James Blaylock's Thirteen Phantasms: escapism and nostalgia in science fiction

  Last week I was sitting in my room surrounded by my science fiction collection, wondering what to suggest to Doug as part of our reading project. Doug's taste sometimes differs from mine, as one would expect, but I have made some fairly accurate guesses in the past. A James Blaylock short story sprang to mind. I knew it involved the discovery of a collection of science fiction magazines. A quick search and I had not just the title "Thirteen Phantasms" but a link to its appearance in Omni.

https://omnimagazine.com/thirteen-phantasms/

My wife and I are huge fans of the work of James Blaylock and Tim Powers. They are close friends and coauthor stories and share characters like the poet William Ashbless. They appear side by side in John Clute's Science Fiction The Illustrated Encyclopedia. Clute says, " Some think Blaylock has only a remote connection with SF, and should be treated as a weaver of misty myths for New Age readers who like their truths soft, their music ethereal, and their sewage plants on the other side of the tracks. Others think he has a real science fiction understanding of the world. " (203) I would suggest his work comes out the Weird Tales tradition of science fiction that also nurtured writers like C.L. Moore, Ray Bradbury and Fritz Lieber. 

While I had the story in hardcover, I initially read the Omni version. As followers of this blog might guess, the illustration by Robert K. J. Killheffer also enthralled me. 

My version

"Thirteen Phantasms" alternates storylines — the first concerns the main character Landers who is living in a rented house in Southern California. He mentions a wife, Janet, who is no present. I assume she has died. Blaylock's characters often seem to single widowers, which infuses the story with a certain melancholy or bachelors. Either way, this allows them to indulge their pension for kaleidoscopes, stuffed axolotl and spontaneous road trips. He seems to be at loose ends; he does not, for example, seem to work. While speaking to his landlady, he learns that her late husband kept a collection of magazines in the attic. " against the north wall, lay four dust-covered cardboard cartons — full of “junk magazines,” or so Mrs. Cummings herself had told Landers this morning. "The cartons were tied with twine, pulled tight and knotted, all the cartons the same. The word Astounding was written on the side with a felt marker in neat, draftsmanlike letters. Landers wryly wondered what sort of things Mr. Cummings might have considered astounding, and after a moment he decided that the man had been fortunate to find enough of it in one lifetime to fill four good-sized boxes.

Landers himself had come up empty in that regard, at least lately. For years he’d had a picture in his mind of himself whistling a cheerful out-of-key tune, walking along a country road, his hands in his pockets and with no particular destination, sunlight streaming through the trees and the limitless afternoon stretching toward the horizon. Somehow that picture had lost its focus in the past year or so, and, as with an old friend separated by time and distance, he had nearly given up on seeing it again. "

The first issue Landers pulls out is for Dec. 1947, which features one of Simak's City stories, "Aesop", on the cover. 

Blaylock alternates Landers' story with that of a group of science fiction fans, the Newtonian Society, living in Glendale Califonia in the late 1940s. Russell Latzarel is the president, and the group meets at the home of Roycroft Squires. Squires is a bookseller and small press publisher, and it is the small press publications that will link the story of Landers with that of the Newtonian Society. 

"There were book ads at the back of the magazine, including one from something called the Squires Press: an edition of Clark Ashton Smith’s Thirteen Phantasms, printed with hand-set type in three volumes on Winnebago Eggshell paper and limited to a hundred copies. “Remit one dollar in seven days,” the ad said, “and one dollar monthly until six dollars is paid.”"

These magazines have an almost talismanic effect on Landers. After reading “Rain Check” by Lewis Padgett, he goes to the liquor store for the ingredients for the Highball described in the story. He also indulges in a bit of magic thinking mailing a dollar to Squires Press for a copy of Thirteen Phantasms. Later in the story, he will make the one hour trip to Glendale to visit Squires' former home. 

I have attached the link, and I would encourage you to read the story before reading further. Roycroft or Ray A, Squires was an actual fan, bookseller and small press publisher. He was born in 1920 and died in 1988. He was a friend of Ray Bradbury publishing the first edition of Bradbury's story "The Aqueduct" as well as other stories and poems by Bradbury, Fritz Lieber and Clark Ashton Smith. Squires was the literary executor for the estate of Clark Ashton Smith. I think he appears in other stories by Blaylock, but I am my relying on my increasingly faulty memory. I suspect he was a friend of both Blaylock and Powers. The epigraph at the beginning of Power's novel The Stress of Her Regard is from Smith's poem "Sphinx and Medusa". According to ISFDB, this poem only seems to have been published by Squires. While there are lots of Medusa mentioned, I could not find it in Smith's Selected Poems. 

