For the Blood Is the Life

F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
“F. Marion Crawford's Six Best Horror Stories” (M. Grant Kellermeyer, The Classic Horror Blog)

Biographical sketch of F. Marion Crawford (Terence E. Hanley, Tellers of Weird Tales)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Luella Miller,” Mary Wilkins Freeman
• “The Dead Valley,” Ralph Adams Cram
• “Kerfol,” Edith Wharton

Buy the books
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now
Boxed set • Two volumes • 86 classic stories of fantasy, horror, and the supernatural • 1,400 pages

Two drawings by American illustrator Walter Appleton Clark (1876–1906) for the original magazine publication of “For the Blood Is the Life” (Collier’s, December 16, 1905).

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In 1904 P. F. Collier & Son finished issuing the massive Complete Works of F. Marion Crawford. Featuring matching gilt-blocked cloth bindings, the edition gathered in thirty-two volumes the thirty-five novels Crawford had published to date, beginning with his extraordinarily successful debut, Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India (1882). The author was accorded the honor of a collected edition even though he was only forty-eight years old, and the set was a notable commercial hit. He would publish nine more novels before his death five years later.

The novelist Henry James was a friend of Crawford’s parents and, eventually, of the young author himself—although it might be more accurate to call them rivals, at least in James’s view. Crawford’s unbroken string of best sellers (and the financial security that came with them) was the source of considerable envy. In 1884 William Dean Howells informed James that Crawford’s third book, To Leeward, had sold nearly 10,000 copies, and James let loose with “ferocities” he acknowledged might be mistaken for “green-eyed jealousy”:

What you tell me of the success of Crawford’s last novel sickens & almost paralyses me. It seems to me (the book) so contemptibly bad & ignoble that the idea of people reading it in such numbers makes one return upon one’s self & ask what is the use of trying to write anything decent or serious for a public so absolutely idiotic. It must be totally wasted. I would rather have produced the basest experiment in the “naturalism” that is being practised here than such a piece of sixpenny humbug. Work so shamelessly bad seems to me to dishonour the novelist’s art to a degree that is absolutely not to be forgiven; just as its success dishonours the people for whom one supposes one’s self to write.

Twenty years later, although the two authors had remained friends and visited each other in Italy and England, James was still harping on in private about Crawford’s fame. In a letter offering advice to a young author who admired James’s writing, he sarcastically warned against emulating his style too closely if she wanted to be popular: “I would have written, if I could, like Anthony Hope and Marion Crawford."

The approach to literature of the two rival authors could not have been more different. When the final volumes of Crawford’s Complete Works appeared, a British critic pointedly remarked on the dissimilarity: “He has no inclination, like Mr. Henry James, to analyse and dissect the complex motives of men and women in the ordinary affairs of life; his characters must be of a more or less heroic or diabolic mould, and they must live under striking and exceptional conditions.” In the book-length essay The Novel: What It Is, Crawford wrote, “There are, I believe, two recognised ways of looking at art: art for the public or ‘art for art.’” He not only argued in favor of the former but, more bluntly, he regarded the novel as a “marketable commodity, of the class collectively termed luxuries.” In Crawford’s view, the successful formula for reaching a wide readership in the late-nineteenth-century literary bazaar was a mixture of historical novels and cosmopolitan romances set in New York and Europe (especially Italy, where he was born and where he lived as an American expatriate for most of his adult life).

Yet markets are notoriously fickle. Every one of Marion Crawford’s forty-four novels has been long forgotten, while Henry James’s novels and stories are still read and admired today (and, unexpectedly, continue to be adapted for film and TV). What Crawford is remembered for would have surprised his fans and detractors alike—as well as the author himself. Two years after his death his publisher collected his various supernatural tales as Wandering Ghosts, and Crawford’s legacy rests almost entirely on those seven influential and still frequently anthologized short stories, one of which we present below as our Story of the Week selection.

Notes: The title of the story is from Deuteronomy 12:23: “Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.”

“For the Blood Is the Life” originally appeared in the Christmas 1905 issue of Collier’s magazine. For an explanation of how ghost stories came to be associated with Christmas during the nineteenth century, see the introduction to “Thurlow’s Christmas Story,” a previous Story of the Week selection.

