The Hole in the Zero: update

Site update: I just expanded last February's The Hole in the Zero JSBlog post - about MK Joseph's amazing 1967 novel of that name - to include an enlightening 1969 review by JP Downey in the New Zealand literary magazine Landfall.

Briefly, The Hole in the Zero is a tour de force of literary SF in which four characters are cast into the 'Nothing' outside space and time, where they play out their conflicts in a series of incarnations into a diverse set of different realities. The subject of Dr Johnson brought the book back to mind, since it has an episode in which its character Paradine, in one such reality, becomes a Frankenstein-like magus who creates an artificial man clearly modelled on Dr Johnson.

The carved eyelids blinked and opened and wrinkled up as the eyes peered out shortsightedly on upon the world. The figure sneezed enormously and sat up. He draped over its shoulders a loose white robe and led it gently to a chair, where it sat like an ancient emperor, with its vast swathed body and its noble flawed face. He held a glass of cordial to its lips; it took the glass from him, swallowed it down, and sighed appreciatively.

"Claret," it said in a voice like the echo of thunder, "is the liquor for boys, port for men, but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy."

"What am I to call you?" said Paradine.

"John Samuelson," said the figure firmly.

"You are now alive, John Samuelson. Does it give you pleasure to be alive?"

"To talk is good and to laugh is good," said the figure, holding out its glass to be replenished. "A tavern-chair is the throne of human felicity."

"Then what is the purpose of life?"

The figure rolled about in distress, and the seamed face crumpled. "The whole of life ... is ... but keeping away the thoughts .. of death."

"Is there no choice?"

"Nature sets her gifts on the right hand and on the left," said the figure more calmly.

"Are not all things possible to the mind?"

"We may take our fancy for our companion but we must let reason be our guide. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity."

"By what then will you rule your life?"

The figure started to its feet and its voice rolled out in full thunder. "Give me something to desire," it shouted, staring with blank eyes to the east, suddenly cold and rigid, a heroic statue eroded by the ages.

All of the creature's words are Johnson quotations, and this poignant vignette of his enthusiasms and torments is one of many literary allusions in The Hole in the Zero.

This particular section of the book has many layers, drawing on the Frankenstein mythos even deeper than the basic scenario of Paradine animating his creation on a slab. Paradine's laboratory also contains a set of homunculi, little figures with single strong personality traits

He passed slowly along the bench where stood his first tentatives, the tiny homunculi, some dreaming, some frenziedly active, in their warm prisons of glass. They were the toys of his youth, childish but lovable - the musician-prince with his little tinkling harp; the spider-woman who had eaten her mate; the idiot-girl, bald and yellow; the spangled juggler perpetually whirling his indian-clubs; the knight, like a small iron statue; the duchess making eyes at the tattered beggar inthe next jar; the sleep-walker; the washerwoman; the siamese-twins; the black boxer sparring with his own shadow; the girl who sang perpetually on one note amid the shining golden waterfall of her own hair.

These are very similar to the jarred homunculi created by Dr Pretorius 1 in the film The Bride of Frankenstein: a king, a queen, an Archbishop, the Devil, and a little ballerina who "won't dance to anything but Mendelssohn's Spring Song and it gets so monotonous". The allusion appears self-referential too, in that in The Hole in the Zero, the main characters are similarly forced to play out scenarios shaped by the fixtures of their individual personalities. Some of Paradine's homunculi are also applicable to the characters themselves. Anyhow, for context, see The Hole in the Zero.

1. The above Dr Pretorius tribute site says "One wonders where Dr. Pretorius got the little costumes-the crown, capes, tutus and ballet slippers. Did he sew them himself? Is the good doctor a closet fashion designer?" Probably the author, Elizabeth Stein, is having an in-joke here: the actor playing Pretorius, the excellent Ernest Thesiger, was an expert in needlepoint, and even wrote a book on the subject, Adventures in Embroidery.

Addendum: see also The Time of Achamoth.

- Ray

Ozymandias

It's interesting to see classical and niche allusions getting mainstream spotlight; one example is the name Ozymandias, via its appearance in Watchmen as the superhero (played by Matthew Goode) who surrounds himself with ancient Egyptian trappings. I knew even before reading the graphic novel that Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramesses II, but only recently ran into the etymology: it's the Greek rendition of part of his throne name User-maat-re Setep-en-re ("Powerful is the Justice of Ré, Chosen of Ré").

The broken "Younger Memnon" statue of Ramesses II, now in the British Museum, is generally viewed as the inspiration for Shelley's famous sonnet, Ozymandias. Its pedestal inscription was reported by the 1st century Greek historian Diodorus Siculus as

"King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works"

- Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, Book I/47

and this is the prototype for Shelley's

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!"

The poem arose out of a sonnet-writing contest between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith, both of their efforts on the same theme being published in The Examiner magazine early in 1818. Smith's is not at all bad, and certainly interesting in its wider scope that taps into a long-running literary fascination with apocalypses engulfing London (see Where London Stood). Maybe it suffered from its decidedly unsnappy title.

On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: -
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." - The City's gone, -
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,- and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Smith deserves to be better known, a polymath who impressed Shelley for combining writing talent with a successful career as a stockbroker. He and his brother James co-wrote a massively popular book of poetic parodies, the 1813 Rejected Addresses, or, The new Theatrum poetarum (Gutenberg EText-No. 3769) which imagines various popular poets' takes on the topical theme of the rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre. Even the poets lampooned liked it; Sir Walter Scott said that he was convinced "that he had indeed written the description of the fire in A Tale of Drury Lane, though he had forgotten when" (ODNB).

Horace Smith went on to write a series of mostly-forgotten historical novels - thirteen including Brambletye House; or, Cavaliers and Roundheads (1826), The Tor Hill (1826), Reuben Apsley (1827), Zillah: A Tale of the Holy City (1828), The New Forest (1829) and Walter Colyton: A Tale of 1688 (1830) - as well as a large body of poetry and essays (see the Internet Archive).

As a prolific and popular writer in his time, Smith was widely read, and as explained in Figs, Bells, Poe, and Horace Smith (Burton R. Pollin, Poe Newsletter, vol. III, no. 1, June 1970, Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore) the works of Poe contain frequent quotations and allusions to Smith's works. Poe's A Tale of Jerusalem, for instance, makes more sense once known to be a lampoon of the overblown pseudo-biblical style of Zillah.

