John A. Cone's A Musical Reformation,
a little known Aesthete collection

commentary by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

   

I read this little book only this morning though it's been on my bedside "to read" shelf for so long. I fear I paid rather a lot for it considering it's exlib & brittle, but I'd never seen it before, & never seen it since, & now that I've read it I no longer feel even slight need to regret the price. I'm surprised A Musical Reformation is (or so I believe) very little known, since it was issued by the highly collectable Abbey Press of London & Montreal, & it is a product of the San Francisco Decadence, published in 1900, & manifestly under the sway of Ambrose Bierce and especially Bill Morrow, whose The Ape, the Idiot & Other People stories these most resemble.

A quick look on-line for the author finds reference to only one book by him -- The Man Who Pleases & the Woman Who Fascinates (New York: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, 1901), which I gather is a fin de siecle take on relations between the sexes. I know nothing more of the author than that -- I would surmise from story context that he was originally from Maine & moved to California in the 1880s, & became a regular contributor to San Francisco newspapers & magazines, from which work the stories in A Musical Reformation were drawn.

"A Strange Adoption" is most like W. C. Morrow. A young man is waylaid by two sisters who offer him every fortune if he will live with them as their brother in their richly appointed San Francisco home. It becomes something of a doppelganger story, not quite really supernatural, but told in terms of dreams & delusions, really quite nice.

"My Escape from Suicide" regards a similar young man -- perhaps the same man, there is an autobiographical tone to some of these tales -- who discovers the creepy reason there has been a rash of inexplicable suicides in San Francisco, & barely escapes the fate of so many others who encountered the weird Dr. Kurtz.

The other tales are at least Decadent, being accounts of moral corruption. The title story outlines a noble dream of redemption in the mind of a man who afterward drinks himself into oblivion . "His Week Off" recounts opening salvos of a possibly romantic encounter that soon dwindles into unutterable delusion. "A Spoiled Story" is a tale of terror in old Hawaii, but which resolves into a lie.

None of the stories are quite the equal of Morrow, but they strive in that direction, & are entertaining.

   

copyright © 2000 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, all rights reserved

   

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