Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

CLUB STORY essay John Clute

1. Assemblages of tales told within an enabling frame-story to a group of companions in a sheltered venue were not always known as club stories, a term of nineteenth-century provenance that does not, perhaps, very adequately encompass the implications of the Decameron (circa 1372) by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), or the Canterbury Tales (written before 1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1343–1400). Only in hindsight, moreover, does the term do much to expand upon our knowledge of the colloquium format used by Sir Thomas More to disengage the presentation of Utopia (1516) from any fixed register of seriousness or advocacy. It may, however, be applied very cautiously to the actual proceedings of the Scriblerus Club (founded 1712, disbanded 1745), of which Jonathan Swift (almost all of whose work was distanced through the use of satirical masks) was a founding member; and to suggest the nature of occasional publications as by Martin Scriblerus, mostly written by John Arbuthnot (1667–1735). But Club Story is still a term of only tangential utility until recent centuries—even though there is clearly a thin line of connection between the Platonic colloquium and imaginary nineteenth-century gatherings—when it surfaces through, for instance, the specific homage paid by Robert Louis Stevenon in the title of his New Arabian Nights (1882), and its successor, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1840–1914), perhaps the first collection in English fully to express the ambience of the nineteenth-century form. The familiar club story—such as Charles Dickens adumbrated in Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–1841), and Edgar Allan Poe, though with only one auditor, clearly exploited in “A Descent into the Maelström” (May 1841 Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine), and which Stevenson and those he influenced brought to maturity—is a far cry from the great assemblages of European medieval material from which culture-founding creators like Boccaccio and Chaucer took their inspiration. Nor does the modern club story normally refract complex Eastern models—from the fifth-century Pañchatantra to the multi-sourced Arabian Nights themselves—in which a frame-story figure like Scheherazade recounts a series of tales under orders; European examples of this category do not seem very common, though The Pentamerone (1634–1636) by Giambattista Basile (circa 1575–1632) roughly fits the model. Any focus on these culture-creating world-encompassing story assemblages makes it clear that the range of implications held within the term club story cannot be addressed by taking the nineteenth-century model as a template. To describe the form as a tall tale told by one man to other men in a sanctum restricted to those of similar class and outlook, who agree to believe in the story for their mutual comfort, and who themselves may (or may not) tell a tale in turn, is to submit to a particularly narrow understanding of a very broad and deep tradition. But the term itself remains useful.

Club story collections featuring a solo raconteur who is not under coercion—they only occur within the last century or so—are not in fact very common, though the most famous modern club story sequences—the Mulliner collections by P G Wodehouse, beginning with Meet Mr Mulliner (coll 1927) and continuing for several years, and the five Jorkens collections by Lord Dunsany, beginning with The Travel Tales of Mr Joseph Jorkens (coll 1931) and continuing for two decades—do focus on one storyteller who tells a number of tales, some featuring the storyteller himself, some recounting urban fantasies and other implausibilities. But both Mulliner and Jorkens are volunteers. As narrators, they are inherently unreliable, though the club story format, if it does not support the truth of their tales, does at least sanction the safely enclosed telling of them.

For club stories as narrowly defined, whether or not narrated by a single figure, safe telling is vital. Certainly it was no coincidence that the form should have become popular in the UK towards the end of the nineteenth century, for by this point the texture of Western World had begun to show marks of strain throughout, an effect that had been gradually intensifying for more than a century. Through the fin de siècle period climaxing finally in the death of Queen Victoria, and through the years leading up to World War One, the great progressive march of Western history had begun to seem more and more problematical, and the swollen empires of Europe were increasingly being characterized in fiction—especially in the literatures of the fantastic—as entities fatally vulnerable to infection. For socially dominant white UK males, whose sense of reality was beginning to fray under the assault of women, and Darwin, and dark strains of Marx, and Freud, and Flaubert, and Zola, the club story created a kind of psychic Polder against the epistemological insecurities of the dawning new world. By foregrounding that sense of sanctuary, authors and readers could sideline the question of the believability of the tall tale; and the tale could therefore be accepted by the males to whom it was addressed not for its intrinsic plausibility but—defiantly—as part of a shared conspiracy to maintain an inward-looking, mutually supportive consensus that the world outside could continue to be gossiped about, and manipulated, in safety. Most club stories are set literally in safe havens, most are told by men to men, and most are conservative in both style and content, though they are conveyed in a tone of moderate self-mockery, an example of this being Jerome K Jerome’s After Supper Ghost Stories (coll 1891) which, though set not in a club but around the table after Christmas Eve dinner, softly parodies the club-story format and the tales told therein. Most club story collections incline more to fantasy than sf, though most incorporate some sf material. Some of the exploits recounted in Andrew Lang’s The Disentanglers (1902) are of sf interest, however, though more frequently—as in G K Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades (1905)—examples of the form read more like lubricated Satire than fantasy.