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We had dined at sunset on the broad roof of the old tower, because it was cooler there during the great heat of summer. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Thesis Turned Broadway

Katherine Dunham (1909–2006)
From Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology

Interesting Links

Katherine Dunham Biography (Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities)

Video: Katherine Dunham on her influence on American dance (Library of Congress)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Terry Helburn,” Frances Parkinson Keyes
• “Me and Old Duke,” Albert Murray
• “The Life and Death of Vaudeville,” Fred Allen
• “Stage Struck,” Channing Pollock

Buy the book
Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology
Spanning two centuries, 100 selections about American dance—from ballet and Balanchine to tap and swing • 677 pages
List price: $40.00
Save 65%, free shipping
Web store price: $14.00

Katherine Dunham performing solo in “Spanish Dance,” Chicago, c. 1934–37. Publicity shot by British American illustrator and photographer Bertram Dorien Basabé (1868-?).

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“I had the advantage of being a pioneer. I would say that its drawbacks were less at that period in America than were its advantages. I didn't realize that I was a pioneer. I just knew that everything I wanted to do I had to start from the beginning, but this method didn't seem too unnatural to me. Here, I think anthropology helped me a great deal. The attitude of an anthropologist is, if one group can do it, another can, so that belief carried over into everything I did.”
—Katherine Duhnam, from a 1977 interview

The following introduction and selection are from Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology (edited by Mindy Aloff):

What a life! Katherine Dunham was a formidable dancer, an irrepressible choreographer, a driven social activist, a groundbreaking ethnologist and anthropologist, a serial autobiographer, an international star, an inspiration, a scandal (banned in Boston!), and a model for generations of African American performers. It’s surprising that she found time to die, even if it was at the age of ninety-six.

She starred as Georgia Brown in George Balanchine’s Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky (1940), the show that Ethel Waters stopped with “Taking a Chance on Love.” (Lena Horne played Georgia in the movie.) She went on a forty-seven-day hunger strike to protest American policies toward Haitian refugees. (Speaking of Haiti, she became a priestess of the Vaudon religion there.) She choreographed a new production of Aïda at the Met, featuring Leontyne Price. For decades, she toured the world with her Katherine Dunham Dance Company, mostly performing revues she created with names like Bal Nègre and Caribbean Rhapsody. (Dancers affiliated with Dunham’s company include Eartha Kitt, Janet Collins, and Talley Beatty.) She married the artist and scenic designer John Pratt, her collaborator on her shows as well, and they adopted a French baby. Occasionally she approached bankruptcy, though she hardly noticed. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of the Arts and received the Kennedy Honors. “Judging from reactions,” she said, “the dancing in my group is called anthropology in New Haven, sex in Boston, and in Rome—art!”

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Thesis Turned Broadway
In the great raft of publicity which, in the past few months, has appeared in connection with my role in the Broadway show Cabin in the Sky, I find myself referred to, and on the very same day, both as “the hottest thing on Broadway” and “an intelligent, sensitive young woman . . . an anthropologist of note.” Personally, I do not think of myself as either one of these extreme phenomena. But eager reporters, confronted by the simultaneous presence of two such diverse elements, have often failed to grasp the synthesis between them; they have chosen, instead, to account for effectiveness by an exaggerated emphasis upon either one or the other. Then there is always the fact that the attempt to relate the dignified and somewhat awesome science of anthropology with the popular art of Broadway dancing and theater works the interviewer back to the question of which came first. Actually, that consideration is as unimportant as the chicken-egg controversy. Now that I look back over the long period of sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous interest in both subjects, it seems inevitable that they should have eventually fused completely.

Every person who has a germ of artistry seeks to recreate and present an impression of universal human experience—to fulfill either human needs or wants. The instrument is the specific art form which may have been chosen; the effectiveness depends upon skill in handling the form and upon the originality of the individual imagination. But the experience which is given expression cannot be either too individual or too specific; it must be universal. In the Greek theater, for example, the importance of the universals was so great that an entire system of formal absolutes was worked out of their expression. Consequently, any effective artistic communication is impossible if the artist’s understanding of human experience is limited by inadequate knowledge. Anthropology is the study of man. It is a study not of a prescribed portion of man’s activity or history, but a study (through some one of the five fields of anthropological specialization—ethnology, archaeology, social anthropology, linguistics, physical anthropology) of his entire state of being throughout his entire history. In such a survey, the student of anthropology gradually comes to recognize universal emotional experiences, common alike to both the primitive Bushman and the sophisticated cosmopolitan; he notes patterns of expression which have been repeatedly effective throughout the ages and which, though modified by many material circumstances, persist in their essential form; and finally, he acquires an historical perspective which enables him, in the confusion of changing maps and two world wars within a single generation, to discern the developing motifs and consistent trends.

