Whiskey Tales

By Jean Ray

Originally published in French in 1925, Whiskey Tales immediately established the reputation of the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray (1887–1964), whose writings in the coming years would come to chart out a literary meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens. A commercial success, the collection earned Ray the appellation of the "Belgian Poe." A year later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years in prison, where he would write some of his best stories.

Something of a prequel to later collections such as Cruise of Shadows or Circles of Terror (both forthcoming from Wakefield Press), Whiskey Tales finds Ray embracing the modes of adventure and horror fiction adopted by such contemporaries as Pierre Mac Orlan and Maurice Renard. Taking us from ship's prow to port, from tavern to dead-end lane, these early tales are ruled by the spirits of whiskey and fog, each element blurring the borders between humor and horror, the sentimental and the sinister, the real and the imagined.

A handful of these stories first appeared in English in Weird Tales in the 1930s, but the majority of this collection has never been translated. This first complete English-language edition is the first in many volumes of Jean Ray's books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming seasons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wakefield Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781939663757

Book preview

WHISKEY TALES

WHISKEY TALES

Jean Ray

TRANSLATED BY SCOTT NICOLAY

WAKEFIELD PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

This translation © 2019 Wakefield Press

Wakefield Press, P.O. Box 425645, Cambridge, MA 02142

Originally published as Les contes du whisky in 1925. This English edition is published by special arrangement with Alma éditeur, France, in conjunction with their duly appointed agents L’Autre agence and 2 Seas Literary Agency. © Héritier Jean Ray, 2016 et Alma éditeur. Paris, 2016

Cover image: Clip # 21277, Des Kindes bester Freund (unid.) from the Turconi collection at the George Eastman Museum.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Garamond Premier Pro and Helvetica Neue Pro by Wakefield Press. Printed and bound by McNaughton & Gunn, Inc., in the United States of America.

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-939663-36-8

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-939663-75-7

Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

75 Broad Street, Suite 630

New York, New York 10004

Tel: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

TO FRANCISQUE PARN

Whose books I love, and whose friendship is dear to me.

J.R.

CONTENTS

Translator’s Introduction

Translator’s Acknowledgments

WHISKEY TALES

Irish Whiskey

At Midnight

The Name of the Boat

A Whitechapel Fairy Tale

Herbert’s Fortune

In the Fenn Marshes

One Night in Camberwell

Belovéd Little Wife with the Scent of Verbena …

Poppelreiter’s Salmon

Over Drinks

Josuah Güllick, Pawnbroker

Vengeance

My Dead Friend

The Crocodile

A Hand …

The Last Gulp

… AND A FEW STORIES FROM THE FOG

The Monkey

The Monsters in the Window

Twenty Minutes after Midnight

The White Beast

The Cemetery Guard

The Good Deed

The Portrait

The Abandoned Observatory

The Strange Studies of Dr. Paukenschläger

Gumpelmeyer’s Debt

Herr Hubich at Night

Translator’s Notes

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Jean Ray’s stories often begin like miniature plays: belonging to a literary lineage openly hostile to French realism and naturalism, his prose operates through establishing a mise en scène, into which actors then enter and dialogue propels much of the rest of the story, punctuated by bursts of action. This approach is effective for the gothic/weird/horror tales that became his métier, as all these modes thrive on atmosphere. His writing is as replete with terms for the feeling and effects of fear and fright as it is with expressions for darkness, fire, and light. He adores the fog, sometimes even using the English word for it. He also loves colors, cut flowers, crystal … and whiskey.

Although his prose offers many rewards, at least some of which I hope I have made accessible in English, it is Jean Ray the storyteller who commands our attention here. Throughout his career he favored a wicked whiplash irony, which he rapidly developed into a nuanced and unparalleled ability to punch around corners as his career progressed. Here, in his debut collection, that predilection operates near the surface of tale after tale in conjunction with a simple, consistent message: Be careful what you wish for. He was a master from the start in the school of limited exposition and show, don’t tell; though neither he nor his characters ever recite any variation of this phrase directly, Ray establishes the link between desire and disaster straightaway in the volume’s anchor story, Irish Whiskey, in which a ship owner worships the Great God Silver, an honorable captain seeks funds for a rebellion, and an old sailor no longer cares for anything other than decent whiskey and ice-cold revenge.

