SS Bonus 16 The Book of Jade

Join Rob as he digs warily into the worm-eaten Book of Jade. Who knows what decayed delights may be revealed...
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Strange Shadows. The Clark Ashton Smith podcasts. Greetings, friend, and welcome to this bonus episode of Strange Shadows, the Clark Ashton Smith Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Poynton, and uh well, we've actually got access to Innsmouth Library today, so please do choose one of these lovely plush armchairs and make yourself comfortable. And we are looking at uh well, it's gonna be a slightly worm-eaten tome, I'm afraid, and it has been freshly, shall we say, acquired from the clutches of its previous owner, just across the road there in Innsmouth Cemetery. It was a little bit of a rush job to retrieve it, because of course the ghouls will be burrowing their way towards that fresh grave. But yes, our pair of diggers managed to get the book out in time, and here it is in all its glory. All highly appropriate, of course, because today we are going to be taking a delve into the depths of the book of Jade. Now you may remember on our last bonus episode, one of the things we were looking at was the correspondence between Donald Wondry and Smith. And Wondry lent Smith a copy of the Book of Jade, who was quite enthusiastic about it. Uh a little more enthusiastic perhaps than Lovecraft was later on, but we shall get to that. And this was very interesting to us because neither Tim nor myself had read the Book of Jade. May have heard of it in passing in some of the correspondence between the Lovecraft Circle or the Smith Circle, whichever you want to call it, but not actually read it. And I'm pleased to say that if you want a fresh version that doesn't have tomb mold on it, then it is quite easy to get online. And in fact, the edition I got hold of is called The Book of Jade, a new critical edition compiled by David E. Schultz and Michael J. Abalafia. This is a hippocampus press book, of course, published in 2015. And it has all the complete collection, all the poems from the Book of Jade, plus a lot of associated essays and articles, reviews of the Book of Jade, and uh some history of the author and so on. So a very comprehensive guide to the whole book and well worth adding to your own personal library. Whether you keep that library in some IKEA shelves or in a cupboard or in a tomb, of course, is totally up to you. It's a free world after all. So we're gonna be studying the book of Jay today. We're gonna talk about its author, David Park Barnett's. We'll look at the publication history of the book, we'll look at the effects and quite lasting impact of the book, and I'm also gonna read some of the poems as well. And one of the most telling things about the book for me is the dedication at the very beginning to the memory of Charles Baudelaire. Now, of course, we have spoken about Baudelaire several times on Strange Shadows in relation to Smith, who of course translated many of Baudelaire's poems into English from the original French, and by all accounts did a very good job because the challenge, if you like, with translating poetry is not so much to get the actual literal translation, but to keep and convey the essence, the feeling, the spirit of those original words. And Smith was uniquely placed to do this, being a poet of great descriptive ability himself. So I think in some ways, perhaps the Book of Jade is another one of those link books. It's a link between the romantic poets of the 19th century with the weird poets and authors of the early 20th century, and even up to modern times with writers such as Thomas Lagotti, who we shall be mentioning later on. And of course, the other thing we have to factor into this, which fits very well into the genre, sadly, is that this is Park Barnett's only published work, because he died very soon after publication. So what he would have gone on to produce, we can only speculate and surmise. But you know, the added air of tragedy, I think as we mentioned in the last episode, it almost adds that King in Yellow feel to the book of Jade. So the hippocampus book that I'm drawing from has an extensive biography of not only David Park Barnett's, but also his father, who bore the name Samuel Bacon Barnett's. Quite unusual. I suppose in England we have Francis Bacon, right? So maybe it's not that unusual, but uh yeah, it did strike me as a little bit of a strange name. Now, there's a huge amount of information in this book about his father, which I'm not going to go into here, but of course it does play a large role in forming the sort of writer that Park Barnett's Jr. became. But his father was basically what we can think of as a sort of travelling minister. By all accounts, he wasn't at home very often, though it seems that the home life was quite happy, and there's certainly no question of abandonment or anything like that. I think this is just one of those things at the times when people had to travel for work. It's not uncommon, even in people like Lovecraft later on, and certainly as we get into the 20s and 30s. But David Park Barnett was