As nearly as I can remember, I have been dancing since I was eight years old and it has been my growing interest to know not only how people dance but, even more importantly, why they dance as they do. By the time I was studying at the University of Chicago, I had come to feel that if I could discover this, not only as it applied to one group of people but to diverse groups, with their diverse cultural, psychological, and racial backgrounds, I would have arrived at some of the fundamentals, not only of choreographic technique, but of theater artistry and function. I applied myself to acquiring this knowledge and eventually, as a “Julius Rosenwald fellow, student of anthropology and the dance,” spent a year and a half traveling through the West Indies in pursuit of this understanding.

In the beginning, I had great hopes of turning out a thesis for the University of Chicago which would take care of the entire field of primitive dance. It was to be entitled “A Comparative Analysis of Primitive Dance.” I ended up by limiting my thesis to “A Comparative Analysis of the Dances of Haiti: Their Form, Function, Social Organization, and the Interrelation of Form and Function.” (Still too much for one sitting!) In the West Indies the peasant natives (primarily Negroes of Koromantee, Ibo, Congo, Dahomey, Mandingo, and other west coast derivation, mixed perhaps with a little Carib Indian and varying degrees of European stock) think very much and behave basically very much as did their African forebears. Consequently they dance very much in the same fashion. Differences there are, of course, due to the shift from tribal to folk culture, to miscegenation, cultural contact, and other items making for social change. But the elements of the dance are still what, in my analysis, would be termed “primitive.” Almost all social activity is dancing or some type of rhythmic motion (it may be the unified movement of the combite or work society of Haiti in cutting sugar cane, or a similar activity in the work socie­ties of the Jamaican Maroons, or the cross-country trek of a Carnival band). Out of a maze of material from the concentrated fields of study—Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, and Trinidad—one important fact stood out: in these societies the theater of the people (“theater” being practically synonymous with dance activity) served a well-integrated, well-defined function in the community; in the case of the Carnival dances of social integration and sexual stimulus and release; in the funeral dance the externalization of grief; the social dances, exhibitionism and sexual selection along with social cohesion; in the ceremonial dances, group “ethos” solidarity in an established mechanism of worship, whether through hypnosis, hysteria, or ecstasy. And so on through the several categories of dances arrived at.

It was one thing to write a thesis and have it approved for a master’s degree. It was another thing to begin earning a living on Broadway. In making use of field training to choreograph for my group, I found persistently recurring in the back of my mind, in some form or another, “function.” It never seemed important to portray, as such, the behavior of other peoples as exotics. But the cultural and psychological framework, the “why” became increasingly important. It became a matter of course to attack a stage or production situation in the same way in which I would approach a new primitive community or work to analyze a dance category. As in the primitive community certain movement patterns, which I cannot go into here, were always related to certain functions, so in the modern theater there would be a correlation between a dance movement and the function of that dance within the theater framework. And certainly a broad and general knowledge of cultures and cultural patterns can be advantageously brought to bear upon the problems of relating form and function in the modern theater. Or so has been my theory and so my practice in my own theater experience.

What would be the connection between the Carnival dance, whose function is sexual stimulus and release, and almost any similar situation in a Broadway musical—for example, the temptation scene on the River Nile in Cabin in the Sky? It would be the similarity in function, and through this similarity in function the transference of certain elements of form would be legitimate.

Originally published in California Arts and Architecture, August 1941, and reprinted in Kaiso!: Writings by and about Katherine Dunham (2005). Copyright © 2005 by Katherine Dunham. Used by permission of the Estate of Katherine Dunham.

Moxon’s Master

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?)
From Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs

Interesting Links
“On the Literature of Cyborgs, Robots, and Other Automata, from Mechanical Ducks to Mythic Metal Giants” (Michael Peck, Literary Hub)

“The Grandmaster Hoax” (Lincoln Michel, The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Eyes of the Panther,” Ambrose Bierce
• “The Angel of the Odd,” Edgar Allan Poe
• “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “It is impossible we should think of Submission,” Benjamin Franklin

Buy the book
Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs
880 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $30.00

Portrait de joueurs d'échecs (Portrait of Chess Players), 1911, oil on canvas by French artist and chess player Marcel Duchamp (1887−1968). Courtesy of WikiArt.

In 1770, at the court of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled the Turk, the world’s first chess-playing automaton. Encased in an elaborate cabinet with visible gears and cogs, the machine was able to play chess against a human opponent—and more often than not it won. On top of the cabinet, a life-sized costumed mannequin with turbaned head and robe-cloaked torso straddled one side—thus, the name. After its debut in the empress’s court, the machine’s fame spread throughout Europe and, a decade later, von Kempelen took it on tour. Among the challengers in Paris was a bemused Benjamin Franklin, who lost his match.

Before each demonstration, von Kempelen would open various doors and compartments so that spectators could inspect the machine’s elaborate inner workings. Although many observers were skeptical, no one could adequately explain how it worked. The most common theories were that von Kempelen was somehow able to operate the machinery remotely or that a child, dwarf, or amputee was hidden away in a secret compartment.

When its creator died in 1804, the machine and its secrets were sold to Johann Mälzel, who continued the tour throughout Europe, across the Channel to England, and eventually to America. One young man who was impressed but skeptical was Englishman Charles Babbage, who was sure the machine was a hoax but began to wonder if such a thing were really possible. Soon after his own games against the Turk (he lost both), Babbage published the first designs for his Difference Engine—the world’s first automatic computing machine. His autobiography, which appeared in 1864, reaffirmed his belief in the inevitable development of game-playing machinery, and late in life he included in his journals schemata for a tic-tac-toe automaton.

Another luminary fascinated by the Turk was Edgar Allan Poe, who witnessed a demonstration in Richmond, Virginia, in 1835. Poe became obsessed with the machine but was convinced the whole thing was a hoax. In a lengthy essay, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” he marshaled the evidence against it. Yet many of Poe’s speculations were wrong (he subscribed to the tiny-human hypothesis to explain the trick), and some of his assumptions exposed an overconfidence in the invincibility of logic-based technologies. “The Automaton does not invariably win the game,” he argued. “Were the machine a pure machine this would not be the case—it would always win.”

By the middle of the century, after fascination with the machine was finally exhausted, the Turk was, of course, unveiled as a hoax that had fooled audiences for nearly eighty years. Most conjectures had been unnecessarily complicated, since the secret proved to be remarkably simple. Inside the cabinet was an adult human chess master of average height and weight. The Museum of Hoaxes explains: “A series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton’s operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a ‘pantograph’ device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.” Most of the other “workings” inside the machine served little purpose other than misdirection or the emission of noises that early-industrial-age audiences would expect such a machine to make.

All of the preceding serves as a preamble to this week’s selection. When Ambrose Bierce sat down to write “Moxon’s Master” at the very end of the nineteenth century, the word “robot” (coined by playwright K. Čapek) was still two decades in the future—yet the idea of chess-playing automata had over 130 years of history and imagination behind it. Yet Bierce takes the idea of a humanoid robot one step further: what if such a contraption could actually think? S. T. Joshi claims that the story “must be one of the earliest tales genuinely to deal with the question of artificial intelligence.” “Bierce’s originality,” write the editors of the anthology War with the Robots, “lies not in writing a story about a chess-playing machine but in his realization of the radical philosophical implications of inventing a machine with intelligence.” As the novelist Michael Peck notes in a recent essay, “It was only a short hop from there to fathom a techverse where that same logic could suddenly turn sinister. Ambrose Bierce was one of the first to make this skepticism explicit.”

Notes: Herbert Spencer’s definition of “Life,” quoted on page 255, is from The Principles of Biology (1864–67). A few sentences later, Bierce alludes to British philosopher John Stuart Mill and his discussion of cause and effect in A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843). On page 257, the quote “The endless variety and excitement of philosophic thought” is from The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte (1867) by British historian and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–1878).

Special note (spoiler alert!): During the 1980s and ’90s, in the pages of Science Fiction Studies and other journals, a number of scholars proposed a series of alternative and conflicting interpretations of Bierce’s story, all of them basically proposing that there was never a real robot in Moxon’s lab. Instead, the perpetrator of the crime was human, either a jealous mistress or Moxon’s assistant Haley, who might have been Moxon’s lover. The interpretations have not gained much traction in the years since; at most, the conversation at the very end of the story suggests that Haley’s role in the story, especially its climactic fiery cataclysm, is intentionally ambiguous. Famed science fiction guru Damon Knight offered perhaps the most appropriate response when he praised Bierce's “ingenuity in creating puzzles for unborn scholars,” and he lampooned the combating academics by presenting his own “solution” to the supposed mystery: “A close reading makes it clear that the culprit is Moxon's brother's dentist. Notice that Bierce never mentions the brother: this in itself is sinister. The brother must have had a dentist, and yet the dentist is never mentioned either. Dentists of that period were known to use ether and chloroform, both of which are inflammable. The case is open and shut.”

