Robert W. Chambers fanart: 1947 edition

 In the late 1940s, Neil Austin did a series of these one-page "Masters of Fantasy" profiles for several great weird fiction writers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith to Arthur Machen--  ...to our friend Robert W. Chambers.  

I love this style of genuine, enthusiastic illustration in 20th century genre pulps.  I believe we have in this one The Demoiselle d'Ys, the Maker of Moons, and the King in Yellow.  I'm not certain who the monk in the upper right is, and the lower left most likely depicts the titular demoiselle's chateau.  

Archive.org has a surprisingly high resolution scan of the whole issue.

Back to the Back to the Future of the Past

Here's an interesting one.  

Today we look back at the "flash forward" to 1920 at the beginning of The Repairer of Reputations as partly a curiosity of retro-futurism and mostly an expression of the narrator's unreliability, but how was it received in its own time?  

I couldn't tell you about 1895, but here's a perspective from just over a year before 1920, and just weeks after the end of the Great War.  

This is a column from the November 30, 1918 issue of The New Republic, in which "F.H." (whom I assume is editor Francis Hackett) reviews Chambers' "prophecy" and New York's progress toward it.  It's at least as notable for what it leaves out as for what it covers:  this is a Progressive perspective protesting a lack of progress, so you get a recap of the beautiful riverside parks, but not of the cleansing of Jews and black people.  Hackett, an Irish immigrant, does not mention "the checking of immigration [and] the new laws concerning naturalization," because he wants to tell a story of the City not living up to a utopian prediction.  There is a reference to lethal chambers, but only figuratively and not in quotation, presumably a wink to the reader already familiar with the original.  

Though of course, it's possible that last one might not even have been seen as darkly as we do:  in 1918 Progressive intellectuals had not yet reformed their positions on eugenics, and indeed the reference at the end of the column to "the lessons of medical inspection [...being] applied to human welfare" may be just such a suggestion, though I'd charitably assume a New Republic writer would more likely approve of "mere" sterilization than of euthanasia.  Chambers would likely have had something picturesque to say, if he were reading The New Republic.  

In any case, this is not F.H.'s point:  he is concerned here primarily with economic matters, which he contrasts with a Chambers prediction which he asserts sees progress "aesthetically, but only aesthetically."  "The reorganizations of society," Hackett says, "did not interest him."  I don't think that's entirely accurate:  Chambers speaks for example of "the colossal Congress of Religions," after which "bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together."  But certainly any moral reformation of society in this "prediction" (such as it is a prediction) is far removed from the Progressives' vision of fundamental economic and class transformation.  

In any case, here it is.  An immigrant in New York City evaluating the approaching year of 1920 in light of (a very carefully chosen subset of) the "predictions" in The Repairer of Reputations: 

WHAT will New York be like in 1945? It is a brave man who'll risk a prophecy but no braver than Mr. Robert W. Chambers was in 1895 when he dared to foretell the New York of 1920. Now that 1920 is just round the corner it is amusing to pick up The King in Yellow and read the cool forecast which opens the first story, The Repairer of Reputations. Strange to say, the words that leap out of the first paragraph are "the war with Germany," a war which he imagines just completed, and the dominant note all through the story is the note of militarism and military service. Shooting at an object he could not see, across a wild space of years, Mr. Chambers scored such hits as this: "the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the throes of Anarchy." But these are only the broad circumstances of his story. He goes into fine particulars about the 1920 New York.  

It is natural that a former art-student like Mr. Chambers should have seen the future New York as a beautiful New York; he spoke first of all of architectural changes. "Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a godsend to the population."  

The subways have indeed come, and stone quays. But the stone quays, all that there are, are rented by the city to the highest bidders, and the elevated roads still scar great thoroughfares. The real source of New York's downtown congestion, the skyscraper, has never been severely regulated. It acts as a ferocious suction-pump to draw up and spew back hundreds of thousands of downtown workers a day, and until this dilation of New York's heart can be reduced the city will remain a monstrosity in transportation. "Squares laid out"! Manhattan Island is a tight, over-crowded flat, with each piece of furniture fighting every other piece of furniture for the last inch of space. Nothing but legislative dynamite can clear it out--or taxation on the top-layers of Manhattan that will make congestion a fool's game. The city of Mr. Chambers's dream is not much nearer in 1920 than in 1895. And New York's worst enemies are still its best citizens.

