THE ETERNAL FEMININE SUSPENDED

Images of women suspended vertically in transparent capsules captured the imaginations of fantasy writers in the 20th Century.  Above and below, illustrations for the covers of pulp science fiction magazines.



And here's the same idea in a classic Hollywood horror film, The Black Cat:

I guess it's just a variant of the glass coffin in which many a fairytale princess has slept her enchanted sleep:

Originally, I suppose, the image suggested a virginal state, from which the prince's kiss would awaken the maid, a kind of sexual initiation.  I'm not sure what it signifies in the modern age, but probably not that — more likely a vision of woman as pure image or possession, safe, contained, unthreatening . . .

OCCULT DETECTION



Paul Zahl remembers Dr. Jules de Grandin, occult detective, and his creator Seabury Quinn:

IN MEMORIAM:

Jules de Grandin



The homage to the
Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay (1914-1971)
which has appeared on the Golden Age Comic Book Stories website (June
16, 2010
) is evocative and beautiful, not to mention haunting.



Square in the middle of the illustrations presented are two old
portraits, from the late 1920s, of “Dr. de Grandin” and “Dr.
Trowbridge”.  These were great men of the magazine
Weird Tales; and I
would like to give a short eulogy to one of them.  He is Jules de
Grandin, occult detective extraordinaire.



Jules de Grandin was a French-born private investigator who lived in
the fictive town of Harrisonville, New Jersey, outside of New York
City.  He was the creation of the writer Seabury Quinn (1889-1969), who
directed funerals by day and wrote horror stories by night.  Quinn had a
fine eye for the macabre detail, and an imagination that created
unusual supernatural situations that were rarely disgusting but often
eye-catching.  They
lurked in the memory.


The occult detective was usually accompanied by his medical friend Dr.
Trowbridge
[below], a fairly sceptical “liberal”, if occasionally moralistic. 
They lived and worked in Harrisonville, which, incidentally,  was pure
James-Gould-Cozzens country.  That is, the old established families were Episcopalian; the professional ones,
Presbyterian or Methodist; the immigrants, mostly Italian and Central
European, Catholic; the blacks and poor-whites, Baptists or
non-denominational evangelical.  I single out the religious aspect,
because most of the Jules de Grandin stories involve occult incursions
into real life that are ultimately defeated by some sort of religious
talisman.





Jules de Grandin is highly educated, most cosmopolitan, and you can't
pull the wool over his eyes, ever!  He reminds me a little of Agatha
Christie's more mainstream character, Hercule Poirot.  But he, unlike
Poirot, deals with vampires (in F. Scott Fitzgerald suburbs), werewolves
(in Little Italy), or Asian gurus and yogis (in Scarsdale).  Beautiful “Society” girls get crucified on the ninth hole of the Harrisonville
Golf Club.  Evil non-sectarian clergymen cause young people to commit
suicide.  International satanic 'combines' kidnap young women at
wedding rehearsals in Episcopal churches.

That particular kidnapping,
by the way, is one of Seabury Quinn's great set-pieces.  It takes place
in the 1932 novella entitled
The Devil's Bride; and in it the heroine
is abducted right under the nose of Doctor Bentley, the Rector of St.
Chrysostom's, during the Friday afternoon rehearsal for her wedding the
following day.  Quinn, like his much more mainstream contemporary James
Gould Cozzens, 'gets' the situation he is describing.  When I came
across that particular story, I was simply stunned.  Had Seabury Quinn
been sitting in the back of the church during the 
every-Friday-afternoon-at-five rehearsal that is still a characteristic
of church life in this country? 



Two great stories involving Jules de Grandin — both available in
paperback anthologies of Quinn's work published in the mid-1970s — are
the 1928 “Restless Souls” and the 1930 “The Brain Thief”.  In “Restless
Souls” de Grandin administers a mercy-killing to a young woman who has
become a vampire and who is actually and really in (human) love with a
predatory vampire.  Our hero makes it possible for the woman to bring
her love for this (creep) to fruition, simply out of compassion for her
obsessive state.  Then he takes a further step of compassion, and it is
unaffectedly touching.  It is also unexpected.




In “The Brain Thief” an Asian mentalist succeeds in hypnotizing two
young marrieds in Harrisonville into deserting their respective (good)
spouses,;carrying on an outrageous public affair, scandalizing the
whole town; and then marrying one another, and having children by one
another — only to be malignantly snapped out of it by the mentalist,
thereby triggering their suicides from guilt and shame.  For the period
in which it was written, “The Brain Thief” is shocking.  Even for now,
it is upsetting.  Although the  villain is taken care of, the story
ends on a note of inevitable tragedy that can sear itself into you.



If you like horror fiction of any voltage, from Baring-Gould (low
voltage) to Clive Barker (high voltage), you will like the Jules de
Grandin stories of Seabury Quinn.  You will also like the illustrations
of Virgil Finlay, who illustrated quite a few of them.  You may also
appreciate the  broadly tolerant WASP context of many of the stories,
as well the diverse undersides of that world, which are constantly
surfacing, as in “The Brain Thief”, and causing carnage.




