First Verse

Although he did not receive credit in the table of contents, Clark Ashton Smith had, in the issue of July/August 1923, the first verse in Weird Tales. The first of his two poems in that issue is entitled "The Red Moon." You will find it on page 48.

The Red Moon
by Clark Ashton Smith

The hills, a-throng with swarthy pine,
Press up the pale and hollow sky,
And the squat cypresses on high
Reach from the lit horizon-line.

They reach, they reach, with gnarled hands--
Malignant hags, obscene and dark--
While the red moon, a demons'-ark,
Is borne along the mystic lands.

The second, a sonnet, appearing on page 68, is entitled "The Garden of Evil":

The Garden of Evil
by Clark Ashton Smith

Thy soul is like a secret garden-close.
Where the cleft roots of mandragores enwreathe;
Where lilies and where fumitories breathe,
And ivy winds its flower with the rose;

The lolling weeds of Lethe, green or wan,
Exhale their fatal languors on the light;
From out infernal grails of aconite.
Poisons and dews are proffered to the dawn.

There, when the moon's phantasmal fingers grope
To find the marbles of a hidden tomb.
In cypress-covert sings the nightingale;

And all the silver-bellied serpents pale
Their ruby eyes among the blossoms ope,
To lift and listen in the ghostly gloom.

There were three poems in the January 1924 issue of Weird Tales, "Hops" by Preston Langley Hickey, "Solution" by Clark Ashton Smith, and "The Cataleptic" by Charles Layng. Mary Sharon had the first poem by a women. Hers was called "The Ghost," and it appeared in the February 1924 issue:

The Ghost
by Mary Sharon

There is a ghost that walks for me,
     A Presence that I dread;
The Spirit of the Youth I was
     Before my dreams were dead.

I sit before my study fire,
     While shadows writhe along the wall,
And Spirit hands rap on the door,
     And ghostly feet glide down the hall.

Outside my window, lifeless trees
     Lift fleshless fingers to the sky;
The night wind whistles eerily,
     Its moaning echoes will not die.

This ghost of mine will not be laid,
    Time cannot set me free; 
It is the wraith of dear dead days,
    That comes to torture me.

Note the similarity in imagery between Smith's poem "The Red Moon":

They [the cypresses] reach, they reach, with gnarled hands--

And Mary Sharon's lines:

Outside my window, lifeless trees
     Lift fleshless fingers to the sky;

Should we take that as a swipe? An inspiration of one author to another? Or two minds arriving independently at the same image?

There were six poems in the issue of March 1924 but only one in the issue of April. That one, called "Nemesis," was by H.P. Lovecraft.

I will soon have more on the first of Lovecraft in Weird Tales, including lines of verse he inserted in his letters to "The Eyrie."

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

"The Eyrie," June 1923

In "The Eyrie" for June 1923, the editor, presumably Edwin M. Baird, once again lamented the sameness of the stories being submitted for publication in Weird Tales:

THE TIME has come to talk of cats and Chinamen, and rattlesnakes and skulls--and why it is these things abound in yarns for WEIRD TALES. Particularly cats and Chinamen. Believe it or not, every second manuscript we open, (and that's placing the average rather low) is concerned with one or the other, or both, of these.

Why is this? Is it because a cat and a Chinaman suggest the mysticism of the Orient, and thus seem excellent "props" for weird fiction? Or is it merely because both mind their own business, imperturbably pursue their destinies, and thereby create the impression that there's some deep-laid mystery here? We ask you that.

Whatever the reason, it's an odd and curious fact that when an author sets out to tell a weird tale his mind turns, as if instinctively, to cats and Chinamen. And then, for good measure, he not infrequently throws in a few rattlesnakes and a skull or two.

Sometimes the result is interesting. And sometimes it is awful! And again, sometimes, it is a ludicrous thing, unconsciously funny.

Letters came from the following readers (and one author): 

• R.E. Lambert , secretary of the Washington Square College of New York University, New York, New York; and

• Rev. Andrew Wallace MacNeill (1885-1937), minister of the Bethlehem Congregational Church, International Falls, Minnesota;

both of whom enjoyed "Beyond the Door" by J. Paul Suter, which had appeared in the April issue of Weird Tales. Joseph Paul Suter (1884-1970), the author, responded in a letter of his own.

• Conrad A. Brandt (1879-1947) of New York City, later a book and film reviewer for Amazing Stories, who observed: "The stories you have printed so far can be grouped under three general headings: Ghost Stories, Snake Stories, Insanity Stories. In your first issue you printed a story called 'Ooze' which approached the type of semi-scientific stories that are liked intensely by all those who are fond of the unusual, and if you would publish at least one story of this type in each issue of your magazine I am sure that your efforts would register larger sales."

• Adeline Jugol of Covina Apartments, Los Angeles, California.

• O.R. Hamilton of Austin, Texas.

• Witch Hazel of St. Louis, Missouri.

• A.M. Oliver of Akron, Ohio.

• P.W. Burrows of Kearney, Nebraska.

• J.C. Wolquist of Des Moines, Iowa.

• Miss Marguerite Nicholson (1907-1987) of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

• M. Nawrocki, probably Michael Nawrocki (1904-1978), of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

• Mary Sharon (1895-1962) of Galena, Kansas, soon to be an author and poet in "The Unique Magazine."

The lead story in Weird Tales for June 1923 is "The Evening Wolves" by Paul Ellsworth Triem. Nevertheless, William F. Heitman's illustration shows a snake. And already in the first paragraph is mention of a Chinese boy. The story itself is set partly in Chinatown.

This might be as good a place as any to bring up a point. Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted to fantasy fiction. I have written that myself in this blog. As we have seen, though, it wasn't so devoted, at least in the first four issues. Instead there were lots of crime stories plus stories with weird elements but no fantasy or supernatural content. The arrival of Amazing Stories--in April 1926--was still nearly two years away, but unless we come upon an issue of Weird Tales in which every story has some kind of fantastical element, then maybe credit as the first American magazine devoted to fantasy should go to the former rather than to the latter.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

"The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror"

Preston Langley Hickey (1900-1962) was just twenty-two years old when he began conducting a regular feature for Weird Tales called "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," which had been announced in the issue of April 1923 (on page 184). Four installments of "The Cauldron" followed in the issues of June, July/August, September, and October of 1923. The idea behind "The Cauldron" is that readers would submit accounts of their own weird or presumably supernatural experiences for publication. Hickey must have served as reader of manuscripts and editor. He was known later as an author of "true" or confessional-type stories in other pulp magazines. I believe stories in "The Cauldron" were of the same type. The idea was revived in the Weird Tales feature "It Happened to Me," published in eleven installments in March 1940 through November 1941. Fate magazine published similar accounts.

The authors of the dozen stories or accounts in "The Cauldron" are lumped in indexes with the writers of letters published in "The Eyrie." I don't think they should be. Instead, I think they should be considered a separate category of authors, though certainly not on the same level as the poets or the authors of fiction and longer non-fiction articles. Nonetheless, they are authors. Their stories or accounts and their names are as follows:

June 1923

• "The Ghost of Death" by Owen King of North Lamoine, Maine.

• Untitled by Otis Trevor, a reporter for the Denver Times.

• "The Death Plunge" by John Burkholz.

July/August 1923

• "The Lesson in Anatomy" by John R. Palmer.

• "The Black Nun" by H.F.K., a woman.

• "The Phantom Train" by Charles White, who may have been the same Charles White of Quebec City, Canada, who had a letter in "The Eyrie" in September 1923.

• "A Strange Manifestation" by Matt. Byrne Ap'Rhys, C.E. In case you're wondering, Ap'Rhys is indeed a surname, I believe of Welsh origin.

September 1923

• "Pat McCloskey's Ghost" by J.P. Cronister.

• "The Velvet Death" by Henry Trefon, no doubt a pseudonym of Mary Sharon (née Henrietta Prouty, 1895-1962) or of Mary Sharon writing with her husband, Van Simon Trefon (1886-1971). Mary Sharon had a letter in "The Eyrie" in June 1923, and she would soon have a poem, "The Ghost," in Weird Tales (Feb. 1924), the first by a woman in the pages of "The Unique Magazine."

• "Arthur Armstrong's Predicament" by D.G. Prescott, Jr.

October 1923

• "After I Was Dead" by John W. Walton, age fourteen, of Pennsylvania.

• "Mysterious Radio" by Maxwell Levey.

Next: "The Eyrie" for June of 1923.

Weird Tales, April 1923, page 184, announcing "The Cauldron."

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Mary Sharon (1895-1962)

Pseudonym of Henrietta Prouty aka Henrietta Trefon
Author, Poet, Freelance Writer
Born December 29, 1895, Galena, Kansas
Died December 21, 1962, Los Angeles city or county, California

Mary Sharon was the pseudonym of Henrietta Prouty, who was born on December 29, 1895, in Galena, Kansas. Her parents were William Harrison Prouty, a mineworker, and Evalina Melvina "Dolly" (Maitland) Prouty. If I have counted correctly, there were eight Prouty children in all, seven girls and a boy. One of the daughters died on the day she was born.

In reading about Henrietta Prouty and her husband in contemporaneous newspaper accounts, you start to wonder what was true about them and what was mere fancy. Or maybe I should say that you start to realize how little seems to have been true and how much was very likely made up. Did she really know Douglas Fairbanks? Was she really a film actress? Did she really write scenarios and form her own movie production company during the early 1920s? I don't think anyone can say.

And then you run upon a fact:

On May 31, 1919, Henrietta Prouty married a man named Van Simon Trefon (1886-1971) in Los Angeles, California. He was supposed to have been French. In actuality, he was a native of Salonika, Greece. Maybe he was a Frenchman born in Greece.

Then the questions begin again. Did Trefon really arrive in America while working for the Pathé film company? Was he really a stage and movie actor who performed with Madame Petrova, Norma Talmadge, Mary Pickford, and Broncho Billy Anderson? Was he really a linguist, possessing a mastery of ten languages and attaining the rank of captain in the U.S. Army while working in the foreign secret service? Again, I don't think anyone can say.

Neither Mary Sharon nor Van S. Trefon is in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). That may not mean a lot. There are probably myriads of films, actors, directors, photographers, and so on not listed there. Besides that, IMDb has a screwy new format. You can't be sure of finding anything. Mary Sharon or Henrietta Trefon is supposed to have written the scenario for a movie called The Redemption of John Williams in which she was to have played the female lead and her husband was to have been "the heavy lead." Directed by Hoddy Milligan and produced by Ozark Film Company, the movie was shot, in part, in Galena in 1921. Hundreds of people were supposed to have witnessed all of that, but did it really happen? Maybe. Probably. Karl Hoddy Milligan (1881-1951) was a real person. He's listed as a maker of local movies in Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States by Martin L. Johnson (2018). Maybe The Redemption of John Williams is hiding in its pages under a different title. Maybe Desert Lure, also shot by Ozark Film Company in Galena, also with Van S. Trefon in the heavy lead, is there, too. Or maybe all of these things--all of the films and all of the facts behind them--are now lost.

A newspaper item from 1923 is more down to earth. It announced that Trefon and his wife were establishing an office in Galena for showing slide shows of comic moving pictures. This was to have been in outdoor venues in the city. Enumerated in the 1925 Kansas state census in Galena, Trefon called himself a film photographer. The couple had three young daughters at the time, a pair of twins aged four and a seven-month-old baby. Trefon's name showed up again in newspaper articles of the 1930s when he was a cameraman and independent film producer. Using the stage name Barbara Sharon, his youngest daughter was supposed to have been in the Our Gang comedies.

The Trefons were divorced on November 17, 1934. Nonetheless, Henrietta continued to use her husband's surname as her own. She lived in Culver City, California, as of April 1, 1935. In 1940, calling herself a freelance writer, she was lodging in Los Angeles with her daughters, Marjorie Derelys, aged fifteen, and Barbara Dolores, aged twelve. I don't know where her other two daughters, the twins Lorraine Erma and Maureen Mary, were at the time. If they weren't already married, they soon would be.

In 1945, Henrietta renounced any allegiance to a foreign country and was repatriated as an American citizen despite never having lived abroad. She may have been required to do this because of her marriage to a foreign national. She gave her occupation at the time as "free lance news and magazine feature writer."

In 1950, Henrietta was in Los Angeles and living with her daughter Lorraine Lawrence and Lorraine's two daughters. There had been some drama a few years before involving another of her daughters, Barbara McGlynn. At holiday time 1946, Barbara, separated from her husband and facing eviction from her tiny apartment, drank caustic poison. Fortunately for herself and her baby daughter, she only suffered a burned mouth. Unfortunately she was unable to avoid eviction.

Henrietta Prouty Trefon, aka Mary Sharon, died on December 21, 1962, in Los Angeles city or county, California. She was only a few days short of her sixty-seventh birthday. Tragedy struck a little more than a month later, on January 23, 1963, when her daughter, Barbara Dolores "Bobby" Trefon Eaton and Barbara's four-year-old son died in a house fire. Two of Henrietta's other daughters, Maureen and Marjorie, were blessed with very long lives. I don't know what happened to Lorraine, but I hope she enjoyed a long life, too.

Mary Sharon's Letter, Poem, & Stories in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (written from Galena, Kansas) (June 1923)
"The Ghost" (poem, Feb. 1924)
"The Door of Doom" (Feb. 1924)
"The Cat of Chiltern Castle" (Sept. 1926)

Further Reading

Many newspaper articles on her, her husband, and family from the 1920s through the 1940s.

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley