AT the end of the nineteenth century, important authors were writing fantasy for adults. So it is perhaps a shock to realize that the two figures from the beginning of the twentieth century who arguably had the greatest influence on the development of fantasy were writing very specifically for children: L. Frank Baum and E. [Edith] Nesbit. Baum and Nesbit between them created what Brian Attebery has termed “the indigenous fantasy”. We know more about Baum’s ideas for this. Baum wrote that he wished to create for American children a fantastic world that owed nothing to the fantasy traditions of Europe. Nesbit was less forthcoming. A professional writer who wrote to support a growing family, Nesbit wrote in a number of different genres for both adults and children. The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), a non-fantastical book, seems to be written as much to present children to adults as for children, in the tradition of Richard Jeffries’s Bevis (1882). In her first fantasy for children, Five Children and It (1902), that tone disappears, and instead we get one of the first examples in children’s literature where the reader is asked to ally with (rather than be amused by) the child. In this and her subsequent fantasies (including The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), The Story of the Amulet (1906), The Magic City (1910), Nesbit also introduced the idea that the fantastic could burst through into our world at any moment, without necessarily being scary. These tales are told in a matter-of-fact voice: London, or your back garden in bright daylight, become venues for fantastical occurrences. A fairy can be found in a sandpit at the bottom of the garden; but as fairies with gossamer wings would not survive long, evolution (and Nesbit was a very scientific person) has produced something hairy, that hibernates, and has a terrible temper before breakfast.
Edith Nesbit created what we now think of as the urban fantasy (or sometimes “low fantasy”) which, while the definition keeps changing (currently it seems to require werewolves), can be understood as magic entering into and disrupting the urban environment. L. Frank Baum Americanized the other-world fantasy. The portal fantasy was still quite new when Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the first in a long series. Previous fantasies in this mode from the English tended to be rather vague about modes of transport to the fantasy world, the location of that fantasy world, and its politics. Baum’s Oz appears on maps (indeed, his are arguably the ancestors of all the maps which introduce so many modern fantasy trilogies). In later books there is a suggestion that Oz exists very close to Kansas. It can be reached in a house picked up by a whirlwind, or by sailing down a river. It has different countries, each with different polities, and there is a suggestion of an economic system. None of this accounts for the popularity of this book and its sequels. In 1900, when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published, there was a debate in progress about the nature of the American child. Concern about large numbers of apparently abandoned children in American cities had led to the growth of a number of children’s aid societies and to the orphan train movement, which took children and placed them as workers on farms. The idea was that the values of independence and self-sufficiency that these children had learned on the city streets would benefit these rural areas. Baum’s Dorothy is a construction of one such child: smart, cocky, and thoroughly self-centred. In the book the three main characters, the Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man, join with Dorothy solely because their mutual purposes intertwine; the notion of friendship and cooperation run second to a philosophy in which each achieves the best for all by serving their individual goal (in the film, friendship and helping Dorothy is much more to the fore). This, as much as the fantasy element, is one reason why many Christian Americans were repulsed by the book, while others adored it. A second reason for its popularity was its apparent allegorical element. The drought in the book’s Kansas, the silver shoes,5 and the fraudulent wizard, all appeared to speak to the state of contemporary America. The third element in its popularity is that Baum was a highly professional publicist who moved rapidly into the movies. Before 1939 there had been six silent Oz movies. The 1939 MGM version hugely boosted the book’s popularity but it was its recycling on television from the 1950s onwards that sealed its classic status throughout the world, among many people who have never actually read the book (and for whom the book can come as a shock).
Whether Baum or Nesbit were the trigger, the first years of the twentieth century produced highly inventive fantasy for children. In 1911 J.M. Barrie published Peter Pan and Wendy, a novelization of his 1904 stage play. In 1906 Rudyard Kipling, already well known for his Indian stories, including a number of ghost stories and the celebrated animal fantasies, The Jungle Book (1894) published Puck of Pook’s Hill, an innovative collection in which Puck tells a story and magically plucks other people from different periods of British history to tell their tales. In 1908 Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows began its progress to become one of the most established classics of children’s literature. A gentle satire on the English gentry, this animal fable also contains an astonishingly elegiac strand of pagan revival which stands out from an otherwise hyper-conventional novel of Englishness and which later formed a core in P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books (the first is Mary Poppins, 1934) as well as influencing – among others – the band Pink Floyd. The Mary Poppins books were nostalgic, looking back to a perhaps nonexistent Edwardian England, but radical in the degree to which they incorporated the ideas of the occultists, including practitioners such as Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists. They were also rather sinister, without being particularly moral.
After the initial pre-war flourish, there is rather a gap in the provision of fantasy for children. From Australia, Norman Lindsay wrote and illustrated the children’s classic, The Magic Pudding: being the adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff, which tells of a walking, talking pudding who loves to be eaten and is never wholly consumed. The characters are a sailor, a koala and a penguin. It was written to settle an argument: a friend argued that children liked fairy stories, while Lindsay argued that they would much prefer to read about food. Eleanor Farjeon’s Martin Pippin series (Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, 1921) and John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk (1927) appeared, but it is in the 1930s that a revival really occurs, with the work of P.L. Travers (see above), Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1935), the work of Hilda Lewis (The Ship That Flew, 1936, and others), and perhaps the best-known children’s writer of this period, Elizabeth Goudge (The Little White Horse, 1940), who continued producing excellent fantasies into the 1960s. Enid Blyton, the writer who would dominate children’s adventure fiction across the British Commonwealth after the Second World War, produced three important fantasies in this period: The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (1936), The Enchanted Wood (1939) and The Magic Faraway Tree (1943).
Not strictly fantasy, but always included in the rollcall of the fantastic, are works of animal fable. The most famous of course are those of Beatrix Potter. Potter published her first fable, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in 1902 and followed it by a series of similar fables. The illustrations are a strange combination of the extremely realistic and the fabulous. Geese look like geese even with a bonnet on; a small kitten looks as if a little girl has stuffed him into a jacket. Yet the tales are surprisingly bitter. Squirrel Nutkin (1903) loses his tail to the owl. The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913) is either a story of two pigs sold off to become bacon, or alternatively a metaphor for the abuse of child labour. In The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908) are we learning about a careless duck, or a seduced maidservant? Read metaphorically or metonymically, these are frightening tales for a small child and a lesson to adults in just how much children can thrive on fear fiction. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows also fits this category, as does Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle adventures (1920–52) and, while not for children, George Orwell’s powerful satire, Animal Farm (1948).
The toy story had been a staple since Hoffmann and has retained its appeal for very young children. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) is a tale of a child’s imagination, although as much later re-imagined by Disney it has become clearly fantasy. Across the Atlantic, Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) offered a combination of animal fantasy and toy story. Joel Chandler Harris had popularized and Americanized animal fables with the publication of Uncle Remus in 1881 and these were filmed in 1946 by Disney as Song of the South – the book, it should be noted, lacks the racial stereotyping of the movie and is an excellent piece of anthropology. Walter Brooks’s Freddy the Pig (1927–52) placed a pig in the role of a curious young boy and E.B. White charmed readers with both Stuart Little (1945) and the slightly later Charlotte’s Web (1952). Stuart Little is a novel of “fancy”, one of those tales that makes no sense whatsoever, in this case of a mouse born into a human family. Charlotte’s Web is about a pig rescued from his fate by a spider. However, there seems to be relatively little children’s fantasy, in the sense of full fantasy, in the United States in this period. There is Carl Grabo’s, The Cat in Grandfather’s House (1929), and Rachel Field’s Hetty, Her First Hundred Years (1929), but the only truly fantastical books aside from Oz seem to be Ruth Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon (1948) and its sequels, and the two short stories from James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks (1949) and The Wonderful O (1955) which are whimsy-vergingon-nonsense fairytales. In hindsight the two key books for children in this period are Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) but their impact was so enormous that we will discuss them separately in chapter four.
The emergence of something clearly marketed for children may have supported the growth of fantasy that had a very adult feel. In Britain and Ireland we can identify something that we could call “weird fancy”. This material was highly experimental, and if you approach it with the kinds of expectations imposed on post-1960s fantasy it can too easily read as failure. It is this period, however, which has provided the taproot texts for the fantasy writers of the late 1990s and 2000s. Arthur Machen’s first success was “The Great God Pan” (1890), in which the pagan god sires a charismatic young woman who causes a stir on the London social scene; but he achieved more popularity in the early years of the new century with stories inspired by his love of the occult. His short story “The Bowmen” (1914), about ghostly soldiers from the Battle of Agincourt coming to help the British troops in the First World War, allegedly inspired the belief in the Angels of Mons. William Hope Hodgson, who himself died in the War, had similarly produced a number of fantasies of supernatural horror: The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907); The House on the Borderland (1908); and the astonishing prolonged vision of an eerie far future landscape, The Night Land (1912). Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908) and Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1910) invent the magical or supernatural detective story. Lord Dunsany, an Irish peer, developed the full fantastic world in such novels as The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and in numerous short stories in which powerful gods and demons play with mankind. Even more extraordinary was the fiction of E.R. Eddison: The Worm Ourobouros (1922) tells of the war between Witchland and Demonland in a world strongly influenced by Norse myths, that Eddison called Middle Earth; the trilogy which began with Mistress of Mistresses (1935) was about three kingdoms ruled by King Mezentius, in a kind of afterlife of the fantasy world of the previous novel. These novels still have the power to shock through their hedonism and amorality. In the 1930s, however, we have a revival of Christian fantasy, by Charles Williams (starting with War in Heaven, 1930) and, most memorably, by C.S. Lewis, with his pre-Narnian “space trilogy” (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943 and That Hideous Strength, 1945). Lewis’s most striking book of this period was The Screwtape Letters (1942) in which a devil offers advice to his nephew. These books will be discussed in the next chapter.
The two British authors who arguably merit most attention are both known for just one of their books: David Lindsay and Hope Mirrlees. Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) tells of a traveller who arrives at a séance where a stranger persuades him to join him on a rocket trip to another world. This is about as straightforward as the book gets. From here on in, a tale of planetary exploration is combined with a version of Norse mythology and Christian mysticism to produce a blinding headache of a book in which the tone shifts constantly from 1920s colloquialisms to William Morris high fantasy excess. The book is completely amoral, totally unpredictable, and constantly fascinating. In contrast, Mirrlees’s tale of a middle-class, stuffy faux-English village, corrupted by the importation of fairy fruit (probably a reference to the heroin problem of the 1920s) seems quite sweet. Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is an unusual book, in that the first two-thirds of the story are about keeping fairy at bay and pretending that it does not exist. Clearly influenced by Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market” (1862), Mirrlees uses all the techniques so far devised to create the air of the fantastic to describe the small town in which the story is set. Faerie when it intrudes, and when we eventually cross over into faerie, is often described in quite mundane terms. The protagonist of the tale is a simple burgher, neither young nor handsome, an unremarkable man: in a way he is a precursor of Bilbo or Frodo Baggins. Although recognized at the time, neither of these books stayed in print, and were largely forgotten until reprinted in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in the 1970s. David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus has inspired writers as diverse as Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison, while traces of Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist can be seen in the work of John Crowley, Elizabeth Hand, Robin McKinley, Michael Swanwick and Neil Gaiman.
A third British author to begin writing in this period, whose major book has rarely been out of print and has been much more widely read than Lindsay and Mirrlees, was T.H. White. His masterpiece was The Sword in the Stone (1938), the story of the education of the young Arthur by his tutor Merlyn. Much of the humour comes from the anachronisms: knights like Sir Grummore Grummursum and King Pellinore presented as old-fashioned English gentry who treat questing much like fox-hunting, but above all Merlyn, who is living backwards and has thus already experienced Arthur’s future. The most memorable sequences are when Merlyn transforms the Wart (Arthur) into various birds and animals as part of his education (and ours). The story was continued with The Witch in the Wood (1939), in which King Arthur starts his reign, and The Ill-Made Knight (1940), which deals with Lancelot and the Grail quest, and is much closer to Sir Thomas Malory than the first two volumes. In 1958 White published The Once and Future King, in which these three novels are rewritten – The Witch in the Wood is halved in length and becomes The Queen of Air and Darkness – and a fourth is added, The Candle in the Wind, dealing with the last weeks of Arthur’s life. The tone of the whole is much darker, and what began in The Sword in the Stone as a light-hearted parody of the Arthurian tradition, eminently suitable for young readers, became a depressing lament for a past age, very much reflecting Britain’s experiences in the 1940s. Luckily, the original version of The Sword in the Stone has often been reprinted, and is much recommended. Another much-loved fantasy by T.H. White was also published in this period, this time very clearly intended for children. Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) imagined that the descendants of the Lilliputians whom Gulliver brought back home with him are still living on an island in the grounds of Malplaquet (that is, Blenheim Palace).
