We are in monstrous waters. This is the second penultimate post in our month-long tribute to William Hope Hodgson, which is patently impossible. As was the idea of celebrating Hodgson’s work in only one month. I am clearly an appalling editor, a slipshod writer and an idiot. Hurrah! Internet fame surely beckons…

So, my dear, dear listeners, please keep tuned to this wavelength a little longer. We have one post today, our feature interview with noted WHH critic and editor Sam Gafford, and another post tomorrow, packing in the last few oddities and trivia.

Speaking of trivia, something discovered whilst reading a commentary by  Sam Moscowitz (mentioned later below). One of Hodgson’s short sea stories, Ships that Go Missing, was first published in March 1920 in The Premier magazine, with a cover illustrating a ship foundering in heavy seas. The cover illo was signed ‘Marny’.

That caught my attention because Paul Marny was an Anglo-French artist who lived in Scarborough, on the coast where I was raised, until he died in 1914. He painted many harbour and seascapes, including The Loss of the Scarborough Lifeboat, a famous local incident, and a number of stormy sea pieces. Is it feasible that The Premier copied a Marny print to illustrate Hodgson? If so it would be very fitting.

It’s also fitting that our last feature interview of the WHH tribute should be with the talented Sam Gafford, who has done so much to enhance Hodgson’s reputation as a writer and to shine a clear, critical light on Hodgson’s work. In early September of this year I contacted him suggesting that we might link up “for a couple of key posts specifically on support for WHH’s work and legacy.” He was enthusiastic, and it grew from there.

It’s fair to say that without Sam’s involvement, I might never have devoted so much of my remaining lifespan to this terrifying endeavour. My longdogs would have had more walks, my spine would be in better shape and I might have written a number of astoundingly well-crafted short stories in that time (this is my eleventh Hodgson post this month, if you haven’t caught my sarcastic tone yet). But hey, no-one’s playing the blame game. So now we turn to the guilty party himself.

greydog: Welcome, Sam. We really ought to start by highlighting your own place in the Hodgson universe. Let’s face it, you are an authority on William Hope Hodgson. How the heck did that come about?

Gafford: Well, I first became aware of Hodgson probably back around 1980 or so when I first read Lovecraft’s essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, in the Arkham House edition of DAGON. As practically everyone knows, that essay is essentially a laundry list of great writers and Hodgson was one that really intrigued me. I’ve always had an interest in horror and in tales of the sea (which is ironic as I have a near pathological fear of the sea as well and will not go out on boats and almost never more than a foot or two in the ocean from the beach) so I decided to try and track down some of his work.

Now, back in 1980, this wasn’t particularly easy to do. There was no internet back then and Hodgson wasn’t an author that you could find in the bookstore either. Luckily, about this time, Sphere Books in England reprinted all four of Hodgson’s novels as well as the Carnacki stories so I snapped those up immediately. Once I started reading, I was hooked! (No pun intended.) Hodgson was unlike any writer I’d ever read before and I made it a mission to find as much of his work as I could which led me to doing research and writing about both the man and his works.

Unlike Lovecraft, there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of scholarly work done on Hodgson and I’ve tried to help change that. My goal has always been to get Hodgson’s work to as many readers as possible and, from there, to encourage and support Hodgsonian research. Through the years there have been some very talented individuals who have done work on Hodgson. Sam Moskowitz provided much of the early scholarship and edited three volumes of Hodgson’s then ‘lost’ works for Donald M. Grant who published them in very handsome editions. Moskowitz’s work, along with articles by Randy Everts, were the foundation upon which much later research was built.

Jane Frank made an outstanding contribution when she edited two volumes for PS Publishing/Tartarus Press which included a volume of poetry and another collection of ‘lost’ material. She also included a masterful critical and biographical essay in the latter. Other writers/editors like Douglas Anderson, Ian Bell, Mark Valentine and Mike Ashley have been hugely important in keeping Hodgson’s name and works alive.

