Disclosures in Black

Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes

DISCLOSURES IN BLACK

A look at the fiction of Carl Jacobi

Well into the 1990’s there were still survivors of a dwindling group of writers who had been published in Weird Tales (during its first incarnation between 1923 and 1954) and numerous other allied fiction magazines of the pulp era. One of the last members of this renowned group was Carl Jacobi. He must also have been one of the last survivors of the select group of writers whose work was publicly praised by H P Lovecraft.

Carl Richard Jacobi was born in Minneapolis on 10 July 1908. He began writing early, and produced several stories for his high school magazine. Whilst at university, his fiction started to gain a wider circulation in literary magazines. Jacobi’s first success was with “Mive” (Minnesota Quarterly Fall 1928). When this story was reprinted in Weird Tales, it was praised by the likes of H P Lovecraft, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith.

Throughout the 1930’s, as he tried to support himself by his writing, Jacobi produced a steady stream of stories for the horror, science fiction, mystery, and adventure pulps. Still living in his parents’ house, Jacobi wrote many pieces with colourful and exotic settings, especially the Far East. In order to get his facts right and gain local colour, he wrote to officers of the colonial governments of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the British parts of Borneo (now part of Malaysia).

Carl Jacobi’s earliest science fiction also dates from this period. Like that by Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, Jacobi’s science fiction tended to concentrate on the creation of alien and bizarre settings, with attendant strange and often horrible happenings, rather than make any serious attempts to outline and use specifically scientific statements or rationales.

Unlike his friend and contemporary Hugh B Cave (born 1910), Jacobi was rarely able to make his living by full-time writing. He was finally forced to take full-time employment in 1942, and took a job with Honeywell, working for the company for over twenty years, until his mother’s death in 1965 left him alone. Such fiction as Jacobi published during these years was thus written in his spare time, and his production quantity declined considerably after the 1940’s.

With the foundation in 1939 of Arkham House by Jacobi’s friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, it became only a matter of time before his stories started to appear in book form. The first collection, Revelations in Black, was published in 1947. This contained 21 stories, including “Mive”, the title story, plus several other early gems.

Throughout the 1950’s and on through into the 1970’s Jacobi published occasional stories in August Derleth’s original Arkham House anthologies, as well as in such established science fiction magazines as Fantastic Universe and Galaxy Science Fiction. He later became a contributor to such up-market small press horror magazines as Whispers and Midnight Sun.

By the early 1980’s Jacobi’s health had seriously begun to fail, and production of new work all but ceased. He had to move out of the house in Minneapolis that he’d lived in since childhood, and into a series of apartments and finally, nursing homes. He died on 25 August 1997.

Carl Jacobi never published any novels or magazine serials, so his reputation rests entirely on short fiction that was originally published in the ephemeral setting of the pulps. And even with the publication of all his best work in book form, Carl Jacobi is a writer in our field who deserves to be better known. I intend this piece to be a general survey of his work, together with a look at a representative selection of his stories published throughout a writing career that lasted for well over half a century.

(A note on pronunciation. I had always assumed that Jacobi was spoken as Jac’obi, as in the actor Sir Derek Jacobi. But when Dixon Smith gave his fascinating talk on Jacobi at the Chester Ghost Story Gathering in November 1994, he made it clear that it was pronounced as Jaco’bi. So now we know!)

Much of Carl Jacobi’s output of horror, macabre, and science fiction is routine. But there are many pleasant surprises hidden away and awaiting discovery in the four collections published during his lifetime. Jacobi was always a smooth, polished writer, who clearly took great pains over his work. In short, although he could rarely live by his writing, Carl Jacobi was a pro.

