Evelyn-waughportraitEvelyn Waugh (1903—1966) is one of my favorite comic novelists.  His prose is clean and elegant and tempered—which takes his cynicism and savagery to a level that few satirists, if any, have ever achieved.  (At the moment, Saki’s the only other author that comes to mind.)   Sadly, Waugh’s not too well known in America.  And most of those who do know of him, it seems, know him best for his most famous book, Brideshead Revisited, which (coincidentally or not) also happens to be one of his least comic novels.  It’s not much of a comedy at all, really. Which is why it might be, given his incredible gift for satire, my least favorite of his early works.  Regardless of its great literary merit.

The real money books, in my opinion, are four that he published prior to BR:

  • Decline and Fall (1928)
  • Black Mischief (1932)
  • A Handful of Dust (1934)
  • Put Out More Flags (1942)

With Decline and Fall being the best of the four, and A Handful of Dust as the close second.  (Though Put Out More Flags, however terribly it fails as a novel, may be his funniest.)

Here’s the thing about Waugh’s humor, which may explain why it’s more appreciated in England than it is in America: it’s plain cruel.  It’s unabashedly mean.  It’s downright vicious.  While none of his characters are ever completely innocent, half of them are inevitably and unjustly tripped up—even killed—by bizarre circumstances, while the remaining half treat the pains of the former half with either aristocratic indifference or, better, something akin to mild amusement mixed with distaste.  Take an early scene in his first novel, Decline and Fall, for example.  Set in a second-tier English public boy’s school, the students are herded about, forced to participate in “sport” before their aloof upper-class parents, by a band of idiot schoolmasters.  One of those teachers, the wheedling Mr. Prendergast, drunk off one drink, is given the role of Starter—which he carries out using not a starting pistol, but an old WWI service revolver:

“I shall say, ‘Are you ready? one, two, three!’ and then fire,” said Mr. Pendergast.  ”Are you ready?  One”—there was a terrific report.  ”Oh, dear! I’m sorry”—but the race had begun.  Clearly Tangent was not going to win; he was sitting on the grass crying because he had been wounded in the foot by Mr. Pendergast’s bullet.  Philbrick carried him, wailing dismally, into the refreshment tent, where Dingy helped him off with his shoe.  His heel was slightly grazed.  Dingy gave him a large slice of cake, and he hobbled out surrounded by a sympathetic crowd.

“That won’t hurt him,” said [Tangent's mother,] Lady Circumference, “but I think some one ought to remove the pistol from that old man before he does anything serious.”

“I knew that was going to happen,” said Lord Circumference.

“A most unfortunate beginning,” said the Doctor.

“Am I going to die?” said Tangent, his mouth full of cake.

“For God’s sake, look after Prendy,” said Grimes in Paul’s ear. “The man’s as tight as a lord, and on one whisky, too.”

“First blood to me!” said Mr. Predergast gleefully.

“The last race will be run again,” said Paul down the megaphone.  ”Starter, Mr. Philbrick; time-keeper, Mr. Predergast.”

It would be one thing if poor Tangent were only shot on the foot.  But as the novel runs its course, we’re given updates on his state of his appendage—which runs from “grazed” to “infected” to “gangrenous” to “in need of etherless amputation” (cut to a scene where two characters are peevishly annoyed by the incivility of Tangent’s shrieks as his leg’s being sawed off in the nearby infirmary).  Until, finally, near the end of the novel, we read a cast-off reference to the boy’s cold, whimpering death.

In these early novels, Waugh’s characters roughly fall into two categories: scoundrels and idiots.  The most glorious example of the former—a character which may, arguably, be the most hilarious scoundrel ever—is Basil Seal, who features as a main character in both Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags.  I could write (and probably should write) a full post on why I think Basil Seal deserves the prize for “biggest bastard in English literature,” but I’ll only say this: any character that comes home to England in good spirits after discovering that, during his last African meal, he unwittingly dined on the woman he’d been making love with for the past year, and then unrepentantly uses the paranoia of pre-WWII England to frame an old friend as a fascist for the sake of gaining a cushy promotion to Captain and taking over the same friend’s spacious and well-located London apartment, deserves some special recognition.

Really, how did Waugh think up such scenes, such swine?  And how did he make them, in addition to being dark, funny, and dynamic—so living?

I think the answer lies in Waugh himself.

When I took Ethics in college, to illustrate why tempered philosophers feel confident in their ability to define and outline guidelines for the best to live among all ways of living, a professor once asked our class: “In medicine, do we think a doctor who’s suffered malaria is better at treating patients with malaria?”  The obvious answer: No, he isn’t.  If both are trained equally, and given access to the same medicine, it makes no difference.  Same, it goes, with the philosopher of morality: one doesn’t need to have lived heinously to decry what constitutes a heinous mode of living.  A variation of this question is also, on occasion, asked of writers: “In literature, does an author need to experience x to write on the subject of x.”  Here it gets a bit tricky.

The author, if he’s doing things right, I think, creates a world atop a world.  There’s the first world, the foundation.  In this world rests images and tastes and touch: the setting.  But more than just the setting: all inanimate objects that are used or made or destroyed throughout the story.  Atop this layer, and interacting with the bottom layer, is the world of characters.

Now the bottom world is something that I feel can be conjured up, in many cases, if the author’s imagination is good, from thin air.  In this case, to answer the question, “Does the author need to experience x to write on the subject of x?” I would say, probably, if the author is any decent: no, probably not.  Kafka wrote about America without traveling to America.  H.G. Wells wrote “The Land of the Blind” without either a) being blind, or b) traveling through the Andes.  Borges built his Library of Babel using nothing but imaginative extrapolation.

On the other hand, creating and sustaining character is something much different.  Returning quickly to Borges: somewhere (I forget where), he wrote that authors can do anything but create a believable character that’s either more intelligent or having more expansive a morality as the author himself.  I like this notion of morality and intelligence as both vessels—measurements of authorial capacity.  I think Borges, in making this connection, was spot on.  It explains for me, having gotten to know a bit about Waugh’s personal life, how Waugh can write like Waugh.

It also, I think, goes further—to explain why some of the greatest writers and artists are also some of the world’s absolute worst people.  I don’t need to bore you with a list of malcontents and degenerates that top the ranks.  Too many to mention.   Just consider this: Borges doesn’t confine his morality to one morality; rather, he implies that the souls of all men may be open to any number of varying moral systems—systems which might (echoing Nietzsche, maybe), be in conflict with one another, at any given time, within the prison of one man’s soul.  As a person, one’s capacity to harbor varying moralities may inevitably lead to disastrous results—but as an author, this capacity allows one the ability to tap into both the highest and lowest modes of human behavior, keep those modes in play throughout an extended period, and play the modes off one another.  In short, for the author, discounting the effects it may have upon his personal life, it’s a clear boon.

What I’m getting around to (sluggishly) is this: maybe the ability to write comedy well is, in some ways—to affirm Woody Allen’s observation that the capacity to write good humor seems more akin to a freak genetic mutation than a skill—inherent: it’s all from the comic’s unconscious jumble of rivaling systems of morality that bump and collide off each other, all while constantly referencing—neurotically keeping at the fore of one’s mind—a deep sense of what constitutes the conventional morality of the day.

So how does this tie back to Waugh?

Well, honestly, this was all just a tedious setup to a strong film recommendation: whether you know Waugh or not, I strongly suggest you watch this hilarious BBC documentary that I recently watched on YouTube.  It’s a multi-generational biography of the Waugh family—a full four (possibly five) generations of brilliant, strong, witty writers, with Evelyn—both the best of them all, and the biggest bastard of them all—at the very top of the pack, in terms of talent.  I think it does an excellent job at illustrating, by showing the complex and often paradoxical nature of Evelyn’s character, how Waugh wrote like Waugh.

coveris up at The Rumpus.  It’s a cool book.

From the review:

Like the host of Russian satirists that preceded him–Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov–Sorokin jumps in impish dance around a host of unspeakable subjects, subjects made taboo by the State, weaknesses that are are never explicitly named, but hang on the minds of everyone. Where Gogol poked fun at the stifling and torturous bureaucracy of Czarist Russia, and Zoshchenko laughed at the stupidity of petty officialdom in the early years of the Revolution, Sorokin takes on the mind-numbing banality of life during late-era Soviet Communism.

I like how these three photographs, shown in sequence, make a story.  You can also repeat them continuously, making a cycle.

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The photos were taken by my aunt, Xandra Castleton, at my family’s home on Lake Erie, in Kingsville.  The little girl is my cousin Jasmin, who was in town from San Francisco for her christening.  I’m the goon with the knife.

In other news, I have a new folktale up at McSweeney’s.

destinations-kingsville

Back home in Kingsville, Ontario.  Visiting the family.  This summer’s weather is perfect: crisp in the morning, pleasant and breezy during the day, cool in the evening.  All the local produce, thanks to the cooler temperatures and heavy rainfall, is the best that it’s been in years.

While here, a new edition of Swink Magazine — where I serve as co-editor of fiction with Summer Block Kumar — was published.  Everyone’s happy to see Drew Johnson’s latest story, “Edson to 1958″, on display.  We were lucky to find the story in the slush pile, and sharp to nab it before it was taken elsewhere.

The story’s an excerpt from the biography of a hapless fictional poet named Norman Patrick Edson (or Fey Edson, as he’s later called).  The piece follows the poet’s life from birth (1916), through youth and war in the Spanish Civil War, then self-imposed exile in Mexico.  It concludes with the 1958 publication of a poem based on the dramatic — and wildly comic — conclusion to that exile: a brawl in Mexico City that involved several real historical figures, including the eccentric composer Colnon Nancarrow, novelist William Gaddis, and jazz cornet player Bill Davison.

The story’s absurdities are livened by the biographer’s earnest, dry delivery.  The use of a period poem to both close the narrative and give voice to the story’s main character — who until the very end (even, arguably, after the end) remains a blank and enigmatic subject — is wry and novel.  There is no epiphanic conclusion, no melancholy acceptance of life’s trappings.  Only a swift, humorous, almost Saki-eske change of perspective.  It’s an excellent piece of fiction.

old-glory-robot-insurance03

New folktale up at McSweeney’s. It’s one that involves something very dear to my heart: hyperintelligent, skull-crushing, homicidal robots.

For more on this subject, click this link for “Old Glory Insurance,” the classic Saturday Night Live skit that best showcases the terrifying danger of living in a world overrun by lumbering steel automatons.  

“When they grab you with those metal claws, you can’t break free… because they’re made of metal, and robots are strong.”

For even more, head over to The Omegle Sessions.  Next week, Monday to Thursday, is devoted to robot-themed conversations with strangers. Might be the strongest set of chats yet.

Per Twitch, the cast of The Kids In the Hall are reuniting to create a new, narrative, eight-episode show called Death Comes to Town.  Great news.

Reposting the below from Steve Etheridge’s blog.  (Steve wrote this great piece recently for McSweeney’s, and this equally funny excerpt from a super-hero screenplay by Chairman Mao.)  Per his note, it’s originally from the Harvard Lampoon.


A Guide for the Freshman of this College, 1670

1. No freshman shall act in a manner unbecoming of a scholar.

2. No freshman shall speak to his senior with his hat on.

3. No freshman shall lean at prayers but shall stand upright.

4. No freshman shall wear his hat in the College yard except when it rains, snows, or hails, or if he be on horseback and hath both hands full with corn, sow feed, or the like, or if he be whipping of his Indian.

5. When a freshman returns to his lodgings and finds that his seniors be baiting a bear within, he shall not conceal his sharpest spears but bring them forth, even if he and his fellows wish to go a-baiting on the morrow.

6. No freshman shall wear his hat while sleeping, except if he put forth a sound reason for doing so, for example, that his head gets cold.

7. At no time shall a freshman beat merrily upon his drum or blow saucily upon his fife, least of all during the hours in which he and his fellows are studying that perfect race, the Greeks.

8. No freshman shall wear his hat at almost any time, yet still it is necessary for him to have a hat.

9. When a freshman is told to go inside a cage, he shall not ask his senior impertinent questions or stall him with an escaping rush but instead shall climb up of his own accord and sing the song that has been taught him, “I Am a Fearful Cage-Bound Boy, Mother,” whilst swinging mournfully back and forth.

10. No freshman shall write his lower case “S’s” as “S’s” but instead shall write them as long and fancy “F’s.”

11. No freshman shall ever be without barrel staves, lest his senior should request a barrel be built him and find the freshman lacking in supplies.

12. When the howl of wolves outside the College gates becomes most loathsome, and the chill of winter freezes dread into the heart and ice onto the eyes, and the Indians which do toil in our fields have most bewilderingly slipped off, leaving us no choice but to sadly starve; during such a time as this, no freshman shall mock his senior for the shedding of tears, but shall instead shed tears along with him, and together, we shall all long for that happy day upon which we return to England.

borgesI wrote an article on my recent search to find the contents of Jorge Luis Borges’ 33-volume anthology of fantastic literature, The Library of Babel.  It was just posted over at The Rumpus.  At the end of the article I attached Borges’ full selection of stories, including hyperlinks to all the works I found in translation online.

It’s a pretty hefty catalogue.  While I recommend almost everything, there were a few stories that stood out.  Here’s a brief reduction.

“Lazarus”, Leonid Andreyev
This story follows the second life of the resurrected Lazarus.  Though newly risen, his body is bloated and cracked, his extremities blue and cold; though once spirited and full of life, he’s now taciturn, gloomy, profoundly indifferent.  His rising is heralded as a miracle — until his cursed gaze begins effecting family, friends, and all those who come from around the Roman Empire to see the only man who truly knows Death.

“The Eye of Apollo”, G.K. Chesterton
Father Brown, a canny Roman Catholic priest, comes upon Kazon, a “blond beast” of a man who leads a cult of neo-sun worshipers.  When a woman falls down an elevator shaft shortly after signing her will over to Kazon, Father Brown begins treating the purported accident as a murder.

“Where the Tides Ebb and Flow”, Lord Dunsany
A member of an illicit secret society is sentenced to death and executed by his peers for committing an unnamed crime. They bury his corpse in the ever-shifting mud flats of the lower Thames.  The story, told in first-person from the perspective of the victim’s half-buried corpse, concerns his soul’s desire to find rest — either through burial on land or burial at sea.

“The Great Wall of China”, Franz Kafka
A Chinese engineer recounts his work on the unfathomably large Great Wall, and tries to explain both the need for the Empire to continue with its eternal construction and the necessary inability for any one man to understand the entire scope or extent of the project — which has been in progress from a time before any man can remember, and will continue to a point in time that seems impossibly distant.

“The Private Life”, Henry James
On vacation in the Swiss Alps, the narrator meets two very different men: a decorous member of the British aristocracy who has the uncanny habit of disappearing whenever anyone leaves his company; and an obnoxious author who has the equally uncanny habit of being seen in two places at the same time: in one place he’s engaging in offensive conversation, in the other he’s quietly at work on a novel of breathtaking genius.

“The Eye of Allah”, Rudyard Kipling
An abbot, a manuscript illuminator and philosopher Roger Bacon dine together at a medieval English monastery.  The illuminator, just back from travels to Moorish Spain, sets down an optical device, called the Eye of Allah, that he’d purchased in a bazaar. Taking a drop of stagnant water from the roof of the monastery, he demonstrates its powers of magnification: the three men gape in wonder at the teeming life they see swimming in the tiny globule. But the abbot begins feeling dreaded misgivings.

“The Minions of Midas”, Jack London
Impelled by a quasi-Nietzschian doctrine on the will to power, an association of shadowy, disenfranchised, yet highly educated (and highly capable) anarchists begin a campaign of terror against a Carnegie-like robber baron.  Until the baron parts with the greater half of his fortune, they’ll continue to silently murder random innocents around America.  The longer he holds out, the closer the murders come to his palatial mansion.

“The Novel of the White Powder”, Arthur Machen
A young law student in late Victorian London falls ill after a long, sleepless stretch of studying.  His doctor prescribes a white powder that’s mixed by an old chemist at a nearby pharmacy.  At first the student’s energy is improved and his mood is excited.  Soon, however, he begins acting strangely and locking himself away inside his garret for days — while, at the same time, his need for the drug steadily intensifies.  As the weeks pass, his family grows increasingly worried — until he stops speaking with them, and drops of black ichor begin falling from cracks in the attic floorboards.

“Sredni Vashtar”, Saki
On an isolated English country manor, a lonely and sickly ten year-old boy begins worshiping his caged pet polecat as a god.  He creates an entire cult around the vicious beast, whom he names Sredni Vashtar.  When his despised cousin and guardian deprives the boy of his other prized pet (a hen), the boy begins praying to his new god, in earnest, for divine vengeance.  With impressive results.

“Markheim”, Robert Louis Stevenson
Markheim, a man of fallen repute, steps in on a pawn broker with whom he has a long and bitter history.  When the pawn broker turns away, Markheim stabs him in the back.  While upstairs, in panic, stealing money the broker hid away in a chest, Markheim hears the door behind him open.  In steps the Devil, to politely outline the irrevocable events that led to Markheim’s fated perdition.

“The Country of the Blind”, H.G. Wells
A mountaineer, on expedition in the Peruvian Andes, falls down a deep crevasse. He wakes to find himself in a lost world, tucked away from civilization, inhabited by natives and livestock.  Due to a genetic mutation, everyone in the community is blind  – and has been since a time before anyone can remember.  As hard as the wayfarer tries to describe his fifth sense, none of the others believe him. His obstinacy to their insistence that their world is the only possible world frustrates the tribe — until they discover the two sources of illness that are causing his willfulness, and demand that they be gouged from his skull.

NYC61I spotted a stack of Joseph Mitchell’s collection, Up In the Old Hotel, at the Strand the other day.  The copies were on the New York table near the front of the store. Priced at only $5.95 (down from its $16 list price).

An entire post could be spent in approbation of just one of his essays, “Joe Gould’s Secret”, which is probably the best story ever published by the New Yorker, and easily one the best non-fiction works of the 20th century.  No exaggeration.

If I can’t convince you of it’s worth, maybe death-obsessed radio talk show host Michael Savage can: in a follow up to his recent profile in the New Yorker by Kelefa Sanneh, Savage tapped “Joe Gould’s Secret” as his favorite among the magazine’s many profiles.  Sanneh quote him as saying that he “loved that profile so much, it actually stayed with [him] for ages….”  

Makes two of us.

14junecIt’s not often that I come across a great find in the dollar rack outside Atlantic Books in Brooklyn Heights.  But yesterday I did.  I scored a tattered 1918 Modern Library softcover edition of The Seven That Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev.  

I learned about Andreyev recently, though his stories “Lazarus” and “Ben-Tobith”, both of which were anthologized by Jorge Luis Borges (the former in Vol. 29 of The Library of Babel and the latter in The Book of Fantasy).  Still, I didn’t know much about the man apart from the fact that his work is almost impossible to find in translation — unjustly, I feel, because every story that I’ve read of his has been exceptional.  The Seven That Were Hanged, a novella in twelve short chapters, was tremendous.  So too was The Red Laugh, a b-side novella used to fill out the remainder of the book.  I read both long stories that afternoon while sitting under the big shade tree in Brooklyn Bridge Park.  

But this entry isn’t about Andreyev.  It’s a quick note of appreciation for his translator and champion, Thomas Seltzer.

Seltzer, according to Wikipedia, was a Russian immigrant of Jewish descent.  He was born in 1875, came to America as a young child, and died here in 1943.  He attended the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship, then went on to post-graduate study at Columbia.  He worked for Harper’s Weekly for several years.  Then as editor for the socialist magazine, The Masses (a rag notable for its publication of the short stories that Sherwood Anderson would later cull and publish as Winesburg, Ohio).  In 1917, after The Masses was shut down by the Fed and its editors (Seltzer included) were charged with anti-sedition laws for publishing articles that supposedly obstructed military enlistment, Seltzer — acquitted by a hung jury — sidled into an editorial position at Boni & Liveright.  In years prior (maybe as a way to support his wife, Adele), he’d translated several Russian novels — including works by Gorky, Gogol and Doestoevsky — for major publishing firms like Little, Brown and Knopf.  220970825-0-mAt B&L he translated Andreyev’s The Seven That Were Hanged.  It was one of the first titles that The Modern Library, an imprint founded by Boni & Liveright, printed.  That’s how my tattered copy came to exist.

Seltzer, in addition to translating The Seven, also wrote the book’s introduction. It’s through his introduction — clearly-written, witty and informative — that I came to learn a good deal about Andreyev and the period in which he wrote.  I also got a feel for Seltzer, whose prose — unlike that of the typical stodgy academic who’s usually asked to pen introductions to obscure texts like this one — shows an uncommon vitality.