The memorable phrase "where London stood" also appears in the 1823 epic poem Love by Ebenezer Elliott, "the Corn-law Rhymer and Poet of the Poor", which has lines - see here - with a very similar suggestion that England might go the same way as other lost empires:

England, like Greece, shall fall, despoil'd, defaced,
And weep, the Tadmor of the watery waste.
The wave shall mock her lone and manless shore;
The deep shall know her freighted wealth no more;
And unborn wanderers, in the future wood
Where London stands, shall ask where London stood?

I just amended this post because I initially thought Elliott's use predated Smith's. It doesn't: the transcriber of the intro page of this online edition has apparently mistaken the publication date MDCCCXL (1840) for MDCCCXI (1811). It looks then as if Elliott got the idea from Smith.

- Ray

Dr Johnson's struggle

Further to Dr Johnson as he really was and Sutherland et al on Johnson et al, I see a new biography of Johnson is getting good reviews: Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (Jeffrey Meyers, Dec 1, 2008, Basic Books, ISBN: 9780465045716).

I saw it mentioned in yesterday's Daily Mail 1 - Revealed: Why the moralising Dr Johnson DIDN'T hold forth on his own love life - which, apart from the prurient lead, is a pretty fair portrait of Johnson's tormented complexity, much of which was airbrushed out in Boswell's classic account, good though it is. The more measured Los Angeles Times review by Tim Rutten ('Samuel Johnson: The Struggle' by Jeffrey Meyers "The new biography does justice to one of the English language's towering intellects") admires Meyers' approach of integrating Johnson's many facets, rather than treating him as a great writer with a catalogue of incidental quirks. (For instance, if the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome 2 is correct, Johnson's amazing quickwittedness and his bizarre array of tics and mannerisms are two sides of the same coin).

[Meyers'] is the first biography to recognize that personal history, habits, eccentricities, style and achievements were inextricably intertwined in what we would call personality.

Judging by the sample available at Amazon.com, it looks in addition extremely readable.

- Ray

1. ... which I abhor for its general "Asylum seekers laugh at dying Diana as house prices plummet" fixations and its crusade to divide all substances into those that cause cancer and those that cure it, but it often produces surprisingly good articles on historical topics.
2. Doctor Samuel Johnson: 'the great convulsionary' a victim of Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome, J M Pearce, J R Soc Med. 1994 July; 87(7): 396–399.

Nova and Samuel R Delany

"Hey, Mouse! Play us something," one of the mechanics called from the bar.

"Didn't get signed on no ship yet?" chided the other. "Your spinal socket'll rust up. Come on, give us a number."

The Mouse stopped running his finger around the rim of his glass. Wanting to say "no" he began a "yes." Then he frowned.

The mechanics frowned too:

He was an old man.

He was a strong man.

As the Mouse pulled his hand to the edge of the table, the derelict lurched forward. Hip banged the counter. Long toes struck a chair leg: the chair danced on the flags.

Old. Strong. The third thing the Mouse saw: Blind.

He swayed before the Mouse's table. His hand swung up; yellow nails hit the Mouse's cheek. (Spider's feet?) "You, boy . . ."

The Mouse stared at the pearls behind rough, blinking lids.

"You, boy. Do you know what it was like?"

Must be blind, the Mouse thought. Moves like blind. Head sits forward so on his neck. And his eyes—

The codger flapped out his hand, caught a chair, and yanked it to him. It rasped as he fell on the seat. "Do you know what it looked like, felt like, smelt like—do you?"

The Mouse shook his head; the fingers tapped his cheek.

- Nova, Samuel R Delany, 1968

I've been meaning for a while to write about the works of Samuel R Delany, but it's quite a daunting thought: Delany is a much-critiqued writer, and it'd be very easy for commentary to be extremely trite. However, I had an enforced chance to re-read some of his books early in 2009 (abed with flu) so will give it a go.

I first read Delany's Nova (see longer excerpt from the introduction) in my early teens, and found the opening amazing in its difference from other SF I'd read. It was the first time I'd encountered the device of not immediately explaining a setting, and it's still intriguing. We find out pretty quickly what's going on, and the Mouse gets his wish of joining a starship crew, except (in a scenario strongly reminiscent of Moby-Dick) he finds that ship, the Roc, is captained by the scarred Lorq Von Ray, whose obsession is to seek out a nova, meanwhile pursued by a psychopathic adversary, Prince Red.

Nova - I recommend its Wikipedia article - is centrally a quest novel, with explicit references to the Grail quest. Its main story is a conflict for dominance of interstellar trade between the Red and Von Ray dynasties (think Old World vs. New World fighting over Third World interests, transferred to an interstellar arena). That could be pretty dull, but the Grail in question is "Illyrion", a prized superheavy material that powers starships and terraforming projects, and Von Ray intends to get it at source: from the heart of an exploding nova. The dynastic conflict is also very much personal, Von Ray having been facially scarred by Prince in a fight over the latter's sister.

As a melodramatic space adventure, Nova can loosely be described as space opera, but it was an early example (long before "New Space Opera" became a genre term) of how the format could have high literary standards. The Roc's crew are not the macho stereotypes of space opera, but very disparate gentle characters with a decidedly countercultural stance. The narrative is nonlinear: flashbacks tell the stories of Von Ray and the Mouse, and there are extensive observational asides on cultural issues from a narrator character, Katin. Other unusual themes are the use in this future of Tarot divination for major decisions; the Tarot is repeatedly mentioned explicitly, through scenes of divination and characters playing Tarot Whist, and implicitly in this scene where the four suits of the Tarot (cups, coins, swords and wands) appear in a video message from Prince.

Across the room Prince turned to face them. "Just what the hell" — His black-gloved hand struck a crystal beaker, as well as its embossed dish, from the table — "do you think you're doing, Lorq?" The hand came back; the dagger and the carved wooden stick clattered to to the floor from the other side.

Another resemblance to Moby-Dick is the wide racial mix of the Roc's crew. Lorq Von Ray himself is mixed-race (his father Swedish, his mother Senegalese) and this caused initial problems when the great but often conservative (and possibly racist) editor John W Campbell refused to serialise it in Analog because of his view - cringeworthy even at the time - that SF readers weren't ready for "a Negro protagonist". However, Nova's multicultural slant is perfectly normal in SF now (consider Deep Space Nine, with its African-American captain) and the book is remarkable for how little, if at all, it has dated. It was out of print from 1990-2002, but is now readily findable. A modest proposal to Hollywood: if any book deserves to be made into a movie, this does (Luc Besson would do it well; Nova's visual focus and multiracial sensibilities are not unlike those of The Fifth Element).

Nova was written in the late 60s - early 70s period when Delany's SF output peaked in quantity and mainstream SF acclaim (as judged by awards). The same time-slot saw Nebula Awards for the novels Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, and the short stories Aye, and Gomorrah and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (collected among others in Driftglass). Although varied in setting, Delany's works of this period have are common factors. They're rarely about heroes, but are more commonly about encounters among future working-class people that examine assumptions about culture and language. In Nova, for instance, all work has been converted to hands-on format by universal cyborg implants, and the abolition of disease has made hygiene taboos obsolete, so that it's perfectly normal for someone to pick up food with their foot or to accept another's sucked sweet. In The Star Pit, perpetual war has led to the institution of "group marriages" designed to give children a stable upbringing given the likelihood that some of the parents will die. Babel-17, a literal dramatisation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - "language shapes thought", has "triples" as a routine form of marital relationship for starship-piloting teams.

Where there are characters with exceptional abilities, these tend to come with a downside, making these characters "outsiders". Aye, and Gomorrah concerns "Spacers" whose elite status as astronauts comes at the expense of being neutered before puberty; their main pleasures are general high jinks and winding up "frelks", individuals who fetishize them for their very unattainability. The novella The Star Pit has "golden", individuals whose unique ability to pilot intergalactic craft is coupled with psychopathic personality. The Mouse in Nova is a skilled "sensory syrynx" player, but has a speech impediment, as does Brass in Babel-17 (caused by his implanted fangs).

Since Barthes' essay Death of the Author took root in literary criticism, there's been a standard caution about relating text content to authorial background. Nevertheless, as Delany later moved toward more overtly autobiographical material and has been extremely candid about his background - such as in his extremely readable and Hugo-winning The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village - it's hard not to make such connections. As this pseudonymous autobiography by "K Leslie Steiner" describes, Delany is African-American, gay and dyslexic, which relates readily to his themes. He's also a highly-respected academic who has worked in professorial posts in English in US universities since the late 1980s: the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, University of Buffalo, and since 2001 Temple University.

These themes - culture, language, race, sexual identity, and the intellectual/academic mindset - continued to develop in his SF works in the 1970s and 80s: Dhalgren explores the adventures of a bisexual young man in Bellona, a reality-shifting dystopian city created when an American city is engulfed by a singularity; Triton is set in a utopian society where people are free to change identity, including gender; and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand involves a romance between an intellectual and a slave in a far future where gender identity is very different (all sentient creatures are defined as female by default, but male when the object of another's attraction).

The 1970s also saw the development of new thread in Delany's work, what he openly called "his pornography", starting with The Tides of Lust (1973) - a compromise with his publisher, who wanted to call it the The Tides of Eros - and now re-released under Delany preferred title, Equinox. (I have a copy of the Savoy paperback signed by Delany - it's one of my few treasured literary possessions. It tells the story of the violent and sexual encounters that take place among a cast of low-life characters over a day and night when a black ship's captain (who, it's strongly implied, may be the Devil) arrives at a small American seaport. The work has been described as "a Baudelairean rite of passage", and is certainly serious in intent. The overall effect is distinctly unerotic, the book being full of literary quotations, knowing asides about stylistic and racial stereotypes of pornography, and literary passages in which characters step out of the action and comment on the plot.

Bibliographically, the most interesting aspect is that Equinox is inseparable from the Delany canon; it was written more or less contemporaneously with Dhalgren and is full of motifs that repeat in Delany's other works, such as Nova: a black ship's captain; a one-shoed character; one with bitten nails and a rope holding up his trousers; and brothers, one black and one white. Even the works of Delany's artist friend Russell FitzGerald make a shared appearance, as influence for the Alkane Institute's art museum in Nova and as Proctor's "Black Studio" in Equinox. Nova and Equinox also share a general focus on dark vs. light (equinox, the time when day and night are balanced, recalls Lorq's interpretation of the Tarot card The Sun in Nova:

"Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under ... the sun. I see Prince and myself.

For critical discussion of Delany's pornographic works, see Delany's Dirt by Ray Davis. Equinox was, and still is, controversial. Like the following Hogg, it featured under-age characters (in the reprinted 1994 edition of Equinox, this was tackled by adding a "Note of Moral Intent" and adding 100 years to the relevant characters' ages). The Mad Man is very different in flavour: in Delany's description "a pornotopic fantasy", it's a massive literary novel with elements of pornography, social commentary, magic realist fantasy and romance. Set in New York just before full awareness of the impact of HIV, it features a young and brilliant African-American academic whose thesis is to investigate the biography of Timothy Hasler, a philosopher who was stabbed at a gay bar some years previously. In the process, Marr finds himself increasingly drawn into sexual encounters with homeless men, eventually establishing a permanent relationship with one.

The book is provocative by any standards; Delany has mentioned that it was inspired by his outrage at Harold Brodkey's classic New Yorker article To My Readers ("I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do") in which Brodkey takes the stance of undeserving victim. The protagonist of The Mad Man, John Marr, states the exact opposite ("I do not have AIDS. I'm surprised that I don't . . .") and the novel explicitly argues, even to the extent of citing a Lancet paper on seroconversion, that there are areas of sexual behaviour where there's no hard-edged data about HIV risks and which, anecdotally, appear to be low-risk contrary to general perceptions. Despite the theme, however, it remarkably manages not to be a dark or depressing book; for the most part there's a huge cameraderie among its large cast of outsider characters. (The Pinocchio Theory has a considerably more intelligent review than I can muster).

The Mad Man moves toward the focus of Delany's most recent works, many of which have been largely autobiographical. Hasler's relationship with a street person, "Leaky" Sowps, mirrors Delany's long-term relationship with Dennis Rickett, told in the autobiographical comic Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York. Delany recounts his experiences in the non-fictional Times Square Red, Times Square Blue too, and the protagonist of the 2007 Dark Revelations - and its overdue companion sequel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders - isn't a million miles from Delany either. However, the novella Phallos breaks away from this territory into the interesting device of modern academic commentary framing a fictional history of Neoptolomus, a young man in the time of the emperor Hadrian. It doesn't look as if we'll be seeing any time soon From The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, the sequel to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand that was under way a long time back. Personally, vastly intelligent and readable though Delany's latest works are, I find it a pity that he has moved away from the richly-imagined SF that sprang from metaphorical exploration of his personal themes - I'm sure he'll be remembered as one of the SF greats - but one can hardly dictate where writers' interests go.