Further examples from before World War Two include John Kendrick Bang’s Roger Camerden: A Strange Story (1887); Stanley W’s The Cassowary: What Chanced in the Cleft Mountains (1906); Alfred Noyes’s Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1914), a set of narrative poems told in Shakespeare’s pub; Zeppelin Nights: A London Entertainment (1916) by Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt (1866–1942), and Foe-Farrell (1918) by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944): these two later examples both being tales which come close to representing World War One as something not amenable to solace (see below); H Rider Haggard’s Hew-Heu; Or, the Monster (1924); Cameron Blake’s Only Men on Board (1933); The Salzburg Tales (1934) by Christina Stead (1902–1983), which evoke Boccaccio, as does a slightly earlier Anthology series, The New Decameron (1919–1929); and Wyndham Lewis’s Count Your Dead—They Are Alive!; Or, a New War in the Making (1937), whose puppet-like disputants augur World War Two. Of more established genre interest are Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1907), though much less uniformly cast in the club story format than his nonfantastic Reginald (1904); John Buchan’s The Runagates Club (1928); and T H White’s Gone to Ground (1935), which—as these tales are told by survivors of a final Holocaust—resembles the Ford/Hunt and Quiller-Couch volumes cited above by stretching to its limit the capacity of the form to comfort (again, see below).

In “Sites for Sore Souls: Some Science-Fictional Saloons” (Fall 1991 Extrapolation), Fred Erisman loosens the argument made above that the club story can be understood in terms of denial; he suggests that sf club stories—or in his terms saloon stories—respond more straightforwardly to a human need for venues in which an “informal public life” can be led. Although Erisman assumes that the paucity of such venues in America is reflected in the UK, and therefore significantly undervalues the unspoken but clearly felt ambience of the pub in Arthur C Clarke’s cosily Recursive Tales from the White Hart (1957), his comments are clearly helpful in understanding the persistence of the club story in US sf. Beginning with L Sprague de Camp’s and Fletcher Pratt’s Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (1953), it has been a feature of magazine sf for nearly half a century, partly perhaps because imaginary American saloons and venues like conventions—where the genuine affinity groups that generate and consume American sf tend to foregather—are similar kinds of informal public space. Further examples of the club story in the USA, not all of them set in “saloons,” are assembled in Poul Anderson’s Tales of the Flying Mountains (1970); Sterling Lanier’s The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (1972) and The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (1986); Isaac Asimov’s several volumes of nonfantastic Black Widowers mysteries, starting with Tales of the Black Widowers (1974); Spider Robinson’s Callahan books, starting with Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon (1977); Larry Niven’s Draco Tavern tales, which appear mostly in Convergent Series (1979) and Limits (1985); and Tales from the Red Lion (2007) by John Weagly (1968–). A further Poul Anderson example, the Nicholas van Rijn story “The Master Key” (July 1964 Analog), pastiches Rudyard Kipling’s use of the club-story format. There are many others; some individual stories are assembled in Darrell Schweitzer’s and George Scithers’s Tales from the Spaceport Bar (1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (1989). Almost certainly the most important sf novel to have been organized around a club story frame is Dan Simmons’s Time Opera, Hyperion (1989), which is very loosely based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales [see above]; and Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled (2005) very effectively applies the model to the contemporary world.

