Hanns Heinz Ewers Volume I (Collected Short Stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers)

by Hanns Heinz Ewers

  Oh yes, the coronation of his dead spouse gave him fame, but it was the fame of fear, of silent grief, the despair behind the smiling mask: A paradise of torments. Virginia sank deeply into his soul and came out in his finest stories. Who can perceive which nameless agonies gave birth to her whisper?

  Before the last thread of life snapped and the still wife was laid in the tomb Edgar Poe wrote his masterpiece The Raven. Nothing like that poem or like him had ever been seen before in world literature. I would like to scream in the faces of the English hypocrites.

  “His ecstasy came out of the divine intoxication of a lost bleeding heart as well as the common intoxication that comes out of a wine bottle.”

  Any psychiatrist that works with alcoholism can prove with ease that The Raven originated from a delirium. It’s just as easy for a psychologist to prove Lenore is owed to the poet’s other intoxication, Virginia.

  Then compare the origins of these poems to the candid, wonderfully clear essay that Poe wrote. Every apostrophe, every line, every single syllable is founded in amazingly simple logic. It is almost as if he were solving a binomial equation! The theme certainly gives no mention of ecstasy and its origins out of his divine and not so divine intoxications.

  He wrote his essay for New England magazine readers that wanted to know how to become poets and learn the speech of ecstasy. The massive hard work, the pure technique, the ability to edit, that is what art amounts to. It has never been more clearly stated than in this essay, American Poetry. It is a master example. Really.

  Admittedly Godfather Schneider and others like him would never use the guide but for the artist it is the most valuable information there is. What he shows is that the divine ecstasy alone is not enough to create a perfect work of art. Hard work, despised technique, deliberation, the weight and tone of words are all indispensable.

  The magnificent Alhambra was not created by the great ideas of Arab architects alone. Masons, donkey drivers, gardeners and painters each played their part.

  Edgar Allen Poe was the first poet to speak with such candor and moderation of the pure craft of writing. Yes, and I will also say that even though he was an American, he was the first on the threshold of modern thinking. The shining proof of the full value of this artist is that he only speaks of technique and with no word mentions the intuition always mouthed by amateurs. Perhaps if he could have written more in the magazine for others to read, he might have been happy to tell about the intoxication technique. Never had anyone before him so analyzed their peculiar craft in such anatomical detail until each fiber was taken apart.

  This is an alternative to the faith of the masses in the inspirational fables that persist in our days. Of the divine voice that dictated the Bible and the Master Artist’s inspiration made possible through God’s grace. When the Holy Spirit came upon them, they painted, they wrote poems and more or less composed an immaculate spirit child that was placed into this world. That was so nice, so comfortable, that certainly some great artists themselves believed in this mysterious consecration.

  The Thracian singer was called “Drunk with God” even though he was sober as Socrates. This idea in its original Dionysian form nearly coincides with our modern view of intoxication and ecstasy which became in the later Apollonistic view, “The Divine Anointing” of the Christian belief that has been in a position to take over and with great enthusiasm cloud clear thinking.

  All the beautiful phrases from the square in Mount Olympus, the kiss of the Muse, the divine intoxication, the Artist’s “Grace of God”, and so on. Thank God we no longer in the slightest think of these and where they have originated.

  It took courage to scatter such a luminous fog. Few, very few poems in world literature could tolerate such relentless scrutiny. Poe could dare take this step because he had created in The Raven a poem that was so pure, so complete. All others not as perfect, the small, the ridiculous, the sublime, are ripped to pieces.

  My glance falls to the plaster on the walls of the hall. The eye can not follow all these arabesque and Kufic proverbs. It gets swallowed up and lost in the fantastic harmonies of the Moorish style.

  Now this Arabic miracle of art is created out of gypsum, common gypsum. How ridiculous, how small, how absurd! But although created out of gypsum it loses nothing from its composition and is a complete work of art.

  The common materials have been given life by the breath of the Spirit.

  Art triumphs over nature, and this art is so great that recognition of the ridiculous common materials of its creation mean nothing.

  by C. F. Tilney

  The Raven

  Poe did not need this ancient fabrication any more. He saw how threadbare and tattered it was and boldly threw it aside. In Eureka he defined the concept of intuition in a few words as a “realization of truth” grounded in inductive and deductive reasoning so hidden in shadows that consciousness retreats from getting a grip on it or understanding of it and mocks our inability to put it into words.

  Here lies a clearer understanding of the way art is created than that of his contemporaries. Those Poet-philosophers that claimed so-called “Intuition” was the opposite of philosophy. This is true in the limited narrow untheological and thoroughly modern sense and a special place has been made for the opposites, Aristotle and Bacon, placing them side by side together at the same time.

  He was the greatest of these first men of modern spirit. He was a romantic, a dreamer, and a worshipper of reason who never let his feet leave solid earth.

  Edgar Allan Poe was also first to openly speak on the technique of thinking a decade before Zolas’s “Genius is diligence”.

  Edgar Allan Poe wrote of this in his forward to Eureka.

  “To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think. To the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities—I offer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: Constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone; let us say as a romance, or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a poem.

