The Diamond Lens and Other Stories E-Book

Fitz James O' Brien

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 155

Beschreibung

Fitz-James O'Brien capitalized on the success of his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe in writing disturbing stories with demented protagonists. This collection of three tales shows his mastery of the macabre. 'The Diamond Lens' tells the tale of a lone protagonist's discovery of a microcosmic world within a drop of water, and his growing obsession in particular with the beautiful Animula, a fair maiden within this world which he can see but never enter. The insights O'Brien gives us to the scientist's uncompromising pursuit of knowledge at any cost foreshadow the mad scientist familiar to science fiction readers in a multitude of works. In 'What Was It?' an invisible man is discovered by residents of a boarding house. Pre-dating H.G. Wells' 'The Invisible Man' by nearly four decades, the residents' capture and investigation of the creature blends the fantastic with the scientific as they seek rational explanations for this extraordinary phenomenon. 'The Wondersmith' is a macabre tale of an embittered toymaker who seeks revenge upon the society that has persecuted him by creating demonic mannequins (a precursor of robots) and imbuing them with life in order to slaughter the masses. The tale is a fantastic melodrama in which the dominating and cunning Wondersmith is offset by the unassuming and unlikely hero Solon the hunchback, who is in love with the villain's daughter.

Leseprobe

The Diamond Lens and Other Stories

Fitz-James O’Brien

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

The Diamond Lens

The Wondersmith

What Was It? A Mystery

Notes

Biographical note

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Fitz-James O’Brien was a good writer; he could have been a great one. He lived life without much thought for the future and died young, the James Dean of the literary world. One of his defining characteristics both as a writer and as a man is his failure to commit: he rarely engaged in any long-term projects and those he did, such as his weekly column The Man About Town (1857), or his serial fiction From Hand to Mouth (1858), were cut short when he grew tired of them, often with little warning. From Hand to Mouth had to be completed by the editor of the paper in which it was appearing. After O’Brien’s death there was talk of the great novel he had mentioned writing, but no such work has ever materialised and his canon is consequently a collection of short pieces of a widely varied style – for in addition to his own tendency to chop and change, O’Brien also frequently catered to his audience’s tastes. Consequently, his works encompass poems, observational columns, melodrama, sensation fiction, literary and dramatic criticism, sentimental tales and politically fuelled articles, all written for the journals of the time, as well as a handful of plays. Today he is remembered for the supernatural short stories he wrote, in particular the three collected in this edition.

In life, as in his fiction, O’Brien packed a lively tale into a short space. It is a tale divided into four disparate chapters: a child in Ireland, a playboy in London, a bohemian in America and a soldier in the Civil War. He was born in County Cork in 1828, the son of James O’Brien, a county coroner, and Elizabeth Driscoll, whose wealthy father had no male heirs save for young Fitz-James. After her husband’s death (when Fitz-James would have been around eleven years old), Elizabeth married Decourcy O’Grady, a man of good ancestry and property. In this idyllic and well-provided life, the juvenile O’Brien made his first attempts at writing, and, curiously enough chose political topics, such as the plight of the common man against the backdrop of the famine and the mass emigration to America.

In 1849 O’Brien turned twenty-one, and with his coming of age he entered the second chapter of his life. He received his inheritance from his grandfather, believed to be worth £8,000 (approximately £600,000 in today’s currency), and moved to London where he lived extravagantly and spent the entire inheritance in just two and a half years. It may have been his lack of funds that prompted him to then move to America in 1852, though once again there are rumours of an alternative explanation, including one, neither proved nor disproved, that he was involved with the wife of a soldier and sought to escape her returning husband. Whatever the reason, when O’Brien entered the third chapter of his life in the New World, he was fortunate to have literary connections formed by articles he had written in England. He settled in New York, writing for magazines and journals, and it is the output produced there for which he became celebrated in his lifetime. His final chapter then began with the start of the American Civil War. He enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 and rose to the rank of lieutenant. Shot in action in February 1862, the severity of his wounds was misdiagnosed and he died of tetanus that April. He was thirty-three years old.

