THE DEEP ONES: "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers

"The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers

Discussion begins on October 17.

First published in The King in Yellow in 1895.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8492
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/RepaRepu.shtml

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63177

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The King in Yellow
American Fantastic Tales
The Yellow Sign and Other Tales: the Complete Weird Fiction of Robert W. Chambers
The Dark Descent

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Chambers
http://kinginyellow.wikia.com/wiki/Hastur
http://kinginyellow.wikia.com/wiki/Have_You_Seen_The_Yellow_Sign%3F
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZhEpT7Cjc
http://tinyurl.com/8cbj3hf

The Gothic Literature group discussed this one last year. Spoilers ahoy, but some interesting discussion to savour after you've read it.

I'm reading this out of American Fantastic Tales.

Our discussion of Chambers' "The Yellow Sign" (also from The King in Yellow) can be found here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/125125

Mr. Wilde and His Cat (Artist: Jerome Huguenin)

Looks something like J.K. Potter's work. And isn't that a signature on the right edge of the image?

>5 paradoxosalpha:

It is Potter-like, but something about it says Photoshop to me, which is very un-Potter-like. Speaking of Photoshop, I tried simply increasing the image size and that does look like a signature. Something like "JE ROM6" or "JEROM6". I'm not a Potter expert, but I don't recall him using anything more than "JK" to sign a piece (and usually there is nothing at all).

I do like this portrayal of Mr. Wilde, though, Potter or not! I once owned a "polecat", as the vet put it. They can be frightening beasts - especially when you are being stalked!

ETA

Well, there is this full signature (!) in one of Potter's most famous pieces:

http://arkham-press.blogspot.com/2010/08/happy-birthday-howard-phillips.html

Comparing it side-by-side with the one in "Mr Wilde", they are different. Unless Potter was perhaps wrestling with a Shoggoth at the same time.

>5 paradoxosalpha: & 6

A little Google-fu reveals the artist's name to be Jerome Huguenin; will edit caption in #4.

>6 semdetenebre:

Yeah, those shoggoths make lousy models - don't know how to sit still! :D

I haven't read this one for a few years. I re-read section I on Sunday evening, and section II last night. Both nights I had intense and creepy dreams afterwards.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, I can't wait to discuss this one. I think it may have inspired me to write up a blog post as well - something that hasn't happened in far too long.

After "The Yellow Sign", I think Chambers scores again with "The Repairer of Reputations". The Brave New World-like, humanistic, scientific utopia is the perfect setting for this bizarre outlier of a tale. I really enjoyed the manner in which Chambers drops subtle hints that all may not be right with our narrator, which perfectly augments that moment of clarity when the reader realizes that Castaigne is not just a little eccentric, but is absolutely, dangerously mad. But was he, in truth, actually driven so by The King in Yellow? Hmmmm...

Some odd dreams last night, but not as intense as the two previous ones.

I've got two words for this story: unreliable narrator. The challenge for the reader is trying to abstract some "objective" view of the events from Hildred Castaigne's account--especially given the proto-Gernsback-continuum of the future 20th century, with its counterfactual "reality." Or you could just give up and immerse yourself in the delerium of the thing.

I found myself a little enchanted by the formula: "The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever."

Is the threat of The King in Yellow perhaps that the beauty of its language converts its readers into partisans for the astral sovereignty of Carcosa and Hastur? (Hastur is a place here, I think, as it is in Bierce.) It supplants the inherited allegiances of state and religion with a more sensuous and volatile myth.

This story is the first in The King in Yellow, and I think it goes much farther than "The Yellow Sign" in setting up the menace of The King in Yellow, to the extent that reading them out of order as we have done rather disadvantages "The Yellow Sign."

>12 paradoxosalpha:

I was referring to the order in which we're reading, but thanks for the clarification. I'm not sure that "Repairer" takes away anything from "The Yellow Sign", or vice verse. They work well in tandem. It's truly a shame that Chambers wasn't able to continue his full-on flight into the weird! He was really onto something for a little while.

Now, about Mr. Wilde. Thanks to our "unreliable narrator", I'm not totally certain if he was real, imagined, or maybe an innocent old cat-lover who was re-imagined by Castaigne for his own insane devices. Or maybe he was just a crazy old guy who got a kick out of egging on the madman...

> 13

I don't think either story detracts from the other, but I think "The Repairer" provides some helpful preliminary to "The Yellow Sign," without which the latter is weakened.

Supposing that Mr. Wilde is really a "Repairer of Reputations," as seems confirmed in the conversation with Hawberk, it appears that all of his clients are not only self-blackmailing and thus available for deployment to shore up each others' status, but they have all "received the Yellow Sign" in some meaningful way. From this I take it that they have all read The King in Yellow. (Contrast the reaction of Louis to the Sign.) ETA: Is it perhaps the use of the Yellow Sign that makes Wilde credible to his clients as a "Repairer of Reputations"?

Vance seems not to have killed Hawberk or Constance, as Hildred understood him to have been sent to do. But I think Hildrid did murder Dr. Archer.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

I think the degree of madness fogs the real picture, but there is a satisfying mix of real supernatural events and genuine insanity. Hildred Castaigne is definitely a psychopath, but there is also something else in the background that is malevolently at work - The King in Yellow, of course!

I like your supposition. Mr. Wilde seems to be a kind of Dr. Mabuse-like criminal lynchpin with the supernatural influence of the Yellow Sign to back himself up.

> 10-14

I have now read this story 4 times but it was not until the H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast discussed it a few weeks ago that I realized that there is not necessarily anything supernatural in it.

Hildred Castaigne may have been bonkers all along from reading The King in Yellow or maybe from the fall from the horse. Mr. Wilde may have been just an unfortunate deformed person living upstairs of the Hawberk's. The details about protecting reputations would be Hildred's paranoid fantasies about Wilde's actual business. 'Hildred Rex' may have written the genealogical manuscript. I cannot account for Wilde allowing his cat to maul him; this may be more fantasy by Hildred.

The details hinting at Castaigne's insanity are ingenious: the gold crown which may be brass, the robe of 'theatrical tinsel' and the time-safe which may be a biscuit box (with the alarm which only Hildred can hear).

The history up to 1920 is impressive farrago. Just about none of it worked out except for the lucky hit of the president being named Winthrop (Wilson). It was not too tough to forecast trouble with Germany. The Lethal Chambers may be a projection of Hildred's suicidal impulses. They do not figure in the story except for the scene where Vance is seen running into one. The hppodcraft.com guys think this 'future history' was all delusions of Hildred in the asylum.

Ultimately the story works as a very creepy 'peek under the hood' of a psychotic.

As per the Gothic Lit discussion linked above, I incline to agree the entire alt-hist (alt-future?) 1920s is part of Castaigne's delusions. In particular, it makes easier to make sense of the cross-references between the other King-in-Yellow stories.

I liked the fact that not only is the narrator unreliable but you start to get a sense of how off his tale is very early on. It opens with this description of how great things are. Then you get this reference about "the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of self-preservation". To a modern reader singling a group out like doesn't exactly scream utopia but I don't know enough to know how it would play in 1895. Either way, when it's followed up with the line "bigotry and intolerence were laid in their graves" there's definately something wrong with his description of the world.

The same idea comes up in next paragraph. Laws against suicide are repealed which first strikes the reader as progressive and then it's immediately followed up with a reference to goverment built suicide centers. Another wait, what? moment. (I also couldn't avoid making a reference to Futurama's suicide booths).

On an unrelated noted, I had never marked the line "the work of a young American sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years old" before. A tie in with the second story in the King in Yellow cycle - The Mask where Boris is a major character.

>16 bertilak:

I do lean toward this story being mostly skewed through Hildred's insanity (maybe he's more of a paranoid schizophrenic than a psychopath, now that I think about it), but it still seems that something supernatural is at work in the background. Something that would revel in such madness. I think that "The Yellow Sign" only underscores this. But then, maybe it was just the horse. The blurring of real/not real is so well done! It keeps the reader off balance.

The Lethal Chambers were a nice touch on Chambers's part. Real or projection, they are little bit of something simultaneously rational and sinister. And, of course, they pre-date the "Sleepshops" of William F. Nolan's Logan's Run by a few decades.

Yeah, I don't see any evidence of the supernatural in this story. I mean, there seems to be some belief in the supernatural on Hildred's part, but not any actual supernatural events even in his account, however distorted it may be.