“Mive” was Jacobi’s first appearance in Weird Tales (January 1932). It is a very short but effective piece, consisting almost entirely of atmospheric description. Writing to Jacobi, H P Lovecraft told him:

Mive pleased me immensely, & I told Wright that I was glad to see at least one story whose weirdness of incident was made convincing by adequate emotional preparation & suitably developed atmosphere.(1)

In “Mive” the narrator goes for a walk in the Rentharpian Hills and an ill-regarded swampy area nearby. Soon he decides to leave the road and plunges into the swamp -- Mive. There he encounters an abnormally huge butterfly. Then he encounters something else even larger... He runs out of Mive and escapes back into the real world. But the thought of what he saw and what it meant haunts him:

I looked back. There it lay, far below me, vague and indistinct in the deepening gloom, the black outlines of the cypress trees writhing in the night wind, silent, brooding, mysterious -- the Mive.(2)

In “Mive” Jacobi showed how at ease he was in creating a sense of place and atmosphere of doom and weirdness -- a trait that remained a trademark of all his best work. He was particularly good at doing it for stories set in the American Midwest: his native Minnesota and neighbouring states.

Several other stories reprinted in Revelations in Black are particularly worth examining.

“The Face in the Wind” (Weird Tales April 1936) is an uncanny story set on the decaying estate of Royalton Manor. The house and estate is separated from an ill-regarded marsh by the ‘frog wall’ -- a self-explanatory wall that is in need of repair when the story begins. The new owner of the estate is warned not to move anything during the reconstruction of the wall, but of course this is inevitable.

A local young man sees some sort of vision of beauty and horror. The owner becomes aware of a huge birdlike creature that may or may not be connected with Classilda Haven, a woman in her eighties who has established herself in one of the estate cottages.

The youngman paints a picture in which the narrator sees a beautiful and yet terrible face. A copy of Richard Verstegen’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence conveniently supplies the narrator with the connection between Classilda Haven and all the strange happenings on the estate.

This book, a genuine volume published in 1605, is a consistent feature of Jacobi’s work -- appearing in story after story throughout his writing career, in much the same way that the fictional Necronomicon did in H P Lovecraft’s fiction. (Verstegen’s book was an attempt to construct an English national mythology and heritage.) A ‘forbidden’ and usually fictional book was often used as a resource to provide relevant and useful quotations, insights, spells, and so on, as and when required. All the classic Weird Tales era writers had one, and Jacobi was no exception. Maybe it was Verstegen’s title that attracted him, as it was as unusual and memorable as many of his own!

“The Face in the Wind” is full of gorgeous pulp atmosphere, with plenty of decay, bad weather, old curses, and decrepit buildings.

Not uncharacteristically, Farnsworth Wright rejected the story the first time round, and only bought it after reconsidering.

“The Digging at Pistol Key” (Weird Tales July 1947) with its vintage Jacobi-esque title, utilized a more exotic setting. The protagonist, Jason Cunard, is an expatriate Englishman living on the then British-run West Indian island of Trinidad. His property on Pistol Key happens to the place where local legend says a hoard of treasure was once buried by pirates, so Cunard is constantly bothered by treasure-seekers digging holes on his land.

In a fit of rage Cunard kills his houseboy after accusing him of a crime that he afterwards found the boy hadn’t committed. Cunard buries the body secretly and puts out the story that the boy ran away.

Soon Cunard feels that he is being haunted by an old black woman -- the houseboy’s mother, who had a reputation as an obeah practitioner, and who committed suicide. Eventually Cunard becomes obsessed with finding the buried treasure himself, and so goes out one night to follow the pirate's instructions.

The next day Cunard is found dead in the hole that he dug. But it wasn’t buried gold that he had found...

Jacobi’s second collection Portraits in Moonlight, was published in 1964. The book featured a highly atmospheric and effective cover by Arkham House favourite Frank Utpatel, whose skill at depicting the uncanny and bizarre, but without spoiling it and reducing it to banality, made him Jacobi’s visual equivalent. Portraits in Moonlight included further stories first published in Weird Tales, this time between 1946 and 1950. (There are a few stories from the later 1950’s, mainly examples of Jacobi’s brand of exotic science fiction.) The horror fiction represented in Portraits in Moonlight is thus vintage Jacobi, and represents his single best collection.

