he wrote:

The problem [of population] is not to be solved by impoverishing the earth of the greatest of its riches, "the life and intelligence of man."

I don't know the origin of the quoted phrase. Nonetheless, he saw that the implicitly anti-human policies of the believers in overpopulation were (and are) likely to prove disastrous. And he didn't just dream that up. His faith and his love for his fellow man were behind it. He lived that faith, and he acted out that love, perhaps nowhere so much as in the classroom, in front of the students who attended Harry E. Wood High School in downtown Indianapolis, with its broken windows, darkened brick walls, and run-down facilities. This was an inner city school of the 1970s, when inner cities were polluted, abandoned, and falling apart, like in a scene from Soylent Green. But my uncle, a scholar like Sol, kept faith and served his students. He was pro-human. He chose love over hate, peace over war, freedom over slavery. And because of the things he valued, thus lived, he was remembered by his students, one of whom graduated in the year that letter was published in the Indianapolis Star and who came to the funeral home fifty-seven years later to see him and honor him one last time.

Copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley