Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 26

“I always wonder what people would do if they knew there was real evil underfoot,” said Richard S. Shaver, “and that Hell was a genuine ancient city with genuine ghouls in it.” Shaver was speaking from firsthand experience. He had seen the evil that is—literally—underfoot. He had been there personally and met the ghouls and the demons. Or so he would insist at voluminous length in print—and, over the years, to a smaller and smaller but still deliciously creeped-out audience—for more than three decades, ceasing only with his death.

One of five children, Shaver was born in Berwick, Pennsylvania, in 1907. On graduating high school and moving to Philadelphia, he worked manual labor jobs which provided no outlet for his fertile imagination. He found one finally in Detroit, where he moved in 1929 to join his relocated family. There he signed up at the Wicker School of Art, where he took instructions in drawing. He worked as a nude model on the side and even made enough money to employ a model to work for him. He took up bootlegging. In 1930 he joined a Communist group, the John Reed Club, but his tenure there was brief, though just long enough to get his attention-grabbing presence at a May Day parade noted the next day in the Detroit News. He went back to the Wicker School for a part-time teaching job, supplementing his income by sketching people in the city park. He got romantically involved with a student, Russian émigré Sophie Gurivitch, whom he would marry in 1933.

In 1932 an unemployed Shaver managed to find a job on the assembly line at Briggs Body. It was a tedious, dangerous occupation. Years later, that period of Shaver’s life would figure prominently in the mythology of his life, but nearly a decade would pass before the story of what supposedly happened as he worked the line became a subject of spirited controversy. It is certain, however, that in the wake of the death of his beloved older brother Tate, he suffered an emotional breakdown. By the time he was taken to the Detroit Receiving Hospital Emergency Ward in mid-July 1934, his behavior had become agitated and violent, and he needed to be forcibly restrained. Besides accusing attending physicians of trying to poison him, he complained that mysterious, sinister strangers were shadowing him. Concerned for herself and their young daughter, Sophie insisted that he be placed in a mental institution. On August 17 papers were drawn up to have him committed to the Ypsilanti State Hospital.

Richard S. Shaver told remarkable stories of his alleged subterranean adventures in a series of wild tales published in Amazing Stories magazine (Mary Evans Picture Library).

In later years Shaver would claim that the episode amounted to little. He had suffered “heat stroke” and been hospitalized a scant two weeks. Not even those who would become friends or followers believe this to be true. According to persons close to Shaver, the hospitalization lasted as long as eight years. (Writer Doug Skinner states matter-of-factly, “Shaver was released from the Ionia State Hospital in Michigan in 1943.”) Pressed on the subject, Shaver responded with conflicting stories. Though the details tended to contradict each other, they generally agreed that these were lost, unsettled years in which he lived in a fog of fear and confusion. Separated from her husband, Sophie died in an accident in her apartment in December 1936. Their young daughter was given to Sophie’s parents to raise, and she would grow up knowing nothing of her biological father until, years after his death, she came upon his name in a magazine article.

At some point Shaver moved to Pennsylvania, landed a job as a crane operator, and remarried. His new wife left him a few months later, Shaver would report vaguely, after “finding some papers indicating I had been in a mental hospital.” Subsequently, Shaver married his third and last wife, Dorothy Erb, who would be with him until his death in 1975.

Whatever else was happening to Shaver between his hospitalization and his emergence into the wider world, it is evident that he was immersed in fantasy literature, including A. Merritt’s popular novel The Moon Pool (1919), which is about good and evil ancient races living in caverns beneath the earth. Besides that, Shaver was trying his hand at writing, seeking without success to get published in the flourishing pulp science-fiction, horror, and adventure magazines of the period. He was also working on a language he called “Mantong,” which he would later represent as the oldest in the world. He took his inspiration from an article he had read in a 1936 issue of Science World. There, Albert F. Yeager wrote of “The True Basis of Today’s Alphabet.” According to Shaver biographer Jim Pobst, “Yeager claimed that six letters in the alphabet stood for concepts, and that each word in the language could be deciphered, with the use of his concepts. … Shaver … [went] further than Yeager, taking 26 letters in the alphabet, assigned them his own meaning and developed what he believed to be a language.”

