Edgar Allan Poe & James Whitcomb Riley

Today is a day of two anniversaries. On this date in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore at age forty. The circumstances of his death remain mysterious. Also on this date in 1849, James Whitcomb Riley was born in Greenfield, Indiana. Two generations, six hundred miles, and the veil of death separated them. How could they ever have been connected? Both were poets. Of the two, only Edgar Allan Poe was published in Weird Tales. Riley could have been, as he wrote about ghosts, witches, and goblins. His verse even earned him a place in Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, edited by August Derleth and published by Arkham House in 1947. Poe was also in that volume, as were H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, among many others. But that wasn't a connection so much as an association. The connection between Poe and Riley was far older than that. It had come about seventy years before, in fact, in July 1877, when Riley, then twenty-seven years old, conspired to perpetrate a hoax on the reading public by passing off his poem "Leonainie," as an undiscovered work by Edgar Allan Poe. On August 2, 1877, the Kokomo Dispatch, its editor in on the hoax, published the poem:

LEONAINIE

Leonainie--angels named her;

And they took the light

Of the laughing stars and framed her

In a smile of white:

And they made her hair of gloomy

Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy

Moonshine, and they brought her to me

In the solemn night.--

In a solemn night of summer,

When my heart of gloom

Blossomed up to meet the comer

Like a rose in bloom;

All the forebodings that distressed me

I forgot as joy caressed me--

(Lying joy that caught and pressed me

In the arms of doom!)

Only spake the little lisper

In the angel-tongue;

Yet I, listening, heard her whisper,--

"Songs are only sung

Here below that they may grieve you--

Tales are told you to deceive you--

So must Leonainie leave you

While her love is young."

Then God smiled and it was morning,

Matchless and supreme;

Heaven's glory seemed adorning

Earth with its esteem:

Every heart but mine seemed gifted

With the voice of prayer, and lifted

Where my Leonainie drifted

From me like a dream.

It didn't take long for the hoax to fall through. Newspapers all over the country were quick to recognize it and to comment on the poem and its then unknown author:

From the New York Evening Post (Aug. 7): ". . . a poetic sin has been laid at [Poe's] door . . . ."

From the Philadelphia Commonwealth (Aug. 8): "The gin mills of Maryland and the Old Dominion never turned out liquor bad enough to debase the genius of Poe to the level of these wretched verses."

From the Baltimore American (Aug. 9): "The unfortunate poet [Poe] was no doubt guilty of many indiscretions, but it is hard to suppose that in his most eccentric mood he could ever have penned such wretched doggerel as that which is now attempted to be fastened on him under the name of 'Leonainie'."

From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Aug. 9): "The composition is wild enough to have been written under the influence of Egyptian or Terre Haute whiskey, and possesses, therefore, what an eminent journalist of this city defines as a local flavor."

And this tantalizing possibility:

From the Nashville Daily American (Aug. 10): "[Poe] will surely pay his respects to the scalp of the Indiana man who brought it out."

On August 25, the Kokomo Tribune, rival paper to the Dispatch, printed an exposé. James Whitcomb Riley was implicated as the author, and the editor of the Dispatch as his co-conspirator. Both suffered damage to their reputations. Riley lost his job. But he didn't stay down for long, and by the end of his life, all had been forgiven, as he was loved and cherished as the "Hoosier Poet" and the "Children's Poet." Even his poem was redeemed in the collection Armazindy, published on this date in 1894. In any case, Happy Birthday to the Hoosier Poet! And R.I.P. to E.A.P.

James Flora's illustration for "Nine Little Goblins" by James Whitcomb Riley, a poem reprinted in the book A Red Skelton in Your Closet (1965).

I would like to acknowledge the website James Whitcomb Riley, at this URL:

http://www.jameswhitcombriley.com/leonainie.htm

for information used to write this article.

Original text copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Origins of the Damp Man

Art reveals something of the artist. It's why so many artists burn their work or wish it to be burned upon their deaths. Luckily, there is a Max Brod for every Franz Kafka--or for almost everyone who would see his work destroyed.

Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan seem to have lived hidden away from the world. Was it really such a terrible place? Or were the two not up to confronting it? I don't know. The imagination is like a pitcher used to fill the vessel of the unknown. I would say, though, that a study of Allison V. Harding's stories would likely reveal something of their author or authors. That might be more than the Buchanans would want. In any case, I have read only five of their stories. "The Damp Man Again" and "Take the Z-Train" are especially revealing.

One of the things I see in reading these five stories is that Allison V. Harding seems to have drawn on previous stories for inspiration. The Damp Man series--"The Damp Man" (July 1947), "The Damp Man Returns" (Sept. 1947), and "The Damp Man Again" (May 1949)--have antecedents. Most obviously, these included stories of weird menace, terror, or horror from the 1930s. The Damp Man also seems like a comic book villain to me, and he came along when millions of Americans--children and adults alike--were reading comic books every month. Although he is a man, the Damp Man is also a science-fictional creation. The Scooby-Doo endings of weird menace stories don't work with him. He is more nearly a supernatural creature--a monster--but with a scientific explanation. In Weird Tales and other magazines, Fritz Leiber, Jr., explicated the need for a scientific (and urban) "ghost" for the twentieth century. The Damp Man would seem to fit in that category.

The Damp Man is also a psychopath and a stalker. We're familiar with his type today. He would have been a more novel concept in the 1940s. However, six years before "The Damp Man" was published, the psychopath or stalker showed up in one of the first movies in a new form. The form was film noir. The movie was I Wake Up Screaming (1941) with Victor Mature, Betty Grable, and Carole Landis. Also called Hot Spot, I Wake Up Screaming features a creepy detective played by Laird Cregar. When I saw the movie, I thought of all the real-life and fictional psychos and stalkers of later years, such as John Hinckley, Jr. Moreover, I thought of the Damp Man, and I wondered if Lamont Buchanan had seen I Wake Up Screaming and called upon it when he created his own creepy and obsessive character of the late '40s.

The Damp Man is a science-based monster. His corpulence and turgidity are results of science gone wrong. As a twentieth-century "ghost" (by Leiber's formulation), the Damp Man can also be considered a kind of water spirit or water ghost, a concept that goes back to ancient times and ancient mythologies. I won't go into the history of water spirits and water ghosts, but I'd like to mention one in particular. The fact that the Damp Man is explainable by science (such as it is) sets him apart from others of his kind. His defeat sets him apart as well, for it is by being frozen that the Damp Man is foiled in his obsession (which can be called a kind of haunting). The Damp Man wasn't the first water ghost to suffer his fate, however. In 1891, Harper's Weekly Magazine published "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" by John Kendrick Bangs, a humorous story with a twist ending. Unlike ghost stories of old, the spirit in Bangs' story is defeated by a scientific process, freezing, just as the Damp Man was frozen more than half a century later. "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" was reprinted many times over the years and four times between Lamont Buchanan's birth in 1919 and the publication of "The Damp Man" in 1947. That's not to say that Mr. Buchanan read the story or was inspired by it. But there was precedence for freezing a water ghost, just as there was precedence in movies, comic books, and pulp fiction for the kind of character Mr. Buchanan developed in his Damp Man stories.

To be concluded . . . 

How has the world gone on without James Flora? I don't know. But at least we have his life's work to sustain us. That work includes his illustrations for A Red Skelton in Your Closet, a collection of ghost stories published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1965. Here is Flora's illustration for "The Water Ghost" by John Kendrick Bangs, previously published as "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall."

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Monsters Alone on the Cover of Weird Tales

There were many monsters on the cover of Weird Tales over the years, but most of those monster covers showed the monster menacing a human being, very often a woman. You can see some of them in my previous postings:

• The Eternal Triangle: Man, Woman, Monster
• Woman and Monster
• Man and Monster
• Trees and Other Plants on the Cover of Weird Tales
• Machines on the Cover of Weird Tales
• Undersea Scenes on the Cover of Weird Tales
• Reaching Hands
• Red Robes and Cultists

There will be at least a couple of more categories with monsters, but the following three covers don't fit into any of them, for they show monsters alone with nary a human in sight.

Weird Tales, January 1947. Cover story: "The Hog" by William Hope Hodgson. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. Albert Roanoke Tilburne specialized in depicting animals, but he also had a flare for truly weird monsters. His image of Hodgson's diabolical hog is a perfect example of that.

Weird Tales, July 1948. Cover story: "Twilight of the Gods" by Edmond Hamilton (?). Cover art by Matt Fox. Who else could have created such a phantasmagoria?

Weird Tales, July 1949. Cover story: None. Cover art by Matt Fox. 

Fox's cover reminds me of Grandpa's Ghost Stories by James Flora (1978), a book that might just as easily be called Weird Tales for Kids. It's hard to recommend books to other readers. My list extends to three books for adults, True Grit by Charles Portis (1968), Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford (1968), and maybe The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1956). I feel much more confident recommending children's books. Grandpa's Ghost Stories is near the top of the list.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Trees and Other Plants on the Cover of Weird Tales

Plants make human life possible, yet writers of science fiction and fantasy have often shown them to be strange and menacing. For instance, the title character in The Thing from Another World (1951) is a plant, a kind of super carrot. The aliens from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the plague species in The Day of the Triffids (1962) are also plants. Then there was The Happening from 2008.

Science fiction and fantasy artists often let us know that something is strange or alien by painting it green. So why should plants be scary or threatening? They may be alien to us, and they may be green, but they are mostly harmless. There are of course plants to stay away from: poison-ivy and giant hogweed for their toxins, briars and brambles for their thorns. Maybe those plants remind us of wild beasts with their poisoned fangs and their claws that catch. More disturbing are plants that move, like the Venus flytrap. Maybe we imagine that plants might want to devour us. After all, we have been devouring them since the beginning. (A moving plant large enough to devour a human is a staple of fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories.)

I can think of a couple of other reasons why plants might be seen as strange or menacing. Both have something to do with weird fiction. First, the dense, dark, overgrown forest or jungle can seem frightening or oppressive. Wild animals lurk there. So might witches and demons and even the devil himself. The Puritans are supposed to have been frightened of the forest. Young Goodman Brown was stripped of his illusions after a night in the darkened woods. Second, if weird fiction is about the past and about decadence, then the image of a tree or a jungle overtaking or growing up among a ruined house or a ruined city becomes symbolic. It may just be too much for us to consider, for we, too, shall be overtaken as all things are by the passage of time.

Who says a weird story can't be told in the form of a gag cartoon? Charles Addams did it. So does Sam Gross. George Price (1901-1995), the creator of this drawing and one of my favorite New Yorker cartoonists, did it on occasion, too.

The great James Flora (1914-1998) told weird stories for children. I would highly recommend Grandpa's Ghost Stories (1978) and The Great Green Turkey Creek Monster (1976), about a plant that takes over a town. But then what would you expect from an artist named Flora? By the way, we just passed the one hundredth anniversary of Flora's birth--January 25, 1914. So Happy Birthday, Jim Flora!

Now let the covers begin.

Weird Tales, August 1926. Cover story: "The Woman of the Wood" by A. Merritt. Cover art by C. Barker Petrie, Jr. The tree on Petrie's cover is the most man-like of plants in this category. It would almost qualify as a monster except that it appears to be the woman's friend. When I first saw this illustration, I thought of the mythological story of Daphne and the laurel. 

Here's one example among many from the art world, "Daphne and Apollo" by the British Pre-Raphaelite artist John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).

Weird Tales, September 1928. Cover story: "The Devil Plant" by John Murray Reynolds. Cover art by C.C. Senf. We have seen this cover before in the category of man, woman, and monster. The sexual symbolism here is unavoidable except that the woman is being engulfed by the plant--an obvious symbol of the woman--while the man endeavors to cut her loose. If you would like to see more explicit sexual symbolism in the depiction of flora, look no further than the art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Weird Tales, April 1938. Cover story: "The Garden of Adompha" by Clark Ashton Smith. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. I pointed out before that there is a lot of looking in fantasy art, maybe in art in general. That's true in this image as well. Finlay had a talent for covering key parts of female anatomy with bubbles, stars, and other things. Here he used leaves and flowers such that we can look but not see. The plant isn't quite a monster, but it is moving.

Finlay's cover reminds me of "Persephone," a painting by Thomas Hart Benton from 1938-1939. I wonder if Benton would have seen Finlay's illustration before beginning his own composition.

Weird Tales, March 1952. Cover story: "Morne Perdu" by Alice Drayton Farnham. Cover art by Joseph R. Eberle. This is more or less a conventional haunted house picture of a kind we all drew as children, but of three monstrous trees (this image and the two to follow), I like this one the best.

Weird Tales, May 1953. Cover story: "Whisper Water" by Leah Bodine Drake. Cover art by Joseph R. Eberle. I guess nobody said, "We used a tree-monster on the cover last year. We'd better not do it again so soon," because here is another tree-monster. It looks like the white box is covering up a key part of the picture, but where else were they supposed to put the blurb?

Weird Tales, January 1954. Cover story: "Effie's Pets" by Suzanne Pickett. Cover art by W.H. Silvey. The illustration here is mostly about a Morlock-like woman and an unlucky guy, but there is also a monstrous tree in the lower right corner. Of all the plants shown here, this one reminds me most of . . .

The apple trees from The Wizard of Oz (1939), one of the creepiest parts of that movie.

Frank Frazetta got in on the act in 1970 with his own version of a monster-tree.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley