The Eldritch Evola & Others

by James O'Meara

  At last, let’s deal with the famous ending, or rather, the famous endings.141 This will require a certain amount of exposition. First, the set-up:

  The movie ends at a stylish beach house in Malibu. Carver fells Mike with one shot from a .38, after [inviting him to] “Kiss me Mike. Kiss me. The liar’s kiss that says ‘I Love You,’ but means something else. You’re good at giving such kisses.” She then opens the box and turns into a pillar of fire . . .

  Now the mystery starts.

  In the version most often seen from roughly 1960 to 1997, Hammer regains consciousness while Carver burns. He rescues his secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) from a locked room, and they limp arm-in-arm toward the exit. At that point we cut to a disconnected string of exterior shots. Light and smoke belch from the beach house. Several awkward jump cuts add superimposed explosions, as a miniature of the house breaks apart. A nondescript “The End” title appears, and the film fades abruptly—not to black, but to gray leader. The music score and roaring sound effects overlap the ragged cut and then end with a poorly-timed fade.

  But according to Francois Truffaut’s original 1955 review of Kiss Me Deadly in Cahiers du Cinema, “As the hero and his mistress [he means Velda] take refuge in the sea, THE END appears on the screen.” The original trailer shows similar shots.

  Someone, identity long since lost, thought this worked better, and cut the negative thusly soon after release. Unknown to MGM, Aldrich, or anyone else, a pristine original negative was sitting around in the Aldrich archives.

  At the point where standard prints cut to the ragged short ending, this copy continued into a completely new sequence. The couple descended some stairs and then took off across the beach. The shots of the burning house were now separated by four new angles with Velda and Mike throwing long shadows down the beach. Rear-projected views showed the pair in front of the exploding beach house. They watched from the surf until an authentic end title (“The End, A Parklane Picture”) appeared. The mystery box growled and howled throughout at full volume, like the monster of a 50s Science Fiction film. [Or the boxt in Raiders of the Lost Ark] The beautiful ending had more production value than anything else in the movie. Although it was disturbing, it was conventionally edited, and resembled nothing that would inspire the French New Wave.

  Quite unusually, it is the original ending that provides something of a “happy ending,” making it clear that Mike and Velda escape the house. The difference vanishes when you consider that Mike has been shot at close range, already burned by radiation before arriving, and is about 50 feet from a nuclear explosion.142 For that matter, we don’t know if the Whatzit is some kind of Strangelovian doomsday device that will destroy the Earth or trigger WWIII, so “living happily ever after” seems unlike in any event.

  Since we are aware of the doubling of Mike and Gaby, as well as the mythical themes running throughout, we can see something else going on in the original, long ending: paradoxically, it is Gaby whose fate is more secure.

  We’ve already called attention to Gaby’s checkerboard clothing, and her purer pursuit of knowledge. We can say that this Pure Fool has reached the end of the quest. As we’ve noted many times, hideous apocalyptic endings are merely a genre convention. What is important here is that Gaby has achieved a state of pure light, becoming a vertical pillar of fire, combining both the Hermetic symbol of light and verticality and the Judaic YHVH. Again, we recall the homage to the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which presents the negative, inverted Judaic version, in which the search for knowledge and transcendence fails and is punished as sin.143

  We cut to Mike, who, having been shot by Gaby, has fallen, in an oddly stiff way, like a tree falling, and now lies sprawled at length on the floor. This is the fall into horizontality, the material world of space and time.144 He and Velda then descend the stairs and flee horizontally across the beach.

  As Lovecraft suggested in the quote above, Mike and Velda are seen to flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. They return to the oceans, like the protagonist of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”145 These are, of course, the Waters of material existence that the Realized Man (or Woman) must cross or walk over.146

  While behind them, the house, another symbol of the warp and woof of material manifestation, no longer needed, disintegrates, as Gaby’s soul, presumably, escapes vertically into the higher dimensions.147 Of course, this also connects us back to Lovecraft, and most importantly, his master, Poe, and his iconic “Fall of the House of Usher.”

  Clearly, anyone who wants to create a work of pure, PC agitprop needs to be a little more careful than to simply put yourself on autopilot while dealing with that infra dig pulp stuff; it may be smarter than you think—or than you are.148

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  February 7, 2014

  A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS:

  REFLECTIONS ON

  OLAF STAPLEDON’S THE FLAMES

  “At various points in our lives we all feel like the one who’s watching the flames; at other times, we feel like the one burning.”

  —Clive Barker149

  Sometimes, when you finally get around to reading a long-recommended author, you are rewarded by finding something quite unexpected. This recently happened to me with Olaf Stapledon, one of those “grand old men” of pre-’50s science fiction.

  In fact, with chronological convenience, Stapledon died right there in 1950, which has also eventually put all his books in the public domain; thus, they’ve been endlessly reprinted by one publisher after another, in multiple editions, themselves making for nice history of sci-fi covers, from the vaguely Victorian creepiness of Dover, to various Penguin examples of ‘60s surrealism,150 to the ‘80s “New Age” tackiness of one or another California publishers. The more recent ones usually came with “Introductions” by sci-fi gurus like Brian Aldiss or literary fiction big-shots like Doris Lessing or some human potential luminary, depending on the target market, claiming his enormous influence and suggesting you take and read. Needless to say, I, with typical mulishness, failed to take the bait.