The stories are more mature and assured than the earlier ones reprinted in Revelations in Black, and do not reflect the natural variations in the quality of Jacobi’s output that would become noticeable with the reprinting of contemporary stories in the later collections Disclosures in Scarlet and Smoke of the Snake.

With “Portrait in Moonlight” (Weird Tales November 1947), Jacobi again used one of his favourite settings -- Trinidad. Clarkson buys a painting from a Negro artist. On the back is the odd inscription: Put me in the moonlight. But instead of hanging the picture in the moonlight, he hangs it in the sunlight. One morning, Clarkson notices that he looks and feels younger. He goes on a trip to Martinique, and feels younger and healthier. Old acquaintances compliment him on his appearance. Soon Clarkson puts two and two together, and rushes back to Trinidad. But he never gets off the boat back in Port-of-Spain. And as for what the picture was found to be showing...

“Witches in the Cornfield” was first published in Imagination August 1954, under the trite and giveaway title “The Dangerous Scarecrow”. Mr Maudsley and Mr Trask are two scarecrows, named for two former farmers in the district, by the children Jimmy and Stella. Mr Trask vanished; Mr Maudsley left in a hurry soon afterwards, and was rumoured to have moved to New Orleans.

No-one except the children seem to notice that the scarecrows are very gradually moving closer together. One day while playing in Mr Maudsley’s former barn, Jimmy finds an old voodoo knife, which he decides to give to the Maudsley scarecrow. Stella gets the idea of giving the knife to Mr Trask. All of the time the Trask scarecrow continues to move towards the Maudsley one.

One day the scarecrows are found next to each other, and Mr Maudsley’s head has been sliced off. The next day Jimmy and Stella's father reads out a macabre item from the local paper: “One thing here, though -- they found a fellow with his head cut off right in the middle of a city street.”

No guesses for which city.

“The Corbie Door” is a return to the exemplary world of the late 1940’s Weird Tales, and the issue for May 1947. Robert and Debora Fielding move to Corbie House, which Fielding’s Uncle Charles has left to him. The house and environs are as odd as any conjured up by Jacobi during his career. Exploring the grounds, Fielding comes across a double row of columns, each surmounted by a corbie. And in the side wall of the arcade he finds a door, with corbies carved into the panels.

Before exploring further, Fielding discovers the house’s library, with its copy of Restitution of Decayed Intelligence and the journals of various ancestors. Clearly Corbie House has a terrible past, rather like Exham Priory in H P Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”.

Fielding now explores beyond the door with the corbies on it. He enters a sort of borderland world, where he sees a rite being performed, with a woman who resembles Debora Fielding. Eventually both Fieldings are found dead, one by murder, the other suicide.

“Matthew South and Company” (Weird Tales May 1949) is a jewel of a story. It reflects Jacobi’s own imaginary use of pseudonyms for various aspects of his personality. He also used, or considered using, some of the names eventually incorporated into “Matthew South and Company” as pseudonyms for his own fiction.

Henry Walters is a rich sugar-mill owner living in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. He fervently dislikes his name, and avoids using it as much as possible by using a string of pseudonyms. All totally harmless? Perhaps.

When Walters is dreaming of a new name, he suddenly writes down ‘Matthew South’. A while later he stops off at his club for a game of cards. In a room which was supposed to be closed for repairs he falls in with three strangers, and Walters enjoys a friendly game. But when he checks the club register for their names, all he can find written is Matthew South and Company.

Soon South is exerting a malign influence over Walters, and forces him to kill the other two members of the first card game -- two men who also had names that Walters had also thought of. Finally Walters meets South alone and shoots him.

The verdict is suicide, but there was no motive for the murder of three friends with whom Walters used to play cards before he met Matthew South and Company.

