The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics) Read online

  THE STUFF OF

  DREAMS

  THE WEIRD STORIES OF

  EDWARD LUCAS WHITE

  THE STUFF OF

  DREAMS

  THE WEIRD STORIES OF

  EDWARD LUCAS WHITE

  Edited & Introduced by S. T. Joshi

  Dover Publications, Inc.

  Mineola, New York

  DOVER HORROR CLASSICS

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  Introduction © 2016 by S. T. Joshi

  Bibliographical Note

  The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2016, is a new anthology of thirteen works reprinted from standard sources. A new Introduction has been specially prepared for the present edition by S. T. Joshi.

  International Standard Book Number

  eISBN-13: 978-0-486-81063-8

  Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

  80615401 2016

  www.doverpublications.com

  Introduction

  PERHAPS EDWARD Lucas White (1866–1934) would be irked if he knew that amidst the mass of his literary productions spanning more than three decades, virtually the only works that are remembered are his tales of supernatural horror, especially those contained in the scarce collection Lukundoo and Other Stories (1927). Such a fate has overtaken many other writers—from F. Marion Crawford to Robert W. Chambers—renowned in their own day for work of a very different sort. It is perhaps a testament to the timeless quality of so much weird fiction that it can be relished by today’s readers far longer than social or political novels whose interest fades so rapidly after the circumstances engendering them have lapsed from public attention. In White’s case it must be doubly frustrating in that his weird tales were in his day received so unenthusiastically that a number of them failed to find lodgment in magazines even after repeated submissions, whereas his historical novels—all ably written and several of them still compellingly readable—achieved near-bestseller status.

  White was born on May 11, 1866, in Bergen, New Jersey. George T. Wetzel, for whose invaluable biographical research on White I am deeply indebted,1 notes that White’s paternal ancestors were French immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the 1730s, and his maternal ancestors were Irish immigrants who established themselves in Baltimore in the early nineteenth century. Shortly after his birth, White’s family moved to Brooklyn, where his father, Thomas Hurley White, was ruined in the “Black Friday” panic of 1869. The family was forced to separate, Edward going with his mother, Kate Butler (Lucas) White, to the town of Coxsackie, New York (on the Hudson River), while his father continued to work in the New York area. An attempt to run a farm in Ovid, New York, in the western part of the state, failed after a few years, and by 1874 Thomas had moved to Baltimore, where his side of the family now resided. The poverty that plagued the family through much of Edward’s early years left a lasting impression on him.

  For a variety of reasons Edward’s mother was unwilling to reunite the family in Baltimore, and for five years she and her husband saw little of each other. Edward was educated largely by his parents, but in 1877 was sent to the Pen Lucy School in Baltimore. His formal schooling was somewhat sporadic, but he made up for it by poring over books at the Peabody Institute Library. It was here that he developed his lifelong fascination for ancient history, specifically the history of Rome.

  In 1884 White entered Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed future president Woodrow Wilson (then an instructor in history) with his skills in a debating club. White had been plagued by migraine headaches since the age of ten, and throughout his life they caused serious disruptions in his life and work. However, the headaches that he experienced during his first year at Johns Hopkins were not migraines, but rather they were caused by overwork (another recurring problem for White), and a doctor advised him to take a long sea voyage. In June 1885 he did so, sailing on the freight vessel Cordorus to Rio de Janeiro. At that time he wrote the first version of his utopia, Plus Ultra, but on the return journey he found it unsatisfactory and threw it overboard.

