Tag: biblio-curiosa

Biblio-Curiosa No. 6 by Chris Mikul

There are a lot of reasons to read Chris Mikul’s work. He’s erudite and has a fondness for the strangeness that is the backbone of this site. He is able to look at terrible literature with a kind intellectualism that I would do well to emulate (there are a couple of books I eviscerated on this site that I want to revisit and see how they read with a more generous, less pedantic eye). He’s introduced me to some amazing books, not the least among them The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June Gibbons, which I’ve had in my possession for a while but have yet to read because I’ve wanted to read it for so long that I feel a weird sort of sorrow at the prospect of losing that feeling of joyful anticipation.

One of the best reasons to read him is his deep knowledge of writers who have more or less been lost to time. There are so many excellent and interesting books that for various reasons slip away from the public eye, and Mikul finds a lot of value in researching such books and the authors behind them. His articles that feature books that are lost or nearly lost to modern readers are fascinating, and at times maddening because I can seldom find copies of the books to read for myself.

There are five articles in Biblio-Curiosa No. 6, and I am limiting myself to the cover story, but bear in mind that the remaining four articles are very much worth reading, especially the analysis of William Nathan Stedman, a poet very much in the running for the worst poet ever. I’m discussing the cover piece exclusively because it is such an excellent example of Mikul’s research chops as well as his affection for the topic as he ferrets out information about forgotten authors and their works.

Few know the name Frank Walford these days, and that is a shame because his books were both ahead of their time in terms of content and because the content itself was often completely lunatic. Mikul’s article focuses on Twisted Clay, a delightfully batshit and sordid book about a psychopathic teenage lesbian. This book was initially published in 1933, and contains violence and sexual implication one does not expect to find in pre-WWII literature.

I’ve noticed that people interact with my work more when there is a cat involved. So here’s Mikul’s ‘zine atop my baffled cat, Calliope.

Twisted Clay is narrated by its protagonist, Jean Deslines. She lives in New South Wales with her father and grandmother. She is, as Mikul points out, “sexually precocious,” and at age twelve was already behaving in a very provocative manner, swimming nude in front of neighbors and attempting to seduce the clergyman her beleaguered grandmother asks to speak to her about her exhibitionism (and it sounds like she very nearly succeeded). Jean is primarily sexually attracted to women and sleeps with the housemaid Jenny, and one wonders how her grandmother felt about having two lesbians in her prim household. Later, Jean’s cousin Myrtle, herself a lesbian, tells Jean that she doesn’t like men so she will likely never marry. When Jean pushes her for more details, she tells the fourteen-year-old Jean to look it up.

Jean reads the sexual arbiters of the time (think Freud and Havelock Ellis) and realizes she is a lesbian and is so appalled by this information that she seeks out a boyfriend, sleeps with him and promptly becomes pregnant. Her father arranges an abortion but this does not change Jean much. In fact, she begins to dress in a manner meant to attract men, and it succeeds, because when her Uncle Harry and Aunt Gabrielle come to visit, Uncle Harry develops a sexual attraction to his young niece, a situation that drives her aunt to despair as she tries to make Jean aware of the situation. Jean toys with the woman, fully aware that her uncle wants to have sex with her, but pretends she doesn’t. When she finally feigns understanding, she immediately accuses her of having a dirty mind. When everyone comes to see what the matter is, Jean adds fuel to the already incendiary situation and her aunt and uncle leave the next day.

Jean’s father speaks to the family doctor, Dr Murray, and they discuss what needs to be done with Jean. Insanely, the doctor recommends that she receive a sort of ovary operation to encourage more feminine behavior, as well as psychotherapy. Jean is thrilled at the idea of psychotherapy because she can “mystify the operator by relating imaginary dreams and fictitious incidents!” She is less enthusiastic about the operation, thinking it would kill her personality and that she would be justified in killing her father in defense to avoid such a death. And this is how this strange girl tries to dissuade her father from forcing the surgery:

“Daddy!”

