Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People

Paul Woods & Gavin Baddeley
Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People (2010)
It's taken me an entire decade to get around to reading this one and for numerous reasons, the main one being that I've known Paul - the author, or one of the authors, I guess - for nearly thirty years and distinctly remember a phone call ending with I'll have to go now, Lawrence, I've got to translate this incoherent piece of shit into readable English before the weekend. I think he was referring to Gavin Baddeley's Lucifer Rising which he'd been given the task of editing for Plexus Books, which didn't instill me with much confidence in their subsequent collaboration.

For what it may be worth, I'm also a contributor. Specifically Paul phoned me back when he was putting the book together asking for a painting of bodies impaled on stakes, mainly because, as he described it, visual material relating to Vlad the Impaler was a bit thin on the ground. It seemed an odd request, but I did what I could and was paid for it, although I'm still not that convinced by the thing I came up with. Nevertheless I'm thanked in the front of the book, and in fact I'm thanked within the same sentence as Boyd Rice. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that but I'm probably about due for cancellation anyway, so I don't suppose it matters.

Online criticisms include one particularly peculiar accusation of homophobia which I can only assume must refer to descriptions of sodomy given without any attendant suggestion of it being a powerful and inspiring challenge to gender stereotypes; and a general whine of discontent about a lack of academic rigour evinced by a haphazard citation of sources. The second of these is true in so much as that this is arguably a populist dissertation, but it seems a little unfair given the scarcity of source material regarding the historical Vlad Dracula necessitating a speculative approach, and that this book is as much about the subsequent myth and our interpretation of the same. Certain speculative passages are written as fictionalised accounts, striking an initially odd note akin to a written equivalent of those bloody awful historical television documentaries which pepper the narrative with scenes of underpaid actors hopping about, pretending to be Shakespeare or to have invented fire or whatever; but the scenes are well written - probably by Paul, I suspect - if gruesome, and surely serve to communicate the visceral power of the mythology under discussion better than would any more sober description. This seems to matter because, I would argue, I think this subject needs to be communicated in terms which may upset the reader in order for us to fully understand it. So, one might term the book a personal vision in the sense of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, which would have amounted to little more than a list of names and dates without the stewardship of its author.

Another criticism I've noticed has been the narrative's tendency to digress, to flit off elsewhere with discussion of Al Capone, Ian Brady, de Sade or whoever for the sake of comparison, which - true enough - would be a distraction in something more academic, but which I believe serves this sort of discussion very well. The epilogue details the mythic appeal of Dracula in the field of black metal and similarly unlistenable genres, which admittedly seems a bit surplus to requirements; and additionally asks the aforementioned Boyd Rice what he thinks, and what he thinks is unfortunately quite interesting and perceptive, which is yet another argument I am absolutely not having ever again - but otherwise it all hangs together beautifully, I'd say. It may even be that digressions made for the sake of comparison somewhat alleviate the potentially overwhelming parade of wooden stakes going up arses, page after page after page.

Vlad Dracula was a minor regent in a part of the world which has been absolutely central to the history of human civilisation up until recent times, and Woods does a great job of impressing upon the reader that Western Europe was very much an obscure fringe concern for most of this story, which itself maps most of why we're here today, culturally speaking; and Vlad Dracula was a fascinating, thoroughly brutal figure, yet by no means the worst of his cultural sphere, and who probably wouldn't have generated quite so strong a legend without some potentially redeeming features - or at least redeeming in the context of fifteen century Wallachia. This book, which is nothing if not thorough in examining its subject from every conceivable angle, explains the appeal of the myth in such convincing detail that I almost want to give Bram Stoker's dreary novel another read.

The Thief's Journal

Jean Genet The Thief's Journal (1949)
I'm not quite sure what brought me here, but it was probably something to do with Amphetamine Sulphate given that, with hindsight, The Thief's Journal seems ancestral to at least a couple of their titles, notably Josiah Morgan's Inside the Castle.
 

Genet - as I will freely admit I didn't actually know until I looked it all up about a month ago - was a petty thief of no consistently fixed abode who took to writing and so caught the attention of Jean Cocteau and other poetic types of his generation. The Thief's Journal is approximately autobiographical in being an account of Genet's existence on the periphery of the law, but rather than reading as a straight narrative comprises a flowery existential analysis which sporadically refers to events from Genet's life, mostly nicking stuff and encounters with men's cocks - these being the main reasons for its apparently having been embraced as transgressive literature, on which subject my friend Paul Woods had this to say:

I liked the couple of early books I read of his when I was a kid and enjoyed a couple of his plays which I saw in filmed versions, but I never really got why the transgressive literature label was applied to him. I suppose it might be straight literati types getting all excited about a writer who's actually from the underworld. I was reading a biography of Genet when I was on a mini-tour with Damo early this year and it struck me that, for someone who called his own semi-autobiog The Thief's Journal, he was pretty piss-pathetic as a thief - stealing shirts and books from Paris shops. More of a failed kleptomaniac really. I remember when my old man had been home from the nick for a couple of years (who really did earn the title of professional thief - or recidivist from the law-enforcement point of view) and he took my copy of The Thief's Journal off the shelves to read. A night or two later he comes in the living room, points at me, says, 'You're fucking mad!' and walks out again. I suspect that may have been old Jean's description of dropping his drawers to other men to earn a crust.