For more bibliographies, which include Delany's critical works and non-fiction titles such as see the bibliographies section of Jay Schuster's Samuel R. Delany Information page, which is probably the single most comprehensive guide to SRD resources online.

- Ray

Déjà view

The Growlery currently has a very interesting post, Déjà vu, all over again, on the fictional theme of "trial and improvement", where characters must revisit the same scenario over and over (as in Groundhog Day) as a kind of Purgatory to learn from their mistakes. Go and read it; it's good.

Of related interest, I just dug out of the archives a blog piece I wrote in 2001 (but somehow managed to delete in blog housekeeping) that focused on a literary dispute hinged on the ubiquity of this theme.

June 28th 2001: I just read an article in The Author (Society of Authors house mag) Summer 2001 edition: Rights in Ideas: how not to sell a novel to Hollywood, by Leon Arden. Arden describes in some detail how he sued - and lost - in a case based on his claim that Columbia Pictures plagiarised his 1981 novel, The Devil's Trill (retitled One Fine Day) which they had read and rejected as a movie script. Arden's hero finds himself stuck in a time loop, he alone realising that he's repeating a single day over and over. He tries and fails to seduce the heroine, collects personal information about her to help him succeed, etc etc. You get the picture: sounds not a million miles from Groundhog Day.

Arden's $15m lawsuit failed because, basically, you can't copyright an idea. You do have a case if the precise treatment of that idea matches closely, point for point. But the court, though sympathising with Arden to some extent, decided that the style and treatment of Groundhog Day and One Fine Day were sufficiently different. Arden disagrees with the view of Judge Denny Chin that the book was "dark and introspective": but whatever may be similar, the Detroit News, December 12 1995 account mentions details of One Fine Day that differ radically in style from the light comedy of Groundhog Day. For instance, it features "witchcraft, an encounter with God ... an aeroplane explosion that kills 192 people, a rape, and a woman's suicide".

But hang on a moment! If you look at SF Recollections by Richard Lupoff at the Timebinders SF fan website, you'll find veteran science fiction author Richard Lupoff making exactly the same claim. He suggests that "a major theatrical film" (identifiable as Groundhog Day) plagiarised his work. He and filmmaker Jonathan Heap "were outraged and tried very hard to go after the rascals who had robbed us, but alas, the Hollywood establishment closed ranks ... After half a year of lawyers' conferences and emotional stress, we agreed to put the matter behind us and get on with our lives."

What's going on? Surely both Arden and Lupoff can't be right? SF movie buffs will recall the Lupoff work in question, a 1993 TV movie called 12:01, which had a very similar plot to Groundhog Day, though with a hard-SF rationale. It was widely assumed that this was derivative of Groundhog Day, but in fact it was a scheduled remake (according to Lupoff, a "very loose" adaptation) of a 1990 Oscar-nominated short film, 12:01 PM, based on a short story by Lupoff published in Fantasy And Science Fiction magazine in 1973.

So who, if anyone, has been plagiarised? Clearly, one shouldn't dismiss the claim that producers recycle ideas, and quite closely. Since Groundhog Day, any number of programmes have reused the time-loop theme: for instance, a Xena episode, Been There, Done That; a 1992 Star Trek:TNG episode, Cause and Effect; an X-Files episode, Monday; and an early episode, Come Again, of the Seven Days time travel series. But Arden's One Fine Day and Lupoff's 12:01 PM appear to have been thought up independently.

Coincidences can happen. I was surprised recently at remarkable similarities between one of my published stories and one I encountered self-published on the Web; yet an e-mail chat confirmed that there was no connection. The other author and I had started from the same premise, and thought through the consequences nearly identically. This sort of coincidence applies especially to SF, where just about anything you can think of has been done before. As the Turkey City Lexicon comments, the worst offenders for reinventing SF wheels tend to be mainstream writers who "try to write an SF novel without actually reading any of the existing stuff". Such writers tend, in my view, to vastly overestimate the uniqueness of their ideas.

Discussion at Fiction-L Archives - 'Replay': Second Chance or Infinite Recurrence Novels shows that the idea of time-loop is quite common in SF. It seems well possible that the writers of One Fine Day and 12:01 PM, like many others before them, came up with the same scenario and developed it logically along the same lines.

Nevertheless, given the many other reworkings of the time-loop theme since Groundhog Day, I wouldn't be surprised if Columbia had, in turn, got the idea from elsewhere. But if they did, it's really anyone's guess what the exact contributions were from the work of Arden, Lupoff, and the many other previous explorers of the same theme.

Since writing this, I ran into yet another possible precursor: the blog post at Gutbrain Records for 2nd February 2005 mentions

On January 1, 1939, The Shadow's radio audience heard "The Man Who Murdered Time", about a mad scientist who uses a time machine to loop New Year's Eve. In anticipation of perpetually reliving these 24 hours, he's borrowed tons of money (which he won't have to pay back) and invited his hated cousin over so he can enjoy the pleasure of murdering him again and again and again. Lamont Cranston is aware of the time loop, thanks to the same mental powers that make him The Shadow, but his resistance is weakening. If he doesn't stop the madman soon, he will also succumb and the whole world will be stuck in the loop forever.

You can even find it on YouTube: Part 1 / 2 / 3. I'd also be interested to read the BFI imprint of the Groundhog Day screenplay (Groundhog Day, Ryan Gilbey, Danny Rubin, Harold Ramis, BFI, 2004, ISBN 1844570320) which contains an account by Danny Rubin of the its gestation...

Originally I'd thought about this guy repeating the same day over and over again. But it didn't have a heart; I didn't know who the character was, or what to do with it. A couple of years later, I bought one of the Anne Rice Vampire novels ... I started thinking about what it would be like to like for a really long time. Would you change, or are you stuck as yourself no matter what? The idea of repeating one day is just a two-dimensional comedy idea. But when you think of it in terms of immortality, then all of a sudden it's about something. After that, the ideas came together very quickly.

...which very much fits my view of the script arising from logical development of a basic idea not in itself unique.
- Ray

Philip José Farmer obits

From the Guardian, Philip José Farmer ("An award-winning sci-fi writer who mixed sex, pulp and literature") and Philip José Farmer, rebel against reality: obituaries for an author who, judging by the number of his books on my shelf, must be one of my favourite SF writers. It's quite pertinent to current JSBlog themes that Farmer got there before Alan Moore in the enjoyable conceit of weaving Victorian and pulp characters into a single mythos. In Farmer's case, this revolved around the "Wold Newton family", the idea that occupants of a carriage in Yorkshire on 13th December 1795 were irradiated by the Wold Newton meteorite, giving rise to superhuman descendants comprising all the heroes and villains of Victorian and pulp literature (notably Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Doc Savage).