The “Shaver Mystery,” as it would be called, got its start in September 1943, when one “S. Shaver” of Barto, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to the editor of Ziff-Davis’ Amazing Stories, based in Chicago and founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback as the very first magazine of “scientifiction” (soon to be renamed science fiction—SF to its devoted readership, later “sci-fi” to the less engaged). The editor of that publication was Ray Palmer, a colorful figure who had risen from the ranks of SF fandom to anointment, in June 1938, to Amazing’s helm. An accident in his youth, followed by a disastrously botched operation, left Palmer with an unfixable spinal injury. His back permanently curved, he never attained normal height (he stood no more than four feet eight inches [1.5 meters])—but his energy seemed never to flag as he lurched from one enthusiasm or promotion to the next. Palmer, one might say, had the instincts of a carnival barker. From the arrival of the Shaver letter onward, Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver would be linked forever in the lore of the outlandish.

As he liked to tell the story, Palmer overheard Amazing’s managing editor, Howard Browne, the one who actually opened the envelope, muttering something about “crackpots” as he directed the letter to the wastebasket. (According to some reports, Browne found the letter sufficiently hilarious to read aloud for the amusement of the editorial staff before he disposed of it.) Not ready to let it go at that, the intrigued Palmer retrieved it from the oblivion to which otherwise it would have been destined.

When he read it, he decided that Shaver had something—or, as the cynics have had it, spotted a potentially lucrative new promotion—and the two entered into correspondence, with Shaver pouring forth his thoughts and experiences in multi-paged, literally daily communications. Shaver said he feared that if he did not get it all down, the truth would be lost. Palmer would recall that the letters looked as if they were composed on a “toy typewriter with several keys missing.” The alphabet appeared in the January 1944 issue. Eventually, Palmer would visit the Shavers at their farm, where he allegedly had a strange and unsettling experience (see below).

Subsequently, Palmer took a 10,000-word Shaver manuscript, A Warning to Future Man, and expanded it (deleting the strong sexual content, for one thing) into the 31,000-word SF novella “I Remember Lemuria!,” published under Shaver’s by-line in the March 1945 issue. (Lemuria here was an ancient name for Earth, not the fabled Pacific lost continent.) With difficulty—or with unearthly assistance, as Shaver asserted—Palmer, preparing for what he suspected would be significantly enhanced sales, managed to push the print run from 135,000 to 185,000, this during the wartime paper scarcity. Again, in Palmer’s not automatically credible version of events, the issue sold out, and a “flood of letters began to come in that totaled, in the end, more than 50,000.” Even the hyperbolic Palmer rescinded that assertion, later characterizing the letter total as in the thousands — still impressive if true.

In his editorial in the issue, Palmer wrote that “Lemuria!” grew out of “racial memory” from 12,000 years ago. “The strange fact of the matter,” he stated, “seems to be that all over the world there are more people than we might imagine who have a firm faith in a memory of past civilizations, and remember such vital things as Mr. Shaver.” Of course, he added (capital letters in the original):

IT COULD be a hoax! IF MR. SHAVER WERE THE CLEVEREST MAN THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN! But we can’t believe this is so. The alphabet alone is too much to explain away in such a manner. We confess we are bewildered, impressed, and excited. And at the very least, we are delighted at the series of stories from the typewriter of Mr. Shaver. … But Mr. Shaver has not been the only source of a great deal of material on Lemuria since we published his first letter. We have been deluged by a storm of corroboration from all over the country.

Shaver provided a brief foreword to the story, insisting, “I know only that I remember Lemuria! Remember it with such a faithfulness that I accept with a faithfulness of a fanatic. And yet, I am not a fanatic. … What I tell you is not fiction!”