Andy Robertson’s website devoted to Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND deserves especial mention. Andy helped bring Hodgson into the modern computer age and created a community of readers and fans who discussed Hodgson and his masterful novel. Much of the credit for Hodgson’s online identity is owed to Andy who, sadly, passed away not long ago. But what is amazing is that what Andy created with his website has refused to die! Through the determination of people like Kate Coady and Brett Davidson, THE NIGHT LAND website has been brought back online and continues to serve as a forum for study, criticism and new fiction. I cannot praise them all enough for continuing Andy’s legacy.

I’ve written numerous articles about Hodgson but the one thing of which I am most proud is the publication last year of WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON: VOICES FROM THE BORDERLAND—Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror which I co-edited with S.T. Joshi and Massimo Berruti (Hippocampus Press). In this book, we worked to bring together many of the notable critical articles that have appeared over the decades (many hard to find now) along with new articles from many of the people I mentioned above. About a third of the book is the comprehensive bibliography that S.T. Joshi, Mike Ashley and I compiled (with the help of dozens of other scholars) which show the length and breadth of Hodgson’s many achievements. It is my sincere hope that this book will inspire others to both read and write about Hodgson in the years to come.

greydog: We have little doubt of that. You mention S T Joshi, who has of course written extensively on Lovecraft, and we know that H P Lovecraft was critically aware of Hodgson’s work. Do you detect any WHH influences in Lovecraft’s own fiction?

Gafford: That’s a tough question. We know that HPL didn’t read Hodgson’s novels until 1934 when his friend, H. C. Koenig, loaned him the books. Sadly, much of Lovecraft’s peak creative work was behind him at that time. Lovecraft, near as we can tell, never read Hodgson’s sea-horror short stories and certainly never read “The Hog” which was unpublished in Lovecraft’s lifetime. Despite the fact that both authors shared many similarities in their work (their sense of cosmic horror and man’s insignificance in the universe, for example), we can’t really say that Hodgson influenced Lovecraft to any great degree before 1934. But, because of their similarities, we can easily see why Lovecraft was so taken with Hodgson to the point where he revised his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, to include his new discovery. (Ironically, Lovecraft had read CARNACKI, THE GHOST-FINDER a few years earlier and did not care for it which may explain why he came to Hodgson so late.)

After that point, Lovecraft only wrote two significant stories and those were “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Haunter in the Dark”. I don’t think that we can see much of Hodgson in the latter story but John D. Haefele made a masterful case for Hodgson having influenced the former tale. After reading Haefele’s article, I am inclined to agree that Lovecraft revised some of his concepts for the story after reading Hodgson and, in particular, THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND.

(Side note, Haefele’s article is included in WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON: VOICES FROM THE BORDERLAND—Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror and is recommended reading for fans of both Lovecraft and Hodgson.)

greydog: Let’s poke a stick at Hodgson’s extraordinary book, The Night Land, which Lovecraft described as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination every written”. The Night Land is an astonishingly original work, but marred by Hodgson’s deliberate use of archaic language. Why do you think he made such an odd choice?

Gafford: It’s hard to say. We don’t have very many primary sources from Hodgson and barely a handful of letters. I still believe that this lack of material is the single biggest handicap to doing scholarly work on Hodgson. Unless a pile of letters suddenly appear one day (which I doubt will happen by this point), we’ll likely never know what Hodgson thought or felt or why he made the writing decisions he did.

Despite this, I do have a few of my own ideas as to why he chose that style. In my article, “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson”, I used a small cache of then-recently discovered letters from Hodgson to prove that his novels were written in the reverse order in which they were published. This means that he wrote THE NIGHT LAND first and THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’ last. This is supremely important when we look at his development as a writer.

THE NIGHT LAND, for all its faults, is generally considered to be Hodgson’s masterpiece. Previously, we would have looked at that as the pinnacle of his career as a novelist and that his other novels led up to this mammoth saga. But that is not true. THE NIGHT LAND was written first and, when it failed to sell to a publisher, Hodgson felt the need to change his style and themes to the more pedestrian ‘adventure’ style of THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’. This inexperience could explain some of the odd choices Hodgson made with his first novel.