In other tales, a character tires of waiting for his long-deferred inheritance, while a wealthy, jaded Englishman and his sidekick yearn to hear a single story that has not been told a thousand and one times before. Some of Jean Ray’s actors have simple desires: a rich but stubborn hunter seeks only to bag a few stringy gamebirds in an uninviting swamp, a soldier can’t resist a tempting swim in tropical waters warm as a wealthy woman’s bath, a homeless vagabond hopes for three hots and a cot, while the nameless narrator of One Night in Camberwell wants nothing more than to sleep in his own bed.

Other wishes are more extravagant, less mundane, and directed toward objectives better left unpursued: a rich vein of gold hidden deep in a cave, an unusual statuette of the Hindu deity Hanuman, the transcendent masterpiece of a dead clockmaker’s artifice, an ethereal portrait that seems almost too sublime, the love of a beautiful violet-eyed chanteuse, even temporary access to the fourth dimension. Circumstances place each of these goals within the protagonist’s reach during their respective tales, and these simple engines carry both narrative and reader forward with all the breakneck starts and stops of an untended carnival ride. The fact that a few of these characters survive helps maintain the suspense from one story to the next.

All of Jean Ray’s protagonists soon discover that these doors are better left unopened, but it is the author himself, alas, who opens the last century’s darkest door of all. In Josuah Güllick, Pawnbroker, the titular character’s passion for a singular and exotic ring overcomes both his better judgment and the influence of divine intervention. Overall this is a fairly standard tale of greed and retribution—and in its earlier English translation, that’s all it was, which made it right at home in the American pulps. What the narrator of this tale wishes for, however, belongs to an all-too-real order of horror, and something we must discuss before we finish here. Which is to say, we need to talk about Jean Ray.

Jean Ray, of course, was a nom-de-plume, only one of over two dozen variously employed by the Belgian author Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (8 July 1887–17 September 1964). He is best known by this name today, and it appears on the cover of the current volume, just as it did when it introduced him to a general Francophone audience in 1925. Thus we shall continue to refer to M. de Kremer herein as Jean Ray.

Les contes du whisky was an immediate success and led to the celebrated pronouncement by Maurice Renard of the author as the Belgian Poe, an appellation that stands today, nearly a century later. After such an auspicious debut, Jean Ray’s future seemed assured. The rota fortunae turned all too soon, however—not for the last time in his career, either—and the following year found the author imprisoned for fraud. He produced a brace of masterpieces during the two-year span of his incarceration, the novellas The Mainz Psalter and The Gloomy Alley, but with his reputation tarnished by a criminal conviction, he had to publish these tales under a different name. Thus was born John Flanders, the second-most famous of de Kremer’s many aliases, and a story to be continued in the next volume of these translations from Wakefield Press.

English-language readers first encountered Jean Ray’s fiction in the 1930s, when Roy Temple House, the founding editor of Books Abroad, translated seven stories for the American pulp magazines Weird Tales, Terror Tales, and Dime Mystery. These works all appeared under the Flanders pseudonym. The current volume includes six of those tales in fresh translations.

House translated other authors from French and German for Weird Tales during the mid-1930s, most notably Gustav Meyrink, but Jean Ray’s tales appear to have dominated his efforts for the pulps. These early translations of the author’s work are competent and flow smoothly. House took some liberties with his source material: he made significant changes in at least one case, and the titles are often completely different, though to what extent those English titles were his doing or the results of editorial decisions is unclear. His versions are faithful to the overall content, however, if not always down to the level of the sentence or word. A more incisive criticism might be that House did not choose the best of Jean Ray’s material in print by that point, though perhaps not all of it was available to him.

The Anglophone world would have to wait until 1965 for a more authentic encounter with Jean Ray’s fiction, which came in the form of Ghouls in My Grave, a paperback-only volume from Berkley Medallion. This collection comprised eight stories of varying length, selected from several different French editions spanning much of the author’s career. It is possible translator Lowell Blair¹ began his endeavor with the author’s cooperation, as Jean Ray died the year before the book’s publication, suggesting that the project was already in the works. His death may partly explain the obscurity into which the book fell immediately upon publication, although this year was also the one when G. P. Putnam’s Sons acquired Berkley from the Penguin Group, and that change in ownership may have been a factor.

Blair took liberties of his own, but his translations adhere more closely to the originals than House’s, rendering Jean Ray’s work into an English prose that strikes a sweet spot somewhere between Edgar Allan Poe and Jim Thompson. Overall, the style of Blair’s versions, if not his selections, was nearly perfect for the time, and with more promotion Jean Ray’s work might have drawn a wider audience across both the Channel and the Atlantic. Only one of the tales in that collection came from Les contes du whisky and thus appears here in a new English translation: The Cemetery Guard (The Graveyard Duchess in Weird Tales, and The Cemetery Watchman chez Blair). The others will appear in subsequent English editions, also from Wakefield Press.

Those readers with whom Ghouls did manage to connect included Stephen King, David Hartwell, and editor/author/publisher John Pelan, all of whom made their own assorted efforts to enlarge Jean Ray’s English-language audience. Two decades ago, Pelan was generous enough to share his backup copy of the book with me. I have long since killed that fragile and friable beater, but to that introduction I owe the volume from which you now read.

The intervening years have seen two very limited editions of Ray’s short fiction in English. Like Ghouls, the tales in these volumes were more or less cherry-picked from across the author’s career. More noteworthy is Iain White’s excellent 1998 translation of the novel Malpertuis, arguably Jean Ray’s masterpiece. White’s version of Malpertuis and two stories in the landmark anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, have represented the author’s only works easily available in English until now.

In selecting stories from multiple volumes to present Jean Ray’s short fiction in a sort of greatest hits format, prior English translations have obscured a principal aspect of most of the collections the author published during his life. Each of those books had a theme, or at least some unifying motif: voyages (La croisière des ombres); Chaucer (Les derniers contes de Canterbury); golf (Les contes noirs du golf). The theme of this first collection, obviously enough, is whiskey. Each of the sixteen tales that compose the core of the book, from Irish Whiskey to The Last Gulp, mention whiskey in one way or another, even if some of these references feel a bit forced.

Jean Ray’s decision to structure Whiskey Tales as something approaching a mosaic novel allows us to consider his debut against the backdrop of—though not necessarily in the company of—such similarly constructed major early works of modernism as James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), or Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). Ray himself would almost certainly reject any modernist association, and any relationship must be seen more as a product of the zeitgeist than influence, Nonetheless, placing his work in dialogue with these authors, as well as with Alfred Kubin, Bruno Schulz, and Franz Kafka, as the VanderMeers did with The Weird, opens intriguing possibilities for critical discussion. Nor should we forget that it was the pre-sciently postmodernist nature of his greatest work, the novel Malpertuis, that drew the attention of Oulipo cofounder Raymond Queneau and led to Jean Ray’s revival in French.

Thus only now, with this first complete translation of Whiskey Tales, can English-language readers encounter Jean Ray’s short fiction the way he intended (in its presentation at least—the quality and accuracy of my translation remains open to you, dear readers, to assess). But this also means that we are encountering his work warts and all … and this debut collection indeed has its warts. The most frequent and abhorrent of those blemishes arrives in the form of multiple episodes of anti-Semitism, most often in the tales that reference the Enchanted Spot, that mysterious den of smugglers and robbers over which the shadowy and Fagin-like proprietor Cavendish presides. Along with whiskey, Whitechapel, and a certain mysterious violet-eyed chanteuse, these tales represent some of the most important recurring motifs in the book.²

Les contes du whisky first appeared during the era between the Dreyfus Affair and the Shoah. Though no longer uncontested, anti-Semitism remained widespread through much of the world and was common in both France and Belgium, taking on a particularly dogmatic cast in the latter country where Catholicism was the official religion. Only after the full scope of the Nazi death machine became apparent in 1945 did such beliefs acquire the stigma that drove them largely underground until very recently.

The original French edition of Ray’s first collection included the sixteen core Whiskey Tales, along with another eleven Stories from the Fog—many of which do mention fog or mist—and the current volume includes all of these in their 1925 order. Subsequent editions altered the story lineup and/or