Alongside the rise of the fantasy novel, the growing magazine market provided a venue for a number of short-story writers. Publications such as Blackwood’s Magazine (1817–1980) and towards the end of the nineteenth century, Strand Magazine (1891–1950), The Idler (1892–1911) and The Pall Mall Magazine (1893–1937) all carried ghost stories. At the end of the nineteenth century The Pall Mall Magazine carried stories of the fantastic in almost every issue. In this period, tales of the fantastic were still very much part of the mainstream of the British publishing scene. It is in these magazines that we see the continuing tradition of the “English” ghost story, extending out from the mid-nineteenth-century custom of telling ghost stories as Christmas stories (as in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, 1843). By the 1900s, ghost stories were staple and highly popular magazine fare, attracting contributions from writers as prominent as Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle. The English ghost story of this period is strongly associated with the popularity of spiritualism and the occult generally, particularly in the period of widespread grief and melancholy that affected Britain in the years immediately after the First World War. Conan Doyle was himself an advocate of spiritualism; however, most of the major ghost story writers were sceptics.
The best remembered writer of ghost stories of this period is M.R. James, a distinguished academic and medieval scholar whose ghosts frequently erupt into the quiet world of the cathedral or university college. James started writing in the 1890s when Conan Doyle’s detective fiction led the short-story field, and James brought into the ghost story a similar “domestic” setting. James’s main collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), was followed by other collections including one of medieval Latin ghost stories. James and his emulators (including a group of Oxbridge academics and clerics now known as the “James Gang”, such as A.C. Benson, R.H. Malden, and A.N.L. Munby) created a distinctive form of ghost story, often quiet, with a ghost that threatens through social disturbance and the revelation of secrets. These are stories of unease and tense fear, rather than of horror and terror. The mode of ghost story championed by James is predominantly a short-story form, and as a consequence one of the best-known names in the history of the English ghost story is Lady Cynthia Asquith, a ghost story writer herself, but best known for editing superb collections: The Ghost Book (1926) and its numbered sequels, such as Shudders (1929) and When Churchyards Yawn (1931). Another significant anthologist was Christine Campbell Thompson who edited an annual series starting in 1925 with Not at Night and ending in 1937 with The Not at Night Omnibus. In 1951, Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard collaborated on We Are For the Dark (1951). The English ghost story is very much of its time although it was revived briefly in the 1970s when Pan began a series of anthologies which reprinted many of these stories, and also through the work of Robert Aickman (“The Trains”, 1951 and “Compulsory Games”, 1976,) and Joan Aiken who brought to the ghost story a touch of affectionate whimsy (as in “Humblepuppy”, 1972, and “A Foot in the Grave”, 1989).
On the other side of the Atlantic, the publishing context for fantasy was rather different. Until the late nineteenth century a combination of paper shortage and poor transport networks limited the emergence of a national magazine industry. There were some small elite magazines, for example The Clack Book (1896–7), but the first fiction magazine really to achieve anything like national circulation was The Argosy, running under various names from 1892 to 1988. This was converted from a children’s magazine in 1896, and regularly ran stories of the weird and the fantastic. As wood-pulp paper became available the economics of printing shifted, creating a demand for material to fill new magazines. The first specialist fantasy magazine was The Thrill Book, which lasted for six months in 1919. Far more important was Weird Tales, which was established in 1923 and ran to 1954. Weird Tales provided a platform for authors including H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Ray Bradbury. After Weird Tales the most significant was the short-lived Unknown (1939–43), a spin-off from the great science fiction editor John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction. Because most of the American writers of this period were professionals aiming to earn a living, they wrote across genres and in many different modes, but we can still identify some differences between Weird Tales and Unknown.
