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| Illustration by Mahlon Blaine for H. H. Ewers' Alraun | |
Hanns Heinz Ewers' Strange Tales
commentary by Jim Rockhill
I just received this Runa-Raven Press trade paperback edition of H. H. Ewers' Strange Tales yesterday. It contains the full contents of the collection Blood ("The White Maiden," "Tomato Sauce" & "Mamaloi"), three tales ably translated into English by Ewers' himself ("Fairyland," "The Box of Counters" & "The Execution of Damiens"), the remaining short fiction available in English translation ("C.3.3." & "The Spider"), & two works newly translated by editor Dr. Flowers ("The Water-Corpse" & "From the Diary of an Orange Tree"). Dr. Flowers' twenty-three page biographical essay is alone worth the price of the book. A photograph of a dandified H.H.E., reclining in an Art Nouveau chair with a cigarette in one hand & bearing the dueling-scars from his short term in the student corps, acts as frontispiece.
Here follow my subjective impressions of the book:
I found only "The Water-Corpse," a more sarcastic than usual fairy-tale based on the standard misunderstood-artist trope, unsatisfactory.
In addition to the famous femme fatale tale, "The Spider," only the Hoffmanesque "From the Diary of an Orange Tree," with its more lyrical take on the destroying female than appears in either Alraune or "The Spider," & "C.3.3." contain supernatural elements, & in the latter two tales these are just as likely to be expressions of psychosis.
The absence of the supernatural, however, does not make the remaining tales any less interesting. Even in such a seemingly slight, short tale as "The White Maiden," Ewers manages to create a powerful image worthy of the greatest Symbolist painters with such simple elements as a pale, naked girl, a dove and a red room. "Fairyland" offers us the contrast between what a child and the adults who accompany her see along the streets at Port au Prince. This dissonance between extreme ugliness, or brutality, & piercing beauty is common in art, but Ewers repeatedly prefers to twist this dissonance into a piquant consonance.
Many of Ewers' detractors have gone on at length against his gloating descriptions of violence & aberrant sexuality, but examination of such tales in this collection as "Tomato Sauce," "Mamaloi," "The Box of Counters" & "The Execution of Damiens" shows that the truth is not so simple. Ewers' prose demonstrates such clarity & power that even in the most brutal episodes, what we read possesses both a clinical fascination & a rather perverse beauty. Furthermore, the sadistic chaplain in "Tomato Sauce" & the patronizing, womanizing con-man in "Mamaloi" are not seen as super-men, as some of Ewers' critics would have us believe, but as fools & worse. Ewers' prose merely acts as the camera, or rather prism, through which all these details, beautiful & repellant, calm & brutal, pass. It is the image & its effect upon us rather than any judgment Ewers or the reader may make about the manner in which it was made or the motives of its creators, that matters. This book is perhaps not for all tastes, but is fascinating nonetheless.