“Yes, Jean.”

“Dr. Murray said, if he owned me, he would thrash me. Why don’t you thrash me, to see if it should do any good?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re too old to thrash.”

“I’m not, I’m not! See, here’s your walking stick. Beat me with it, beat me hard!”

“Go to bed, child, and don’t talk nonsense.”

With a quick jerk, I stripped off my pyjama trousers, standing before him nude to mid-thighs, clad only in my dangling pyjama coat. “Beat me, Daddy, beat me hard, beat me till the blood flows. I want you to.”

Okay, so by now it should not surprise anyone that some of Frank Walford’s books got banned and that this book is unlikely to end well for anyone involved.

To avoid going to Europe for the surgery, Jean fakes interest in a grave site in which someone will be buried later that day. Jean’s father takes her to see the grave and she takes him out with a hatchet to the head and pushes him into the grave. But this was a “from the frying pan into the fire” sort of situation because Dr. Murray is given guardianship of her. Jean, once again with her back against the wall, decides to set up Dr. Murray. She senses he is attracted to her so she tries to seduce him and arranges for a policeman to see the good doctor throw himself at her. Alone finally, her father’s ghost appears to her telling her no hard feelings for killing him, but later she hears a voice that tells her she must go to the grave, dig her father up and wrap up his broken skull. She does so but realizes that she didn’t secure her father’s corpse, which could implicate her, so she pretends that she dug her father up because she had overheard Dr. Murray murmur something about killing him. This causes the town to consider Jean a heroine but the voice again speaks up, wanting her to return to bind his wounds a second time. This time Jean’s luck runs out and the police catch her in the act and arrest her. (The plot makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it.)

Sent to a mental asylum, she escapes and turns to prostitution to support herself. She is disgusted by the men she sleeps with but earns a lot of money. Later the voice comes back and tells her to start killing the men who lust after her, and yet again she does what the voice tells her. She runs into cousin Myrtle again, they resume their sexual relationship, but the voice tells her to kill Myrtle, too, and she obliges. Later Jean opens a beauty salon and a gangster takes a shine to her and wants her to join his criminal pursuits. She does and later finds that she is attracted to the gangster and becomes a sort of moll. Life is going as well as it can when one of the policemen who arrested her for killing her father sees her, follows her and manages to get a sample of Jean’s fingerprints. She kills the police officer, but this last murder has her feeling contemplative. She muses about suicide:

Life was not so attractive that I desired to cling to it like a limpet to its rock. I had tasted almost everything but death. Should I…? Why not?

Why not indeed? I leave the reader to wonder what she ultimately does.

This book sounds like a hoot, but the fact that the author was a hoot as well is the icing on the odd cake. Frank Walford was born in Australia in 1882. He was a gifted amateur boxer who could have gone pro had a horse not kicked him in the face, breaking his cheekbones and knocking out a few front teeth. He then decided to purchase a boat and traveled along the Australian coastline and three months later came back to land but the rough company he kept caused him to lose a job with a bank. He then returned to sailing again, and made money fishing and shooting crocodiles. (It’s right about here I need to mention that I am not making any of this up.)

Walton was pretty good with a knife and gun and got to prove his mettle with a knife after a man with a grudge stabbed him in the back, right in his kidney. After he recovered, he challenged the man to a knife fight and severed the tendons in his elbows, ensuring the man would never again stab a man in the back.

He eventually married and had children and began to write. He became involved with a group of writers who called themselves the Blue Mountaineers. Interestingly, the only other member of the group who had some success writing penned a novel that featured an atypical heroine who thinks about suicide when life got too boring. His novel Silver Girl sounds absolutely lunatic. It features a passage wherein a side character realizes his wife gave birth to the protagonist’s child. When the protagonist comes to visit with his new wife, the side character grabs the infant and uses it as cudgel to beat the protagonist’s wife to death.

