APPENDIX

CRITICS ON ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

ANONYMOUS REVIEW

The King in Yellow, Bookman (London) 9 (October 1895): 29–30.

Mr. Chambers succeeds where so many try and fail. He makes our flesh creep. He has a gruesome ambition to torture us with mysterious horrors of the night and of madness, and the skill for it is not wanting in him. The book should be kept out of the way of all nervous and morbid persons, for even the healthy will dream miserably of his imaginings, and throw the volume aside with a shudder. But they will first have read it. He belongs to the school of his compatriot Poe, though his workmanship is of another stamp, and though he is perhaps a trifle more sensational. But he is not imitative. Within the suggestive covers of the little book there is an unusual amount of invention, and it is very rare that to nerve-assailing tales so much genuine talent is devoted. It is this talent that calls us to protest against some things. We feel doubtful of the right of anyone to invent such a tale as “The Yellow Sign”; the physical disgust that mingles with the mysterious horror condemns it. But yet we read that with the others, chained to them like a child to the fireside where ghost stories are circulating. Nevertheless, Mr. Chambers is so master of the power or trick of mysterious suggestion that he need never stoop to such means to cause a thrill. In “The Demoiselle d’Ys” he has landed us far more surely in a world of mystery by fine touches. His book divides itself into two parts. The first are stories of strange delirium, of characters subjugated and made mad by the influence of a book of evil genius, called The King in Yellow. The second contains mostly tamer stories of student life in the Latin quarter. The former are perhaps the more powerful and original, as well as the more sensational. But in them he is tempted to greater artistic sins—to force the note, whether of horror or of mystery, till it defeats its end, or to become self-conscious in his style, and to aim too much at fine writing. In the superficially less striking stories we see more promise, and, indeed, with respect to the beautiful Breton vision, “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” and the excellent description of the siege of Paris in “The Street of the First Shell,” it is too late to speak of promise. Self-conscious, rhetorical, sensational, Mr. Chambers may be; we name his faults not unkindly, feeling sure they will fall away from a writer of force and imagination, from one endowed with an unusual sense of beauty.

FREDERIC TABER COOPER

From “Robert W. Chambers,” Some American Story Tellers (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), pp. 76–78.

Following this novel [In the Quarter] come a succession of volumes which, with the exception of one or two negligible efforts, consist of collections of short stories: The King in Yellow, The Maker of Moons and The Mystery of Choice. Mr. Chambers has, at intervals since then, published other volumes of tales, such as The Tree of Heaven, and Some Ladies in Haste; but unquestionably, his fame as a writer of the short story will rest upon these earlier volumes. Widely as they differ in character and quality, ranging from painfully sinister horror-stories to fantasies light as rainbow bubbles, they all of them have one quality in common: A wanton unreality, a defiance of everything that, in our sober senses, we are accustomed to believe, coupled with a certain assumption of seriousness, an insistence upon little realistic details that force us for the time being to accept as actual the most outrageous absurdities, and to vibrate, as responsively as a violin string, to the touch of the author’s finger and the sweep of his imagination.

