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We Will Explore Hell: W.C. Morrow, Tourist Traps and the Conte Cruel

May 26, 2016 Christopher Davis

“Having passed through death… we will explore hell,” says Bishop, a friend of artist Edouard Cucuel, to their mutual guest, a Mr. Thompkins in William Chambers Morrow’s 1899 travelogue Bohemian Paris of To-Day.

Leaving the Cabaret du Néant (Nothingness / Death) and about to enter the Cabaret de l’Enfer (Hell) — with its monstrous demon’s mouth of a door — the trio’s evening had long since passed the bizarre, knocking now at the Gates of Hell itself. Or at least a nightclub meant to look like it. Complete with a man at the threshold dressed in red tights and devil’s horns, this was an approximation of hell. A hell on earth, so to speak. And a bit of fun at that.

BOHEMIAN PARIS OF TO-DAY (1899)

Such is a scene in one of the last works of little-known American author W.C. Morrow, a colleague of Ambrose Bierce and early-practitioner / respected author of “the Weird tale.” Working from the notes of Edouard Cucuel, Bohemian of Paris of To-Day was an odd departure for Morrow. With the exception of a pamphlet, Roads around Paso Robles (1904), it was the only travelogue he ever produced.

The book is best known for its chapter on Montmarte, particularly sections showcasing the strange and often salacious hotspots of fin de siècle Paris. Possibly the best account we have of the notorious Cabaret du Néant and Cabaret de l’Enfer — both of which appear to have operated at least through the early 1920s (with the buildings still standing as late as the 1950s) — Morrow’s transcription of Cucuel’s notes provides details that photos (which abound on the web) never could.

DEATH

The Cabaret du Néant, for example, was funereal and thick with the trappings of death — a place where tourists dined off of coffins and were served by undertakers. It was a nightclub that catered to the thrill-seeking tourist who wanted more than the dancing girls of the Moulin Rouge. Its main attraction? An illusion on stage of an attractive girl in an upright coffin. Before the crowd’s eyes, she transformed into a skeleton. A trick with mirrors, most likely.*

HELL

“Enter and be damned,—the Evil One awaits you!” were the words that welcomed the visitor at the next stop along the way.; at the gaping mouth of the Cabaret de l’Enfer, Mephisto himself greeted you. There, at eerily lit red tables, imps served black coffee with cognac, calling it “seething bumpers of molten sins, with a dash of brimstone intensifier.”

HEAVEN

The nearby heavenly Cabaret du Ciel completed the trio. It was arguably the most boring of the clubs — the kind Oscar Wilde would have skipped.

Overall, they were clubs any modern-day Goth would love to be caught dead in. Some might call it bad taste. Others, campy fun.

ABOUT MORROW

The travelogue is interesting, but it is also telling. Why did such places interest not only tourists and Parisians alike, but artists like Cucuel and the writer who transcribed his notes, W.C. Morrow?

The Ape, The Idiot and Other People (1896)

Morrow — a displaced southerner who became a San Franciscan of some fame whose short stories reminded many a critic of the work of Morrow’s friend, Ambrose Bierce — wrote many a serious horror tale. His most famous collection, The Ape, The Idiot and Other People (1896) had established him among known “weird tale” writers of his day. A mere three years later, he had apparently abandoned the short story (for he would publish no other collection) and was here transcribing the notes of an artist wandering about Paris. It makes Bohemian Paris of To-Day stand out as such an odd departure for Morrow — especially considering the subject matter of his most famous work.

“His Unconquerable Enemy” (first published in 1889 and later collected in the aforementioned volume) is unquestionably the best story written by Morrow. And it most certainly belongs to the class of horror fiction often called conte cruel. As opposed to the supernatural weird tale, the conte cruel concerned itself with the horrible in human nature in a world where death by violence seems almost inevitable. In the tale, a western doctor tells the tale of Neranya, a temperamental servant of the Rajah with a penchant for violence who is punished for his frequent offenses by being systematically dismembered with each passing transgression. Finding himself in a personal hell by the end of the story — as nothing more than mere head and torso in a cage — Neranya pulls off one final (if implausible) act of revenge that ends in his falling upon the Rajah and killing him. It is a vicious act in a tale completely devoid of the supernatural, and it belongs to a class of short-story called the conte cruel.

INFLUENCE OF THE CONTE CRUEL

In his seminal study Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) , H. P. Lovecraft observed that “[the Conte Cruel]… is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself… in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors.”

So how did a writer of such violent and disturbing fiction come to transcribe the travels of an artist through the equivalent of themed restaurants that were the nineteenth-century equivalent of Disney’s Haunted Mansion?

The words of horror master Clive Barker — quoted by Rob Lowman of the Los Angeles Daily News regarding Barker’s “Freakz” live show at Universal Studios in the late 1980s — may provide an answer. For Barker, author of The Books of Blood (1984-1985) and director of Hellraiser (1987), putting together the equivalent of a Halloween Haunted House may seem like a step down. But it may be better seen as a step sideways — from one kind of scare to another.

“There’s something deeply perverse about this,” says Barker of his live show. “If something like this happened to us in real life… we’d reject it wholesale. But if it’s a safe environment, like a movie or a ride or a book then we can put [it] down.”

Or simply leave, like we would a nightclub where skeletons appear on stage and the devil serve us drinks.

Barker continues: “what it is, is a confrontation with death in a very safe environment. If we walk away from the play environment having confronted death… then maybe we are stronger when we confront it in the real world. We all need to do this. We’re all going to die. The years tick on and you get closer to the end, and that’s part of the dynamic of being alive. Knowing we’re on that journey.”

Taking Barker a step further, perhaps a trip to hell helps us explore the dynamic of being damned. If only for an evening.

CONFRONTING DEATH

Morrow shares that journey with us — via both the tourist traps of turn-of-the-century Paris and the gruesome horrors of the conte cruel; as radically different as these writings are, they resonate with Barker’s keen observation that “If we walk away from the play environment having confronted death… then maybe we are stronger when we confront it in the real world.”

Perhaps the camp of the cabarets and the carnage of the contes cruels are not all that incompatible.

Perhaps Morrow saw this too.

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* For a really cool article about the Cabaret du Néant and the use of mirrors with the girl-in-the-coffin-trick click here.

Note that Morrow’s Bohemian Paris of To-Day is also available from archive.org. There, you will also find the full-text of his collection of Weird Tales The Ape, The Idiot and Other People, including “His Unconquerable Enemy.”

For more information about little-known horror authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, read S.T. Joshi’s seminal The Evolution of the the Weird Tale. In fact, get it on amazon.com along with my book!

books, culture, history, musings, occult

The Gothic Staircase: From Piranesi to Harry Potter

January 21, 2015 Christopher Davis

Of the many influences upon the progenitors of Gothic fiction —the German and British Romantics of the eighteenth century — was the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an artist known for etchings of Rome and labyrinthine “prisons” (Carceri d’Invenzione). With arches, vaults and staircases that lead nowhere, Piranesi’s prisons were visions of the impossible. To the Romantics, he was a virtuoso of the imagination.

“I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.” — Giovanni Battista Piranesi, as quoted by an early biographer

Plate 14 of Piranesi's Prisons — Plate 14 of Piranesi’s Prisons

The first edition of Carceri d’Invenzione was published in 1750; a decade later, Piranesi would return to his imaginary prisons, revising the existing and adding two more (click here to see all 14 of the original Carceri in order). By the late eighteenth century, his work was known throughout Europe.

Writing in his Italian Journey: 1786-1788, Goethe confesses that his visit to the ruins of Rome had failed to measure up to Piranesi’s images of them. Horace Walpole — author of the Castle of Otranto (1764), generally agreed upon by critics as one of the first Gothic novels — urged his fellow artists to “study [Piranesi’s] sublime dreams.”

Coleridge was well aware of Piranesi; Thomas De Quincey in his Confessions of An Opium Eater (1821) reminisces

“Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c.&c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overccome. Creeping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.”

Again and again, De Quincey comes back to the image of the staircase to the point where Piranesi’s labors are likened to unfinished stairs.

It is as if in the staircase itself, De Quincey and by extension, Coleridge (if the recollection is accurate) find in Piranesi’s etchings a potent symbol for the imagination itself. And for the authors of the Gothic novel, that symbol, consciously or not, plays out again and again.

Emily St. Aubert, the heroine Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) encounters many a supernatural terror on the staircase in a gloomy castle. In his Monk: A Romance (1796), Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis similarly situates his paranormal happenings on the stairs when in Voume II, Chapter I he writes “Occasional gleams of brightness darted from the Staircase
windows as the lovely Ghost past by them.” The aforementioned Castle of Otranto finds many a dastardly deed tied to the castle’s stairs. And as late into the nineteenth century in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the titular Count leads an unsuspecting Jonathan Harker “up a great and winding stair.” So prevalent is the image from Dracula that it is repeated again and again in film adaptations of the novel, from Carl Laemmle’s 1931 version with Bela Lugosi to Francis Ford Coppola’s with Gary Oldman (in 1992).

“Winding” “dizzying” “narrow” and “great” are just a few of the adjectives tied to the Gothic staircase. More than a means of moving from point A to point B, they are a mystery within the mysterious. They are architectural ruminations of at once possibilities and simultaneously dead ends. To the writer, they are ready made for metaphor.

No surprise then, Freud states that “staircases, ladders, and flights of stairs, or climbing on these, either upwards or downwards, are symbolic representations of the sexual act.” (Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners. 1921. Chapter 5). But Freud stops short of fully exploring the nature of the staircase as metaphor in the same way that the Judeo-Christian tradition mistakes original sin as some type of sexual awakening — when it is indeed all knowledge that the forbidden fruit affords.

Knowledge then, as it emerges from the path of imagination, is at the end of the staircase. Something Jung might see as Hermetic knowledge and light from darkness.

Winchester House and the stairs to nowhere

Sometimes it is knowledge of a truth one does not want to confront as in the curious case of the Sarah Winchester’s “Mystery” House in San Jose, California. Plagued by thoughts of the horrors her husband’s rifle had wrought, the widow Winchester spent the years following her husband’s death building a mansion with doors, windows and stairs to nowhere as a means, or so she thought, to confuse potentially vengeful spirits or hold off death itself. Hundreds of rooms with no sense or reason. An attempt to ease a guilty conscience.

More often, the staircase can be seen as a retreat or escape. A Jacob’s Ladder of sorts. A movement toward reward. It is interesting, for example, that a radical form of psychotherapy called Emergence Therapy uses the staircase as a metaphor. The patient ascends from darkness to light. Even in popular music, we find stairways to heaven. Where a “piper will lead us to reason.”

Piranesi’s etchings were born out of an Age of Reason. Knowledge, the promise of the Enlightenment, was believed within reach by men of science in the mid seventeenth century — providing the man of reason stayed the course and used a scientific mind to stay on point. But as Piranesi’s mind-boggling prisons reveal, the imagination — the creative yet too often cruel tool of the inquisitive mind that was championed as much as reason by poets and philosophers of the early nineteenth century — can obfuscate more than enlighten. Or perhaps better put: enlighten through the challenge of obfuscation.

Stripped of its many layers of metaphor, it becomes clear that the staircase is the mind. Up into the light. Down into the dark. Knowledge. Fear of the unknown.

Hogwart's Grand Staircase (courtesy of harrypotter.wikia.com) — Hogwart’s Grand Staircase (courtesy of harrypotter.wikia.com)

It has been reported that among the many influences for J.K. Rowling’s depiction of the Grand-Staircase at Hogwart’s was a bookshop in Portugal called Livraria Lello. In its beauty and grandeur, one can see a model for Hogwart’s in Livraria Lello, but it is not until one really considers the bewildering movement and plot points served by Piranesi-like staircase at Hogwart’s that the real foundation for Rowling lay somewhere in the Gothic.

Not only is there an impressive architectural style in Hogwart’s, but also, even more so, a movement of the mind therein — from darkness to light. It is this very movement that for Harry Potter and company literally reveals hidden [i.e., occult] knowledge again and again across the novels each time the Grand Staircase comes into play, placing Rowling’s work (and the eerily reminiscent prisons of Piranesi) firmly within the Gothic tradition.

VAULT OF THOUGHTS