During WWII, Walford served in the Voluntary Defense Corps and became an avid anti-Communist and continued to write. Mikul observes that it is very difficult to summarize Walford’s style.

He could be coarse…, morbid and willfully perverse, but when he chose to, he could write with great sensitivity and feeling. He had a journalist’s eye for detail, and the settings for his stories are always vividly imagined, no matter how wild the plots became.

I can’t help but marvel that Walford’s work was published, especially Twisted Clay. He really was pushing boundaries, and even now, it seems very likely social media would have come for him and cancelled him had his books been released today. I’ll probably spend the weekend looking for copies of his books and pray they are affordable if I find any.

Check back tomorrow for another Mikul ‘zine before I pivot back to non-Mikul content. Should you decide to purchase a copy, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

ETA: Holy crap, it turns out that Amazon carries Twisted Clay!

Oddtober 2020: Biblio-Curiosa No. 5 – The Children’s Books Issue

It has been far too long since I have discussed Chris Mikul on this site.  When I decided to devote a bit of Oddtober to media for children, I remembered that Mikul had released a Biblio-Curiosa devoted to kid’s books and the authors of said books. As is the case with just about everything Mikul writes, I could write reactions to his articles that are longer than the articles themselves but I will work to restrain myself.  In the past, Chris Mikul sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole chasing the memory of the man  known as F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, as well as discussing the book that has since become my odd book Holy Grail, The Pepsi-Cola Addict by the surviving Gibbon twin, June, a name likely known more to fans of strange phenomena than to bibliophiles.

His body of work is what I’ve often said I hope OTC can be when it grows up, which it probably won’t. Which is just as well because Mikul’s work approaches being sui generis, and it’s a bad idea to mimic that which is one of a kind, though it’s always nice to have such inspiration.  Issue 5 isn’t creepy or Halloween-y in a supernatural way, but all the books he discusses in this issue have some element to them that is strange, eerie or odd.  Emphasis on “odd” because, as the title reveals, one the books he covers is actually entitled Odd.

The fact that the cover is re-enacted in my neighbor’s backyard in no way influenced me where Mikul’s look into this book is concerned. It should also not be surprising that I would be kindly disposed toward a book that features two little girls washing a pig.

 

This was one of the shorter of the seven articles in this edition, but it struck me as being the most relevant to my interests and as being the story that best illustrates one of the many paths a child can take to becoming an odd adult.  Odd tells the story of six-year-old Betty, daughter of an MP and the middle child of five.  Her two elder siblings are close in age and her two younger siblings are twins, leaving Betty on her own.  She is literally the odd one out.  One day Betty accidentally knocks one of her younger brothers down and is locked in a storage room with a Bible (!!) as punishment.  Her nanny tells her she cannot come out until she memorizes a Bible passage.  And it’s here that the “weird kid” roots begin to take hold. Mikul describes the scene:

Turning its pages, Betty comes to the Book of Revelation and the text “And I came unto him, Sir thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” Betty learns the text by heart and becomes obsessed by it.  She finds out what tribulation means, and after that asks everyone she meets if they have experienced it yet.  She is terribly worried that tribulation is only for grown-ups, and if she dies before experiencing it she won’t go to heaven.

This resonated with me strongly.  As a child who grew up in a large city in the American South, I cannot be the only kid who, when confronted with another child’s steadfast opinions regarding baptism and salvation, became convinced that I was going to hell because Southern Baptists didn’t baptize babies (or at least my church didn’t).  Luckily I was able to ignore conversations about full body immersion versus top of head christenings and avoid a freakout because I figured that even if the top-of-headers were correct, the top of head got wet in a full body immersion so pretty much everyone would be fine in the end.