In Hodgson’s mind, THE NIGHT LAND is a romance. He even subtitles it “A Love Tale”. So it’s my contention that he tried to imitate what he thought was the right language which we see in works like ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (known commonly as THE ARABIAN NIGHTS). We see much of the same language here but, sadly, Hodgson is not up to the task of recreating that style and it often works against him in his text. There has also been discussion of the possibility that Hodgson was attempting to duplicate the style of the Bible and specifically the King James Version. I think that this idea has some merit. We must remember that Hodgson’s father was a Priest in the Anglican Church and that both of his parents were deeply involved in missionary work. It is entirely conceivable that Hodgson could have had this in mind as well after a lifetime exposed to the Bible and its language.

What is clear is that this was a poor decision. Made, I believe, through his inexperience and probable lack of his own personal voice. He had the imagery, he knew the landscape, but he could not describe it yet and so tried to emulate something that, to his mind, was appropriate to the story. I leave it to the readers to decide if that was the correct choice.

greydog: We haven’t really done justice to all of Hodgson’s output this month. Tell us something about Captain Gault, skipper for hire, for those who have only read WHH’s horror stories.

Gafford: Ah, I am so happy you asked about Gault! So few seem to know this character or have read his exploits. There are times when I enjoy Gault stories even more than Canacki!

Hodgson knew that the key to repeated sales to magazines depended upon the use of serial characters like Sherlock Holmes. They created an audience and could be counted on for regular paychecks. However, Hodgson’s characters never really caught on that well. After Carnacki, Hodgson had his biggest success with his Captain Gault stories and they are radically different.

Captain Gault, unusual for Hodgson’s characters, is contemporary for the times in which he was written. The first Gault story appeared in 1914 and there is evidence that Hodgson was still writing them up until 1917 or so. Gault is the unscrupulous captain of a steamship and his primary goal is smuggling contraband and outsmarting customs officials. The way in which he does this is in the stories is often quite ingenious and gives the stories much of their ‘cat and mouse’ flavor.

However, it is the character of Gault himself that is the most interesting. Hodgson is often criticized for not creating the best characters and this is mostly true. In many of his early stories, the characters are either one dimensional or stereotypical. But, in Gault, we have a fully formed individual who lies, cheats, steals, trusts and is inevitably betrayed. Gault has a moral code all of his own. He will not smuggle certain items and actively works to thwart German spies in the early days of World War I. A true romantic, Gault does not trust women because, whenever he does, they prove themselves to be worthy of his low opinion. (This is, in itself, a remarkable change from women characters in early Hodgson works who are invariably virtuous, chaste and worthy of rescue.)

There is no horror in the Gault stories which, I fear, have caused many to ignore them and that is a shame. They are filled with action and adventure with spies, duplicitous women and corrupt government officials. They are, quite frankly, excellent examples of the sea adventure stories of their day and terrific pulp reading. Mark Valentine wrote a splendid article on the Gault stories which appeared in the second issue of Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies. Hodgson wrote more Gault stories than he did featuring Carnacki. There are at least thirteen Gault stories compared to Carnacki’s nine (or eight considering that Carnacki was shoe-horned into a revised version of an earlier story to neither’s benefit). Perhaps someday I will reprint all of the Gault stories in one volume so that everyone can read these marvelous tales.

(Side-note, I have no idea if they are Hodgson fans but the creators/writers of the show LOST once had a smuggler character named Captain Gault!)

greydog: Hodgson stays with many people from their youth because of his stunning imagery. Provide us with a piece of WHH imagery that really gets to you.

Gafford: There’s so many that it’s really hard to choose. Do I pick the narrator’s futuristic vision in THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND? The haunted trees and the Sargasso Sea in THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’? The ghost ship coming into view in THE GHOST PIRATES? Or the narrator’s trek over the midnight landscape of THE NIGHT LAND? So much of Hodgson is built on strong imagery.