"The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of the Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio." So the prophecy continues.

These are rather thin ideas, borrowed from contemporary England and France, but they indicate Mr. Chambers's desire for fine arts institutionalized. What has happened? The moving pictures, chewing-gum of the arts, have become the great popular institution, quite unforeseen by Mr. Chambers. The thickening of apartment-house walls has not kept pace with the spread of mechanical music. Fine arts have no representative in the cabinet, save in the beadledom of Mr. Burleson. And the National Academy of Design is, indeed, like European institutions of the same kind. The things we still need an incubator for young artists, a lethal chamber for old ones, a better means of introducing painters to patrons and students to teachers--these remain to be organized. Perhaps 1945 will see them here.

What will New York be like in 1945? It is impossible to imagine a better New York, a radically better New York, without a change first of all in the avenues of human opportunity. How can you rectify a city that has at its base a foolish wage system, and how foolish is a wage system that looks on the wage-earner as a person without a past or a future, and pretends to protect him in all his inevitable incapacitations--his childhood, his unemployment, his sickness, his old age, his birth and death and marriage--by the puerile counselling of "thrift." So long as there is nothing but "thrift" between millions of New Yorkers and the breakdown of their civilization, you will be bound to have a population that nothing can lift up--not all the penitentiaries and orphan asylums and dispensaries and anti-poverty leagues and money-lenders and public libraries and drinking troughs and fresh air funds and anti-cruelty societies and charity organizations and beggars' licenses and human dog-pounds and free burial and bread-lines in the world. It doesn't much matter, even, whether or not you have "public squares well laid out." Unless the wage system is also well laid out, you'll have little but human driftwood cast up on the park benches, to reproach a clear-
eyed sky.

But of course a right wage system is only the foundation. Think of the visible results in the New York of the next generation if profit did not decide the site of factories. Imagine the shores of the Hudson without its stinking glucose factories on one side and its baleful railroads on the other. Imagine the Hudson River turned to those great uses of recreation and beauty which it so obviously invites, instead of trammelled and polluted by the profiteer. And suppose that the persons who were to find part of their recreation by the shores of the Hudson were persons who had really been permitted to have an education, instead of running the gauntlet of slum mortality and child labor and disease and destitution and misdirected instinct. These are only a few of the rectifications that would have to precede that ennobled city which Mr. Chambers attempted to envisage in the despondency of 1895. He saw it aesthetically, but only aesthetically. The reorganizations of society did not interest him. The better New York, as he saw it, was really the smartened New York as it might have appealed to a man writing to Mr. Dana's New York Sun.  

If the wage-earner gets his title to civilization guaranteed, then 1945 may smile on New Yorkers. It will not simply be a new city because the roofs will be flat to receive airplanes, and the flushing of the streets will be arranged in the same clever way that central heating is to be arranged, and snow-melting and dust-cleansing. There will be newness in the emulative power of the great guilds of workmen that control hours and labor conditions and wages and patents and safety appliances, that thrust aside all the silly limitations of profit and profiteers and have the same respect for tangible values in time of peace that a frightened state has in time of war. It will be the grotesqueries of advertising, however, that will be flung out of newspapers when the guilds are in control, not the genuine free discussion of vital issues. And the lessons of medical inspection and chemical laboratories and scientific cooperation will be applied to human welfare rather than destruction, in this remote era when New York will be a great city of free men and women.  

Putting it down for 1945 is rather too sanguine. One had better say, the year One of Democracy.

Robert W. Chambers' secret Manhattan studio

Chambers is best known as a resident of Broadalbin, NY, but spent his winters in New York City.  In that less private environment, he found it useful to maintain a separate space for writing, away from the distractions of New York society life. 