It would be easy to pick a dozen of these stories as characteristic examples of Mr. Chambers at the height of his fantastic mood. As a matter of personal preference, I would single out the story which gives its name to the volume entitled The Maker of Moons, for it runs the gamut of all the varied emotions that characterize these stories—the repulsion of tangible, physical ugliness, the dread of unguessed horror, the witchery of supernatural beauty, the pervading sense of invisible, warring forces of good and evil. We start with cold, prosaic details—a favorite trick of Mr. Chambers. The United States Treasury officials have reason to believe that an unscrupulous gang of counterfeiters have discovered a method of manufacturing gold, so adroitly that it defies chemical analysis, and they decide that these makers of “moonshine” gold must be suppressed. There is only one peculiarity about this gold—and herein lies the first suggestion of creepy repulsion—wherever a lump of the gold is found, there are pretty sure to be found also one or more curious, misshapen, crawling creatures, half-crab, half-spider, covered with long, thick, yellow hair, and suggestive of uncleanness and venom. The headquarters of these counterfeiters is somewhere in the northern woods, in a region of peaceful trees and still waters. And the whole effect of the story is obtained by the swift series of transitions between the physical violence of a ruthless man-hunt and the ineffable charm and beauty of a dream-lady, who appears to the hero repeatedly and without warning, standing beside a magic fountain and talking to him of a mystic city beyond the Seven Seas and the Great River, “the river and the thousand bridges, the white peak beyond, the sweet-scented gardens, the pleasant noise of the summer wind, laden with bee music and the music of bells.” It is hard, in a clumsy retelling of such gossamer-spun tales, to give the impression of anything more than a jumble of mad folly. Yet the tale itself leaves an insistent memory of supernatural beauty, seen vaguely through moonlight, and of time fulsome opulence of demon gold, distilling foully into writhing, crawling horrors.

BLANCHE COLTON WILLIAMS

From “Robert W. Chambers,” Our Short Story Writers (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1920), pp. 59–64.

Urged by the writing instinct and by a desire to express himself more rapidly than the medium of the brush would allow, he produced his first novel, In the Quarter (1893). The King in Yellow (1895) made his reputation and determined his career.

His life as art student may be gleaned from certain stories in this first collection. “Rue Barrée,” which begins “one morning at Julian’s,” presents Kid Selby “drunk as a lord,” a study of intoxication equalled only by Owen Wister’s in Philosophy Four, and as indubitably drawn from life. “In the Street of Our Lady of the Fields,” Valentine names the artists whom she knows and who are more or less contemporaries of Mr. Chambers: Bouguereau, Henner, Constant, Laurens, Puvis de Chavannes, Dagnan and Courtois. One might also deduce from the book that while in France he had become interested in armor and falconry, and then or later in the elixir of life and metempsychosis as starting points for adult fairy tales. “The Mask” and “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” though the latter is somewhat overburdened with technical language, are both admirable examples of the story-teller’s art. Almost from the first Mr. Chambers was sure of his manner. To know one art is to know the principles of all art. Throughout this volume and all those succeeding it, the author’s training in drawing and painting serves for first aid toward perfection of method. He might have been thinking of himself when he wrote of Leeds in “The Ghost of Chance” (in The Tree of Heaven): “The technique that sticks out like dry bones, the spineless lack of construction, fads, pitiful eccentricities to cover inability—nothing of these had ever, even in his student days, threatened him with the pit-fall of common disaster.” And if the tales here and there are already the efflorescence of exaggerated romance, he justified himself to himself. He said later, through the Countess in “A Journey to the Moon” (in The Adventures of a Modest Man): “Romance is at least amusing; reality alone is a sorry scarecrow clothed in the faded rags of dreams.”

In “The Yellow Sign”—to return to The King in Yellow—which combines an artist and his model with a supernatural theme, the author finds kinship with Edgar Allan Poe. The horror achieved through the coffin-worm watchman, the hearse and the yellow sign is unforgettable; and the mysterious book, The King in Yellow, so dire in its effects here and elsewhere, stands for the power of suggestion which Mr. Chambers grasped at the outset. Outside of the stories mentioned, the collection sows the seed for the more regrettable harvest-portions of the author’s later achievement. One striking exception should be noted. The beginning of the first story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” must draw a gasp from every reader who reads with awareness that it was written a quarter of a century before the year 1920 had dawned: “Towards the end of the year 1920 …The end of the war with Germany had left no visible scars upon the republic.… And even in New York a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors.… In the following winter (1911–1912) began that agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide, which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.” With all due allowance for failure to foresee every detail accurately, no one will hesitate after reading the first three pages of this tale, to add to Mr. Chambers’s other qualifications that of seer. For what he lacks in exactness is more than counterbalanced by the comprehensiveness of his vision.… It is to be hoped, however, that the Lethal Chamber never will be established!

Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice has pointed out, in The New York of the Novelists, that Mr. Chambers was living at 60 Washington Square South when he wrote The King and that not only the Square but its environs are used in a number of his early stories. But “The Robert W. Chambers of the later books, so far as the Borough of Manhattan is concerned, is essentially associated with the vast expanse of city which comes under the head of Tea, Tango, and Toper Land—in a word, the great hotels, clubs, and theatres; the sweep of Fifth Avenue from Murray Hill to the Plaza, and beyond along the east side of the Park, the Park itself, and the structures that line the Riverside Drive.”

The Maker of Moons appeared the same year as The King in Yellow. Of the eight stories bound in its covers, the title narrative of some fifteen thousand words illustrates the author’s progress in the unreal and the horrible. It has to do with the alleged discovery that gold may be synthesized, with the repulsive creature that accompanies the manufactured metal “something soft and yellow with crab-like legs, all covered with coarse yellow hair,” with Yue-Laou, who lived in the moon and perverted the Xin or good genii of China, with Yeth-hounds, or spirits of murdered children, passing through the woods at night, with the members of the Kuen-Yin, or sorcerers of China, and with Ysonde, the daughter of her who was created from a white lotus bud. Unreal, undoubtedly. But even the most fantastic of these motives are not without parallel: Eden Phillpotts’s “Another Little Heath Hound” is the counterpart of the Yeth hound; James Branch Cabell’s “The Hour of Freydis” (McClure’s, June, 1920) recalls the origin of Ysonde. Mr. Chambers makes immediately credible all these marvels by a device as old as DeFoe. Tiffany’s, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Canadian woods are real, and they are the factual scenes of the tale; Cockney-speaking Howlett and Gamekeeper David contribute to reality through person and dialect; the narrator Cardenhe aids conviction through his matter-of-fact style— notwithstanding the fantastic passages, which are integrated through contrast; his friends, Pierrepont and Barris, by their worldly pursuits, increase it.

Mr. Chambers is a necromancer here, as elsewhere. The moons Yue-Lauo conjured up rise about you like golden bubbles; later horror overwhelms you: “Up out of the black lake reared a shadow, a nameless, shapeless mass, headless, sightless, gigantic, gaping from end to end.” This power of magician he displays most beautifully in “An Ideal Idol,” which is Chapter IV of The Green Mouse, and part of the first story. He pursues his uncanny description of the horrible in “A Matter of Interest” (in The Mystery of Choice, 1896). The thermosaurus in “A Matter of Interest” is a close relative of the sea-monster in Kipling’s “A Matter of Fact,” copyright in 1892. It is interesting to compare the tales, to notice the American writer’s inventive facility and his riot of imagination in contrast to the economy and greater convincingness of Kipling.

In this volume, The Mystery of Choice, the author continues his stories of the supernatural. “The Messenger,” a ghost tale, covers the gap from 1760 to 1896; it uses thirty-nine skulls, a death’s head moth (the messenger) and the gruesome incident of the Black Priest by way of steps to the climax: “We were looking into the eye-sockets of a skull.” In conjunction with the modern Breton setting, with the simple minor characters of the action and with the lives of Lys and her husband, they produce sufficient plausibility for entertainment. At the other extreme from this longish story is “Passeur!” a brief conte, after the French models. The ghost returns, through a voice, to one who wished to be ferried over the stream, answering as in life to his “Passeur!”, “V’la Monsieur!” he marvels, “and when he raised his eyes he saw that the Ferryman was Death.”

H. P. LOVECRAFT

From “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012), pp. 69–70.

Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by du Maurier’s Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is “The Yellow Sign”, in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave worm’s. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of ’is fingers come off in me ’and.” An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head like thick oily smoke from a fat rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. What he mumbles is merely this: “Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up in the street by the sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur—from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seems to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men’s minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor—two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, “That man must have been dead for months.” It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.