As with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, this unifying theory makes for a nice vehicle for literary analysis, criticism and subversion. Farmer's Doc Savage, His Apocalyptic Life is an authoritative account of Lester Dent's Doc Savage series of pulp novels, and the peripherally connected The Other Log of Phileas Fogg a neat reinvention of Around the World in Eighty Days, taking the inconsistencies and pecularities of Verne's novel and weaving them into a backstory about a conflict between two alien races. Tarzan, too, is a prominent figure, both in his conventional identity as Lord Greystoke in the biographical Tarzan Alive (see Tarzan Alive at Ed Stephan's Tarzan of the Internet) and as "Ras Tyger" in Lord Tyger, an unbowdlerized reimagining of Tarzan:

My Mother is an Ape
My Father is God
I come from the Land of Ghosts

So sings Ras Tyger, Philip José Farmer's superb incarnation of a modern-day Jungle Lord. He is fluent in four languages. He devours grubs, insects, and palpitating flesh. He communes with wild beasts and proffers them his love. Men he butchers. He is feared as a ghost, yet the village women welcome him at night. savage, heroic and beautiful, he is the master of his world - until the day when the incredible truth of his existence begins to unfold...
- cover blurb to the 1974 Panther Books edition

It's like a jungle Truman Show - Ras Tyger comes to the realisation that his whole environment is a construct, the scheme of a millionaire who wants to create a duplicate of the fictional Tarzan.

Lord Tyger also grades into another aspect of Farmer's work, its frank exploration of sexual themes as one of the "New Wave" SF authors. His first published story in 1952, The Lovers, set the scene with its story of a puritanically-conditioned linguist's relationship with an uninhibited humanoid woman who turns out to be an insectoid mimic: a miscegenation that "nauseated" John W Campbell but didn't stop the story winning a 1953 Hugo Award when published elsewhere. This vein continued in various guises throughout his career: Flesh, in which a starship captain takes on the role of a Golden Bough style priapic god; Strange Relations, a lower-key exploration of family-like aspects of alien-human interactions (see the Addendum); the erotic horror of A Feast Unknown (which brings Wold Newton characters into a pastiche making explicit the homoerotic subtexts of the action hero genre); and the borderline-pornographic Image of the Beast and Blown, which again involve classic fictional characters.

As with many authors, some of Farmer's work tended toward the potboiling. I found his "World of Tiers" parallel-world series unexceptional, and the superb and also Hugo-winning To Your Scattered Bodies Go (in which Sir Richard Burton, Alice Liddell and other historical figures interact in a seeming afterlife among all humanity on the shores of an endlessly stretching river) also stretched seemingly endlessly to the far too many sequels of the Riverworld series. When he cut to the chase, however, Farmer was invariably readable and inventive. He was also a brilliant and adaptable prose stylist, an aspect that shone in such conceits as The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod, a short story about Tarzan as if it had been written by William Burroughs rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs.

For more background, see the official Philip José Farmer Home Page (The Brobdingnagian collection of all things Farmerian) and the Philip José Farmer International Bibliography.

Addendum (topic upgraded from comments): Felix Grant just reminded me of our conversation a while back of Farmer's story Mother, from Strange Relations. In The Lovers, Farmer had introduced one example of a strange reproductive biology, in which mimicry is achieved by the mother literally "photographing" the father at the moment of conception. Strange Relations is a story collection not so much about sex as about human encounters with other unusual reproductive biologies. Mother, for instance, tells of a mother-dominated man who survives a starship crash, but finds himself literally returning to the womb when he is trapped inside the comfortable interior of the sessile female breeding stage (the "Mother") of an alien life-form that relies on non-sessile creatures ("mobiles") for food and pollination-style fertilisation.
- Ray

Watchmen: the movie - update

Further to Watchmen: the movie, time for graphic novel enthusiasts to start looking at cinema schedules: Watchmen just had its premiere screening, and initial reviews are good. 1 The MetaFilter post links to a couple of interesting Wired magazine interviews with the graphic novel's creators. Artist Dave Gibbons' Gut Feelings on the Watchmen Movie explores an artist's reaction to seeing his 2D work expanded into a realistic medium, and Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic explores various themes from his work (Moore, following past unsatisfactory dealings with Hollywood, has dissociated himself from the film).

Moore and O'Neill's forthcoming The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III) (previewed here) looks worth checking out: moving on 12 years from Vol II, which retold The War of the Worlds, its setting is the early 20th century of The Threepenny Opera

Because—as ever with the League—we tend to base the adventures upon the fictional landscape that was around at that particular time. Since this is set in 1910, we found the idea of bringing in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill irresistible. So I've rewritten the libretto for a number of the more gutsy and dark and powerful and sardonic Kurt Weill numbers. There's a new "Mack the Knife," a new "Pirate Jenny," a new "MacHeath's Plea From the Gallows," a new "What Keeps Mankind Alive."

The third part of the Moore interview is especially interesting for his exposition of what the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mythos is attempting to achieve

Moore: ... I suppose we're attempting to come up with a kind of unified field theory of culture that actually links up all of these various works, whether they're high culture or low culture or no culture.

Wired: How do you position yourself on the continuum from homage to parody to commentary? If you're engaging with all of these other texts to try to do what they did, to talk about what they did?

Moore: ... It's a matter of tying these things in. Sometimes they are lesser-known works that we think should be better known, and we're including them in the hope that people might actually go out and pick up the original books. Sometimes we have characters who are greatly revered that we feel are perhaps too revered, and we would like to give a more accurate picture of them ... So, yes, it is a big literary game, but it is one that lets us touch upon a surprising amount of stuff that's in some way relevant to the contemporary world

Moore goes on to give examples from The Black Dossier' (the interim volume) of its deconstruction of various characters and literary relationships: the sadism and misogyny of James Bond (who appears in TBD as a brutal womanizer called "Jimmy"); the literary interconnections of the spy Kim Philby (nicknamed after Kipling's Kim and, as a friend of Graham Greene, quite possibly a model for The Third Man, Harry Lime); and the hostility between George Orwell and "Frank Richards" 2 over Billy Bunter books (see Orwell's essay, Boys' Weeklies, and Richards' reply - which is fairly embarrassing. Taken to task for depicting foreigners as figures of fun, Richards' reply is "I must shock Mr Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny: they lack the sense of humour which is the special gift of our own chosen nation...").

