The Authors
Two of the authors whose stories are featured in this May Weird Tales have sent in some interesting sidelights on their stories and themselves.
P. Schuyler Miller and Frank Owen are the writers. If you haven't already read John Cawder's Wife and The Man Who Amazed Fish in this issue, we think you've got a treat, two treats, in store for you.
Mr. Miller says he is a reader of Weird Tales from quite sometime back. He explains his interesting way of working up the story idea. But really now, Mr. Miller, is it as easy as you make it sound below?
It comes as a distinct shock to me to realize that I very probably rank now as an old reader of Weird Tales. As a farm boy I had been brought up on a diet of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, but it was not until we moved to the city to permit me to enter high school that I saw my first copy of Weird Tales in a newsstand window. I remember vividly the huge spider on the cover, and watched that window faithfully for what must have been more than a year before I got up courage to buy my first copy. I've never stopped and never will, if I can help it.
That first issue had in it Edmond Hamilton's first story, "Monster God of Mamurth" and a serial by Greye La Spina, and not long after, if my memory is still good, came Merritt's "Woman of the Wood." I only wish that I could go to my bookshelf and check on that memory, but an early tragedy in my young life came when the mother of a friend, to whom I had lent my collection of two years of the magazine, threw the whole stack out in a frenzy of housecleaning. I've never been able to replace them. In a fit of insanity I clipped my next two years, taking out my favorite yarns—and have kicked myself at the proper intervals ever since.
My first attempt at fiction was inspired by a story in Weird Tales—probably another of Hamilton's—and even I knew that it was terrible. A fan magazine printed it later as a horrible example of what goes on before a writer gels. Not until much later did I write anything that was fit to send to an editor. Meanwhile, the Miller career has not been particularly exciting. Because arts degrees were a dime a dozen prior to 1929, I majored in chemistry at Union College, got an M.S. in 1932, and found that in those times I had to have a Ph.D. to be worth hiring. The fooling around I had done with writing came to the rescue, and by devious paths I am now in a job in which I am writing news stories, taking photographs, editing reports, sitting on committees, and writing radio scripts for the Schenectady Department of Education—and enjoying it greatly, for all it leaves precious little time to write, except in school vacations.
When I can, I like to get outdoors and soak up the wilderness. It's more than two years since I've been able to go on a camping trip in the Adirondacks, but I tried to get a little bit of the mountains into John Cawder's Wife. I have aspirations as an amateur archeologist—a small toad in a comfortable puddle—and probably would be content to spend my days scratching around with a trowel and brazenly advancing theories on the typewriter. I hope that I can put some of the fascination of this study into words for Weird Tales some day without completely outraging my scientific friends.
But this is the story of John Cawder's Wife as well as of its author. Like many of my attempts, the story started with a title that floated up out of nowhere one night and was written down for safe-keeping. Ideas began to associate themselves with it: a woman who would be the wife not only of one John Cawder but of all Cawders—an immortal, handed down from father to son for generations, held captive to keep her from working her evil on the world. It would have been easy to make such a woman a routine vampire, but it seemed to me that there would have to be a stronger motive than such a creature could arouse—that the Cawders could not let her go. And I began to wonder why.
It is strange how history plays into one's hands in these things. There have been mysterious dark women in the lives of many great geniuses—probably of more than I know about. Such a woman as Cawder's wife could live down through the generations, whipping the spark of genius to flame and basking in that flame. Perhaps it was her breed which gave the Greeks their myths of the Muses. She may have been the princess who found Moses, or the guiding spirit behind Akhnaton's ill-fated experiment with monotheism. Her kind would inspire the unhappy genius of a Poe or a Nijinsky. Cawder's wife is dead, but she may have had sisters who still play their dark role in the evolution of man's civilization.
I've never met a ghost nor had a personal experience with the supernatural, though I have friends who have. Last night I heard a number of ghost stories of old Schenectady, some of them elaborately fanciful, others simple enough to be convincing: the St. Bernard dog whose dead tail still thumps the floor to welcome his mistress' friends to her former home; the footsteps that pace the floor in a house which I can see from my office window, marking 22 paces where there is room for only 18; Aunt Harriet near Herkimer, who sees to it that her house is kept just as she left it many years ago. Maybe some day the skeptical chemist and archeologist will meet one of these "others" and really know.