Here’s a sample of Setlzer’s intro, where he comments on the largely defeatist literary scene that arose after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, and the start of the imperialist crack-down that was the Coup of June 1907:

New and strange gods arose whom the Russian intelligentzia [sic] fervently worshipped, each in turn: Artzybashev with his novel Sanin, which, with its glorification of the sexual appetite, swept the young Russian generation like a holocaust; Merezhkovsky and his school with their reactionary religious mysticism in the name of culture; Valery Briusov, a wondrously artistic nature, who, when not contemplating the cheerful prospect of the destruction of the universe, takes flight from the misery of this world to a world of his own creating, a sort of realistic-romantic world of marvelous beauty; and Fiodor Sologub, another poet of great merit, who sees in death the only good in life.

The bit on Briusov is pretty classic, and representative of Seltzer’s humor: wry and sardonic, yet suggesting a personal lightness.  It’s the type of humor that I find makes for great commentary.  It’s similar, in a way, to that of future New Yorker journalist A.J. Liebling, who, at the time that this book was published, was a teenager living nearby in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, filling out his application to Dartmouth.

In 1919, a year after The Seven went to print, Seltzer started his own publishing firm, named (aptly) Thomas Seltzer, Inc.  This company went on to put out a great number of D.H. Lawrence’s novels, effectively introducing them to the American public.  For his publication of Lawrence’s Women In Love and two other novels of “questionable” taste, he was sued in 1922 by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a group founded by  Anthony Comstock, the man who inspired the sadly forgotten word comstockery.  (The same society had, just two years prior, brought a successful suit against The Little Review for its publication of the masturbation scene in Joyce’s Ulysses; at the 1921 trial, Ulysses was declared obscene, resulting in its ban in the US until 1933.)  Refusing to be cowed by Comstock’s legal action, Seltzer fought and won.  Then Comstock sued him again in 1923.  Again, Seltzer fought the suit.

So Seltzer wasn’t just a witty guy — he was scrappy one, too.

Sadly, though, he wasn’t a man of unlimited wealth: due to the cost of his second protracted legal battle over censorship, his firm declared bankruptcy in 1925, just after publishing two translations of Proust and a novel by Ford Madox Ford.

On reading the introduction to The Seven, I was surprised by the openness with which Seltzer wrote in favor of the Russian communist revolts, and the frankness with which approached the (still) touchy subject of revolutionary terrorism.  He was obviously — as evidenced by his involvement with The Masses – a far-left leaning man.  But he was also one who stood up against those who sought to censor literature and impose stifling limits on freedom of expression.  All together, he had a strong libertarian streak, may have sympathized with bomb-hurling anarchists, had good taste in literature, and could tell a joke.  The early 20th century was an incredible and sadly forgotten era in the history of America.  It seems that Seltzer was, for better or worse, very much a man of his era.

None of this would have come to my attention — none of this, in my mind, given the distance between his life and mine, would have mattered to me at all — if Seltzer hadn’t been produced such a damn fine translation of Andreyev’s The Seven That Were Hanged.  Certainly, the source material was undoubtedly good.  But given the wealth of bad translations from that era — stories dragged down by an overuse of punctuation and a total lack of humor (here I’m thinking of an early translation of Gogol’s The Inspector General I remember reading as a teenager, and hating) — his skill is to be lauded.

McSorley's_Bar_1912_John_SloanIt would have been interesting to meet Seltzer.  I’d have mentioned that his contracting of John French Sloan (a great influence on Edward Hopper, and the painter of the famous oil of McSorley’s shown on the left) to illustrate The Masses was inspired, and pretty amazing.  I also would have thanked him for his work in introducing Russian works, like those by Andreyev, to North America.

I’m probably not the only one who felt the same way.  According to S.T. Joshi, the same 1918 Modern Library translation of Andreyev’s The Seven That Were Hanged was conspicuous among those books in the library Lovecraft left at his death: it was heavily thumbed through, marked, annotated.  Given that The Seven follows the lives of seven prisoners–five anarchists, a brigand and a mentally-deficient murderer–as they await their common hanging, all seven reflecting on and (in some cases) coming to to terms with their incipient demise without the aid of organized religion, it’s not surprising that it appealed to Lovecraft, the consummate materialist.  Especially, I’m guessing, as he neared death by stomach cancer.

Thankfully, 1918 ed. of The Seven is now available online.  You can find it here, at GoogleBooks.

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