Anyway, Genet takes an aesthetic position loosely comparable to that of Esseintes in Huysmans' Against Nature.

Abandoned by my family, I already felt it was natural to aggravate this condition by a preference for boys, and this preference by theft, and theft by crime or a complacent attitude in regard to crime. I thus resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me.

It's also comparable to certain Shamanic ideas informing members of the priesthood in Mexica society before the conquest, specifically their embracing the filthy, the unclean, and the transgressive as pertaining to the sacred through existing beyond the limits of the traditionally acceptable. Genet therefore finds endless beauty in the world he inhabits.

The beauty of a moral act depends on the beauty of its expression. To say that it is beautiful is to decide that it will be so. It remains to be proven so. This is the task of images, that is, of the correspondences with the splendours of the physical world. The act is beautiful if it provokes, and in our throat reveals, song. Sometimes the consciousness with which we have pondered a reputedly vile act, the power of expression which must signify it, impels us to song. This means that treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.

The Thief's Journal is therefore mostly about Genet finding poetry, and unusually florid poetry, in dirt, poverty, degradation, shame, small acts of betrayal, and a seemingly never ending procession of men's spunky cocks - this novel having been written back when homosexuality was a somewhat more contentious subject to the point of representing an open act of rebellion against some notional natural order. So as with Sartre, then Debord, William Burroughs to some extent, and more recently the aforementioned Josiah Morgan, it's actually about how reality relates to our perception of the same, or something in that general direction.

Unfortunately, whilst Inside the Castle - for one example - was a punchy forty pages or thereabouts, The Thief's Journal is more than two-hundred, allowing me ample scope to tire of endless descriptions of men's amazing cocks to the point of turning to Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols biography on a couple of evenings for the sake of reading something which didn't feel like homework. I can appreciate both Genet's craft and his philosophical depth - if that's what I mean - but other's have done this sort of thing better with significantly less droning.

Planet of the Apes

Pierre Boulle Planet of the Apes (1963)
I was never a massive fan of the films although I liked the first one well enough. As it happens my first commissioned book cover was for The Planet of the Apes Chronicles by Paul A. Woods, essentially a collection of vaguely scholarly essays about the films, television series, and so on; at least I assume they were vaguely scholarly as I probably skipped a few of them. Nevertheless, Boulle's novel struck me as worth buying when I chanced upon a copy, it being sufficiently interesting in itself regardless of the films it inspired, even just as a piece of science-fiction history.

Although there were quite a few significant changes made to the story between this original novel and Charlton Heston shaking his fist at the Statue of Liberty, most seem well-made for once, given that Planet of the Apes is science-fiction by a fairly liberal reading of the term, having more in common with Gulliver's Travels than The First Men in the Moon. In fact, you might be better off reading it as a prequel to Will Self's Great Apes than as formative to the Charlton Heston vehicle. For starters, Boulle's apes are more technologically advanced than their cinematic descendants, and at least have technology sufficient to send experimental satellites into orbit, some with human test animals inside. Beyond this they're pretty much in the tradition of Victorian tables turned caricature, wearing suits, puffing away on pipes, driving cars - whatever Boulle thought would best shock us into taking a long, hard look at ourselves and the institutions of our society. Ape civilisation here is rigidly divided as a parody of the class system with gorillas as an arrogant aristocracy, orang-outangs as the stubbornly scientific class, and chimpanzees standing in for more or less everyone else.

Despite the bold text represented by this mirror image of ourselves as apes, and despite a lively and readable prose without too much in the way of fannying around, whatever Boulle was trying to say often seems oddly ambiguous with his focus shifting from animal rights to the absurdity of the class system, even taking a parodic swipe at the stock market at one point. Ultimately the statement is a broad one concerning human vanity and the misplaced faith we have in our own institutions. The conclusion is radically different to the one we saw on the screen, although it has to be said that the film actually makes more sense of its story in being significantly less reliant on coincidence and with less convoluted purpose. By contrast, Planet of the Apes with all of its laboured twists and raised eyebrows is of such Swiftian thrust as to count as a Surrealist novel. It's also a very good book, possibly just not the one you might have expected it to be if you've ever heard of Roddy McDowall.

The Mind Parasites

Colin Wilson The Mind Parasites (1967)
Once was that I held Colin Wilson in relatively high regard, at least as the one author of cranky pseudoscience literature who stood a chance at being right about some of it. Somebody had given me a copy of Mysteries, of which I read about half. I tried it a couple of times, on each occasion losing interest around the halfway mark, at which point Colin started bringing in theories too wacky even for me. Later I realised that most of the good stuff had actually come from T.C. Lethbridge who wrote some broadly fascinating books about dowsing and the like. Mysteries tied Lethbridge in with some of Wilson's own ideas, most notably the one about a ladder of selves, which seems to work quite well as psychological analysis without requiring that one should take it as a literal description of the mechanism of the human mind.

Later I picked up The Outsider from a charity shop, but ended up giving it away because I couldn't be arsed to read it. The Outsider was amazing according to apparently everyone, an important book in the truest sense; and then my friend Paul Woods, who I seem to recall having had some dealings with Wilson in his capacity as a criminologist, always spoke very highly of the man, albeit not quite so highly as Wilson spoke of The Mind Parasites, his own novel:

Is it not time that we create a new type of novel? I think of a hatchet biting into a tree and making the chips fly, not an evasion of reality or a description of it, but an attack on it... What is needed is an existential realism. Like the social realism of the Soviets, yet biting much deeper; its attitude is not passive or pessimistic. In a qualified sense, it might be called practical; it wishes to change things. What it wishes to change I prefer to leave unsaid, it can be inferred from this book.

Really? This was a new type of novel? I was expecting some sort of - dunno - a mash-up of William Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Guy Debord, massive ideas flying about left, right and centre, a book reading like nothing I have ever read before.

The Mind Parasites gets off to a tremendous start as a more contemporary take on Lovecraft's squelchy mythology with mysterious blocky cities discovered several miles underground, events unfolding with the chilling realism of a Quatermass serial; after which it all goes very much tits up. The underground city is revealed to have been a red herring for reasons which either remain unclear or are so poorly described that I've forgotten them. The true culprits are the mind parasites, malign incorporeal entities dwelling in the depths of the collective unconscious, or some other place which probably makes more sense if you've read either Jung or Huxley. These entities are the cause of war, racism, cruelty, inequality, suicide, boredom, accidents at work, and Doctor Who having been shite since it came back on the telly. Were it not for them we would all be telepathic supermen, at our full potential and qualified to lead the common herd of humanity to its destiny and all that good stuff. The thing that bothers me is that I suspect Wilson may actually have believed at least some of this crap.

A few years ago I made fumbling attempts to identify a literary genre which I provisionally named dinnerpunk based on it comprising poorly written yarns which come to their authors as they mow the lawns of their Surbiton homes as Marjorie is preparing dinner. They've read Biggles, several Ian Flemings, and it can't be that hard considering some of the fairies who make a living of it, so they're jolly well going to have a go. Dinnerpunk fiction tends to be written from an entirely male perspective, suggests a conservative view of the world, usually one fixating on some peculiar detail such as aviation history - because nutters are always into planes for some reason - and amongst the cast of chaps and renowned scientists, there's nearly always somebody identified simply as the Colonel. Dinnerpunk is the written equivalent to Bob Mortimer's Graham Lister character. It knows doctors and dentists, professional people...

Regrettably, after the tremendous start described above, The Mind Parasites reveals itself to be not merely a disappointment, but to be fully-leaded weapons grade dinnerpunk.

Neither is there any evidence to indicate that the crew of the Pallas intended to build a new civilisation on another planet. There were only three women on board. The number would surely have been higher if any such plan had been contemplated?

I should jolly well, say so. Our heroes are a team of top scientists who travel around in a gang of about fifteen for most of the book, routinely pooling their psychic powers to make the world a better place. Human history is a litany of woe thanks to the mind parasites, because it was them what made us do all that bad stuff like Hitler and that, which ironically is itself a typically right-wing narrative, the enemy and source of all woe being those people or things over there; it's because of them that we can't have nice stuff. Freed of the mind parasites, we are able to travel around in gangs of fifteen making stuff more good, even psychokinetically sending the moon crashing into the sun because that was where the mind parasites was all coming from innit. Except the mind parasites are actually ourselves, or at least ourselves what have failed to evolve into thinking, reasoning supermen, people who know doctors and dentists. Meanwhile the black nations of Africa unite and rise up against the white man because the mind parasites make them do it innit, just in case you mistakenly thought they might have had any other better reason to be pissed off.