A literary game maybe, but one that takes the reader down such intriguing byways is worth playing. For more on the mythos, see Jess Nevins' Black Dossier Annotations. While it obviously needs reading in juxtaposition with the graphic novel, it is quite readable in itself (a set of footnotes that have a life of their own) for the tasters and followable references to historical miscellanea and little-known works of fiction.

1. And if you want local interest, I didn't realise that Matthew Goode, who plays Ozymandias, is from Exeter (see City actor's sci-fi blockbuster role); he's the son of Jenny Goode, director of the Exeter Gilbert & Sullivan society St David's Players.
2. "Frank Richards" was the pseudonym of the fairly enigmatic author Charles Harold St John Hamilton (1876–1961), who is probably the most prolific English language writer of all time, having written "the equivalent of nearly a thousand full-length novels" (ODNB). Certainly this beats the 904 books of Mary Faulkner: see league table. See Billy Bunter and 'The Magnet' by Bill Nagelkerke for an analysis of the Bunter mythos in relation to the rather complex peronsality of its author.

Ray

Litcrit models and more on Colin Wilson

Further reading from yesterday's post that mentioned psychoanalytic literary criticism: Critical Approaches, a handy guide to a number of the approaches to analysis/critique of a text. One not mentioned, however, is existential criticism, which is the style of the author and philosopher Colin Wilson's The Strength to Dream (much of it online at Google Books). It's a very clear overview of the works of many authors of the late 1800s to early 1900s, loosely groupable together as "imaginative" 1. They're seen through the filter of existential criticism (as Wilson puts it, "the attempt to judge works of art by the contribution they make to the science of living, to judge them by standards of meaning as well as impact") as opposed to literary criticism, which Wilson characterises as concerning itself "with the general artistic 'satisfactoriness' of the work".

It's a pleasantly robust stance: commonsense without being in the least anti-intellectual, and not afraid to tackle stylistically iconic experimental works for their failure to engage the reader...

No matter what their rewards may be, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu are about as readable as a telephone directory

... his point being "not in disparagement of two great works" but to highlight the fallacy of assuming reader bafflement to be down to significant radical developments in the novel form. Some experiments, he argues, are "fishes gasping on the strand" that in hindsight failed to move the novel form onward.

The Strength to Dream, I didn't know because of its nominally different subject matter, is one of Wilson's seven books at the core of his "New Existentialism" philosophy: The Outsider (1956), Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat (aka The Stature of Man) (1959), The Strength to Dream: literature and the imagination (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider: the philosophy of the future (1965), and Introduction to the New Existentialism (aka The New Existentialism) (1966)

This comes from news Colin Stanley just sent us about the forthcoming release of his book Colin Wilson's Outsider Cycle: a guide for students (Pauper's Press, 2009, ISBN 9780946650965), which comprises essays, critical appraisal and bibliographies on these works (with an explanatory afterword by Colin Wilson himself). Stanley, as I've mentioned before - see Colin Wilson connections - is the bibliographer and probably the chief authority on Wilson's works, so this is likely to be an extremely astute analysis of works that need to be considered in relation to each other (Wilson has said that "These books are closely linked-so closely that it is impossible for any one of them to be understood without the others").

1. A diverse bunch including Lovecraft, Yeats, Wilde, Strindberg, Zola, Nathanael West, Faulkner, Waugh, Greene, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Andreyev, Beckett, Wells, Zamyatin, Lovecraft, Hoffman, Gogol, Le Fanu, MR James, Tolkien, De Sade, Maupassant, Wedekind, Artsybashev, DH Lawrence, Huxley, Kazantzakis, and Dürrenmatt.

Addendum (point just promoted from comments): in The Strength to Dream, I particularly like Wilson's identification of trends in fiction, such as its highlighting the sameness of format of many novels written in the early 20th century, a trend previously satirised as "Little Percy" novels by Aldous Huxley in chapter 3 of Crome Yellow:

"Prose?" Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. "You've been writing prose?"

"Yes."

"Not a novel?"

"Yes."

"My poor Denis!" exclaimed Mr. Scogan. "What about?"

Denis felt rather uncomfortable. "Oh, about the usual things, you know."

"Of course," Mr. Scogan groaned. "I'll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future."

Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. "You're entirely wrong," he said. "My novel is not in the least like that." It was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written. He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.

- a syndrome presumably arising from the typical career of the middle-class arts-educated men of a temperament likely to write novels.

- Ray

Shamanic shamuses

Bill Poser at Language Log - see One shaman, two shamuses? - just commented on a typographical (probably spellchecker) slip here that mistakenly renders the plural of "shaman" as "shamuses" (= private detectives).

Angered by her reluctance, the rich shaman called upon other equally strong shamuses to punish her.

There doesn't appear to be an etymological connection between the words, and the origin of "shamus" itself is uncertain: it originally referred to police, and is likely some cross-fertilisation of Yiddish shammes (a beadle or sexton in a synagogue) and the Irish personal name Séamus (historically, many New York police were of Irish stock). But idly Googling led me to a different connection via Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television (Lee Siegel, Westview Press, 2007, ISBN 0465078109) - a scholarly analysis of US television whose chapter on Monk finds close analogies:

Adrian Monk is the ancient shaman as modern shamus.

Monk, for those who haven't seen the programme, is a deeply neurotic detective who, following a psychological crisis after the murder of his wife, suffers from a variety of phobias and compulsions. These, paradoxically, aid him in his work ("It’s a gift ... and a curse"). Siegel's analysis notes the similarity to the psychology of shamans, who typically suffer "shamanic illness" of a recognisably psychological flavour, and begin their career after a particular initiatory crisis: see Is the Shaman Sane? in Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia (Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, M.E. Sharpe, 1997, ISBN 1563249731).