  White had been writing fiction and poetry since his teens, but upon his return to Baltimore he destroyed virtually every scrap of this work—which he estimated to consist of more than 1200 items. Returning to Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1886, he received his B.A. in Romance Languages in 1888 and immediately began postgraduate studies, hoping to earn a Ph.D. But, by June 1890 he was forced to withdraw, as his father no longer had the money to fund his education. It was a bitter blow to White, seemingly dashing his hopes to secure a teaching position in a university. By 1892, however, he was hired to teach freshman Latin at Dartmouth, but he taught poorly and his assignment was not renewed. He subsequently landed a teaching job at Friends High School in Baltimore, thereby beginning a lifelong career as a high school teacher that would make him a legend to generations of boys in the Baltimore area. In 1899 he was hired at the Boys Latin School, where he remained until 1915. In 1900, after a long courtship, he married Agnes Gerry, the sister of a school friend.

  In the 1890s White resumed writing, and produced a great quantity of poetry. Among the products of this period were two striking poems, “The Ghoula” and “Azrael.” The latter, written in 1897, was not published until White included it in his book Matrimony (1932). Addressed to his future bride, the poem’s chief feature is its suggestion of White’s recurrent nightmares. White had been a vivid dreamer since the age of five, and nearly all his weird tales are the product of dreams, in many cases being literal transcripts of them. “The Ghoula” was inspired by a chance remark in Rudyard Kipling’s “Her Majesty’s Servants,” in The Second Jungle Book (1895), in which Hindu oxen are said to be instinctively afraid of the English because they know that the English will eat them. This set White to thinking of the reverse phenomenon: what if there were a creature that ate human beings? Hence “The Ghoula,” a chilling poem about a female ghoul, and the clear predecessor to White’s striking tale “Amina.”

  White published two stories in the small Baltimore magazine, Dixie, but the bulk of his short fiction was written in a remarkable span between 1905 and 1909. Of the tales in this volume, all but one date to this period. Among the first of them was “The House of the Nightmare,” which White dated 1905 when it appeared in Lukundoo. Unlike many of his stories, it sold readily, appearing in Smith’s Magazine for September 1906. “The Flambeau Bracket,” written in January 1906, had a less happy fate: it was rejected by 75 magazines over a 51-month period, finally landing in Young’s Magazine (the date of publication is uncertain; it probably appeared in late 1910 or early 1911). The story is a remarkable testament to Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on White. White notes that he had been a devotee of Poe since his early teenage years, and late in life he made the confession that “I have had to banish from my home every scrap of [Poe’s] printed writings, else I should waste my time and fuddle myself and reread him when I should be doing other things.”2 He also confessed that he destroyed nearly every scrap of his work that was influenced by Poe, but “The Flambeau Bracket” survived. Although based upon a dream, White admits that the dream itself was largely triggered by “The Cask of Amontillado.” It is White’s solitary excursion into non-supernatural horror.

  “Amina,” written in 1906, appeared in the Bellman on June 1, 1907, but several other weird tales—“The Message on the Slate” (written 1906), “The Pig-skin Belt”
(written 1907), “The Picture Puzzle” (written 1909), and “The Snout” (written 1909)—did not find periodical publication and appeared for the first time in Lukundoo. The title story of that collection—far and away White’s finest weird tale—was also written in 1907, but not published until it appeared in Weird Tales in November 1925—one of White’s few contributions to a pulp magazine. “The Song of the Sirens” appeared in severely truncated form as “The Man Who Had Seen Them” in Sunset Magazine (March 1909).

  White published a number of other stories around this time, but they are not weird. One, “The Little Faded Flag” (Atlantic Monthly, May 1908), is a fine tale of the Civil War.3 Another, a humorous story entitled “A Transparent Nuisance” (New York Herald, June 17, 1906), is marginally weird in being derived from Wells’ Invisible Man. “The Buzzards” (Bellman, July 25, 1908) is a melding of romance and suspense. On the whole, however, White’s uncollected stories are not of high quality, and have not been included in this volume.