I’d have to say that one that has really stayed with me over the years is the image of the malevolent ocean in “Out of the Storm”. In it, a scientist is receiving messages via telegraph from a friend who is on a boat that is in the middle of a cataclysmic ocean storm and is sinking. The images of that vast, uncaring sea are horrifying and are written by a man who knew of what he wrote. How many storms like this must Hodgson have seen during his time at sea? That gives this story a terror and verisimilitude that few others can ever match. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Such a sight is difficult to describe to the living; though the Dead of the Sea know of it without words of mine. It is such a sight that none is allowed to see and live. It is a picture for the doomed and the dead; one of the sea’s hell-orgies—one of the Thing’s monstrous gloatings over the living—say the alive-in-death, those upon the brink. I have no right to tell of it to you; to speak of it to one of the living is to initiate innocence into one of the infernal mysteries—to talk of foul things to a child. Yet I care not! I will expose, in all its hideous nakedness, the death-side of the sea. The undoomed living shall know some of the things that death has hitherto so well guarded. Death knows not of this little instrument beneath my hands that connects me still with the quick, else would he hast to quiet me.”

It’s an incredible story and I can’t recommend it enough. There’s even an audio version here:

Out of the Storm

greydog: And we should point out that you write weird fiction yourself. Does Hodgson influence your own work in any way?

Gafford: Well, not consciously. With few exceptions, I don’t set out to write a ‘Hodgson’ story. I think it would be for others to say how much or how little Hodgson has influenced me in my own writing. I would venture to say that, if anything, his sense of cosmic horror (shared by Lovecraft) has been a big influence. The concept that humanity is meaningless and unimportant in the universe is one that I both share and expound in much of my own fiction. We’re all pawns in one sense or another. I did write a story based on Hodgson’s final days in WWI called “The Land of Lonesomeness” where I attempted to put much of Hodgson’s life and work in perspective before that mortar shell fell on him. I think it’s one of my better stories and I tried to equate the landscape of THE NIGHT LAND with that of WWI Ypres. (This story was published in Weird Fiction Review and will be included in my upcoming collection of weird stories, THE DREAMER IN FIRE AND OTHER STORIES due out from Hippocampus Press in 2016.)

greydog: It’s nearly a century since Hodgson was killed in the Great War, and yet we’re doing this tribute to him. To what would you ascribe the continued and growing interest in his work?

Gafford: I think that, in many ways, Hodgson still resonates with us even a century later. His themes and plots are still very much ‘man vs. universe’ and that is a struggle that continues to this day. And then, of course, there’s his great imaginative and visual power. Some of the images in his work are so stunning that one cannot equate them with anything else. THE NIGHT LAND is like one long, continuous fever dream with images that shock, amaze and terrorize. There are few people whom, after I convince them to read some Hodgson, do not come away with something to admire. His words may be clumsy at times but his stories often have the impact of a brick to the face. I doubt that Hodgson will ever have the impact of a Lovecraft or even a Machen but it is my dearest hope that, 100 years from now, there will still be acolytes spreading the word.

greydog:  And finally, for fun, which Hodgson story or novel does Sam Gafford like the most as a reader?

Gafford: It may be sacrilegious for me to say this but THE GHOST PIRATES has always been my favorite Hodgson novel. As I said before, I love the literature of the sea and this is a high point in that genre for me. The amount of detail is so amazing that you feel you’re actually on board that doomed ship and I especially love the eeriness of the whole story. That point in the novel when they actually see the ghost ship is entrancing and the scientific rationale for the whole thing appeals to me as well. It’s a novel that I don’t feel gets enough love from the readers and critics. I would rather read that novel than THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND.

greydog: Thank you! Sam’s excellent website devoted to WHH can be found through this link:

William Hope Hodgson

And that’s it for today. Back tomorrow for the real, genuine, I-mean-it-this-time-honest final post of our tribute to WHH!