2. But there is more to the club story form than its capacity to fix tall tales into sanctums where it is safe to pretend to believe them. Fixing a tale into place can be a double-edged sword. Superficially, locking a story into the moment of its telling may seem to constitute a narratological insistence that the meaning of the story is itself locked down by the visibility of its telling; but for at least three reasons, it is in fact dangerous to make a story visible. One: each and every club story represents a bringing into the present tense of witness a story which, it is claimed, has already happened, which is to say the world of the auditors was in some sense false or incomplete before the truth was told. The Club Story brings together the past and the future. Two: it could be argued that the more visible a story is, the less reliable any paraphrastic abstraction of that story will be, for what is almost inevitably exposed by paraphrase is the essential elusiveness of Story, what might be called the polysemy of the visible when narrated. Three: it seems clear that to make a story visible within a club story frame is primarily to enforce not meaning but witness, for the story has now been told to auditors whose very attentiveness affirms the storyable world: it is, in a clear sense, impossible to deny the existence of a story once told in this fashion, in this context. The club story is a vessel explicitly shaped for the mandatory reception of raw story. There are few genuinely great club stories, but all of them are threatening.

It may be more than a rhetorical gesture to note that at least two paradigm creations in the nearly new-born realm of the fantastic, the Frankenstein Monster and the Vampire—both transgressive figures central to the evolution of sf, and fantasy, and horror—were created within the context of the club story. In the middle of a famous 1816 walking tour in Switzerland, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892–1822) were forced by rain to stay inside at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. After an evening recital of readings taken from an assembly of Schauerroman tales told in a club story frame—Das Gespensterbuch [“The Ghost Book”] (1811–1815) by Johann August Apel (1771–1816) and Friedrich August Schulze (1770–1849) writing together as Friedrich Laun—Byron suggested that each member of the party make up a similar tale to be told on a subsequent night. Though there is no clear evidence as to what was actually recounted aloud, both Polidori’s and Mary Shelley’s eventually published narratives—The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) and Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818)—came out of that club-story moment, and both stories exhale the intrusiveness—the first words spoken by Frankenstein’s “monster” are “Pardon this intrusion”—of tales that enforce witness. (It might be noted that Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted: A Novel of Stories (2005)—which suggestively treats a writing workshop/retreat in club story terms—is set in a “theatre” referred to as the Villa Diodati.) In Germany at about the same time, transgressive authors like E T A Hoffmann—whose Die Serapionsbruder [“The Serapion Brothers”] (1818–1821) is a club story assembly—and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)—whose Phantasus (1812–1816) is also presented in club story form—were publishing work of oneiric power that hit, as it were, below the belt.

Though James de Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) is a powerful precursor, and works as a corrosive dismantling of Imperialism’s exploitative gaze upon worlds that comment upon its pretences, the great period for the club story, for the club story that threatens rather than consoles, comes rather later: during the 1890s, exactly when reactive club story writers (see above) were beginning to construct Polders against a sense that the Western imperium had become fragile. The four greatest novellas of that decade are probably Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894), H G Wells’s The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James (1843–1916) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (in Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, 1902). Each of them is a club story. Each of them constitutes a witness against any stable understanding of a darkening world. The case of The Time Machine is central to the history of sf: the Time Traveller recounts his Scientific Romance–inflected epic of long inevitable decline to a group of auditors who are forced to recognize his tale by virtue of the fact that he returns like some inverted Hero of the Thousand Faces to irrefutably tell it. In Heart of Darkness—whose setting and tone reflect the contemplative witnessing of the Gustave Doré New Zealander, who gazes upon the same darkening Thames that Marlow and his auditors have sailed into—a tale almost totally resistant to paraphrastic analysis is recounted, at times somewhat bewilderedly, by Marlow, whose pilgrimage into the heart of darkness at the head of the Congo leaves him whited like a sepulchre: Kurtz’s cry of “The horror! The horror!” is in fact—after decades of critical analysis—beyond all understanding: though we suspect he sees what the future will hold. In conveying his witness to this overwhelming cry, and by enforcing his auditors’ witness to that prophetic experience, Heart of Darkness perfectly exemplifies the deep power available within the club story format. A club story that has been told cannot be untold.