These four stories also have a common thread of voodoo or other black magic influence. Clearly this theme was of constant interest to Jacobi, as were the tropical settings that go with it. As a man who apparently rarely, if ever, left his native Minnesota, Jacobi either made good use of his native Midwest landscape, or got away from it entirely, choosing distant and exotic ones -- the stuff of pulp fiction.

Disclosures in Scarlet (1972) was one of the first Arkham House volumes published after August Derleth’s death, and again featured a superbly atmospheric cover by Frank Utpatel. The original publication dates of its contents ranged from the late 1940’s to 1971, and were a mixture of science fiction and horror.

The stories were first published in original anthologies, as well as magazines generally regarded as specialising in science fiction. Which goes to show that Jacobi was always able to sell to a wide variety of markets, especially when editors were liberal in their definitions of the various subgenres of the fantastic.

“The White Pinnacle” first appeared in August Derleth’s original anthology Time to Come (1954). The story was ably, if briefly, summed up by Damon Knight in his review of the anthology as ‘a preposterous farrago of unexplained and unconnected creepy doings on a mysterious planetoid’(3).

Prospectors discover an asteroid (with atmosphere and plant life -- Knight was right to ridicule Jacobi’s science, and Derleth should have known better). The prospectors land, and very soon the oddness of the life-forms they encounter becomes apparent. And there is also the mysterious ‘white pinnacle’ -- an outcrop of rock carved with strange hieroglyphics. These are quickly, if improbably, translated, and Jacobi winds up this confusing story by having the narrative found later by the crew of another ship landing on the asteroid.

Not a very good example of Jacobi’s science fiction!

An excellent example of it, however, had been published in Galaxy Science Fiction (June 1970). The evocatively titled “The Player at Yellow Silence” concerned a mysterious contestant and a game of golf played for a far more important outcome than a mere trophy changing hands. Not an original basic idea, but one that Jacobi handled with ease.

“The Singleton Barrier” first appeared in Derleth’s 1971 original anthology, Dark Things. It is a terse and vivid piece about an oddly-designed wall in the middle of the woods in the American Midwest -- Jacobi’s home ground.

Vance Singleton comes upon the wall by accident during a rainstorm, and is immediately taken with its ‘gypsy’ design, and the fact that he thinks that he can hear sobbing sounds coming from the other side.

In the local town he finds out that the house behind the wall was the site of a tragic death, and that the man involved in the affair now lives over the road opposite where the wall now stands. Singleton visits the man, and notices a copy of Verstegen’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. Also he has found out the meaning of the odd designs on the wall.

Later Singleton returns to the wall, and enters the enclosure. There he discovers what really happened, and the real reason for the wall’s existence.

Occasional stories of good quality continued to appear in the shrinking number of professional magazines that catered for the distinctive sort of fiction that Carl Jacobi wrote. However, the connected growth of the small-press horror field continued to allow Jacobi an audience.

Stories from this period in Jacobi’s career, together with a sprinkling of old material from the 1930’s and 40’s, make up the contents of Smoke of the Snake (1994).

“The Elcar Special” (Whispers II, edited by Stuart Schiff, 1979) is a piece of black humour that contains Jacobi’s recurring devices of a wall and references to obeah practices. A somewhat shiftless character takes a job helping the owner of a car collection to look after his prize possessions. Among these is the Elcar Special -- a special vehicle with a mysterious past.

The narrator is out driving the Elcar Special when his personality seems to change. He finds a package hidden in the car, and somehow under the a strange influence, makes a journey that uncovers the car’s past, and the murder of a woman connected with it.

The humour lies in the stolid character of the dodgy and feckless narrator being confronted, in the American Midwest, with a classic car, West Indian obeah, and old murder. A weird mixture well handled.

“A Quire of Foolscap”(Whispers October 1987) was Jacobi’s last horror story (4). In his morning mail Rutledge receives a gift from a dead man. Rutledge, a lawyer, uses this quire of foolscap from his dead partner, to write a brief on the man he has framed for the murder of his wife's lover.