O’Brien had a self-destructive personality. A popular man, with many friends in the industry, he was nonetheless said to have a fiery temper and throughout his life he got into a number of fights, disputes and narrowly-avoided duels. His lifestyle was bohemian; he gathered debts, often reaching a point of desperation before getting another article published, only to then spend the money on extravagances. O’Brien was an eleventh-hour writer, and the fact that he made a successful career out of this is both to his credit and a sign of weakness: friends spoke of his tendency to write stories or poems in one sitting, suggesting a fertile imagination that could have produced longer masterpieces if only it were coupled with discipline. It was also noted by observers that O’Brien did little revision to his work; the quality of some of his stories is therefore to his merit given that they may well be first drafts, but for every good story he produced there is another that would have benefited from a little polishing. Furthermore, critics accused him of plagiarism (and not always unjustly); the pressures of producing new work on a regular basis involved O’Brien borrowing inspiration from around him, including his own life: several of his pieces have an author as protagonist, while other minor details crop up, such as a minor character in The Lost Room (1858) being given the surname of O’Brien’s grandfather. It is therefore important to place the cries of plagiarism in the context of an author who absorbed ideas and adapted them when trying to produce work at the hectic frequency required to make a living in writing.

O’Brien also often catered to popular taste, quite sensibly given that each work had to be accepted by the publishers in order for him to get paid, and in doing this he adapted his style depending on the type of work he was writing (his biographer Francis Wolle called him a ‘Literary Bohemian’, but it is appropriate to call him a literary chameleon too); this meant not only that he lacked his own inimitable style, which in turn makes it difficult to identify all of his stories accurately given the practice of journals to publish anonymously, but also that he was often reviewed in comparison with other writers. Today he is most frequently likened to Edgar Allen Poe for his macabre and surreal imagination, though Wolle astutely pointed out that O’Brien’s distinction from Poe was his grounding of his weird and wonderful stories in the recognisable and mundane surroundings of the contemporary world, often identifying actual New York streets and addresses as the location for extraordinary tales.

The Diamond Lens (1858) is widely considered to be O’Brien’s best work. It caused a literary storm on its first publication, and from that moment forward he would always be known or introduced as ‘the author of The Diamond Lens’. The celebration of this work was not universal; early critics accused O’Brien of stealing the idea from his rival William North, though this was robustly discredited both at the time and since; yet more recently it has been suggested more convincingly by Neil Cornwell that there are similarities between the work and an earlier tale, TheSylph, written by Vladimir Odoevsky in 1837. Whatever its origins, O’Brien’s telling of the tale is masterfully done, the protagonist drawing us in initially with an amicable narrative of his early life, before the decline of his morals and humanity which holds the reader’s attention while distancing us from what first appeared to be a rational human being.

The science fiction elements in The Wondersmith (1859) are less explicit than the other tales in this collection. Scholars have suggested the mannequins created by Herr Hippe are early examples of robots; where O’Brien’s tale differs from another well-cited tale, E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman (1816), is that the Wondersmith’s robots do not make any pretence to humanity but are distinguished precisely by their lack of it. This is not a tale to invite philosophical discussion of life, but rather a rollicking sensationalist story that revels in the horrors of the unknown. And yet, surprisingly, in the character of Solon and his romance with the Wondersmith’s daughter, it provides a happy antithesis to the tragic tale of a far more famous fictional hunchback, Quasimodo, and his doomed love for Esmerelda; O’Brien’s tale, while preaching the terror of a different life form, simultaneously champions the rights of a man to be loved for who he is, not how he appears.

Finally, in What Was It? (1859), we have what is now a recognisable type of monster in the invisible creature. At the time O’Brien was something of a pioneer, preceding by over two decades other tales of invisible creatures such as Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla (1886), Ambrose Bierce’s The Damned Thing (1898) and, of course, H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). What particularly marks O’Brien’s tale out as science fiction, rather than horror, is not the monster, but the heroes’ reaction to it. Their attempt to explain and understand the unknown through the use of scientific methods grounds the supernatural in the world of technology, the unreal in the realm of the possible. It was his most popular work after The Diamond Lens, another great success for O’Brien in his lifetime, and yet curiously, when he himself planned a collection of his works (that was ultimately not produced), this tale was not on the list of twenty he proposed. It was, however, included in the collected works printed after his death by his friend William Winter and has continued to be celebrated as one of his best ever since.