  What I propound here is true: --Therefore it can not die; --or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life Everlasting!”

  Poe stood completely independent from Th. Gautier and his “L’art pour l’art” principle. His claim was more than Gautier’s, who only saw beauty with the eye of the painter and also lower than Gautier’s in that the external form alone revealed the beauty. First beauty, then truth. To truth, that was his correction without negating beauty. That is the highest claim of any art that has ever been framed. He spoke in waking life of the longing for true value and reality, the simple reality that only the dream could fulfill.

  Also here is Poe-the Romantic- Pathfinder; revealed here as the first of the modern spirits. His claim was so ultra modern that even today only a small portion of the many great writers can understand this radical spirit that sprang out independently fifty years before Zola coined his technique of creation principle and more widely than Parnassier’s principle of art.

  Among civilized people the fertilization of literature through Poe’s spirit is now in full bloom in this century. The past saw him only as an outsider like the ridiculous pair, Puke and Snot. Certainly as someone fortune has turned her back on unlike Jules Verne and Conan Doyle who made fortunes.

  It is entirely certain Poe wrote these things for his daily bread. The travels of Gordon Pym and Hanns Pfaall …ect. It was only through the need for a hot noon meal that the criminal novels (for example: Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, The Gold Bug) originated. Poe knew what it was like to starve! So he wrote these things, made translations and scientific collaborations whenever possible.

  Really, every single story, even his weakest, make all the adventures of Sherlock Holmes fade in comparison. Why does the large public, especially the English speaking, devour Doyle’s ridiculous Detective stories wit
h enthusiasm and lay Poe’s aside? It doesn’t make sense!

  Poe’s characters like Dostojewskys are so genuine, his composition so complete that the reader’s imagination is held captive in his net. That’s when the reader is helpless against the painful murderous horror and seized in cruel suspense. They are continuously white with tension.

  In his popular imitators this is merely pleasant titillation. The reader always knows that it is all stupid nonsense. They stand apart from the story and prefer it that way!

  But Poe takes the poor drip by the hair, drags them to the abyss and catapults them into hell! They lose hearing and vision and don’t know where they are anymore. That is why the average person that likes to sleep avoids Poe’s horrific nightmares and is attracted to the scenic heroes of Baker Street.

  He wanted to write for the large masses and set his goal way too high. He wrote way over their heads and thought they would like to read him! Then he went from publisher to publisher trying to market intelligent works to people that only wanted to buy straw!

  There will come a time when the world is ready for this poet’s gifts. There have already been many promising starts and we recognize the singular ways that Jean Paul, Th. Hoffman, Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe have contributed to the culture of art.

  Such art can no longer be dressed in nationalistic colors. First of all we need to realize that Poe’s art was not for the people of America, but for the thin cultural layer whether it be German, Japanese, Latin or Jewish. We all wish and believe that no artist creates just for his people but for the entire world.

  Velazquez and Cervantes are as completely unknown to the large masses in Spain as the English writers, Shakespeare and Byron, the French Rabelais and Moliere or the Dutch Rembrandt and Ruben are.

  The German people don’t have the slightest idea who Goethe and Schiller were and have never even heard of Heine. We hear the small blunt questions of soldiers in the regiments, “Who was Bismark? Who was Goethe?” When will blissful blind trust finally open its eyes?

  Entire worlds separate the people of culture in Germany from their fellow countrymen, which they see daily on the street. There is only water that separates them from the people of culture in America.

  Heine perceived that Edgar Allan Poe was great and threw it in the faces of the German experts. Even in our day most artists, scholars and experts of national culture have such little understanding that they misinterpret Horaz’ refined “Odi Profanum”.

  The artist that tries to create for his people strives for the impossible neglecting something much more accessible and higher, to create for the entire world. Over the Germans, over the British, over the French stands a higher nation to create for, the Nation of Culture. It alone is worthy of the artist. The awareness of Poe is as solidly grounded there as Goethe but in a different, not as modern sense.

  by C. F. Tilney

  The Pit and the Pendulum

  I slowly walk for a long time through the park at Alhambra under the ancient Elms that Wellington planted. On all sides I hear the babble and rustle of flowing water mixed with the sweet songs of a hundred nightingales. I stride between the high towers into the luxuriant valley of Alhambra.

  Who does this magic palace, these dream gardens belong to? The destitute Spanish nation that I despise? The vulgar strangers with their red books that I must take ten steps to avoid?

  Oh no! It belongs to me, to me and the few capable of receiving this beauty into their souls. There is a voice in these stones, in these bushes that lends life to the spirit of beauty and brings an understanding of truth.

  Everything around me and everything that is beautiful on this earth is the sacred everlasting property of the Nation of Culture that stands above the masses. It is ruler. It is owner. The beauty does not speak to anyone else. Understand this command and dare to live. Edgar Allan Poe did.

  I sit on a stone bank where Aboul-Haddjadj once dreamed. In front of me a spring gushes up out of the hill and flows into a marble basin. I wonder if the Sultan ever sat alone here in the dawn hours. Oh, it is so sweet to dream here.