Weird Tales is most identified with the work of H.P. Lovecraft: indeed, his stories proved so popular that his presence arguably guaranteed the magazine’s financial soundness, and the universe he created attracted other writers to work within it. His most famous short stories include “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), “The Rats in the Walls” (1924) and “The Color Out of Space” (1927). Lovecraft’s stories were typified by a morbid belief in something terrifying beyond, but it is his language that continues to identify the Lovecraftian sub-genre. As Colin Wilson and David Langford wrote, “HPL was always inclined to hurl around words like ‘eldritch’, ‘monstrous’, ‘miasmic’ and ‘gibbous’ with the abandon of a tachist artist, flinging paint at the canvas.”6 Lovecraft’s long-term influence among writers of fantasy seems to be mostly as an entry text, and enthusiasm is frequently followed by cringing embarrassment. His influence is nevertheless evident, among the writers fostered by August Derleth, Lovecraft’s publisher and publicist, and much more recently among the highly intellectual writers of the New Weird (see chapter eleven). Lovecraft’s work has lived on beyond the written page. In 1981 Sandy Petersen and Chaosium released Call of Cthulhu, the role-playing game, complete with Cthulhu, the Malign Sleeper, and a pantheon of terrifying Great Old Ones such as Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath; the game has been enormously successful and produced a range of merchandise. The one most commonly seen is the green stuffed Cthulhu monster, which has been photographed eating the brains of many a famous science fiction writer.
Other writers of weird fiction in Weird Tales included Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote short stories set within several imaginary worlds, based very loosely on traditional mythological places, including Hyperborea (stories from 1931 to 1958) and Atlantis. The best-known female writer of this loose grouping was C.L. Moore. Her “Shambleau” (1933), a story of a soldier seduced by a Medusa, is strictly speaking science fiction, but it is painted in the dark colours and enduring sense of threat we associate with the weird. Her other well-known story, “The Black God’s Kiss” (1934), was the first of a series of stories featuring a female warrior in fantasy medieval France, Jirel of Joiry. This short story, with its similarly florid language, and dark overtones, is also strongly associated with the emergent sub-genre of sword-and-sorcery, which is initially understood as adventures of sword-wielding non-magical heroes up against various forms of magic.
The first name in sword-and-sorcery is Robert E. Howard. He began writing for Weird Tales in 1925 when he was nineteen and published most of his stories featuring King Kull and Conan the Barbarian, in that magazine, up to his suicide at the age of thirty. Howard’s reputation has been badly damaged by the posthumous editing and rewriting of his work by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter starting in the late 1960s, and more recently by the movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (1981). The version of Conan handed down to us is of a not terribly bright, muscle-bound, over-sexed adolescent fantasy hero. The original stories are quite different: John Clute has written that “In REH’s hands… the barbarian’s shrugging contempt for effete civilisation is married to a wintry fatalism clearly reminiscent of the doom-laden worldview expressed by heroes of Nordic saga.”7
Robert E. Howard’s Conan set the model for a new kind of hero, but also for a new kind of tale, one frequently episodic and set beyond the kind of fey civilization that the late-nineteenth-century British fantasy writers had constructed. It is not stretching a point to argue that Howard (along with authors we have not discussed because their work is not strictly fantasy, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs), constructed both an “American” hero, and a frontier landscape in the historical settings they chose. Almost all sword-and-sorcery tales take place in worlds reminiscent of the Roman, Greek or early medieval worlds. There are decadent empires and violent barbarians, and conflict is often over conflicting ideas of morality and honour. The stories are told in a context in which gods, demons and the supernatural are an ever-present and assumed reality. Unlike the quest fantasies to which they sometimes seem allied, they are almost always episodic. Frequently, the hero breaks up other people’s grand narratives.
Sword-and-sorcery is a term apparently invented by Fritz Leiber, who himself began one of the best known sword-and-sorcery series with a story called “Two Sought Adventure”, published in Unknown in 1939. Leiber approached the mode with wit and humour, and his stories featuring Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, which appeared at intervals right up to his death in 1992, are much loved favourites in the field. Sword-and-sorcery continued in popularity throughout the next few decades even when the field is superficially dominated by quest fantasy; perhaps surprisingly (as we will see) it was picked up by feminist writers such as Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and Marion Zimmer Bradley to very great effect.
