Metropolis by Thea von Harbou

Simplistic dystopian epic adapted into a landmark film

The 1927 science fiction film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is widely considered one of the masterpieces of the silent era of film. Few these days are likely to remember, however, that the film was adapted from a book. Metropolis the novel, published in 1925, was written by Thea von Harbou, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. She and Lang were married at the time.

The novel takes place at an unspecified time in the future, though some promotional copy for the book states the date as 2026, a hundred years after publication. Metropolis is a technologically advanced urban industrial center. It is not intended to be a future vision of New York or London, both of which are mentioned as separate cities. It’s unclear exactly where Metropolis is supposed to be located, though Germany would be a safe bet. Metropolis is ruled by wealthy capitalist oligarchs who live in lofty towers. Chief among these is Joh Fredersen, the city’s most powerful citizen, dubbed “the brain of Metropolis.” The army of laborers who operate Metropolis’s machinery of production dwell in underground cities. Existing only to perform their robotic jobs, they are veritable slaves to the machines they tend.

Joh Fredersen has a son, Freder, who lives an idle life hanging out at the Club of the Sons, a resort for male heirs of the oligarchs. One day while visiting his father’s place of work, however, he develops sympathetic feelings towards labor. He also falls in love with a beautiful woman who seems to run the factory’s day care. As he pursues this mysterious maiden, Freder learns that she is the leader and cult figurehead of an underground (literally) revolutionary movement. Meanwhile, a mad scientist has created a robot woman, which you likely already know if you’ve ever seen a single shot from the movie.

The story is fine, though rather predictable. I didn’t care much for the way that story is told, however. Von Harbou grandiosely exaggerates every phrase. She saturates the text with biblical imagery and constant hyperbolic references to “the gods.” Realism is not a concern. The prose is largely written in incomplete, choppy sentences, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. In spite of the futuristic sci-fi trappings, the story resembles yet another Victorian-era romance. I guess this is German expressionist literature, but if so, it’s not as effective as German expressionist film or visual art. What makes Lang’s Metropolis such a stunning film are the visuals, which were developed apart from the novel. Von Harbou’s text doesn’t contain much visual description at all, not even of the robot woman. The author doesn’t go into a great deal of detail in describing the dystopian future she has created. There isn’t much futuristic tech, for example, or sophisticated social and political commentary. The most outstanding feature of this dystopia is the obvious extreme disparity between the lives of the rich and poor.

The revolution of the workers against the oligarchs inevitably delivers a socialist message, though it feels half-hearted, intended more to generate drama then for actual political persuasion. If social reform or forebodings of an authoritarian future were the important concern here, the novel would have needed more of a grounding in the reality of the class struggle. Metropolis reads more like opera than realism. It has more in common with sci-fi films like Star Wars or Logan’s Run than with novels like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), or even Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Metropolis is what it is, and it’s pretty good at what it is, but the film is more impressive than the book.

The Terror by Arthur Machen

Ingenious and spooky WWI thriller

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) wrote primarily in the horror and fantasy genres, and his work has proved greatly influential to subsequent authors in those areas, from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. Machen has only recently come to my attention, and so far I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by him. He may be the greatest of Edgar Allan Poe’s successors in the literature of horror and the supernatural. Machen’s work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries brings Poe’s gothic terror into the modern era in a way that can still be appreciated by, and frightening to, 21st-century readers.

Machen’s novel The Terror was published in 1917. It takes place in a small rural coastal village of southwestern Wales named Meirion. In 1915, at the height of World War I, a shocking rash of mysterious deaths occurs in and around this village. Children have fallen off of cliffs, or were they pushed? Bodies are found of people who appear to have died of asphyxiation, but with no apparent evidence of strangulation or other trauma. A family lies dead in the highway out in front of their home, their brains bashed in. A girl is stung to death by bees. A farmer is found dead of a stab wound, as if pierced by a spear. There are no witnesses to these killings, and no clues as to their causes or perpetrators. Since it’s wartime, however, one can’t help but wonder if the Germans are responsible. Could there be a secret network of German soldiers operating within the British Isles, spreading terror throughout the countryside? Whether the Germans are responsible or not, this tragedy and terror on the home front is certainly not helping Britain’s war effort and has greatly hindered England’s fight against Germany.