So the middle and odd kid’s parents have to go away and in what I feel like is a typically upper-class British manner, the kids are sent to live for six months on a farm their nanny’s brother owns, and are permitted to run amok unsupervised in manner that would likely make the evening news if it happened in my neck of the woods.  Betty meets all sorts of grownups, including a church organist, who gives Betty a puppy, which predictably causes Betty to worry about whether or not her dog will go to heaven. Betty develops a friendship with the father of a dead little girl, and genuinely enjoys the company of adults, and in turn the adults in her life don’t mince words or treat her like a foolish little child.  They don’t speak to her like an equal, but they also do not shelter her and as a result she takes the slings and arrows of life with more equanimity than many modern adults would.  The book ends with a tribulation that involves a mad dog and sacrifice and if this sounds familiar know that Amy le Feuvre’s Odd was published in 1897 and that she handled the way such a plot plays out far better.

In this issue, Mikul also shares the story of E.W. Cole and his astonishing book store in Melbourne, Australia, Cole’s Book Arcade, and his charming picture books that appeared to have a preternaturally Aquarian Age reliance on rainbows.  He has me rather interested in finding one of the Wallypug novels by G.E. Farrow, a series of books influenced by but not nearly as smarmy-sounding as Carroll’s Alice books.  He also revisits an author he discussed in issue two.  Murray Constantine, who wrote Swastika Night in 1937, was actually a lady named Katherine Burdekin and she wrote a book aimed at children in the 1920s called The Children’s Country under the name Kay Burdekin. In retrospect this is a heavy book for children if they are skillful in picking up on subtext.  I wonder how modern, woke audiences would feel about Burdekin’s blurred sex/gender lines.

If nothing else, this issue shows how many books for children and young adults were written by women. Amy le Feuvre is clearly a woman’s name but one could be forgiven for assuming Erroll Collins and EE Redknap were men, writing heavy and at times brutal science fiction with a splash of fantasy for young readers.  Nope, those were the writing names for Ellen Redknap, whose hardcore militaristic and intensely martial story lines ensured that a reader like me would not have enjoyed her writing when I was her target audience. What makes this writer all the more remarkable is how… girlie she was.  Evidently she was known as “Goody” as in goody-two-shoes.  Deeply maternal and helpful, she raised her siblings after their mother died, lived as a spinster while offering all sorts of assistance to aspiring writers, all the while writing books aimed at aggressive pre-teens entitled The Black Dwarf of Mongolia and The Hawk of Aurania.

The oddest book Mikul looked at is the utterly bizarre, plot-driven Susie Saucer & Ronnie Rocket by Stella Clair, illustrated by Edward Andrewes.  Whew lad, this is one hell of a book and hopefully Mr. OTC adds this to the “need to buy if I come across it” list. Heavily influenced by the 1947 description of “flying saucers” and the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this 1957 children’s book is a synthesis of that which is cute, that which is arcane, and that which is absolutely fucking terrifying.

Honestly, she’s waving a little handkerchief that matches her bloomers. How could something this adorable be so creepy?

 

Stay with me: Okay, so on Venus, the business men decide to stop making flying saucers and Susie is one of the last ones constructed. Susie is recruited by “Flame,” who is a Lord of Venus, to be his… I don’t know, spaceship ward, and he places her in service on a huge spaceship carrier called Jupiter.  On a mission to Earth, Susie meets a rocket, Ronnie, and the two race each other and get up to all kinds of shenanigans but Susie gets stuck in a pond and she and Ronnie are found and taken in to be examined by Earthlings, certain Ronnie and Susie are enemy weaponry.  Ronnie gets help, Susie is rescued but Ronnie is caught again and turned into a bomb and the UFOs have to save the day.

This story is full of absolute WTF-ery that make it absolutely mind-boggling, especially given how adorably illustrated it is.  Here Mikul is discussing when Susie and Ronnie meet:

They strike up an awkward conversation, with the rocket’s “gorgeous dorsal fin” making Susie’s magnet quiver.

Later, when Susie is captured, the attempts to disassemble her sound very close to rape.  It’s a weird little book to be sure.

The part I liked the best about Susie is clearly she was a means by which true believers in UFO-ology were trying to make the topic approachable for children, going so far as to mimic a widely known but disputed photograph of a UFO.