Unfortunately when he reads from his brief in court, he finds that he can’t read the lies that he has written down. Rather, the truth, and the identity of the true murderer, is revealed in open court...

“The Tunnel” was written in the 1970’s and first published in Weird Tales Winter 1989. Characteristically, Jacobi created a menacing atmosphere in an exotic setting, this time in Central America. A tunnel engineer is hired to supervise the construction of a railway tunnel near -- too near -- to an Indian shrine and site of an ancient temple.

Jacobi’s consistently used ‘forbidden’ book, Richard Verstegen’s Restitution of Decayed intelligence, makes probably its last appearance, and warnings as to the fates of previous explorers are, of course, ignored.

Two stories -- the former neat and wry, the latter doom-laden and claustrophobic, and both in the classic Weird Tales tradition of entertaining fiction with impact, and a story well-told.

Carl Jacobi told his distinctive stories from first to last. He brought his own slightly skewed vision to bear on his native American Midwest, as well as the far-eastern and Caribbean settings that he loved. Jacobi’s best fiction exemplified the bizarre, the fantastic, and the downright strange and odd. His uses of landscape, (both terrestrial and alien) and such devices as isolated walls, lakes, roads, and houses, helped to build and sustain the continual vague unease and sense of things looming that infects the reader.

Even Jacobi’s titles are generally distinctive and memorable -- no doubt sometimes more so than the stories themselves: “Revelations in Black”, “The Tomb From Beyond”, “The Face in the Wind”, “Tepondicon”, “Gentlemen, the Scavengers”, “The Player at Yellow Silence”, -- the list goes on...

In his final years, Jacobi lived to see a considerable growth in the study of the fiction published in the horror, science fiction, mystery, and weird menace pulps, as well as interest in those who had written for them.

Two books in particular give an insight into Carl Jacobi’s world, and what it was really like to write for and read the horror, menace, and adventure pulps that proliferated between the World Wars.

Lost in the Rentharpian Hills (a quotation from “Mive”) by R Dixon Smith is a fascinating and detailed biographical study and appraisal of Jacobi’s work. Smith spent several years getting to know Jacobi, so the information given is first-hand. Also Smith gives as complete a bibliography as possible, and there are many reproductions of story illustrations and letters from editors, especially Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales.

Magazines I Remember, by Jacobi’s close colleague and friend Hugh B Cave, is a memoir of his career as a pulp writer, and reproduces nearly 60 years of his correspondence with Jacobi. There are plenty of reproductions and photographs. The book becomes very moving towards the end as Jacobi becomes more and more ill, and clearly found it almost impossible to respond to Cave’s letters and encouragement.

What happened to the handsome and vigorous young man in his 20’s who set out to be a pulp writer? He simply lived and grew old -- in a literary career of superior quality that lasted for the best part of sixty years.

NOTES

1. H P Lovecraft, letter to Carl Jacobi, Selected Letters IV, p 24

2. Revelations in Black, p 233 (pagination from the Neville Spearman reprint edition)

3. Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, 3rd ed.,1996, p 152

4. R Dixon Smith, Lost in the Rentharpian Hills, p 19

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HughBCave, Magazines I Remember, Tattered Pages Press 1994

Carl Jacobi, Revelations in Black, Arkham House 1947 (UK reprints were in hardcover from Neville Spearman in 1974, and paperback in 1977 from Panther Books -- two volumes as Revelations in Black and The Tomb from Beyond)

Carl Jacobi, Portraits in Moonlight, Arkham House 1964

Carl Jacobi, Disclosures in Scarlet, Arkham House 1972

Carl Jacobi, Smoke of the Snake, Fedogan & Bremer 1994

R Dixon Smith, Lost in the Rentharpian Hills, Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1985

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To David Longhorn for lending me his copy of Portraits in Moonlight, and Muriel Smith for pointing out that Richard Verstegen was the real author of a real book!

A slightly different version of this article first appeared in Supernatural Tales 4, 2002

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