The principal rival to Weird Tales was Unknown. Its short life reflected not a lack of success but the paper shortages of World War II (it was in the end reabsorbed by its progenitor, Astounding). Unknown’s editor, John W. Campbell, was himself a science fiction writer, and his approach to fantasy was coloured by this: Campbell wanted fantasy that was susceptible to the same rules of consistency and logic he applied to science fiction. For this purpose Campbell recruited a number of his favourite science fiction writers. Robert A. Heinlein, the most influential of all, contributed stories such as “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” (1942), a Lovecraftian tale of a permeable world told in hard-boiled detective style. Campbell was quite an interventionist editor, and this resulted in Unknown becoming a home for what then was termed science fantasy and we now call “rationalized fantasy”. Rationalized fantasy is fantasy in which laws of magic are explained pseudo-scientifically. These stories are frequently set in other worlds in which magic is as fundamental as physics and treated in much the same way. Heinlein’s 1940 novella “The Devil Makes the Law!” (invariably re-published as “Magic, Inc.”) is one example. In this story magicians establish a monopoly that is then broken through a combination of magic and legal practice. Two other notable practitioners were Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp, who together wrote the Incomplete Enchanter sequence of short stories, in which Harold Shea and his accomplices visit various fantasy worlds such as the world of Norse mythology or the world of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Many of these worlds have different physical laws. Some of the stories in Unknown (like these) are part of the developing tradition of genre-referential metatexts in which characters move in and out of earlier fictional works which genre readers are expected to know. These will crop up more and more in succeeding decades as the genre develops the conversation.
Also characteristic of Unknown are “slick” fantasies (so called because they were considered acceptable in the “slick” magazines that were increasingly distancing themselves from fantastic fiction, such as The Saturday Evening Post). Slick fantasies are a form of modern fairytale in which a wise-cracking urbanite is confronted with the kinds of three wishes which faced the fisherman who caught the king of the fish (or other equivalent), or is accidentally cursed by creatures from fairy, or makes pacts with the devil. The endings of these stories almost always assert the cleverness of modernity. The most famous of these stories within the genre, is probably Horace L. Gold’s “Trouble With Water” (1939), which has been extensively anthologized. In this story a man offends a water gnome, and is cursed to do without water in any form. After a few days the man is filthy and dehydrated. He is advised by a barman to appease the gnome by offering him sugar, and the “trick” is to work out how to give sugar to a creature that lives in water. The solution is the newfangled cellophane used to wrap candy.
In the midst of rationalized fantasies, and neat slicks, Unknown also published the Arabian fantasies of L. Ron Hubbard. These consisted of fully built faux-Arabian worlds, with plots drawn mostly from nineteenth-century adventure fiction. They are full of flashing swords, swarthy turbaned villains, and vulnerable maidens. They sit oddly with the other contents of Unknown, however. The best of Hubbard’s stories, “Typewriter in the Sky” (1940), is better seen as a rationalized fantasy: in this story the protagonist is caught inside a book, and as the author alters the text, the protagonist’s world changes around him. The influence of orientalist ideas in fantasy, however, continued to provide one alternative to the medieval European settings that would dominate full fantasy in the later twentieth century.
The magazines were the location of genre fantasy in America, but fantastical material was being published straight into book form, and displayed a very different sensibility. Abraham Merritt, who also published in the magazines, was probably the most popular American fantasy writer in the first decades of the twentieth century (Lovecraft’s popularity grew posthumously). Merritt published in many of the magazines at the beginning of the century and some of his novels received their first readings there, but Merritt also developed one of the first independent novel careers in American fantastic fiction. His best-known works are the science-fictional The Moon Pool (1919) and his full fantasy, The Ship of Ishtar (1926). The Ship of Ishtar has many of the characteristics of full fantasy, including a climactic struggle between good and evil.