  Well, actually, I did eventually push myself through Last and First Men (1930), his first but not last novel, about which more anon, but more to our present purpose, just recently some enterprising Kindle publisher put the whole kit and caboodle together and, for $3.80 and no space at all, I just had to snap it up.151

  Stapledon’s prose could best be described as “workmanlike”; if you like that sort of thing, it’s “reminiscent of H. G. Wells” or some such, if not, it’s “sludgy” and “pedestrian.” I would call him the C. P. Snow of sci-fi, with F. R. Leavis’ devastating dismissal of his fiction in mind.152

  You might say that he is the anti-Lovecraft, whose prose was certainly non-pedestrian, only to go to the opposite extreme of purple prolixity, to equal critical disdain.153

  Which is interesting, since I think one reads Stapledon, like Lovecraft, not for their “deathless prose” (Stapledon’s is still-born, Lovecraft’s glows with a luminous putrescence) but for imparting the impression that has come to be called “cosmicism.” As Robert Anton Wilson described it:

  Basically, I like Lovecraft and Olaf Stapledon better than any other writers in the areas of fantasy, science-fiction and “speculative fiction.” This is because I think HPL and Stapledon succeeded more thoroughly than anyone else in creating truly “inhuman” perspectives, artistically sustained and emotionally convincing. That HPL makes the “inhuman” or the “cosmic” a frightening and depressing thing to encounter, while Stapledon makes it a source of mystic awe and artfully combined tragedy-and-triumph, registers merely that they had different temperaments.154

  Actually, the early Lovecraft was not ashamed to write about ghosts and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night; this “cosmicism” is the position he eventually evolved into, in the process of becoming more of what we would now call a sci-fi writer than a writer of horror. This move, around the late ’20s and early ’30s, wa
s coincident with his move to the longer novella format, to his publishers’ indignation.

  With that in mind, Last and First Men, Stapledon’s first novel, put me in mind of Lovecraft’s last major work, his “single greatest achievement,”155 “The Shadow out of Time.”156 Both works labor to convey a sense of what Lovecraft called cosmic awe, a kind of celestial terror that took the place of the old machinery of ghosts and tombs.157 In each tale, an alien but in some sense terrestrial intelligence takes over the mind of a contemporary human, revealing in the process the unfathomable extent of time and space—either awesome or terrifying, in each case—and the infinitesimal place of man therein. While both men seem to have been hard-core materialists, Lovecraft was rather more pessimistic and antiquarian than Stapledon,158 characteristically setting his “advanced” race in the distant past, while Stapledon writes more in the H. G. Wells mode of rugged but inevitable “progress”—at least, until The Flames.159

  Stapledon’s last work reminds me more of a slightly earlier work of Lovecraft’s, his penultimate masterpiece, “The Whisperer in Darkness.”160 In this novella, Wilmarth, a Professor of Folklore at Miskatonic University (of course) is a typical Lovecraftian smug wise-ass. After pooh-poohing newspaper accounts of sensationalistic tales of alien bodies found after a Vermont flood, he receives a letter from one Henry Aiken, taciturn Vermonter, disputing him, and hinting at unspeakable facts he has witnessed. After an extensive correspondence, he invites Wilmarth to visit, bringing all the evidence with him, so as to learn Aiken’s ultimate verdict on these Fortean occurrences. Upon arrival, Wilmarth is disturbed not only by Aiken’s weird appearance—the chair-bound, heavily bundled-up “whisperer” of the title—but his tale: the aliens are real, but he has now learned they are friendly and only want to help us. Needless to say, the climax reveals this to be a horrible—and horrifying—deception.

  In “The Flames” we find a very similar plot. The action, such as it is, is easily summarized. A couple pages of “Introductory Note” gives us our frame: what follows will be one of those long letters people (like Lovecraft) used to write all the time, instead of blogging or Face Booking, which conveniently provided Victorian authors just enough material for a two or three part magazine story or one of what James called “the dear, the blessed nouvelle.” And we know right away that the genre is the weird tale, (“a strange document”) since our narrator winds things up with, “The head of the following bulky letter bears the address of a well-known mental home.”

  Which bulky letter immediately follows, with the point driven home by this opening: “My present address is bound to prejudice you against me, but do please reserve judgment until you have read this letter.”