  Wetzel describes several unpublished stories found among White’s effects. Two in particular seem of interest to devotees of the weird. The first is “Mandola.” Written as early as 1890, Wetzel summarizes the plot as follows:

  Mountjoy, the narrator, is studying prehistoric man and owns a plaster cast of an ancient skeleton found at Neandertal, Germany. Later he has a nightmare in which he sees the Neandertal relic as a living being, stalking in the woods. After waking he remarks, “In dreams the nightmare effect of terror is tenfold that which one feels awake. The agony of dread, the sickness and cold sweat, and the total inability to move is made up of a torture unpaintable.” (Here, of course, White is clearly describing his own reactions to nightmares.) Over a period of time the terror of this nightmare affects Mountjoy’s memory. One day he decides to see how badly his memory has been affected by trying to recall details from his dreams. He evokes the Neandertal image, and sees it again as if in his nightmare— but now it strikes down with its club at a shawl near where he is sitting. Later he looks for his fiancée, Mandola, who earlier had wandered off for a walk in the wood. He finds her seated on a stone, dead from fright, at her feet her pet dog a pulp of blood and bones; and on the ground footprints bigger than any human’s. His ability to visualize has actually conjured into existence the horror from his nightmare.

  Wetzel describes the other story as follows:

  “The Serge Coat” is another story based on White’s actual dreams. He described it as “of double location and thought-transference,” but it would more accurately be termed a variation on the doppelgänger theme. Hume, the narrator, is walking in the autumnal countryside. Becoming overheated, he takes off his jacket and puts it under his arm along with a thin serge topcoat he is already carrying. Later in his walk he discovers that the serge coat is missing. The following spring he is tramping again over the same countryside, and by an accidental series of events enters a barn wherein he finds the lost coat. Several young women in the adjoining house chat with him as he passes. On arriving home, he tosses the coat in a drawer and lies down to nap. When he awakes, he believes he dreams of entering the barn and talking again to the women. And as he stirs, his landlady, who had been nursing him as he lay actually unconscious for ten days, notices the serge coat, which she is sure was not in the house at the onset of his illness. Hume keeps his puzzlement to himself. Not long after he encounters the young women, who say they met him not on the day he believes, but during the time of his unconsciousness.4

  It is evident that White was frustrated by the lack of commercial success of his short fiction. Other aspects of his work met a similar fate. In 1908 he published his first book, a slim volume of poetry entitled Narrative Lyrics. Although it appeared under the imprint of the prestigious G. P. Putnam’s Sons, it was (as commonly, both then and now) issued at White’s own expense, and sold only 78 copies in two years. As a result, White decided to turn to the writing of novels, and here he enjoyed markedly better success.

  El Supremo: A Romance of the Great Dictator of Paraguay, which White began as early as 1910, was published in 1916 by E. P. Dutton and was both a popular and a critical success. This historical novel, set in 1815, deals with Dr. José Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, the autocrat who ruled Paraguay from 1813 to 1840. Although more than 700 pages in length, it was reprinted at least ten times, the last in 1943. White followed this up with two superlative historical novels about his beloved Rome, The Unwilling Vestal: A Tale of Rome under the Caesars (1918) and Andivius Hedulio: Adventures of a Roman Nobleman in the Days of the Empire (1921), both published by Dutton. Both were well received by critics and readers; the former went through twelve printings by 1937, and the latter had been printed fourteen times by 1941. H. P. Lovecraft, also an ardent devotee of Rome, considered Andivius Hedulio the finest and most realistic novel about the Roman Empire he had ever read, far surpassing such popular works as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896) and William Stearns Davis’ A Friend of Caesar (1900). White, however, was not able to sustain his popularity. Helen (1925) was a lackluster novel about Helen of Troy, and the nonfiction work Why Rome Fell (1927)—which, in a reprise of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, blamed the fall of Rome on the spread of Christianity—received very mixed reviews, some praising the work but others condemning it for superficiality and factual errors. White’s final book, Matrimony (1932), is a touching account of his marriage with Agnes, who had died on March 30, 1927.