>15 semdetenebre:

I see that there are two equally valid readings of the King in Yellow stories.

Theory A: The King in Yellow was written by a 19th century decadent author. It really does drive some people insane, but because it contains archetypal, degenerate material but nothing supernatural. The Yellow Sign is a sign of recognition between fans/victims of the play but nothing more.

Theory B: The King in Yellow was based on actual events. Carcosa was real. There is a current, living King in Yellow or he is a supernatural being something like Nyarlathotep. The Yellow Sign is an efficacious sigil.

The text of the stories may suggest theory B, but do we actually know that? Do we see anything done by the Yellow Sign other than through the eyes of unreliable narrators?

Perhaps the work The King in Yellow is not supernatural in and of itself, but it is so indescribably foul that it drives the more vulnerable minds of 1895 mad!

I noticed on the Wikipedia entry for TKiY that Karl Edward Wagner's "The River of Night's Dreaming" was influenced by Chambers. I'll have to go revisit that story. I found the following related snippet on Joseph S. Pulver's blog:

Taken from an interview that was conducted by Chuck Owston for "Dark Troubadour" #1, Autumn 1994.

"Q: In "THE RIVER OF NIGHT’S DREAMING" you make references to THE KING IN YELLOW. How much did this classic influence you?"

"KEW: Much of my work has resonances of Robert W. Chambers. While almost all of his books were hack-work romances, the best of his supernatural horror can stand with the very best. The primary lesson I’ve learned from reading Chambers was to create a deliberate barrier against final comprehension — thus creating the lost uncertainty of an extended nightmare."

>21 bertilak:

Upon reading your two theories regarding the 'Yellow Sign', I can't help but wonder if this is Chambers commentary on the controversy surrounding Lovecraft's readers and the validity of the Necronomicon.

> 23

Not unless he had a time machine. Chambers wrote The King in Yellow long before HPL invented the Necronomicon, and the cursed play is generally understood (and possibly admitted) to be part of the inspiration for everyone's favorite imaginary grimoire.

>24 paradoxosalpha:

Well my timeline's all screwed up then. I always assumed when the 'King in Yellow' was grouped into Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, that it was Lovecraft that came first.

...it is almost impossible to appreciate the singularly haunting and suggestive power of The Repairer of Reputations unless it is read by itself, divorced from the sequence of stories in which it is a part.

- Lin Carter, Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy, Vol. II

It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck... all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.

- Robert W. Chambers, "The Repairer of Reputations"

Y'know, speaking for myself, I think I've gotten a bit hubristic regarding weird fiction. Over the course of the last four or five years, and particularly since joining this discussion group, I have immersed myself so heavily in the genre that I was actually starting to think that I had probably read all the really great masterpieces of the genre, or at least all the short-form ones. And then I come across a tale like "The Repairer of Reputations" and realize how wrong that is.

It may seem like I'm going into crazy hyperbole mode (as is my wont) over a story I just read for the first time three days ago, but as it stands right now, I've been thinking about this story basically nonstop since I read it, and I'm ready to say that I haven't been as impressed by a piece of weird fiction since I read "The White People", and that's my favorite weird story of all time. Much like that tale, "Repairer" strikes me as both remarkably avant-garde (an assessment shared by both David G. Hartwell (in his introduction to "Repairer" in his landmark anthology The Dark Descent) and the author of the Wikipedia article on the story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Repairer_of_Reputations#.22Anti-Story.22_Nature_of_the_Work)) and "singularly haunting and suggestive", as Carter put it above. In other words, it is both cerebral and visceral, stimulating to both the mind and the emotions, and extremely stimulating at that. If that doesn't make for great art, I don't know what does.

ETA: Also agree with Carter that, although the story fits in with the mythopoeia of the other King in Yellow stories (as well as with the Cthulhu Mythos tales, as noted in the discussion above), it really works best if you read it as a stand-alone; it's a story that really has to have some time to linger in your mind by itself for a while in order to have its full effect, I think.

>26 artturnerjr:

I think I've gotten a bit hubristic regarding weird fiction

I know what you mean, Art. For example, last night I read Carl Jacobi's 1962 "The Aquarium" out of The Century's Best Horror Fiction. I'd never run across it before and it turned out to be a nicely done Mythos tale. Not a masterpiece, but quite enjoyable.