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“Are you serious?—do you really believe that a machine thinks?” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Baby, You Were Great

Kate Wilhelm (1928–2018)
From The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women

Interesting Links
“Kate Wilhelm: An Appreciation” (Scott Bradfield, The Los Angeles Times)

Interview with Lisa Yaszek: We get the history of women in science fiction “thoroughly wrong” (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Created He Them,” Alice Eleanor Jones
• “Knight to Move,” Fritz Leiber
• “The Refugee,” Jane Rice

Buy the book
The Future Is Female!
25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women
From Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin
List price: $27.95
Web Store price: $17.50

Illustration by American artist Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990) from the cover of November 1956 issue (“Women’s Work”) of Original Science Fiction Stories. Image courtesy of Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

When Damon Knight included Kate Wilhelm’s “Baby, You Were Great” in the 1975 anthology Best Stories from Orbit, he admitted that Wilhelm’s story, originally published in Orbit 2 in 1967, was a rejoinder to one of his own works, “Satisfaction,” which had appeared in Analog three years earlier and was later retitled “Semper Fi.” Knight was certainly in a position to know what Wilhelm thought of his story—they were husband and wife—but he doesn’t specify what motivated her to write something in response, except to note that she “disagreed” with his story’s point of view.

Knight later explained how his own story came about: “I began to think about what it would be like if you had a gadget that would permit you to invent any vision you liked, store it, and retrieve and modify it at will.” One reviewer summarized his story as “a gentle projection of the step beyond TV, when everyone who has the money can live in a synthetic dreamworld.” We can’t be sure what about Knight’s tale stirred Wilhelm to write her own, but there’s nothing at all “gentle” about her deeply disturbing and harshly cynical vision of the future. The “gadget” in Wilhelm’s story harnesses visions by capturing the emotions of a live subject and distributing them as a form of mass media and, far from being a plaything of the rich, the technology becomes a voyeuristic opiate for the masses.

Its origin aside, “Baby, You Were Great” has stood on its own merits in the half century since it first appeared—and, to be clear, one need not have read “Satisfaction” to appreciate it. Wilhelm’s story was a finalist for a Nebula Award, has been translated into a dozen languages, can be found on various college course syllabi, and is one of the selections chosen by Lisa Yaszek for the just-published anthology The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women. Recent critics and readers have noted the eerie parallels between Wilhelm’s prescient concerns and the current spate of reality TV series, the ready availability of online pornography, and the intensifying mania for virtual reality. In 2011 T. S. Miller, a teacher of medieval literature and science fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, revisited the story and wrote:

Today we are effectively no closer than we were in 1967 to achieving the capacity to transmit personal emotions and a subjectively-experienced sensorium directly from one person’s brain to another for commercial purposes, yet Kate Wilhelm's “Baby, You Were Great” does not suffer in quality simply because the technology it imagined shows no signs of arriving soon. The story works just as well on the level of metaphor as a meditation on media, celebrity, and the various forms of vicarious pleasure we obtain from our technologies—of the ’60s and today—and the fantasies of access that those technologies permit.

Earlier this year, exactly three months shy of her ninetieth birthday, Kate Wilhelm died in Eugene, Oregon, where she had lived since the 1970s. A native of Ohio who spent her teenage years in Louisville, Kentucky, she sold her debut story, “The Pint-Size Genie,” to Fantastic in 1956 and became a regular contributor to genre magazines, writing more than one hundred stories during the following six decades. She married Damon Knight in 1963; together, they hosted the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference from their home in Milford, Pennsylvania, and later cofounded the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, launching a tradition of literary mentorship and mutual criticism that influenced countless careers. The author of more than fifty novels, Wilhelm remains most famous for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), which won the Hugo and Locus awards for the year and was a finalist for the Nebula. In 2003 she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

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John Lewisohn thought that if one more door slammed, or one more bell rang, or one more voice asked if he was all right, his head would explode. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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