At a more elevated, self-consciously literary level was the Southern writer James Branch Cabell who during the 1920s and 1930s was weaving together a series of novels known as the “Biography of the Life of Manuel”. Many of these books are set in the pseudo-medieval world of Poictesme, whose motto is “The World Wishes to Be Deceived”. Cabell’s mixture of irony and allusion often makes his work difficult to understand, but the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was in no doubt that Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (1919) was rife with playful double-entendre references to Jurgen’s “sword” and “sceptre” and the like, and the resultant scandal brought Cabell much publicity. Jurgen, like some of his later novels, forms an anarchic and anachronistic picaresque. In his travels, Jurgen meets Guinevere, the Lady of the Lake and Helen of Troy, and finally, which perhaps caused most contemporary upset, Jurgen visits heaven and discovers God to be an illusion.
Three other authors of this period worth noting are Charles G. Finney, Evangeline Walton and Robert Nathan. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) tells of the arrival in Arizona of a circus whose freaks include mythical and legendary creatures such as unicorns and werewolves. The book is heavily inflected with the promise of liberation through the abandonment of Christianity and the embracing of paganism – which the movie version (Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, 1964) left out. Evangeline Walton was for a long time one of the hidden secrets of this period. Her one novel, The Virgin and the Swine (1936) received little recognition at the time, but was reprinted in the fantasy boom of the early 1970s as The Island of the Mighty (1970). This was received well enough to support three more volumes, completing her reworking of the four branches of the medieval Welsh legend, The Mabinogion in 1974. Robert Nathan was the best known of the mainstream authors of the period to produce well-received fantasy. Some of his works are anti-Christian fantasy such as The Bishop’s Wife (1928) where the archangel Michael falls for the eponymous character (filmed in 1947), or There is Another Heaven (1929) in which the protagonist discovers heaven to operate an alternative morality. The novel which had the widest readership (and was later filmed) is Portrait of Jennie (1940) in which a painter meets a small girl whom he paints at regular intervals but who is very much older each time he meets her.
Finally in this chapter we should take a quick look at the role of fantasy in the developing movie industry. Before the 1930s there had been a number of fantasy shorts including the work of Georges Méliès, Baum’s own shorts of The Wizard of Oz, Cecil Hepworth’s version of Alice in Wonderland (1903) at twelve minutes the longest movie yet shot in England; and versions of Peter Pan, various Shakespeares, and some silent Frankensteins. The most famous are The Thief of Baghdad (1924, featuring Douglas Fairbanks) and The Sorrows of Satan (1926). During the silent era, European films were also available, and directors such Friedrich Wilhem Murnau (Nosferatu, 1919 and Faust, 1926) and Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927 and M, 1931) have a clear impact on the horror cinema of America, particularly as many European directors were forced to migrate in the 1930s.
There are a number of interesting movies in the 1930s: a version of Alice in Wonderland (1933) and of A Connecticut Yankee (1931), and a second version with Bing Crosby, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949), helped to keep both of these texts in the popular eye. From Britain came The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936) based on a story by H.G. Wells: a man is given the power of gods to change the world but discovers that this creates problems rather than solutions. The two most memorable movies of the 1930s however, were Disney’s groundbreaking Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, which used Technicolor to realise the fantastical images painted by words. In the 1940s Disney again struck gold with Fantasia (1940), a very mixed movie but one sequence of which, to the music of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, experienced an afterlife beyond the movie as a whole. A movie of Oscar Wilde’s ghost story “The Canterville Ghost” was released in 1944, and David Lean’s Blithe Spirit (1945) revived Noel Coward’s ghost play. But perhaps the most interesting fantasy movie of the 1940s and the one which has had most influence in the work of modern writers, is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In this movie George Bailey, on the verge of suicide, gets offered a chance to see what the world would have been like without him. The movie was a flop financially, but like The Wizard of Oz it achieved an afterlife as a Christmas TV movie, which is rather strange because the movie records the slow death of all George Bailey’s hopes and ambitions. Whether one regards the movie as uplifting (as the American Film Institute does) or depressing depends on whether one believes that George’s family life is ample compensation for the college education, travel and writing career for which he had hoped. It’s A Wonderful Life has become the model for a range of personalized parallel world stories and has been reworked in some notable movies, the best of which may be Groundhog Day (1993) and Sliding Doors (1998).
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Shortage of coin was leading to inflation, and the populists, a predominantly rural movement, were campaigning for a switch from the gold to a silver standard in order to increase the amount of money in circulation. |
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Clute and Grant, eds., The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 596. |
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Clute and Grant, eds., The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 481. |