It wouldn't be hard to extend this analogy to other fictional detectives: for instance, Sherlock Holmes, with his intense concentration, mood swings and ragged nerves (not to mention drug use, another common feature of shamanic ritual). In this vein, Dysthymic Dicks (On the Melancholic Shamus, from Dupin to Cracker) by Harvey Roy Greenberg, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, offers a tour of the many psychologically troubled fictional detectives. While he doesn't mention shamans directly, his description of such detectives as "wounded healer" is a phrase classically applied to shamans. Greenberg's site The Movies on Your Mind is well worth exploring for its interesting takes on media critique from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Addendum: 16th February 2009. Having slept on the idea, a few other examples of shamanic fictional detectives surfaced. In Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Randall achieves his results by, like shamans, communicating with a guiding spirit. There's Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, in which Morse gains some of his powers by contemplation in a drug-altered mental state (he believes beer is an aid to thought) and has a distinctly shamanic motif of a hidden true name that relates to his spiritual origins ("Endeavour", a name from the same Quaker roots that gave him his sense of duty). And there's the reinvented Inspector Abberline in the film version of From Hell, who gains insights from clairvoyance under the influence of absinthe and opium.

Addendum: 23rd February 2009. I just ran into a further example, the Sonny Baca series of novels by the acclaimed Mexican-American author Rudolfo Anaya (Zia Summer (1995), Rio Grande Fall (1996), Shaman Winter (1999), and Jemez Spring) in which the New Mexico private detective hero literally becomes a shaman.

Addendum 2: March 6 2009. Detail promoted from Comments: Dr C just drew my attention to another example of the crossover, Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee novels. See Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn Mysteries.
- Ray

The Great Game and other adventures

I always find it an interesting experience to revisit literature with a greater knowledge of context. Kipling's Kim (Gutenberg EText-No. 2226) was set reading when I first was at secondary school, but even though it explicitly mentions "The Great Game", that part made little sense, and I don't recall any analysis or discussion.

For those who don't know it, Kim is the story of an Anglo-Irish orphan, Kimball O'Hara, who has grown up as a street urchin in Lahore and who (with various spiritual asides involving a kindly lama) is recruited and trained as a Secret Service agent - via exercises such as what's now called "Kim's Game" - to go undercover on missions to thwart Russians in the Himalayas. Only now that I know a bit more history, does Kim fit into the complex game of espionage and diplomacy played out in 19th century central Asia between the Russian and British empires. Nor was I aware of the sensitivity of Kipling's politics. Kim appears to be one of many books that has fallen into the "children's literature" slot by virtue of having a juvenile protagonist, but is really rather heavy in its demands on the modern reader in understanding cultural context.

A further level of complexity is that Kipling's stance - he has been called "prophet of Empire" - is not quite a simple as once thought: see, for instance, Artist of empire: Kipling and Kim (Clara Clairborne Park, The Hudson Review, Winter 2003). Although Kim doesn't fit this description, many of Kipling's works can be read as ironic commentary on imperialism. A prime example is the 1888 The Man Who Would Be King (Gutenberg EText-No. 8147), which is a story of the inevitable downfall from hubris when its protagonists go to Kafiristan - now Nuristan - to set up their own kingdom, but ultimately fail through lack of understanding of the local culture.

Nowadays The Man Who Would Be King is widely known from John Houston's film version, which manages to be largely faithful to the story while expanding it creatively: for instance, making Kipling himself part of the framing device, and building an aside about Alexander the Great into a central plot element. It's extremely well cast (I can't imagine without mentally - no, actually physically - wincing at the thought of Houston's various previous ideas for the pairing of Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan: Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable, then Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, then Robert Redford and Paul Newman). However, the personas of Connery and Caine, good as they are, sanitize the activities of Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, making them into largely likable rogues. In the story, they achieve their aims with considerably more cynicism, brutality and cultural insensitivity, such as shooting their own followers to encourage the others; creating demeaning rituals such as demanding food but only accepting it when a chief brings it; and not bothering to learn locals' names, instead calling them English names after people they look like.

... he brings forward that same Chief that I left at Bashkai—Billy Fish we called him afterwards, because he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days
...
We gave them names according as they was like men we had known in India—Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan that was Bazar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.

Nor does Dravot fall for a specific local woman as in the film (even there, it can scarcely be called love - just unreciprocated attraction combined with her role in slotting into Dravot's delusion of destiny). In the crowning and ultimately fatal cultural blunder, he just demands a wife, with menaces, until an unnamed woman is brought to him:

All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.

"'I'll have no nonsense of that kind,' says Dan. 'I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own wife. 'The girl’s a little bit afraid,' says the priest. 'She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.'

"'Hearten her very tender, then,' says Dravot, 'or I’ll hearten you with the butt of a gun so that you’ll never want to be heartened again.'
...
Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench she was, covered with silver and turquoises but white as death, and looking back every minute at the priests.

"'She’ll do,' said Dan, looking her over.

Charming fellow! The story includes a number of interesting regional details omitted in the film. Kipling is more or less correct about Kafiristan being pagan. Before its Islamization and renaming in 1896, it was an enclave of ethnic religions incorporating elements of animism, polytheism and shamanism. The Kafiristani in the story are also pale-skinned:

Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they was so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends.

This has a large grain of truth: like some other ethnic groups in the region, such as the Pashtuns - recall the iconic image of Sharbat Gula - the Nuristani frequently have European-like colouring of light hair, eyes and skin (the consequence of multiple migrations into the region from the West). Kipling weaves this into a story of their descent from Alexander the Great's people. The primary influences for the overall scenario are generally cited as the careers of James Brooke, the "White Rajah of Sarawak", and Josiah Harlan, "Prince of Ghor". See also Rudyard Kipling and his Masonic Career for background on the Freemasonry aspects that are crucial to both Kim and The Man Who Would Be King.

Elements of Kim and The Man Who Would Be King impinge on a different piece of literature, Sir Henry Newbolt's melodramatic ballad He Fell Among Thieves (which appeared in Newbolt's 1898 anthology of jingoistic poetry The Island Race). Again, I remembered this from school minus context. The poem dramatises the murder in 1870 of the explorer George W Hayward in Darkot, Dardistan, on an expedition to reach the Pamirs region. At the time, accounts predictably took an un-nuanced view of events:

Thus, this intrepid and accomplished traveller, in the prime of his youth, was treacherously slain, and his body lies under a heap of stones in that inhospitable region
- The Times, Thursday, Nov 17, 1870

However, without diminishing an unpleasant death, Hayward must have known he was in very dangerous territory. An ex-soldier, he was first hired by the Royal Geographical Society to explore central Asia after approaching Sir Henry Rawlinson (and it's significant context that Rawlinson was a known Russophobe, and that geographical information was highly significant intelligence in the Great Game - as The Great Game, linked below says, "the dividing line at that time between exploration and intelligence-gathering was often extremely narrow"). The Great Game was not the gung-ho boy's game portrayed in Kim, but a deadly serious one. After one close shave - capture by Yaqub Beg, an Uzbek ruler who was negotiating with the Russians - he returned to India; then, after a harrowing winter trek to and from Gilgit via a warzone, had a letter published in a Calcutta newspaper about alleged atrocities committed by the Kashmiri in that region.