  There was once a poet that wrote only of his conversations with the dead. He chatted with all seven Sages, all the kings of Ninevah, with Egyptian priests and Thessalonian witches, with Athenian singers, with Roman Commanders and with the knights of King Arthur’s round table. Finally he didn’t want to talk with living people anymore, the dead were so much more interesting!

  Certainly anyone can chat with them. Every dreamer knows this and everyone that believes in dreams as the ultimate reality.

  Have I not today wandered there above through the halls with my favorite? Have I not shown the world a beautiful piece of the dead that living eyes have never seen before? Now he stands before me leaning against an elm.

  “Any questions?” He says.

  He looks good, my caressing eyes question him and he speaks. Soon clear words drip from his lips, soon his voice babbles out of the fountain and sings out of the throats of the nightingales and rustles in the leaves of the ancient elm. The dead are so clever.

  “Leave my poor life alone.” He says. “Ask Goethe about his. He went hunting around the world with a prince that paid him with six stallions. I was a solitary.”

  I never let my gaze leave him. “Tell of your life and of your love!”

  “I forgot life, forgot that I lived.” He says. “Oh, not now since I’ve been dead, as the children say. I forgot every day on the next day. Could I have lived any other way? My true life, the one in my dreams you already know about.”

  A light mist rose from the ground and scurried away into the evening; a sweet cool fanned my temples. I certainly knew his dream life; it poured through me and through the world. Through his poetry his life has slowly unfolded before me.

  William Wilson. Naturally this is Poe, so very much Poe that the moralist Griswold deemed Wilson’s birth year as the poet’s own. The boy ruled over all his schoolmates in the old boarding school at Stoke-Newington, all except one, his own self.[2]

  Those good things that he inherited as a boy, youth and man would always turn to rags because his conscience was not free of the other Wilson, his own self.

  Pigheaded conscience pushed against his fascination with crime in the world and he became his own punishing judge.

  This is how the poet’s childhood poisoned his youthful years. What he inherited along with his education awakened still more feelings for good and evil so exaggerated in him that he went here and there trapped in an eternal struggle that nearly destroyed him.

  Every little wrong he had ever experienced grew in his dreams into enormous crimes that tormented him, tormented him. Still more was the sinful thought of playing with the idea of evil in his dreams until it became real as well. He, himself, is the hero in all his gruesome stories. As the last of his kind he rights the sins of his father and like his Friedrich von Metzgerstein rides a demonic horse into the flames of hell.

  How the elm leaves rustle! I hear this luckless voice in the wind. “If I had not been a poet I would have been a murderer, a fraud, a thief and a cheat.”

  The elm leaves clang and his voice continues, “and perhaps I would have been happier.”

  I think, who knows?

  How is it that this tormented poet never became a criminal? Where he really lived, in his dreams, he was not only a murderer but at the same time a victim. He entombed his enemy alive in the cellar and it was himself that he entombed. (A Cask of Amontillado)

  He murdered the man with the vulture eyes because he had to and buried him under the floor. The heart kept beating and beating and gave the deed away. It was again himself. (The Tell-Tale Heart) His evil twin, the double, William Wilson everywhere.

  Seldom has an artist toiled so much for so few results, never has anyone so immersed themselves in their work. A German or Frenchman could more easily have freed himself from this morality. But the poet was so encumbered with a crushing religion of the soul from early childhood and in his education
that he could never entirely free himself. When he was finally able to distance himself it was too late.

  He was never able to stand on the other side of good and evil. The old English curse oppressed him. No fortune would spare him and like Breughel, Jean van Bosch and Goya, this poor soul had to suffer insane anguish and drink the bitter cup to the last drop.

  Oh yes, if he had been a criminal he would have ended his life on a gallows instead of in a hospital for the poor. He would not have shared his thoughts and his life would still have been miserable and full of agony but not as dreadful as it was.

  But a temple stands out of Golgotha, lily fields grow out of blood fertilized meadows, and we are fortunate to partake of these glorious flowers that grew out of the poisoned heart’s blood of this poet.

  The spring fed brook splashes through the park at Alhambra. Small lively rivulets prattle and chatter. It rushes in the narrow gravel plastered bed, rushing like the good hours of this poet’s life. The hours, minutes perhaps that he was able to spend in harmless enjoyment.

  In those times when he dreamed they were amusing dreams. About the man with the wonderful nose so huge that all the world sat in amazement. Painters painted it and Duchesses kissed it. This precious little story in a bizarre way is in advance of the talent of Mark Twain. Only in this one by Poe the exaggerations are finer and expressed more naturally so that no where is word play over emphasized.

  Or his funny one about Hot Beggars Soup dished up in the weekly paper for good natured readers, or the instruction of Miss Zenobia with her capable and gripping Blackwood article and lastly the Honorable Thingum Bob from the World Lantern with the sublime delightful chat over his literary career.

  So light, so kind is the poet’s wit like the lively splashing brook babbling through the park at Alhambra.

  But how the nightingales sob his dream of longing! And his soul appears to sing in the voice of the nightingale, so pure, so without blemish that the divine Cecilia would be jealous and break her violin and Apollo would smash his lyre. In his criminal dreams there was no hell deep enough for this poet but in this divine song there is no heaven high enough.