Finally, can I say a word about Jules de Grandin's religion?  It
figures in the stories.  You can't escape it.  And it is fairly
wonderful, and . . . contemporary.  In a gruesome little tale from 1927
entitled “The Curse of Everard Maundy”, the named villain is a
non-sectarian revivalist, a thorough squid as it turns out.  When Jules
de Grandin informs Dr. Trowbridge that they will be attending one of 
Maundy's services, Dr. Trowbridge comments, “But aren't you a Catholic,
de Grandin?”



This is the great one's reply:



“Who can say?  My father was a Huguenot of the Huguenots; a several
times great-grand-sire of his cut his way to freedom through the Paris
streets on the fateful night of August 24, 1572.  My mother was
convent-bred, and as pious as anyone with a sense of humor and the gift
of thinking for herself could well be.  One of my uncles — he for whom
I was named — was like a blood brother to Darwin the magnificent, and
Huxley the scarcely less magnificent, also. 



“Me, I am” — he elevated his eyebrows and shoulders at once and pursed
his lips comically — “what should a man with such a heritage be, my
friend?”



Now that is just simply too good.  Evocations of John Calvin, Audrey Hepburn, and
Aldous Huxley: for what more could you ask?



Here is to Jules de Grandin, and to his great creator, and to his
excellent illustrator. 
Requiescent in pace.

THE DREAM OF THE FISHERMAN'S WIFE

Most “erotic” works of art aren't erotic at all.  They are, at best, vaguely sensual, and at worst merely shocking.  The truly erotic is never shocking, but always surprising.

The image above by Hokusai strikes me as genuinely erotic.  It has a delirious, unreal quality, a sense of suspended boundaries, of otherness becoming familiar and intimate.  It doesn't purvey a male fantasy — more of a female fantasy which no man could actually fulfill.

The octopus here is an ideal lover to which men of great industry and imagination might aspire.

THE HORSES OF SAN MARCO

To me, these are the greatest works of art ever created.  I had a nearly overwhelming emotional response to them when I first saw them, adorning the facade of the basilica in St. Mark's Square, Venice.  They are, of course, magnificent images of horses, and I love horses very much, but they also have an odd spiritual quality.  To me they seemed on that first viewing like an image of the grace of God as a team of work horses — patient, kind, tireless, gallant, indomitable.

No one knows when or where they were made.  Many dates and points of origin have been proposed — going as far back as Greece at the time of the building of the Parthenon.  They don't look like horses of that era of art to me.  The horses of the great Parthenon frieze have an otherness to them, an aura of the purely equine — they are magnificently themselves.

The Horses of San Marco have been imbued with the sculptor's emotional relationship to horses, a sense of what they represent in addition to what they are.

The best scholarly guess about them today is that they were made in the second or third century A. D., somewhere in the vicinity of Constantinople.  This feels right to me — they seem like works of the Christian era.  They were certainly standing somewhere in Constantinople when the Venetians plundered it in 1215 and took the horses back to their lagoon.

Napoleon swiped them in turn when he conquered Italy and took them to Paris, but they were returned to Venice in 1815, after Napoleon's demise, and set back up on the facade of the basilica, which is where I saw them in the early 80s.  Soon after that they were moved to a display room inside the basilica, because they were being severely damaged by air pollution, and replicas took their place on the facade.

Originally the four horses pulled a chariot in some sort of triumphal monument, possibly at the great hippodrome of Constantinople.  I suspect they feel more at home in a church, though the relatively small room in which they're currently kept does not show them off to best advantage.

Jan Morris, the great writer on Venice, had this to say about them:

They are works of art of such mingled grace and compassion, such magic
in fact, that down the centuries millions of people have taken them to
their hearts.  It is not just that they are beautiful.  They really do
seem transcendental.

. . . to my mind the way the animals incline their heads so tenderly one
towards another, the thoughtful look in their eyes and the soft
clouding of their breaths on winter mornings — all these things make it
apparent to me that they were never actually made by anybody, but
simply came into being as darlings of God.

Amen.

THE VENUS D'URBINO

By Titian.

The Venus d'Urbino doesn't look classical or Byzantine.  It looks Italian, which made it famous.  The painting was decided to be cool.

                                                                                — Dave Hickey

SEAFRET

New tests seem to confirm Darwin’s theory that all life on earth shares a
single ancestor.  But what would this microorganism have looked like?

One scientist says, ” . . . to us, it would most likely look like some sort of froth, perhaps
living at the edge of the ocean, or deep in the ocean on a geothermal vent.  At the molecular level, I’m sure it would have looked as complex and beautiful as modern life.”

So we were all born, like Aphrodite, from the foam of the sea.  Above is François Boucher’s visualization of the event.

Seafret, one of my favorite words, is sea foam blown by the wind.