  We also learn that the writer is known as “Cass,” for Cassandra, among his friends from the old Oxbridge days, before the Great War, doncha know, one of whom is our narrator, who modestly goes by the corresponding nickname of “Thos” signifying “Doubting Thomas.”161 So we are eavesdropping on the correspondence of some of those literal Old School Boys that used to run the largest empire the world has ever known, while never quite leaving the nursery—calling each other silly nicknames, eating bland, comfortingly over-cooked swill, and perhaps carrying teddy bears. Think Charles and Sebastian, if you take them seriously,162 or perhaps Jeeves and Bertie, if not so much.163

  Anywho, we plunge ahead into Cass’s crazy letter. This has been nicely summarized for us by David Auerbach:

  [T]he sensitive narrator [that is, a clairvoyant with an interest in psychical research, like Stapledon himself] talks to a “flame” in a burning stone who tells of life on the sun and subsequent exile when the planets were formed, with a polite dispassion not so far from that of Hal Clement. [It is then revealed] that the flames are hell-bent on manipulating humanity to help them thrive and pursue their spiritual aims, through mind control if necessary. To this end the flame reveals that he and his comrades caused the narrator’s wife to commit suicide, so the narrator could devote himself fully to his studies and establish contact with the flames.

  [Later] Stapledon plays down the mind-control aspect and the particulars of the flames’ existence to focus on their religious history, which is a rewrite of the tail end of Star Maker: advanced beings, including the flames, join into a single cosmic mind that then searches the total vision of reality. This time, though, the revelation of the total indifference of the Maker (who, while not quite absent, is not as personified as it is in Star Maker) is catastrophic and the cosmic mind collapses. Star Maker ended with a little homily on the significance of humanity’s efforts; “The Flames” ends with the flames deciding that a Loving God is such a great idea that He must exist, and stupidly start the whole process up again, killing the narrator in the process for questioning them.164

  The novellas seem quite similar.165 The lengthy correspondence between the skeptic and the reluctant believer, the alien beings—far more indescribably strange than any Lovecraftian entity—living among us, their plans for us, at first benevolent but then revealed as malevolent, the increasing control over the hapless believer who is first taken over (in the process, a loved one is killed), then after delivering his “I welcome our new alien overlords” message is ruthlessly eliminated, etc.

  Reading this brief work, an odd feeling gradually came over me; no, not “cosmic awe” but the feeling something was going on here beneath the surface. It didn’t read like the usual run of post-War literature.

  The first clue was the curiously even-handed noting of German suffering during and after the War. “I had recently done a job in Germany, writing up conditions, and things had got on my nerves; both the physical misery and also certain terrifying psychical reverberations which will sooner or later react on us all.”

  And a bit later:

  I had felt the same terrifying presence in Germany too, but in a different mood. There, it was the presence not of the outer cold and darkness but of the inner spirit of madness and meanness that is always lying in wait to make nonsense of all our actions. Everything that any of the Allies did in that partitioned and tragic country seemed fated to go awry. And then, the food shortage. The children wizened and pinched; and fighting over our refuse bins! And in England one finds people grumbling about their quite adequate rations, and calmly saying that the fate of Germans doesn’t matter.

  Rather unusual for someone who had spent the War in Britain; unlike the expected “filthy Jerry got just what he deserved.” Notice that even the “madness and meanness” doesn’t seem to refer to the tired old “Nazi madness” but rather the cruelty of the occupying Allies. Was this simply the “cosmic” or “inhuman” perspective? Since Stapledon seems to have been a typical British academic parlour pink,166 perhaps a holdover from the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact, or even the post-War Trotskyite anti-Stalinism that eventually became neo-conservatism, which in a non-Jew like Stapledon could take the form of sympathy for the German struggle?

  But there was more going on here, and as I used Kindle’s handy highlight feature to bring together one passage after another, a pattern began to emerge.

  The flames originated in the photosphere of the sun. Ironically, the cosmic processes that created the planets had a cataclysmic effect on them, resulting in their dispersal throughout the solar system in various stages of sleep or hibernation, due to their need for enormously high temperatures to live.167

  “For you, the golden age is in the future; for us, in the past. It is impossible to exaggerate the difference that this makes to all our thought and feeling. . . . With us, save for the few young, the golden age is a circumstantial personal memory of an incomparably fuller life in the glorious sun.”

  Wherever they live, the flames have overcome all ethnic or racial differences, and compose a single mind.

  [S]eparate peoples evolved, or perhaps I should say “species.” These distinct populations were physically isolated from each other, and each developed its characteristic way of life according to its location. But from a very e
arly time all the solar peoples were to some extent in telepathic communication. Always, so far as our elders can remember, the members of each people were in telepathic contact at least with members of their own nation, or rather race; but international, or inter-racial communication was at first hindered by the psychological differences of the peoples. There came at last a time when the whole sun was occupied by a vast motley of peoples in geographical contact with one another, and indeed interpenetrating one another.

  Consequently, “We all lived a curiously double life, an individual life and a racial life.”

  Frozen into a coma on our frigid world, the recent war was a great boon to them:

  He paused, and seemed to sigh. “Those days of the great air-raids,” he said, “those were the great days; great at least in comparison with our present reduced circumstances. Thousands upon thousands of us, nay many millions, now lie frozen in sleep among the charred remains of your buildings, particularly in Germany, where the fires were most extensive and most lasting. The concentration of our spore in the atmosphere must now be many times greater than it was in pre-war days.”

  At the risk of showing my hand, I must point out: their spore were concentrated in Germany, due to the fires.

  Having achieved some degree (ha!) of re-awakening, the flames offer a deal. While acknowledging a vast difference in physiology and history, and thus totally alien mentalities, perhaps we and they can work together,