  White’s two collections of tales, The Song of the Sirens (1919) and Lukundoo, were also accorded a mixed reception, and neither sold well. Aside from the title story and “The Flambeau Bracket,” The Song of the Sirens is largely devoted to tales of ancient Rome. In his afterword to the book White takes pride in maintaining that these stories are “veracious glimpses of the past, without any marring anachronisms,” but as stories they often drag and are weighed down with excessive historical baggage. Another story in this volume, “Disvola,” is a vivid tale of the Italian Renaissance, based on a dream. As noted, most of the stories in Lukundoo date to 1905–09, but he did manage to write the tale “Sorcery Island” in 1922, although it too remained unpublished until its incorporation into the collection. This story is perhaps dimly related to the unpublished “Diminution Island,” a work dating from as early as 1896.

  For much of his adult life, however, White was at work on a variety of rewrites of his destroyed utopian novel, Plus Ultra. He had begun rethinking the work from as early as 1901, and in 1918–19 he produced a short novel, From Behind the Stars, but it remained unpublished. Then, beginning in 1928, a year after his wife’s death, White devoted the next five years to Plus Ultra, incorporating From Behind the Stars as the opening “book” of the work. The result is an immense, 500,000-word novel with many science-fictional elements that might well be of interest to present-day readers; but the novel’s length caused it to be rejected by several publishers, and it remains unpublished among White’s effects.5

  It is perhaps fortunate that White—who in later years sported a long white beard and came to look rather strikingly like Bernard Shaw—did not attempt to be a full-time writer, for he would have suffered even greater poverty than he experienced as an impecunious school teacher, especially prior to his novel-writing period. Wetzel’s biography is full of charming recollections by White’s students, and he clearly came to love the instruction of young scholars into the mysteries of the ancient languages. From as early as 1911 he had begun teaching at the University School for Boys in Baltimore, and he started working there full-time in 1915, remaining until his retirement in 1930. Edward Lucas White died on March 30, 1934—seven years to the day after his beloved wife.

  It is difficult to convey in small compass the distinctive qualities of White’s weird tales, especially as I am reluctant to reveal their plots for those coming upon them for the first time. Aside from their inspiration from dreams, their most salient feature is perhaps the sheer bizarrerie of their weird manifestations. Rarely do we find the conventi
onal ghost in White’s work; instead, we come upon the female ghoul in “Amina,” the hideous growth that plagues the protagonist in “Lukundoo,” the monster that is Hengist Eversleigh in “The Snout,” and so many others. Even when a ghost is present—as perhaps is the case in “The Message on the Slate”—it exhibits itself in a piquant and novel way.

  White admitted that he had renounced all religious belief as early as the age of fourteen, and this very lack of belief may have contributed to the effectiveness of his tales. As H. P. Lovecraft noted in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”:

  It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness than do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.6

  It is this sentiment that lends poignancy to the charlatan clairvoyant’s confession in “The Message on the Slate,” that the supernatural phenomenon he has just experienced “has demolished the entire structure of my spiritual existence.”

  There is perhaps a reason to complain that White’s development of his narrative is at times a bit slow and drawn-out. Indeed, it would appear that several of his lengthier tales were rejected largely on the grounds of length; as noted, “The Song of the Sirens” was first published only in a heavily abridged form. But in most instances, White’s leisurely narration is designed to build up an insidious atmosphere of horror by the slow accretion of bizarre details, and in the end we find that few of his tales are open to the charge of prolixity. He had learned well from his early idol Poe, and adhered fully to Poe’s conceptions of the “unity of effect.”

  White was able to mingle his love of classical antiquity and his love of the weird only in “The Song of the Sirens”; but his tales feature other interesting bits of autobiography. The ship Medorus that is the setting for “The Song of the Sirens” is a clear reflection of the Cordorus, on which White sailed in 1885. “Sorcery Island”—a weird and ambiguously supernatural tale that uncannily foreshadows the “Prisoner” television series—may also owe something to White’s travels. “The House of the Nightmare” evokes the rural setting of White’s early years in New York.