Frankly, it's a complete fucking dog's dinner besides which even Lindsay Gutteridge's dinnerpunk tour de force Cold War in a Country Garden may as well be The Mayor of Casterbridge. The psychological discussion amounts to pseudoscientific bollocks of the kind which invariably namechecks Velikovsky, Gurdjieff, Madam Blavatsky and the usual wankers; there's barely a story to speak of; and there's a faintly unsavoury aftertaste of Hubbardry - telepathy, Nietzsche, supermen blah blah blah - except Hubbard could at least string a decent story together. This is like bad van Vogt stripped of all charm and art.

He had a shuddering distaste for most human beings; he once complained to me that most of them seemed so unfinished and shabby. Myers made me feel that the true historian is a poet rather than a scientist. He once said that the contemplation of individual men made him dream of suicide, and that he could reconcile himself to being human only by considering the rise and fall of civilisations.

I suspect Colin Wilson, whilst he may have been prone to a degree of ukippery, probably wasn't entirely a man without merits, but none of them are to be found in The Mind Parasites which was most certainly never a new kind of novel by any description. It's not often that I'm driven to such harsh words with regard to a book, but this really was a complete load of shit.

Dracula

Bram Stoker Dracula (1897)
Without actually bothering to reach over, pluck Trillion Year Spree from the shelf and check, I seem to recall Brian Aldiss attributing the success and enduring appeal of both Dracula and Frankenstein to the post-Darwinian demise of the notion of a human soul surviving the death of the body to live on in some form of afterlife, both Count and monster representing post-mortem existence in the absence of spiritual stuff. I may have remembered that wrong because having now read Dracula I've realised that it doesn't quite work, although it is true to say that both novels definitively belong to the industrial revolution. Nineteenth century advances in science play an obvious and integral role in the story of Frankenstein, although in Dracula this relationship is less clear, serving to influence the means by which the story is told rather than its detail. Specifically Dracula tells a traditional horror story using a rational perspective for the sake of contrast, scepticism and incredulity informed by contemporary mores expressed at almost every turn mainly for the sake of firing up the dry ice machine, pulling a spooky face, and whispering that the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere "modernity" cannot kill, as Harker puts it, or asking is there fate amongst us still, sent down from the pagan world of old, as does Van Helsing, later to emphasise the same point thus:

"Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men's eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young—like fine ladies at the opera."

In other words, just like Lovecraft a decade later, Stoker was hinting at spooky stuff beyond our ken whilst pioneering the language we would today associate with flying saucer types who describe sightings in the driest possible terms in the hope of someone else pointing out that it definitely sounds like it was an alien spaceship. The problem is that unlike Frankenstein - which I seem to recall as revelatory - once Dracula has done this, it doesn't seem to do much else, four hundred pages stood around in the mist looking mysterious and occasionally claiming to know stuff that would probably freak you out a bit if it told you, so it isn't going to tell you because it's all mysterious and stuff. Take this passage for example:

As I approached the house, I explained to him, I was startled to hear the word 'vampire' called out by a passer and looked up to see a huge bat making an ingress of the Count's window. Dracula chuckled in Romanian, his red eyes aglow from that medical condition which he had earlier described to me, telling me that he had just recently returned from a cricket match at which he had served as umpire and therefore that cry in the night would almost have certainly been a colleague attempting to draw his attention to the bat at his window. Of course he had himself been quite aware of the flapping beast, and it had startled him so as to cause him to drop his hot dog and indeed I saw there upon his lapels and around his mouth the tomato ketchup which had been so unceremoniously distributed by his startlement. My mind duly set at ease, I wished him well and took my leave.

It's okay. I made it up. That isn't really in the book.

Maybe it's just that a million cinematic Draculas have somewhat spoiled the story for me, but beyond the admittedly wonderful opening Transylvanian chapters, I found it difficult to sustain enthusiasm, and after our man shows up in Whitby, it just sort of dithers around for several hundred pages before returning the Count to his castle, thus rendering the bulk of the tale more or less pointless; and it's told in diary form thus striving for a realism which shoots itself in the foot in presenting characters who must presumably have spent four or five hours each day writing up their circular conversations about how they're really scared and would rather not get bitten, the most ludicrous being Mina Harker's:

Of course he wanted to be with me; but then the boat service would, most likely, be the one which would destroy the... the... the... Vampire. (Why did I hesitate to write the word?)

I don't know, Mina, but it really didn't help.

Dracula undoubtedly has its moments, and it's interesting to note that the main character is unambiguously identified as the undead Vlad Tepeş of Wallachia; yet like those goth types who go all weak at the knees for the whole vampire routine, it may look interesting, but there's not a lot else going on once you're past the window dressing. Whilst plodding through this, I paused to dip into Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People by Paul Woods and Gavin Baddeley for research purposes, and it's a bit embarrassing to admit that the non-fiction was about four-thousand times more interesting than Stoker's misty mumblings. Actually,  even Twilight was a better read, blasphemy though that may well be.