> 26

I agree that this story deserves to be classed with "The White People," and not just for general quality or innovation. In both cases, the recounting of the tale involves a teller's abnormal or distorted perspective. Madmen and children (and women, if it's misogynist Machen?) necessarily see things differently, and force the reader's mind into unaccustomed postures, when written as effectively as they are in these stories.

Thanks to whomever suggested this tale. I must admit, after reading "The Yellow Sign" awhile back, I wasn't all that eager for more Chambers. But I think the discussion here shows it's a pretty rich work, and now I am going to read all of The King in Yellow.

>18 lucien: I read Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower a few months back, so I found the background concerns of anarchism, war with Germany, a German invasion, disputes over the Samoan islands, immigration restriction, and labor unrest in this story to be an interesting projection of 1895 concerns. And, yes, I also noticed that weird juxtaposition of anti-Semitism and alleged religious tolerance.

However, I hadn't considered the possibility of the whole background being a vast Hildred delusion. That probably does make more sense if the context of the rest of the book is stories in the present or past.

Yes, Hildred is crazy -- but he somehow knew where the rest of that armor was and he knew Vance somehow. Perhaps Vance's recent embezzlement and resulting disgrace is what drove him to the Lethal Chamber -- assuming there really is one.

And maybe, if I read the whole book, I'll understand Robert Silverberg's Thorns better.

>27 semdetenebre:

I feel like I'm just beginning to understand how deep of a well weird fiction really is. Not only do I feel like I'm only just starting to get a handle on the work of the old masters of the genre, I'm really a novice when it comes to the many acclaimed new writers of the weird; I can only imagine the wonders I'll discover once I get into those folks' stuff.

>28 paradoxosalpha:

Madmen... necessarily see things differently, and force the reader's mind into unaccustomed postures, when written as effectively as they are in these stories.

When I was reading "Repairer", I was reminded quite a bit of another work that has effected me profoundly - the movie Taxi Driver. On the face of it, that may seem rather odd, but if you dig below the surface a little, they're actually quite similar. Both stories feature protagonists with paranoid, messianic delusions and take place in a nightmarish New York setting. Both also derive a great deal of their power from their creators' ability to depict what these sorts of derangements feel like from inside their characters' heads with an unflinching intensity that can be difficult for the reader/viewer to take. I was also reminded quite a bit of the delirious metaphysical gamesmanship of Philip K. Dick when reading this - that queasy and profoundly unsettling realization that you have when reading his fiction that you don't have the slightest fucking idea what's really going on. Chambers is obviously a progenitor of HPL's; would it not be fair to say he's a progenitor of Dick's as well?

> 29 Thanks to whomever suggested this tale.

Credit goes to lucien.

> 29
Glad you enjoyed. After our recent conversation about leaning towards common choices and ignoring most obscure choices, I was concerned that this might be too well known. Nice to see that it's new for a couple of readers.

Just a heads up on The King in Yellow - only a few of the other stories are weird fiction. The remainder are romances some with a supernatural twist and others more prosaic. They're a mixed bag. On the weird front, In The Court of the Dragon is another excellent tale not to be missed.

Just one more detail on the question of whether the setting of this story is really the future or a delusion of Castaigne.

In "The Yellow Sign", later in the book, reference is made to the "awful tragedy of young Castaigne". That story is set in contemporary Paris.

>32 lucien: And I did finish reading the whole book. I agree that there are only a few stories that are of interest to the weird fiction student. Most are rather insipid romances burdened by what I suspect is intended to be humor.

You have to pay for it, but the latest issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction has a long look by Michael Andre-Driuss of "The Repairer of Reputations". It can be had at https://weightlessbooks.com/format/new-york-review-of-science-fiction-317/?ap_id...

Reading "Repairer of Reputations" in preparation for "The Mask" (Spring 2019) and benefited from this discussion. I thought I'd read this before, but after completing it I'm fairly certain I never have. It also impressed me with its forceful accounts of delirium, whether from madness or some species of Weird. Great stuff.

I am struck by the possibility that the Lethal Chambers (assisted suicide centers) double as a meta-commentary on the stories themselves, viz Robert Chambers has written stories loosing the power of the King in Yellow upon the reading public: lethal, indeed.