Two local citizens attempt to find an explanation for these bizarre happenings. Dr. Lewis is a country physician, while Mr. Remnant seems to be a well-read retiree. The two theorize as to the causes of these events and bounce ideas off of each other. Lewis seems to be the more rationally scientific of the two. Remnant is more open to far-fetched conspiracy theories. The story is related by an unidentified third-person narrator who, like an investigative journalist, has gathered testimony related to these incidents, much of it from the mouths of Lewis and Remnant.

Even to today’s audience, who has developed an immunity to murder novels and serial killer movies, Machen’s descriptions of the deaths are bluntly brutal and must have been quite shocking to readers of a century ago. Many horror filmmakers of today are still squeamish about killing children in their stories, but not so with Machen. The indiscriminateness of this tragedy, coupled with the journalistic style with which the details are presented, give the novel an air of realism, even when contemplating possible supernatural occurrences. There are times over the course of the novel when the plot just seems to be a collection of random scary events with no rhyme or reason to the proceedings. Machen concludes the mystery, however, with an ending that ingeniously ties all loose ends together into a unique, imaginative, and praiseworthy resolution.

Of the three novels by Machen I’ve read so far, The Terror is superior to The Hill of Dreams but falls just short of The Great God Pan. All three are really quite exceptional works. While it’s easy to draw comparisons to Poe, Machen really has a distinctive voice and style all his own. His writing is quite unlike any of his contemporaries. The horror stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, and Algernon Blackwood seem tame and quaint by comparison. I’m not an habitual reader of horror or supernatural fiction, but in Machen’s case I will gladly make an exception.

Foma Gordyeff (The Man Who Was Afraid) by Maxim Gorky

Born into the bourgeoisie

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) is one of the all-time greats in Russian and Soviet literary history, though American readers these days are unlikely to be familiar with his work. He is considered the founder of socialist realism, that Soviet genre of literature that advocates socialist and communist ideals. While we often hear about Russian writers or artists who were persecuted by the Soviet government, Gorky was embraced by the Soviets as a national hero. That’s not to say he was a sell-out to the regime in power, however. Gorky really believed in socialism and wrote realist works with proletarian themes. His fiction gained a wide readership in Western Europe and America in the early 20th century, back when readers in those nations were more sympathetic to labor and more open to socialist ideas. As the world became disgusted with Joseph Stalin and his authoritarian regime, however, Gorky’s brand of literature fell out of favor with readers outside the Soviet Union.

Gorky’s novel Foma Gordyeff was published in 1899. The title of the book is the name of its main character. The original title in Russian is Фома Гордеев. The 1901 translation by Herman Bernstein, available in the public domain, bears the spelling I’ve used in the title of this review. Within that edition, however, the name is spelled at least three different ways: Gordyeff, Gordyeef, and Gordyeeff. Alternate English spellings include Gordeyev and Gordjejew. The Man Who Was Afraid was tacked onto an English translation and doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense in relation to the book itself.

Foma Gordyeff is the son of a rich father who owns a successful shipping business that moves agricultural and industrial goods up and down the Volga River. From a young age, Foma is groomed to take over the family business, even though, as Gorky bluntly states, he’s not very smart. As a young man, Foma has a love affair that ends disappointingly and instills in him a bitterness toward the hypocrisy of polite society. When his father dies, Foma is taken under the care of his godfather, also his father’s right-hand-man, Yakov Mayakin, who continues to train Foma in the shipping business while trying to control every other aspect of the young man’s life. As Foma learns that Mayakin and capitalists like him are greedy exploiters of labor, he loses interest in the family business and starts leading a dissipated life of drinking and partying. He can find no satisfaction in life and longs to be free of Mayakin and his father’s legacy.

