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The tradition of the American in Paris – the expatriate enjoying himself in one of Europe’s most appealing cities – goes back way beyond such luminaries as Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway. So many Americans got to know the place as a result of the First World War that it was quite forgotten that others had been there before, under less trying circumstances.

When Robert Chambers and Charles Dana Gibson went there to study art in 1886, we must hope they had as good a time as Miller (while perhaps not so athletic). They stayed there for seven years, after all. What did come out of it was a book of tales of terror seldom surpassed in the genre, yet in its own way a very unsatisfying work, making the reader wish for more. Which statement just about sums up the writing career of Robert W. Chambers, as far as enthusiasts in this genre are concerned.

Chambers, despite displaying an early, unique talent for tales of terror, returned to them very seldom in later life. He was an astute writer, who knew what sold well, and produced the goods accordingly. Spy novels, adventure stories, society dramas, social comedies – if that’s what the public wanted, then Chambers was happy to oblige.

He was one of the authors featured in ‘How I “Broke into Print”’, an article in the Strand Magazine’s November 1915 edition, and had this to say on his first major success:

My most important ‘break into print’ was with a collection of short stories of a weird and uncanny character, entitled The King in Yellow, which the public seemed to like. So flatteringly was it received, indeed, that it decided me to devote all my time to fiction, and so I have been writing ever since. I cannot say which of my books I prefer, because just as soon as I have finished a story I dislike it. I am continually trying to do something better, so that I presume my ‘best’ book will never be written.

The King in Yellow (1895) is at the same time one of the most enjoyable yet one of the most irritating books in the fantasy catalogue. At its best – as in ‘The Yellow Sign’ – it is genuinely scary, with original ideas seldom equalled. At its worst – as in ‘The Prophets’ Paradise’ (not included here: think yourselves lucky) it is obscure, pompous, and overwritten.

The title refers to a play, rumoured to be so evil that it shatters lives and lays waste souls. We never get to see much of it; in fact, this much-vaunted evil work doesn’t even appear in some of the stories. Where it does, as in ‘The Yellow Sign’ or ‘The Mask’, it adds untold atmosphere. Where it doesn’t, as in ‘The Street of the First Shell’ (again not included), then the book is a distinct let-down. At times, it is hard to see what Chambers is intending with this erratic book. While it is an indispensable part of any self-respecting horror reader’s library, I have to say that it does not live up to its reputation.

And yet, as strange as anything (and at a time when M.R. James was just starting his ghost story career), there comes a line in ‘In the Court of the Dragon’ which could not be more Jamesian:

… I wondered idly … whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery.

‘The Yellow Sign’ is by far and away the most reprinted story from The King in Yellow, and earned the praise of H.P. Lovecraft, among others. It very quickly conjures up an atmosphere of death and decay (count the words in this vein that appear in just the first few paragraphs) and, in the form of the church watchman, one of the genre’s most disturbing figures.

‘In the Court of the Dragon’ and ‘The Demoiselle D’Ys’ are lesser items, though ‘In the Court of the Dragon’ has its own scary church figure. ‘The Mask’ limply trails its fingers in the waters of science fiction, like so many tales from the 1890s. (An odd fact: Chambers mentions Gounod’s ‘Sanctus’ in ‘The Mask’, as a symbol of purity; Werner Herzog used the music over the closing credits of his film Nosferatu in 1979, a most un-pure film.)

While Chambers borrowed various things from Ambrose Bierce to embellish The King in Yellow, like the names Carcosa and Hastur, he has inspired precious few imitators himself. There may be one: Sidney Levett-Yeats, the British writer, introduces a book written by the devil (in his story ‘The Devil’s Manuscript’ (1899)) which ruins lives when read. It is titled The Yellow Dragon.

As The King in Yellow proved to be a winner, Chambers turned to writing full-time, while still keeping up his artistic habits (though, oddly, he never seems to have illustrated any of his own books, Charles Dana Gibson certainly illustrated some for him). He supplied illustrations for magazines such as Life, Truth, and Vogue, and was photographed for The King in Yellow, palette in hand.