Chinese Authority
Frank Owen, aside from being a mighty good writer, is also an authority on Chinese character and lore. We've received more than a few letters from you readers asking just how and where Mr. Owen digs up so much on the "Celestial scene."
Here is that author's answer:
The manner in which I began to write Chinese stories had nothing whatever to do with China. I wanted to write a story in yellow with no other color mentioned therein. I called it The Yellow Pool. It took place in the Canal Zone during the time they were building the Panama Canal. I wanted a yellow girl to be the heroine. Tire story was published in "Brief Stories." The magazine received a number of letters praising it. A few of the letters were published. Later Weird Tales used it as a reprint. Still later it was reprinted again in "Tales of Magic and Mystery."
My next Chinese story was The Wind That Tramps the World, published in Weird Tales in 1924 and reprinted in 1929. In 1929 it was used as the title of a collection of Chinese stories published in book form. After that I began studying the lore of China in all its amazing aspects. So far I have only scratched the surface, but nevertheless I have read many hundreds of volumes. I like to use real Chinese material in writing my stories. The descriptions of the drug-shop, the drugs, and the philosophy of Doctor Shen Fu are accurate. So, too, is much of the incidental material in Quest of a Noble Tiger. There is an obscure legend that Red Haired People lived in a mountain. The remarks on amber were the result of research. I had the idea for writing a story of this sort for about three years before I began it. Then suddenly I decided to write it and finished it quickly.
The main reason that I write Chinese stories is that the Chinese is the oldest existing civilization in the world. They gave us an idea for almost everything we treasure today. More than fifteen hundred years ago they were trying to make flying machines; three hundred years before Galileo invented the telescope, telescopes were in use in China; the Chinese performed the first plastic surgery operation a thousand years before it was used in this country; they invented paper, ink, block printing and manufactured the first printed book somewhere around 868 A. D. The medicine ephedrine which has taken the United States by storm was used by the Chinese for four thousand years. The Emperor Ming Huang of the T'ang Dynasty (684-762 A. D.) had one of his palaces air conditioned. He allowed the utmost religious freedom. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists and other religious sects all lived in his empire in perfect harmony. China has always been noted for religious freedom. For instance, the Jews have been in China since two hundred years before Christ and they have never been persecuted.
The Chinese love poetry, flowers, landscapes. They are good to their children. They cherish their girl babies, calling them "My Thousand Pieces of Gold." There is no infanticide in China though the claim has often been made. It used to be smart to discredit "the heathen Chinese" who only gave us the Golden Rule, and who proclaimed "Within the Four Seas All Men Are Brothers." We are fortunate to have these great people as our allies. They cannot lose because they do not know what it is to be conquered. As W. J. R. Thorbecke, former Netherlands Minister to China wrote in 1938, "Whatever the future may bring, China will outlive every danger, endure all suffering and, smiling patiently, emerge from all troubles to face life, to cultivate her soil, to beget children and to hold her place in the sun."
| Readers' Vote | |
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John Cawder's Wife
A Wig for Miss Devore
The Man Who Amazed Fish
Lost Vacation
Colleagues
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Specter in the Steel
Time and Again
The Miracle
The Crowd
The Glass Labyrinth
Lover of Caladiums
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Here's a list of ten stories in this issue. Won't you let us know which three you consider the best. Just place the numbers: 1, 2, and 3 respectively against your three favorite tales—then clip it out and mail it in to us. | |
| Weird Tales | |
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Mr. Grossette Again
I was very interested to read the replies to my letter in the Weird Tales Club department last issue. In the three letters I saw it looks as though I was overruled, two-to-one.
MacDowell and Scofield didn't think much of my skeptical outlook on weird occurrences and the supernatural. But Mr. Mulligan apparently agreed with me.
Maybe we can all agree pretty much on one thing, though. Reading about fantasy and weird things is great entertainment, and none the less so for those of us who have never actually run up against a ghost or vampire.
And anyway, if there are such things as ghosts, I guess I'd rather meet them in the pages of Weird Tales than face-to-face.
new Members
We're sorry that lack of space prevents the inclusion of the names of all New Members. The rest will appear next time.