The book benefits greatly from its colourful and charming illustrations by Edward Andrewes.  Susie, with her ribbons and polka-dot outfits, must surely be the most feminine flying saucer ever conceived.  Andrewes based her closely on the iconic flying saucer Adamski claimed to have photographed in December 1952. This looks like a hubcap (probably because Adamski made it from one) and has three round protuberances at its base (probably light bulbs). In Andrewes illustrations, these become Susie’s three legs, clad in polka-dot material with frills.

I feel like I need to say something here but words sort of escape me.

You know terribly scary and awful Christian cartoons are?  Like Davey & Goliath and basically all those weird vegetable and fruit animations? They mean well but they are invariably off-putting at best, nightmare-fuel at worst. It’s good to know ufology attempts to recruit the young suffer from similar shortcomings.  I guess dogma marketed to children will be a tough row to hoe, so to speak.

There’s much more to the article than this and I’m holding myself back because this is a “worth the price of admission” article.  Actually, every article in this issue is worth the price of admission.  If this is the first time you have encountered Chris Mikul’s work on my site, I should apologize for my sloth of late because you really need to be made aware of him annually, if not quarterly.  I plan to discuss his most recent book, My Favorite Dictators, here as soon as I reasonably can, and you can have a look through my “Authors A-Z” list and see more of my looks at his work.  Also, if you are interested in buying issues of Biblio-Curiosa or Mikul’s equally fascinating Bizarrism, you can contact him at cathob@zip.com.au to get costs and shipping rates.

Mikul’s look at children’s literature was an excellent starting place to discuss media for children that ended up being unintentionally disturbing to children or alarming to adults.  And what better time to consider terrifying children than during Oddtober?

Biblio-Curiosa Issue 3 by Chris Mikul

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

‘Zine: Biblio-Curiosa Issue 3

Author: Chris Mikul

Type of Book: ‘Zine about strange books and the authors who write them.

Availability: You have to get copies straight from Chris. If I recall correctly, he charges $8 USD for the ‘zine and shipping. You need to contact him at chris.mikul88@gmail.com to place an order.

Comments: I did not intend for this to be a Chris Mikul mini-week here, but I needed something I could write about quickly and Mikul’s ‘zine fit the bill. I am writing like a maniac to get ready for my upcoming New Bizarro Author Series giveaway that starts next week and the Jim Goad ANSWER Me! week that follows soon after, so this issue of Biblio-Curiosa lent itself well to a quick discussion (well, quick for me).

Chris Mikul is a fellow traveller in the world of strange books, but he does it so much better than I do. When I grow up I hope to be able to dissect books as concisely as he does. He has a style that marries utter glee for and absorption in the weird books he finds with an investigative and succinct style that my innate verbosity makes impossible for me to imitate. The third issue of Biblio-Curiosa is a delight for anyone who lives for that moment when they find a strange or unusual book at a used book store or an estate sale. Mikul gathers as much information about the book, its author and any other details that will make the book or its author come to life. He finds amazing gems that my untrained eye would have skipped right over.

The first article in this edition discusses a book called The Ferocious Fern by C.B. Pulman. On a trip to a hotel on the Greek island of Rhodes, Mikul and his wife found a hotel library that featured some astonishing books, including a first edition of Animal Farm. Some of the extraordinary books had ex libris information from their previous owner, Archie Wilkinson, whose story is interesting in its own right so I won’t spoil it. One of Archie’s books that particularly interested Mikul was The Ferocious Fern, a collection of short stories with horror and fantasy twists. You need to read the article to get a feel for the book itself, but given what Mikul’s research reveals, this may very well be the only extant copy of this book.