He married Elsa Vaughn Moller in 1898, and they spent their married life at Broadalbin, an 800 acre estate in the Sacandaga Valley, northern New York State. Broadalbin had been in the Chambers family since his grandfather William Chambers first settled there in the mid-1800s. This beautiful country estate in the Adirondacks included a game preserve (where it seems Chambers never shot) and a fishing lake.

Broadalbin House was remodelled by Chambers’s architect brother, William Boughton Chambers, and was crammed with the family’s and Chambers’s collection of books, paintings, and Oriental objets d’art. His collection of butterflies was said to be one of the most complete in America.

Chambers spent most of the year at Broadalbin, travelling into New York to work in an office which he kept secret from his family (so much so that they had trouble finding it when he died). His chauffeur would drop him off and pick him up again at a spot some distance from the office.

Chambers lavished much care and affection on Broadalbin, planting thousands of trees on the estate. When he died, he was buried under one of the oaks.

Not all his time at Broadalbin was contented. He saw 200 acres of the estate vanish under the waters of the Sacandaga Reservoir which now covers much of the valley. He would have been even more desolate at the fate of his carefully planted trees (see Part Two).

Though part of the house at Broadalbin was demolished, the building still stands, now owned by the Catholic Church. It was abandoned (literally overnight, on the death of Chambers’s widow in 1938) for some years, and was vandalised terribly. It is reported that Chambers’s papers were used by intruders and squatters to light fires.

Chambers loved the outdoor life: it shows up in his writing time and again, where his descriptions of nature, scenery and forests are superbly evocative. A keen hunter, shooter and fisher, his characters are so often engaged in these pursuits as to suggest Chambers himself at play. He could apparently call most kinds of birds and was well versed in Indian languages (see ‘The Key to Grief’).

He must have been the most fortunate of authors: successful, rich and surrounded by the life he loved and wrote about. It is easy to see why he was reported to be so popular with his estate workers and neighbours in this period of his life.

To follow up the success of The King in Yellow, Chambers published another book of short stories in 1896, The Maker of Moons.

The title story, included here, is in many ways a practice run at his 1920 novel The Slayer of Souls. As in that book, we have ample helpings of the American secret service (fine men all), Oriental magic, and strange goings-on in the forest. It also shows how Chambers would finally drift away from the fantasy genre, into the world of espionage and adventure. ‘The Maker of Moons’ is nonetheless a superb fantasy, quite unlike anything else around at the time, and holds up well, even now.

From the same book comes ‘A Pleasant Evening’, another indication of the way Chambers would develop. Here, in a fairly traditional theme, he shows the skill that would lead to The Tree of Heaven (in Part Two) – the writing of neat and well crafted supernatural tales, not necessarily meant to frighten.

The next year, Chambers published The Mystery of Choice, a fine set of stories which was a series of vaguely connected tales, set mainly in France, but this time not in Paris. By far and away the most powerful of them was ‘The Messenger’.

This is a long, sometimes rambling story that nevertheless guides the reader along to a most eerie conclusion. The setting – coastal Brittany – has seldom been used to such effect, and the historical tale behind the story’s events has a grotesque ring of truth. This is one of Chambers’s best stories, and its use of the traditional masked figure has never been bettered.

‘Passeur’ from the same book, is a much shorter, traditional ghost story, easily guessed by anyone familiar with the genre. But Chambers is too good to give it all away completely; relish the scenery he depicts in the closing paragraphs.

Sticking out like a sore thumb from the rest of the stories in the book, ‘The Key to Grief’ is set far away from France. Chambers might have borrowed the odd name or two from Bierce for The King in Yellow; here he all but ransacked Bierce’s living-room. This is a shameless reworking of Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, which still has its own sense of the unknown, and is included here by virtue of its unusual location.

The Mystery of Choice contained a lot of what was to become the cardinal vice of Chambers’s writing as time went by: an awful tendency to be rather soppy, especially in his romantic scenes. This style probably didn’t read too well in the 1890s; nowadays it just grates alarmingly.

After 1900 Chambers moved steadily away from his roots in the fantasy genre, but still – though not often enough – popping back from time to time, as will be seen in Part Two.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

January 2018