Hannes Bok, ‘The Sorcerer's Ship’ (1942/1969)

Hannes Bok was the pseudonym (the moniker being, it seems, a variant of ‘Johannes Bach’, a favoured composer of the author) adopted by artist and writer Wayne Francis Woodard (1914-1964). Bok is known today for his fantasy-themed illustrations, many of which appeared in Weird Tales, and, amongst odd books on codes and astrology and whatnot, his writing of two short novels: The Sorcerer's Ship (first published in the magazine Unknown in 1942; reprinted as a Ballantine Adult Fantasy series paperback, 1969) and Beyond the Golden Stair (1948). To look at the first.

Gene Trevelli, a man from ‘our’ world, goes swimming off Coney Island and nearly drowns. He wakes to find himself floating on a ruined raft upon a strange ocean, rescued eventually by a ship that appears like ‘an old Venetian galley, two sails puffed and ablaze with colored lanterns’ [6]. He finds himself in a Fantasy realm, and is caught up in the battle between Koph and Nanich, two large island nations (the ocean is occupied only by them and ‘the uncharted isles in the far seas beyond’). The ship belongs to the beautiful Princess Siwara of Nanich, who is sailing upon a peace mission to Koph. But there is a traitor on board! Gene is immediately caught-up in the political machinations, whilst also developing a romance with the toothsome Siwara. The passage from mundanity to fantasy is explained away by Gene himself as an arbitrary Fortean happenstance (many people, we’re told, have ‘passed through a door which was a flaw in the elements which make the world … a man named Charles Fort compiled books of them’ [39]).

The ship, blown off course, odysseys through the uncharted islands, running upon a dead pyramid-city whose only inhabitant, an ancient fish-man creature, worships a mad god called Orcher, which deity obligingly makes himself known to the voyagers.

Orcher’s musical voice was enlivening, like a psychic wind which fanned the fires of life into a fiercer heat. Though it was tainted by nothing remotely resembling humanity, it was colored with passions, but passions no human could ever hope to know, so intense that at their faintest they would have blasted a mortal's body into atoms. And though the strange entity was only a great splash of light, Gene knew that it had eyes. [116]

At this encounter the tone of the book shifts, from a rather arch, rococo bookishness to a tenor of intensified violence. Koph has sent an armada to invade Nanich. Orcher decides to intervene, which he does by scattering destruction indiscriminately around, raining fire from the sky, summoning giants to crush the houses ‘like paper boxes’, and obliterating everything on both sides. His point, it seems, is at once to teach humanity the futility of war, and yet also somehow to taunt them into more fighting:

Orcher’s voice beat down on the captured city like a sledge of sound. “So you would make war, would you—you puny microbes! But can you do this? And this? And this? Then what good are your wars—what good can they accomplish? Some of you wanted power — what are your powers beside mine? Can you fight me? Will one of you — all of you — come forth to try it?” [196]

Then he vanishes leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces. Gene and Sirawa sail away to find refuge on an island somewhere. That's where the novel ends.

The romance between Gene and Sirawa is entirely without spark or believability, in part because the Princess is so entirely spindly and two-dimensional, more doll than woman, given equally to childish ingenuities and childish tantrums (‘she peered up at him, stamping a small foot in rage’ [54]). That Gene, a New York office worker without military training, suddenly finds himself a potent warrior with sword and bow in a Fantasy war is, of course, improbable; although that improbability is itself merely the index of the function of the novel as, precisely, wish-fulfillment. But that Sirawa is so cardboard, so unenticing and sexless, speaks to a more interesting disconnection of desire and reality. For all that this is a novel, in Paul Kincaid’s words, about how ‘a traveller from our world who finds himself in colourful, magic lands that are far more attractive than our own’ [Kincaid, ‘American fantasy 1820-1950’, in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, (CUP 2012), 46] the actual colour and magic here are all told rather than shown, enchantment declared rather than evoked (‘the air here—it seems different—as if charged with electricity’ [12]). The book is a two-tone composition, half a faded and exhausted gesture in the direction of an—enchanted, heroic, heteronormative—adventure, half a violent swamping of that very fantasy in apocalyptic destruction.

This, it seems to me, is what is most interesting about his odd little novel. It was not the actual ‘fantasy’ of bookish, hermetic, gay Wayne Francis Woodard to leave his comfortable New York apartment, festooned with his artwork and horoscopes and precious items, and range out into the hostile world as an oceangoing warrior who seduces a conventionally-categorised beautiful princess-woman female. And yet this is what he has written. ‘It has caused me the greatest trouble,’ Nietzsche said in The Gay Science, with a lesser flavouring of his complex irony than usual, ‘and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realise that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are.’ There’s a great truth in here, alas. The individual called ‘the man who makes America great again’ is unspeakably more important than the satsuma-coloured idiot-buffoon Ubu Roi who actually occupies the White House. History is what the winner call prior events, even though those prior events do not flatter or justify the winners. Performative statements such as the marriage service’s ‘I do’ and even the one-on-one’s ‘I love you’ name, but do not necessarily actualize, these realities. Bok knew he wanted the harmony and beauty, the enchantment and glory of Bach, but he cannot quite reconcile Bach with Book and ends-up truncated. Perhaps this is the real insight of this slight, spotty and yet strangely compelling book: that it dares to put into words not just that what we think we desire is not what we desire, but the more radical proposition: what we desire is not what we desire. The fantasy (as with ‘Fantasy’) is not what we crave, so much as we desire the catastrophic annihilation of what we have fantasized, which is to say, of fantasy itself.

I appreciate that this is a reading that depends upon finessing ‘Fantasy’ as a cultural mode (Narnia, Middle Earth, fairyland) with ‘fantasy’ as a psychological operant that numerates and denominates human desires more broadly. I don't expect you simply to accede to this: there are things we desire, and Fantasyland might be desirable to us, but these two qualia don't necessarily, of course, map precisely one upon the other. Nonetheless it seems to me ww miss the point of Fantasy as a genre if we pretend that it is not informed by prodigious psychological cathexis on behalf of the reader, or viewer, or fan of that Fantasy. And so far as that goes, it is worth noting that people don't Fans might claim that they love this or that Fantasy world because it aligns with their values, or desires: because it is suitably diverse in representational terms, or because it elaborates a satisfyingly complex and coherent worldbuilding and magic system, or simply (I would have said this, if you'd asked teenage me why I was so obsessed with Tolkien) because I really wanted to be there rather than here. Such responses are not being, although they are perhaps a touch unaware of the dynamic of desire itself. Hungarian poet and novelist Sándor Márai published Conversations in Bolzan in 1940 (it was not translated into English, by George Szirtes, until 2004). It's a novel in which Casanova confronts his own hyperbolic desires, under the rebuking logic of the Duke of Parma, who says:

You know very well that we do not love people for their virtues, indeed, there was a time when I believed that, in love, we prefer the oppressed, the problematic, the quarrelsome to the virtuous, but as I grew older I finally learned that it is neither people’s sins and faults nor their beauty, decency or virtue that makes us love them ... We simply have to accept the fact that we do not love people for their qualities; not because they are beautiful and, however strange it seems, not even because they are ugly, hunchbacked or poor; we love them simply because there is in the world a kind of purpose whose true working lies beyond our wit, which desires to articulate itself as much as an idea does.

And so here we are.