This next article is a price of admission article and I will write just enough of it that hopefully you will feel the same way and will want to read it yourself. “Swastika Night by Murray Constantine” is Mikul at his book-loving, researching best. Swastika Night is an alternative history novel wherein the Nazis have taken over the world, women are less than second class citizens and keep themselves covered in a manner that modern Westerners associate with fundamentalist Islam. They are breeding stock and little else. Not too unexpectedly, this relegation of women to such a demeaned status has a perverse effect on the men. Mikul’s far fuller examination of the book has caused me to put this book on my wish list so I remember to buy it and hopefully discuss it on this site. There are two very interesting elements to this alternative history of Nazi occupation. First, it was written in 1937 and is both an alternative history for the modern reader and a fear of what the future was to hold for the writer and reader during the time it was written. Second, Murray Constantine was really a lesbian writer named Katherine Burdekin, who wrote more dystopian books. It seems very likely that Burdekin’s works, especially Swastika Night, written more than a decade before 1984, were an influence on George Orwell. This is a deeply fascinating look at a female writer whose legacy was almost lost to us.

The next article, “My Friend Froggy,” was written by Jeff Goodman and will be of deep interest to those who originally found out about F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre through the second issue of Biblio-Curiosa. Jeff Goodman once worked at an “adult fiction” mill, typing out very specific porn books, often in one sitting, for very little money. It was at this job that he met Froggy, as he called MacIntyre, and when he read Mikul’s examination of MacIntyre’s life, his strange stories about himself, and his suicide, he wrote to Mikul and revealed his experiences with Froggy. MacIntyre, even after reading a good friend’s examination of him, still remains a cypher to me, as I don’t understand why he created such a fabulist tale of himself when the real story was equally as interesting. I’ll stop discussing this now so as not to ruin it for those who want the details of Froggy’s life through the eyes of someone who knew him, but even as I know little about MacIntyre’s motivations, he was clearly an endearing, interesting, talented, deeply intelligent and deeply depressed man and I want to read his science fiction book The Woman Between the Worlds all the more.

Oh man, the next article is another “price of admission” article. “Tod Robbins, Master of the Macabre” is an amazing look at the life and works of Tod Robbins, who if he is known much by modern readers, is known for writing the book upon which Tod Browning based his movie Freaks. Strangely secretive about his many marriages, imprisoned in an internment camp in France during WWII, Robbins’ life was as interesting and strange as his fiction. Born wealthy, Robbins lived an enviable life during the day, but…

…when he took up his pen at night, his thoughts turned to crime, horror, madness and murder. To crimson thoughts, as he called them.

And indeed he turned to many crimson thoughts, writing novels and short story collections that seem quaintly horrific in a James Whale sort of way and strangely prescient to modern tastes in the deeply disturbing nature of some of his content. I hope it does not seem like a cop-out to say that there are two “price of admission” articles in this small ‘zine but there really are. This article is also worth reading just to be able to see some of the covers and illustrations that Robbins’ novels sported. An illustration for “Close Their Eyes Tenderly” initially seems very whimsical but the longer I looked at it, the more menacing it became.

The last article is “The Cardinal’s Mistress by Benito Mussolini.” I had no idea Mussolini had written books, but evidently in 1909 a socialist newspaper owner suggested that Mussolini write a book that would be defamatory to the Catholic Church. The novel ended up becoming a potboiler and though salacious was actually somewhat sympathetic to the Cardinal who took a poorly regarded mistress who ruined his name. This somewhat sympathetic portrayal is quite interesting when one learns how much the book would mirror his later life, as if he either predicted his own fate or reenacted it from his own book. Mussolini later thought the book he wrote was trash, but it sounds roiling enough that if I can get my hands on a copy, I may give it a read.

It’s probably clear by now that I am a big fan of Mikul’s but my fannish love of his works is born from a bit of envy. The books he digs up, the analysis he puts forth and the investigation skills he possesses are understandably enviable. For a 48 page ‘zine, this reads more like a book and the people and books it will show you are nothing you can find anywhere else because even the most extensive Wiki on interesting, bizarre and lost books will lack Mikul’s clear love of the topics. Highly recommended, e-mail him now and get your copy and if you don’t have issues 1 and 2, order those as well.