O’Brien’s contemporary Charles Dickens was frequently disgruntled when others presumed that writing was an easy task, because it overlooked the time and effort he put in to shaping and perfecting his works. Fitz-James O’Brien is the other side of the coin. A great talent, O’Brien, like Dickens, produced a number of works both fictional and non-fictional for the mid-nineteenth-century press; but where Dickens strived almost fanatically to get his writing and characters just right, O’Brien’s approach was altogether more human. He was a man who worked to live, not lived to work. As a person he is perhaps easier to identify with because of this, but as a writer this presents a lack of focus, which results in some good works and a lot more that have flashes of brilliance but are let down by hasty production and little to no revision. In this context, the continued interest of science fiction scholars in O’Brien’s writing has been both a blessing and a curse. It has guaranteed that these stories and others remain in the public consciousness, when they could have easily been forgotten, and O’Brien along with them; simultaneously, it has pigeonholed him in one genre. Yet there is no doubt that the works in this collection deserve to be remembered as his best, for reasons beyond their significance to science fiction. The fantastical element of these stories showcases O’Brien’s fertile imagination, one of his greatest qualities as a writer. Furthermore, in each one he builds tension expertly, commanding our attention; he intersperses horror with humour; he showcases his wider reading through several references and allusions, and teases out metaphysical questions while simultaneously producing a dramatic plotline. He is not the greatest writer ever to have lived, but he was a writer who lived greatly; reading these tales, which show the quality he was capable of when everything came together, it becomes apparent that with a little less decadence and a little more dedication, O’Brien could have been one of the best.

The Diamond Lens

I THE BENDING OF THE TWIG

From a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been towards microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me, by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole, in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes, that intervened between that promise and his departure.

Meantime I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest semblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon and employed in vain attempts to realise that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as ‘bull’s eyes’1 were ruthlessly destroyed, in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvellous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humour from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavoured to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha’s spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties,–in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

At last the promised instrument came. It was of that order known as Field’s simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could not have been selected. Accompanying it was a small treatise on the microscope,–its history, uses, and discoveries. I comprehended then for the first time the ‘Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’. The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments. I felt towards my companions as the seer might feel towards the ordinary masses of men. I held conversations with Nature in a tongue which they could not understand. I was in daily communication with living wonders, such as they never imagined in their wildest visions. I penetrated beyond the external portal of things, and roamed through the sanctuaries. Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce and protracted as those of men. In the common spots of mould, which my mother, good housekeeper that she was, fiercely scooped away from her jam pots, there abode for me, under the name of mildew, enchanted gardens, filled with dells and avenues of the densest foliage and most astonishing verdure, while from the fantastic boughs of these microscopic forests hung strange fruits glittering with green and silver and gold.

It was no scientific thirst that at this time filled my mind. It was the pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed. I talked of my solitary pleasures to none. Alone with my microscope, I dimmed my sight, day after day and night after night poring over the marvels which it unfolded to me. I was like one who, having discovered the ancient Eden still existing in all its primitive glory, should resolve to enjoy it in solitude, and never betray to mortal the secret of its locality. The rod of my life was bent at this moment. I destined myself to be a microscopist.

Of course, like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer. I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantages of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schultz, Dujardin, Schacht, and Schleiden2 were then entirely unknown to me, or if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches. In every fresh specimen of Cryptogamia which I placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was as yet ignorant. I remember well the thrill of delight and admiration that shot through me the first time that I discovered the common wheel animalcule (Rotifera vulgaris) expanding and contracting its flexible spokes, and seemingly rotating through the water. Alas! as I grew older, and obtained some works treating of my favourite study, I found that I was only on the threshold of a science to the investigation of which some of the greatest men of the age were devoting their lives and intellects.

As I grew up, my parents, who saw but little likelihood of anything practical resulting from the examination of bits of moss and drops of water through a brass tube and a piece of glass, were anxious that I should choose a profession. It was their desire that I should enter the counting-house of my uncle, Ethan Blake, a prosperous merchant, who carried on business in New York. This suggestion I decisively combated. I had no taste for trade; I should only make a failure; in short, I refused to become a merchant.

But it was necessary for me to select some pursuit. My parents were staid New England people, who insisted on the necessity of labour; and therefore, although, thanks to the bequest of my poor Aunt Agatha, I should, on coming of age, inherit a small fortune sufficient to place me above want, it was decided, that, instead of waiting for this, I should act the nobler part, and employ the intervening years in rendering myself independent.

After much cogitation I complied with the wishes of my family, and selected a profession. I determined to study medicine at the New York Academy. This disposition of my future suited me. A removal from my relatives would enable me to dispose of my time as I pleased, without fear of detection. As long as I paid my Academy fees, I might shirk attending the lectures, if I chose; and as I never had the remotest intention of standing an examination, there was no danger of my being ‘plucked’. Besides, a metropolis was the place for me. There I could obtain excellent instruments, the newest publications, intimacy with men of pursuits kindred to my own,–in short, all things necessary to ensure a profitable devotion of my life to my beloved science. I had an abundance of money, few desires that were not bounded by my illuminating mirror on one side and my object-glass on the other; what, therefore, was to prevent my becoming an illustrious investigator of the veiled worlds? It was with the most buoyant hopes that I left my New England home and established myself in New York.

II THE LONGING OF A MAN OF SCIENCE