At this point, sense would suggest not returning, at least not immediately. However, even after having been told he'd get no help or protection from the Crown or Geographical Society (from which he resigned) Hayward went back to the region via Gilgit, and was killed en route to the Pamirs. Theories for the perpetrators and motive vary: the two main versions say a) he had argued publicly with the friend, Mir Wali, who had told him about the atrocities; or b) that Mir Wali was framed by the Maharajah of Kashmir, who had Hayward killed in revenge for the unfavourable newspaper exposure. Whatever, Hayward had put himself in astonishingly dangerous circumstances: maybe he was simply reckless, maybe a danger-lover, and maybe his geographical activities were serving the Great Game in some capacity (some sources actively say he was working for the British government 1, 2 - which would make his murder by agents or allies of the Russians a third and highly plausible option).

There's a very clear account of his career at Death in the Morning. The sources aren't cited, but it concurs largely with Chapter 26, The Feel of Cold Steel Across His Throat, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (Peter Hopkirk, Oxford University Press, 1991, ISBN 0192802321). This book has some fascinating details about espionage in the era that inspired Kim, such as details of the work of "Pundits", native explorer-spies who carried out clandestine surveying through artifices such as disguise as Buddhist pilgrims, carrying rosaries modified for tallying distances and various other equipment hidden in everyday gear. For more detail, see The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia (Derek John Waller, University Press of Kentucky, 2004, ISBN 0813191009 - Google Books preview).

Apart from Kim, a number of other novels use a Great Game setting, such as John Buchan's The Half-Hearted and John Masters The Lotus and the Wind.

Addendum, Feb 10th 2009: We just had a very nice e-mail from Robert Middleton who comments: "Congratulations on posting interesting historical information on your website. The mystery surrounding Hayward's death will probably never be cleared to everyone's satisfaction". Robert is co-author of the recently-published Odyssey guidebook Tajikistan & The High Pamirs: the heart of the Great Game, this is the region that Hayward was trying to reach. Robert mentions that his research for the book included the little-known reports of the original Pundits: "one of these, 'The Havildar' 3, gives an account of an interview with Mir Wali a few weeks after the murder in which the latter provides some interesting additional information - see pp. 349 and 357 of my book!" Robert sent me a sampler, and I can highly recommend the book on its basis. For instance, one snippet I can give away as I've seen it elsewhere, online, is that the final scene of The Man Who Would Be King appears to have been based on a real event, when the head of the explorer Adolph Schlagintweit was brought back to colonial administrators (see Central Eurasia Experts Directory).

Robert runs a highly informative website Pamirs.org about the Pamirs region, with a comprehensive bibliography. Aside from the more academic aspects of the region's uniqueness, my immediate impression is that its inhabitants are incredibly striking in appearance - a remarkable and varied mix from the distinctly Asiatic, via people that one wouldn't be surprised to see in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, to many indistinguishable from Western Europeans - the result of the area's role as "a crossroads for the passage of the many different tribes and ethnic groups that controlled Central Asia over the past 3000 years".

Addendum 2, February 11th 2009. I've just been reading The Imitation of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (Robert J Rabel, Helios, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 2007, PDF format). In an extended analysis, the paper quotes the scene in the screenplay by John Huston and Gladys Hill, not in the Kipling story, where Dravot comes to a deluded realisation of his destiny:

Danny: I ain’t going, Peachy.

Peachy: What? ...Have you gone barmy?

Danny: No, I ain’t been drinking neither. I see things clear. It’s like bandages have been removed from my eyes. Have you ever walked into a strange room, and it’s like you’ve been there before? . . . This isn’t the first time I’ve worn a crown. There’s more to this than meets the eye. It all adds up . . . More than chance has been at work here . . . One more thing is needful for my destiny to be fulfilled. That I take her [Roxanne] to wife...A queen to breed a king’s son for the king . . . The contract only lasted until such time as we was kings, and king I’ve been these months past! The first king here since Alexander, the first to wear his crown in 2,200 and . . . 14 years. Him, and now me. They call me his son and I am, in spirit anyway. It’s a huge responsibility . . . It’s big, I tell you. It’s big.

Peachy: And, I tell you, you need a physic!

Compare and contrast:

LADY MARY (shivering). You hurt me. You say these things, but you say them like a king. To me it is the past that was not real.

CRICHTON (too grandly). A king! I sometimes feel--(For a moment the yellow light gleams in his green eyes. We remember suddenly what TREHERNE and ERNEST said about his regal look. He checks himself.) I say it harshly, it is so hard to say, and all the time there is another voice within me crying--(He stops.)

LADY MARY (trembling but not afraid). If it is the voice of nature--

CRICHTON (strongly). I know it to be the voice of nature.

LADY MARY (in a whisper). Then, if you want to say it very much, Gov., please say it to Polly Lasenby.

CRICHTON (again in the grip of an idea). A king! Polly, some people hold that the soul but leaves one human tenement for another, and so lives on through all the ages. I have occasionally thought of late that, in some past existence, I may have been a king. It has all come to me so naturally, not as if I had had to work it out, but-as-if-I-remembered. 'Or ever the knightly years were gone, With the old world to the grave, I was a king in Babylon, And you were a Christian slave.'4 It may have been; you hear me, it may have been.

The latter section comes from JM Barrie's The Admirable Crichton, the scene where the butler Crichton, having become effectively king of an island, declares similar feelings of destiny to Lady Mary. I wonder if Huston and Hill had this in mind.


1. "the British Government deputed Lt. George Hayward on reconnaissance purposes to the Pamirs" - British Policy Towards Kashmir, 1846-1921: Kashmir in Anglo-Russian Politics, FM Hassnain, Sterling Publishers, 1974
2. "George Hayward had become an ambitious and successful explorer-cum-agent", Chapter 6, Playing the Great Game, For a Pagan Song: Travels in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, Jonny Bealby, by William Heinemann, 1998
3. Pundits went by code names such as "The Pundit", "the Havildar" and "the Mirza".
4. Quote from William Ernest Henley's Echoes of Life and Death XXXVII. How exactly a King of Babylon, which was destroyed in the Hellenistic period at least a century BC, could have a Christian slave is not explained.

See update: The Great Game and other adventures #2.

- Ray