Foma Gordyeff is an anti-capitalist novel, but it stops short of being a pro-socialist novel. The hero is a wealthy bourgeoisie, and the word “proletariat” isn’t even mentioned until three-quarters of the way through the book. For the most part, this novel is simply about a rich guy continually bitching about how life is meaningless and sucky, and that goes on way too long. Gorky never gets you to like Foma before he turns him into a bitter, insufferable grouch. Gorky tried to cap the story off with a shocking ending, but it just feels week and anticlimactic. This novel is much less radical than the works of some American writers of the time, like Jack London (The Iron Heel) and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle). A few years after the publication of Foma Gordyeff, Gorky himself would crank the red rhetoric higher in works like The Mother.

London, a proclaimed socialist himself, loved this novel and even wrote an introduction to one of its English-language editions. That’s not surprising, since London, although born poor, was practically an American incarnation of Foma. London not only shared Gorky’s political beliefs but shared Foma’s depressing outlook on life and disgust at the pointless shallowness of much of modern capitalist society. By the time you’ve read through this protracted and dreary exercise in pessimism, you might find their depressing outlook to be contagious.

Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson by Paul Lawrence Farber

A brief primer on the history of natural history

Paul Lawrence Farber (1944–2021) was a professor of the history of science at Oregon State University. His specific area of interest was biology and natural history. His book Finding Order in Nature was first published in 1994. It relates how, over the course of about 250 years, the science of natural history progressed from the earliest efforts at species classification to the development of unified theories of life and the discovery of universal laws of nature.

Farber begins in the mid-18th century with the work of Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus and France’s Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, both of whom brought the classification of species to a systematic level that formed the foundation of modern natural history as we know it today. Many of the subsequent chapters revolve around conflicts of opposing views in the biological sciences: religious vs. secular views, form-ists (e.g. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire) vs. function-ists (e.g. Georges Cuvier), experimental physiologists vs. collector/taxonomists, morphology vs. genetics. Of course, there’s a chapter on Charles Darwin, as well as those who championed his theory of evolution (e.g. Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Henry Huxley) and those who opposed it (e.g. Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen). As the subtitle indicates, the book ends with the recent work of E. O. Wilson, who pretty much gets a chapter all to himself.

This book is in Johns Hopkins University Press’s series Introductory Studies in the History of Science. The volumes in this series are deliberately intended to be brief overviews of their particular domains of science. Judging by Farber’s book alone, the only one I’ve read, these books are indeed introductory and written for students or other nonscientists. Finding Order in Nature runs about 200 pages. There are only about two or three footnotes per chapter and a bibliographic essay at the end. To me, this book reads as if it were meant to be a textbook for undergraduate students. The reading level is accessible enough, however, that it could even be used as a text for a high school course, if a course on such a subject existed.

I myself am not a scientist, but I read quite a few history books and biographies of naturalists. I like to live vicariously through their travels, researches, and discoveries. I was hoping that by reading this book I might discover some naturalists I’d never heard of and perhaps a few books I might want to pursue reading. The contents of Finding Order in Nature, however, were already largely familiar to me. In each of the book’s nine chapters, Farber covers two or three major players in natural history, and for the most part they are very well-known individuals. The most I got out of this was a few interesting biographical details on some of the scientists featured. I found a few titles of interest in the bibliographic essay, but the list of books is almost entirely comprised of secondary texts from the past fifty years rather than accounts written by the naturalists themselves.

That’s not to say that the book was a disappointment. I kind of knew what I was getting into when I bought it (as a Kindle Daily Deal). Farber accomplishes exactly what he set out to do. If I had read this book in my college days, it would have sparked my interest in natural history and given me a basic foundation for building further knowledge. At my present state of life and education, it was a brief and satisfying recap of a subject that I enjoy.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories by B. Traven

Ten well-drawn tales of Mexico

The information we have on author B. Traven’s life is sketchy. The name is a pseudonym, and he deliberately kept his real identity a secret. Journalists and literary scholars have connected him to prior aliases, but I don’t think his actual birth name has ever been ascertained with certainly. He was born in Germany and emigrated to Mexico in 1924. Traven wrote all of his literary works in the German language, and most of his fiction is set in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories, a collection of Traven’s short fiction, was published in 1966 by the American publisher Hill and Wang. Some of the volume’s ten stories had been previously published in a German-language collection entitled Der Busch, published in 1928. One story, “The Cattle Drive” is an excerpt from Traven’s debut novel The Cotton-Pickers (1926). As is typical of Traven’s work, all of the stories in this volume take place in Mexico.