born on the 24th of June 1878 in Wheeling, West Virginia. The family had a German background, they were the descendant of early German settlers. And I mentioned the church connection. We know that Samuel undertook pastorship of the Lutherian Church at Wheeling in 1862, and that was the start of his church work, which continued throughout his life. In 1882 the family moved to Des Moines in Iowa, where they lived at 722 18th Street and became members of the Church of St. John under Pastor John A. Wirt. By all accounts they became an integral part of the congregation there and were active in both congregational and community work. Park and his brother Frederick attended public schools in the city, and in fact in the poem The House of Youth, Park speaks of a building he once knew, perhaps the Church of St. John itself, described as a red bricked building standing on a hill. Yea, surely I have seen it long ago, far sunken in the weary dust of time, yea, surely even that stair so hard to climb, I climbed, and strode its hallways to and fro, the which were bright with many lamps aglow, and loud with choristers in ceaseless chime. One thing that strikes me is how Lovecraftian in tone a lot of this is, or, of course it's the other way round. Lovecraft drew on this kind of language, this kind of feeling very much for a lot of his own poetry and prose as well. This is where the father, Samuel, Dr. Barnett's, began his travelling, and we read that in one of the years of Dr. Barnett's service in the Western Field, he did not spend more than three active weeks of the year at the family home. In 1899, Samuel closed the letter home, though to stay only thirty six hours. Tomorrow morning I must up early and off to Carthage, Illinois for five addresses. So his work for the church involved an awful lot of travelling around. We also read though that Dr. Barnett was a very domestic and home loving man devoted to his wife and children. He was a strong temperance advocate, which we might expect in a churchgoer of that time. This is something that perhaps Park Jr. riled against a little. Certainly we read a lot about the banquets of women and wine throughout the Book of Jade. At the age of fifteen in 1893, Park Barnett entered the Midland College of the Lutherian Church at Acheson, Kansas, and soon, according to his obituary, developed more than ordinary talent in the line of language and literature. So Park Barnett attended at Acheson from 1893 to 1897. In his college grade book, Barnett is noted as D. Park Barnett, suggesting that he was already known by his middle name, which was his mother's maiden name, perhaps because of some breach philosophical or otherwise with his father. So we get a little hint of maybe some difference in opinion or disagreement between him and his father, because his works published in Poet Law and Overland Monthly and his correspondence with publisher William Doxey are simply signed Park Barnett's. And Donald Wandry and Lovecraft later likewise refer to him as Park Barnett's. This was in the nineteen twenties and thirties, of course. So Barnett's lowest grade is 75 for essays. This is in the fall of 1894. And some people might think that is rather low for a would-be poet or writer, but the general consensus is that that low grade is due more to the opinions expressed in his writings than to the actual quality of the work. Again, from his obituary, it's noted that Park detested shams of every kind, and some of his criticisms would have been regarded as severe. Sounds like a little bit like the Lovecraft approach to criticism, where you know you give it both barrels if you don't like something. From there Barnett attended the Midland College Classical course, where alongside the usual courses, such as history and geometry, he also took biblical history, rhetoric, composition and declamation, psychology, Anglo Saxon, oration, English literature, logic, English history, English philology, aesthetics, American literature, and recent American writers. As if that wasn't enough. During the months of his senior year at Midland, he also studied Sanskrit and other languages with Dr. Carl M. Belsa of Colorado University. In 1897 he graduated from the Midland College with an AB. A few months after graduation, he entered Harvard University, where he was quickly made a member of the American Oriental Society, his name being suggested by Professor Landman, and he was the youngest person ever admitted. And Barnettes' sponsor here, Charles Rockall Landman, was a distinguished Sanskrit scholar, editor of the Harvard Oriental series, and the author and translator of numerous and voluminous writings dealing with the Orient, what we would today call Asian studies. And I think this is something the commented on before as well, of course, at that time, with things like Volthum and Tales of the Arabian Knights, there was this huge growing interest in Oriental studies, sometimes with overtones of stereotyping and racism, perhaps. But I think it does indicate as well a movement away from the very more traditional Catholic or Lutheran Christian viewpoint to this wider world view. We know, for example, that later on Park under Lamman would also take an interest in the precepts of Hinduism and Buddhism. And of course, at that time we have to remember we've got Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution, and all these things floating around in the ether as well. And it does seem from accounts at the time that there was this deep division at Harvard, with one side tending towards laborious pedantry in the worst tradition of the German graduate schools, and the other toward a momentous cheapening of humanistic values and studies, a process which had already begun in 1892 with the substitution of sociology for Latin. Now, interestingly enough, we mentioned Landman there. Among his later pupils was T. S. Eliot, who, before he became devoted to Anglicanism, was a student of Indian mythology and whose Sanskrit passage in part five of the wasteland reflects Landman's teachings. So I think it's interesting this sort of relationship between philosophy and Eastern thought in Barnett's work is a forerunner or a foreshadowing of people like Eliot's later poetry as well. In 1898, Barnitz received his A B and proceeded to study for his AM, and he became known as a very good student. Now it seems likely that Barnett's composed much of the Book of Jade while a student at Harvard, and we can pick up something of the atmosphere of that time, that division I mentioned earlier, through the intentionally blasphemous, mocking, and disrespectful nature of much of the book. Some even have said this is rather suggestive of a student prank perpetrated by Barnett's, perhaps with the jaded approval of fellow classmates. And in fact, there are penciled annotations and interpolations signed by one HVS in the Yow copy of the Book of Harvard. This shows that at least a few of the poems were possibly collaborations, suggesting that perhaps Barnett's had a small audience of like-minded people interested in his efforts. Inside the Yow copy of the Book of Jade are also pasted the galley proofs of a grotesque poem titled Dance Macabra that according to HVS, at my suggestion, but only after some argument, was omitted from the collection. Now various theories have been put forward as to who this HVS may have been. Some say that it was Barnett's publisher, William Doxy. It could be that HVS was another member of Docsy's firm. However, it seems much more likely that HVS was a member of the Massachusetts Circle rather than the New York publisher. In fact, there was a clergyman associated with Yao because the archives of the Yao Divinity School Library have two boxes of documents related to a Harmon van Sleck Peak, or HVS Peak. He was a missionary to Japan under the American Reformed Church from 1893 to 1929. It's possible that Barnett may have met him either through his scholarly orientalist circles or by virtue of his Lutheran background. And although Peake apparently was in Japan for most of the time after 1893, the Yale Archive includes the types and annotated transcripts of regular circular letters written by Peak from 1893 to 1906, which suggests that if the HVS of the Yale Book of Jade was in Japan when Barnett's composed and published his book, then perhaps their numerous discussions, debates, and later annotations may have been transacted solely by Mao. There are various references to Japan in both the Book of Jade and in Barnett's essay The Art of the Future. So again we can speculate that the information from these derived from either circular or personal letters by Peak. According to HVS's notes in the Yao Book of Jade, Barnett's book was originally called The Book of Gold, then The Divan of Park Barnett, and finally the Book of Jade. The tentative title The Divan of Park Barnitz no doubt derives from such earlier Persian collections as the Divan of Hafiz, which was popular with both Orientalists and aesthetes, including the decadent Bostonian patroness Isabella Stuart Gardner, who displayed a manuscript of it in her museum collection. The final title of the book perhaps was based on Judith Gautier's Le Livre de Jade, a book of adaptations from the Chinese, which scholar Enid Starkey likens to the later prose poems of Oambo, and of which Barnett's would have been doubly aware because of both his Orientalist and French literary studies. And of course, at this time there was what we might term a decadent movement. How involved Barnett was in that we can't be sure. As far as we know, there was no fully fledged decadent movement at Harvard until later on in the next century, when there was a resurgence of interest in people such as Macken and similar weird writers, which later, of course, fed into groups such as the Lovecraft Circle. In 1899, as a graduate student at the age of 21, Barnitz received his AM. Not long after that, he was back at home with his parents and siblings at 18th Street in Demoan, where he is listed as a student in the 1900 City Directory. There he began doing literary work, and again, according to his obituary, this is where he published the volume of poems anonymously, which was spoken of as of unusual merit. Barnitz died on the 10th of November 1901 at his home from a heart attack, and according to the obituary, young Barnitz has been affected with an enlargement of the heart, but the family had no idea of his condition being serious. He has been unusually well this autumn, up to last Saturday night, when he complained of severe pain. Tuesday he was much better, and Wednesday feeling so well that he told his mother to accompany Dr. Barnitz to the Synod and Missionary Convention at Iowa City. Wednesday evening he read for several hours, and Thursday breakfasted and lunch with his sisters, seemingly quite better. After lunch he decided to rest, but after reaching the second story fell, and in an instant life was extinct. Medical aid was summoned at once, but to no avail. The funeral took place from his home on eighteenth Street Tuesday afternoon. The rendering of the chants and hymns was very beautiful, clear, and effective. Everything was plain and simple in taste, display, and ostentation being scrupulously avoided. The deceased was dressed in the student's gown of the degree of AM, the cap being by his side. Vases of autumn leaves, of which he was very fond, were placed about the parlour, and a bunch of chrysanthemums on the lid of the plain cloth covered casket. The service was that of the Evangelical Lutheran Church rendered in full. There was no sermon or address. The internment was private an hour after the public services. So the Book of Jade itself was reported as being published in 1900, though the book's title page has a publication date of 1901, which ties in with HVS's annotations in the Yale Book of Jade. And that also states that Mr Barnitz died suddenly a few weeks after the appearance of the book. So it's most likely we're looking at a publication date of autumn 1901. And again we get into sort of speculative territory here, but there is some thought that Barnett's may have predicted his early death in his poems. Joseph Payne Brennan observed, did Barnett actually experience premonitions of an early death? It seems not unlikely. And Mark Valentine in his introduction to the Dertro Press edition of the Book of Jade concurs. We must suppose that a consciousness of the imminence of death was ever in the poet's thoughts as he wrote the volume, that he meant it to outlive him, to stand as his sole summation of the strong sardonic truths he had discovered for himself. Let's turn now to the book itself. We know it was published in the autumn of 1901, and we know that it was published anonymously at Barnett's instruction. Publisher was William Doxy of California, and we believe that Barnett's learnt about Doxy through his extensive course of reading, avant-garde and decadent literature. As well as publishing limited and popular editions, Doxie included decadent Macabra and Rubayat type books on his publishing lists and was not averse to publishing new or unknown authors. He wasn't a prudish publisher either, because uh, you know, for the day Barnett's work would have been seen as gruesome and even blasphemous in many circles, especially in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials, of course. But it had been said that Doxie was more a bohemian and a bookman than a businessman, with a wide Who had extravagant tastes. By 1899, however, Doxie was on the verge of bankruptcy. Given a reprise by his Eastern printers, he implemented a new policy consisting of a modest publication program with a concentration on specialization, special printings, and fine bindings. And in fact, a second edition of the Book of Jade was about to be issued at the time of the author's death, which suggests that Doxie was still actively publishing as late as October 1901, although perhaps the only new author in his roster at that time was Barnett's. Barnitz apparently was very happy with Doxy's choice of design for the book, the cover showing a line drawing done in red and orange yellow on a black background of a long-haired figure, probably Mao, partially wrapped in a great flowing cloak or shroud and carrying a sword, while the title page carries the volume's title over an ornate cut depicting what is presumably a mermaid among fish. In his letter to Doxy Barnett says, I have received the twelve copies of my book, and I have to say that I am very much pleased with the care you have given to its printing and with the result. The result is entirely admirable, the square form, the title page, and the cover are particularly novel and happy. It makes a pleasant change to hear of an author who's happy with what a publisher has done with their work. We think of the numerous times that Smith's work was altered by editors, and uh yeah, one can only sympathize. So it's a limited edition of 600 copies, which was well distributed, and in fact it can be found in libraries across the United States, including the New York Public Library, the Harris Collection of the John Hay Library at Brown University. We have mentioned Yale University, of course, and the University of California Library. And as I mentioned before, we know that two noted Macabra poets, Donald Wondry and Joseph Payne Brennan, both owned copies. And this presumably is the copy that Wondry sent to Smith, who I'm sure returned it once he'd finished with it. And we do know that Lovecraft had read it as well, because 32 years later we get this from HPL. And who could have written that nasty cynical book of Jade? Internal evidence indicates a Harvard student. The internal evidence is probably a poem called Harvard, so you know that's not exactly a covert. And we believe that Lovecraft was introduced to the Book of Jade as Smith was through Wandray, because there's no mention of it before Wondray's correspondence to Lovecraft. So on the question of anonymity we get this, this is a Barnett's letter to Doxie. It is not necessary to remind you that I wish my anonymity strictly preserved for the present. This perhaps reflects the climate of fear or at least caution that affected literature during that time. We mention the wild trials, of course, but there were other cases going on as well. An attribution of the book of J to Barnett's eventually would have been facilitated by his other writings published during 1901, including two of his poems in the Overland Monthly, which appeared under his own name. By the 1920s there was a general revival of interest in writers of the 1890s, and as we've already seen, several members of the Lovecraft Circle knew of Barnitz and perpetuated an interest in the writer. There was this sort of talk or rumour at the time, this is something we originally picked up on and mentioned, that a Harvard youth named Park Barnitz had subsequently killed himself after writing the book. And we get this from Lovecraft actually in one of his letters. There doesn't seem to be any evidence at all for that. And I'm not sure it's mentioned anywhere else or by anyone else. So I don't know if that was just HPL picking up on some misinformation or perhaps putting two and two together and getting five. Who knows? What we do know is that Barnett's had a big influence on Donald Wondry in his own poetry. It's not hard to see the influence in such poems of Wondry as Somewhere Past Isafan or Chant to the Dead. And we believe that Wondry's first encounter with the Book of Jade was during his adolescence. At age 15, Wondry had begun part-time work after classes as a page boy in the circulation room of the St. Paul Public Library. This, of course, would have given him access to a wide range of literature. And in a similar way, we know that Joseph Payne Brennan, also a contributor to Weird Tales and a New England poet, came upon his copy of the Book of Jade during his work at Yale's Beinacker Library in the 1940s. So we already see the book's influence growing uh just a couple of decades after its author's passing. But this continued into the 40s, 50s, and 60s and even later because in 1998 Dertro Press brought out the Book of Jade in a limited edition of 300 copies, with an introduction by Mark Valentine and an afterward by one Thomas Lugotti. Calling the Book of Jade a book of power, Valentine equated it and its sustained extremities of idol breaking and bourgeois baiting to works such as Aubrey Beardley's Impudent Pictures. The implacably dark stance of these poems would appear to be not the occasional verses which were popular fare of the time, Valentine writes, nor the chronicle of a spiritual struggle which one might expect from a thoughtful youth's first book. They are all aspects of a tenaciously held philosophy. And in the afterword, titled Thoughts Concerning a Decadent Universe, Ligotti explores the idea of the forbidden book as depicted in the realm of weird fiction, for example, Necronomicon, and as embodied in the real world by certain works of decadent poetry. In doing so, Legotti suggests that the fictional poet Justin Jeffrey in Lovecraft The Thing on the Doorstep was perhaps inspired by David Park Barnett's. And we can perhaps see elements of Barnett's as well, also in the creation of such fictional decadents as Henry Wilcox, Richard Pickman, Frank Marsh, etc. So now we get to the reason for the hippocampus press book being published. Of course, there are the library copies of the Book of Jade. There are other original copies in circulation, very few, I imagine, and as you would expect, they command an exorbitant price. We have the limited edition Dirtro Press, and I think there might have been a sort of paperback edition going around at some point as well. But it was definitely a difficult book to get hold of until the publication of this hippocampus press edition, which, as I'd say, comes not only with the complete poems itself, also a lot of background about the author, a number of reviews of the original book of Jade, and a lot of essays as well by people like David E. Schultz, K.A. Opperman, Ashley Diocese, and so on. So I think I'll leave you to discover those for yourself because there's a huge amount of interesting information and speculation in those. What we'll finish with today is a reading of a few of the poems, and you can get something of the tone and timbre of the whole work itself. And after the readings, I'll just make a few of my own observations and comments. And we'll begin with a poem called Somber Sonnet. I love all sombre and autumnal things, regal and mournful and funereal, things strange and curious and majestical, whereto a solemn savour of death clings. Cerulean serpents marked with azure rings, awful cathedrals where rich shadows fall, hoarse symphonies sepulchral as a pall, mad crimes adorned with bestial blazonings. Therefore I love thee more than aught that dies, within whose subtle beauty slumbereth the twain solemnity of life and death. Therefore I sit beside thee far from day, and look into thy holy eyes always, thy desolate eyes, thy unillumined eyes. Their perished limbs moved to the tune of some worm orchestra unheard, a sight enormously absurd. First in the valse, with fishy eye, tripped something dead of leprosy, all silvery like a virgin's breast. A buried glutton danced with zest, all greenish and all dropsical, like a deformed and vital ball. The third was very beautiful, of charming smallpox saw its fall, a smallpox ending corpse was thine. There danced one in that naked line, whose corpse was rotten with much love. I wished the white worms joy thereof. A suicidal corpse came next, who wished to illustrate the text. Better to be chewed than to chew. So he became a worm ragu, and cholera corpses weirdly black, carrying their dead flesh like a sack, falsed gracefully beneath the sun. Blue fever and consumption and hollow pated lunacy bowed in that dance, with courtesy covered with sores from foot to head, like flowers in a flower bed. Strange plagues all beautifully green went pirouetting through the scene and shrunken corpses dead of age. These things went dancing o'er the stage, smelling of graves and worm toothed scars, death's musty meted avatars. The grave The loathed worms are crawling over me. All the dead hours about my buried head, their soft, intolerable mouths are gathered, and in my dead eyes that have ceased to see, I am full of worms and rotten utterly. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. The lifeless earth lies close against mine eyes. I know that I have rotted long ago, my limbs are made one with the worms I know, where all my head and body putrefies, so in the earth my coffined ordure lies, within my loathed shambles, straight and low. There is no thing now where my face hath been, and all my flesh lies soft upon the floor. Unto my heart the worms have found a door, and all my body is to the worms akin. A long time since their feasting did begin, and they shall part not from me evermore. Here lie I, stretched out through the rotting years, and I am surely weary of the grave, and I have sometimes thought that I might rave, and my two perished eyes almost shed tears. There is no one that sees, and none that hears. I shall not out from my corrupted cave. Here now forever with the lustful worms, I lie within my putrid sunken style, and through eternity my soul shall die. O thou toward whom all my dead spirit squirms, forevermore I love thee through all terms, until the dead stars rot in the black sky. There we are, then just a selection of three poems from the Book of Jade, and I think that'll give you a good indication of the of the flavour, shall we say, of much of these poems. Very goth, very romantic, and I can see echoes there in Clark Ashton Smith, of course, and even Lovecraft in that last poem with the stars that eventually die, that evokes that sort of uh that cosmic aspect as well, but also very grounded, literally grounded in the earth with the worms, and that sort of fascination with the changes that we undergo post-death. Now, as to whether this is good poetry or not, I'll leave that for everyone to judge because we all have our own standards. I do think we we should remember this is a man of 1920, really, writing these, and I think there is much in here that is admirable in poetical terms. Some of it may be a little what we might call juvenile, perhaps. I don't know. But what I've read so far I've really enjoyed, and we can only sadly speculate on what may have been had Park Barnett lived longer and produced the second or third or even more volumes of poetry. Perhaps he might have even developed into writing prose. So he would have been around the same time, maybe somewhere between Chambers and Hodgson. Again, part of that link from the Romantics and Poe into the 20th century and then all the way up to the modern day with Mr. Logotti. There we are then. Some thoughts on the Book of Jade. If you have seen it or you do manage to get a copy, I highly recommend that hippocampus edition, as I said. I'll put a link up to that in the show notes below. Always interested in hearing your opinions, of course. Do get in touch via Patreon, drop us a line at insmouthbookclub at outlook.com, post up on our YouTube channel, or you know, you could write in blood on a scroll and place it in the stiffening hands of a corpse as they are interred. Perhaps we'll pick it up sometime in the future. Who knows what lies ahead. Thanks very much for joining me today, and a special thanks again for supporting the podcast. Tim and I really do appreciate it, and it really does help us to continue our, I feel, very important work digging into places that few people dare to dig. I'll see you next time.