Broadalbin historian Lewis Cornell is sadly no longer with us.  But in the 2000s his successor, Jay Nellis, passed on his recollections to Chambers researcher Larry Loc, who posted the relevant correspondence on his website:

Mr. Chambers kept as a secret the location of his New York City office.  [His chauffeur, Leon] Crannel left him at a club each morning, from where he walked to his office. He was then picked up at the club following the day’s work.

This echoes Stanley J. Kunitz's 1934 biographical reference book Authors Today and Yesterday, which says:  

During the winter months Chambers lives in New York City and has an office, the location of which not even his family knows. Here he writes daily from ten to six, secure from distraction. He says his stories have the most erratic way of developing. "Sometimes I begin with the last chapter, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes I lay out an elaborate skeleton. The despair of my publisher is this uncertainty of working method. I have sometimes written thirty thousand words, waited two weeks to decide what should happen next, and torn up the whole thirty thousand to get rid of the dilemma. It was much easier for me to do that than to doctor the manuscript."  

This has for quite some time been spoken of as a lost location, kept so secret that future researchers were unable to find it.  I don't know how much serious effort has been made and how much of this talk is truth or myth, but I do believe I may have found it.  

Late-1920s editions of The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association include membership rolls, complete with addresses.  Several list Mr. Chambers thus: 

 

 Chambers, Robert W. - 43 East 83rd St., New York.  

At first I'd thought this was the family home, not a secret studio.  Chambers' wife Elsie was active in the NYC art and antique community (contemporary sources note her making donations of paintings and furniture to institutions), so it seemed unlikely Chambers would use a private address in a context that would be published.  But of course, the sources and oral history may have overstated the absolute secrecy for effect, and the world was so much less searchable back then.  

This weekend I got ahold of Chambers' 1934 New York Times obituary (which is paywalled and not available through my library's Newspapers.com subscription, so I hadn't read it before) and it very briefly mentions the location as well:

In his studio off Fifth Avenue, Mr. Chambers painted while the light was good, then wrote stories in the evenings. 

The building at 43 E 83rd no longer exists, but the lot is a block from Fifth Avenue, right down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in fact. That's not proof-positive, but it's pretty persuasive, and an attractive location for such a devotee of art and beauty as Chambers. 

"A Writer of Romance" by Duffield Osborne: an early positive review of Chambers' weird fiction

  

In addition to my bibliography of Chambers-inspired work, I'm always collecting cited details about his life, appearances of his work in periodicals (almost all, but not quite all of which were reprinted in books), and writing about Chambers, trying to build the fullest picture I can of the man and his work. 

Today I found a real prize.

People frequently ask about the reception of The King in Yellow in its own time, and the answer is always unsatisfying: literary critics dismissed Chambers in general, and references to his weird work are usually in passing, even his fans generally preferring his historical fiction. 

 But check this out: an 1898 review from The Overland Monthly covering Chambers' early weird books The King in Yellow and The Mystery of Choice, and an overwhelmingly positive one. 

 Note that in this article, when the writer speaks of "romance," etc. he is referring to the Romantic movement in literature, which by Chambers' time had been mostly displaced by Realism and made him read as dated to fashionable critics. He doesn't necessarily mean "love stories" in particular. 

 

A Writer of Romance

by Duffield Osborne

IN VIEW of the recent and almost simultaneous publications of "Lorraine" and "The Mystery of Choice," the moment seems auspicious for a short resumé of Robert W. Chambers' work. To say that, all things considered, Mr. Chambers stands foremost among the American writers of fiction who are alive today, may occasion a stir of surprise among a certain great public that knows little of his claims, may call up a sentiment of languid indignation among some half dozen authors who have gotten into the habit of patting each other on the back and assuming it as axiomatic that the best name lies somewhere within their little circle. Mr. Chambers may be fairly termed an out sider. He did not begin by writing down to the standard of magazine commonplace nor up (?) to the flattery of society complaisance. He was not unobjectionable from the standpoint of the young female person of North Shelby Center, nor did he fire the heart of the matinee girl with impossible pictures of her truly godlike though four-hundredesque hero. He just wrote what was in him to write; and the name and locale of his first publisher would have sufficed to cause the literary pharisees to lift up their hands and make the usual pharisaical comments, had not the aforesaid pharisees felt it quite impossible for them to notice a book bearing such an imprint.