On rereading it I enjoyed the story. However, the section dealing with the road trip to Glendale and Landers' attempt to get directions at the convenience store struck me. The passages perfectly capture his unhappiness with his life and a certain disconnect almost paranoia when confronted with life in Southern California at the present day. But for me, rereading the story in 2019 drove home both the power but also the danger of nostalgia. As a fictional character, Landers' longing for, in his mind, a more uncomplicated or more comfortable society inhabited by people he will find congenial is harmless. But Canada is currently undergoing a Federal election and many issues I thought we had resolved, topics like race, the environment, indigenous and LGBT rights and the rights of women are suddenly flash-points. Many people seem attracted by rhetoric about returning Canada to some (non-existent) golden age. It is hard for me to read Blaylock's story and not reflect on this. I would suggest that a careful reader can be aware of potential problems with a work without ignoring its' merit. I also do not think authors of fiction are writing autobiography and their work should not always be read as such. I do participate in the world of today, I vote and support causes, I think, are important. But like Landers I also find a bit of refuge in a room filled with science fiction and weird tales, both old and new, warts and all. 

Publisher: Roy A. Squires items published by year.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisher.cgi?29481

Covers

Thirteen Phantasms by Design Bryan Cholfin Ill. Greg Spalenka

Astounding 

"Aesop" by Alejandro

"The Roads Must Roll" by Hubert Rogers

"Exploration Team" by Emesh

"The Big Front Yard" by Freas

Follow Me by Emesh

The Stress of Her Regard by James Gurney

The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith The Mirage Press 

New Arrivals, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, aging

  A few posts back, I spoke of the death of Peter Nicholls the editor of the 1979, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. As I was preparing for that post, I took out my tattered edition and leafed through looking at the pictures. Which meant looking for my favourite, a 1937 edition of Argosy with an enchanting Burroughs cover by Emmett Watson. I then decided to see if there was a decent/affordable copy on ABE. I found one and since one of the main drawbacks of ABE is the initial shipping costs, I looked to see if the vendor has other items I could add. I knew from previous purchases that this vendor, Leonard Shoup, tends to carry Weird Tales related material so I did a quick search on Lovecraft. And there they were. I could not resist adding The Lurking Fear and Other Stories and The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Horror to the Argosy and now all I had to do was wait until the frantic barking of the dogs signaled the arrival of our letter carrier

When I first began collecting, rather than simply buying books randomly, I focused initially on two areas. Lovecraft with the obvious (to me) addition of Arkham House and other Weird Tales authors, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I chose Lovecraft because I was introduced to his work by a school chum at 15 and enjoyed it.

These two Lovecraft titles would be considered minor collections at best. The stories in the The Shuttered Room are pastiches or stories based on Lovecraft's notes by August Derleth. The Lurking Fear contains what I think I can safely describe as lesser tales, although I have a certain fondness for the wildly illogical The Lurking Fear, with it's warning against the dangers of inbreeding, cannibalism and a subterranean existence. I purchased them for the John Holmes covers, these were among the first editions (now lost) that I owned.

(Both author's works can be considered problematic in their treatment of women and minorities, I posted my thoughts on Lovecraft here

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-real-shadow-over-innsmouth-odd.html )

I chose Burroughs because his books filled the used bookstores of my youth and I loved the covers. James Blaylock in his wonderful Burroughs themed novel The Digging Leviathan expressed this beautifully. 

" Edward St. Ives was a collector of books, especially of fantasy and science fiction, the older and tawdrier the better. Plots and cover illustrations that smacked of authenticity didn't interest him. It was sea monsters; cigar-shaped, crenelated rockets; and unmistakable flying saucers that attracted him. There was something in the appearance of such things that appealed to the part of him that appreciated the old Hudson Wasp …,.  Once a month or so, after a particularly satisfactory trip to Acres of Books, he'd drag out the lot of his paperback Burroughs novels, lining up the Tarzan books here and the Martian books there and the Pellucidar books somewhere else. The Roy Krenkel covers were the most amazing, with their startling slashes and dabs of impressionist color and their distant spired cities half in ruin and shadow beneath a purple sky." (17)

Cover by Timothy McNamara (as by Ferret)

Roy Krenkel below

I have to admit this purchase was rooted very much in nostalgia or perhaps immaturity if you like. I have lately found the rise of irrationalism worldwide troubling and some days the world seems unrecognizable. As I get older my reading and collecting helps keep me mentally active, engaged and grounded. The process of aging has been beautifully described by Wendell Berry in his novel (a favourite of mine) Jayber Crow.

 "Back there at the beginning, as I see it now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.
     And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." (24)

I try very hard to avoid wallowing in memories of the past, and make sure that I read new and diverse works and authors, but I, like Edward St. Ives, cannot resist the occasional winged T-Rex.