Fortunately, however, we have in this country a small but ever widening class of readers who can recognize and enjoy what is really good; and "The King in Yellow" won at least a name for its author, where a name was best worth having. I maintain now, as I have maintained from the first, that there are no better short stories in the language than "The Demoiselle D'ys," "The Court of the Dragon," "The Street of the Four Winds," and "Rue Barrée": nothing more weirdly imaginative, nothing finer in sentiment, nothing more finished in execution, and nothing more absorbing in interest. At times it has seemed to me as if Poe had come to life; but Poe with an added lightness of touch and shading, Poe with a newly developed sense of humor.

Previously to "The King in Yellow," another book had been put out by the same publisher: a novel which, though showing unmistakable promise, had failed somewhat of fulfillment. Later appeared from a New York house a second collection of stories, called "The Maker of Moons," wherein was the same remarkable combination of weirdness, naturalness, and humor. Several of the tales, including the title story, "The Silent Land" and perhaps "A Pleasant Evening," were fully up to the high standard of the earlier works. Then came two novels and they came like a fulfilled vaunt of triumphant versatility. In "A King and a Few Dukes," Mr. Chambers sauntered over into Anthony Hope's home grounds and beat him handily at his own game; while in "The Red Republic" he wrote an historical romance of Paris under the Commune which is warranted to hold the interest of any living reader, not to mention a few who have not been too long deceased. I do not speak of Mr. Chambers' book of poems: "With the Band" because they hardly seem to be truly Mr. Chambers'. What he himself may do in poetry is better foreshadowed by some stray dedication or introduction or scraps here and there under the titles of his tales.

And now to open the new books. "The Mystery of Choice," contains several stories that show their author at his best, such as "Pompe Funebre," "The Messenger," and "Passeur;" while, if in two or three instances both here and in the "Maker of Moons," he has revealed a trace of the blighting magazine impulse, it cannot be said that he has ever forgotten to be interesting, and it is perhaps his misfortune that the author of "The Demoiselle D'ys" and "Rue Barrée" has condemned himself to be judged by a higher standard than most of us. As for "Lorraine," it is another historical romance - a tale of the Franco-Prussian war, and unquestionably the best of Mr.Chambers' longer works - best in style, proportion, truth, and sustained interest.

And now a general word by way of conclusion. I have not ventured to use the term "great" in this paper. It is one that is used much too freely now-adays. Nor do I feel that an individual critic is justified in applying it unless supported by a very general critical sentiment. Besides, I am a confessed adherent of the romantic cult and might fairly be said to have some measure of bias. [I] do not mean by this, that there are not realistic novels that have aroused my strongest enthusiasm and interest - but these novels are not by the professed, and if I may say so, professional realists. The latter parties may be pretty safely counted upon either to evolve some pitiful libel on humanity or to invite you to meet a lot of people who would bore you to death in the flesh and whom I find equally competent when translated into type. I do not affect such hosts whether they be social or literary. It is he who writes well what is known as romance, that tells me of things which, while they may not happen very generally, certainly ought to - if only to enliven life; who takes his guests away on short vacations-away from the sordid details of office and shop, away from the monotonous routine of domesticity and society, and who presents them to people they have perhaps never known - people very pleasant to meet-people whom, for the moment at least, you feel convinced you might have met had you only turned that last corner in the other direction. Is not this the highest art? To me the best realist is only a painter of portraits and landscapes; a man endowed with observation, judgment, taste, and skill. The best romanticist must be all of these but he must also be a creator of great compositions, a thinker of great thoughts. It is to Robert W. Chambers, the romanticist that I pay my respects.