Two of the stories included here are longer and more substantial than the other eight. In “The Night Visitor,” an American farmer in Mexico loses himself in his neighbor’s extensive library and becomes obsessed with pre-Columbian Mexican history. “Macario” has the feeling of an old Mexican folktale that Traven has adapted for modern readers through some O. Henry-esque storytelling. The title character, a poor, overworked woodchopper, has one great desire in life: to eat a roasted turkey all by himself. This humorous story takes some wonderfully unexpected turns. In both these selections, Traven inserts some supernatural elements that create a Twilight Zone effect. He doesn’t overdo it, however, to the point where these tales venture into the horror or fantasy genres. Of the book’s shorter entries, the aforementioned “The Cattle Drive” and the comical “When the Priest Is Not at Home” are both very vividly rendered and engaging stories.

The American writer whom Traven most calls to mind, stylistically and philosophically, is Jack London. London spent a few years in Alaska and the Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush and was able to parlay that experience into half a career’s worth of novels and stories. He brought the Klondike alive for armchair readers who would never venture there. Traven does the same for Mexico. Both writers depict their chosen settings in a naturalistically realist style but draw romantic touches from regional folklore and legends. London was a socialist; Traven an anarchist. Both often feature proletarian themes and critiques of capitalism in their fiction. Later in his career, London did travel to Mexico and wrote one excellent story set there, entitled “The Mexican.” Traven, however, is the best writer of fiction about Mexico who’s not actually Mexican. Katherine Anne Porter might be his only real competition in English-language literature.

Traven’s writing on Mexico is more than just typical tourist fare. He really makes an effort to understand and interpret the culture, mindset, and spirit of the Mexican people, including the nation’s Indigenous inhabitants. As a Mexicophile myself, I appreciate that Traven gives Mexico the same attention and consideration that countless other authors have given to Paris or London. Traven’s work sometimes resembles the writings of the great Mexican author Juan Rulfo, whose landmark collection of short stories, The Burning Plain, was published in 1953. In general, the stories here in The Night Visitor are more lighthearted than Rulfo’s, but they share a similar grittily authentic, sometimes eerie atmosphere and a respect for the Mexican peasant, the Indian, and the working man. For an American reader, it is surprising that it takes a German author to reveal Mexico to the non-Latino. These enchanting stories make one wonder why more authors from the U.S. haven’t ventured south of the border for literary inspiration.

Stories in this collection

The Night Visitor

Effective Medicine

Assembly Line

The Cattle Drive

When the Priest Is Not at Home

Midnight Call

A New God Was Born

Friendship

Conversion of Some Indians

Macario

A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas

Speaking truth to power in the 16th century

Perhaps a half a dozen contemporary book-length accounts of the Spanish conquest of Latin America have survived. These accounts now serve as foundational texts in Latin American history. Much of what we know about the early days of conquest and colonization come from just a few narratives, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, the autobiographical Journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the Narrative of Some Things of New Spain by an anonymous member of Hernán Cortés’s army. Indigenous accounts of this period are even scarcer. One Spaniard, however, did stand up for the Native peoples of the Americas and documented their experience of oppression and genocide under the Spanish conquerors.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was among the first Spaniards to arrive in the New World. His father, who had served on one of Christopher Columbus’s voyages of exploration, brought his family across the Atlantic in 1502 to become colonists on the island of Hispaniola. At first, Bartolomé de las Casas lived on a farm with slaves and participated in raids and massacres of the Native population. In 1514, however, he had a change of heart and began campaigning to end slavery and the abuse of the Indigenous people of the Americas. He had been ordained a secular priest in 1507 and entered the Dominican order in 1522. De las Cases wrote A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542 and, during one of his trips back to Spain, presented the document to King Charles V of Spain and members of the Council of the Indies in hopes of influencing policy changes in Spain’s governing of the Americas. The Brief Account was published in book form in 1552.

The book is divided into chapters based on geographic location, starting with Hispaniola, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands. Mexico is divided into several chapters according to the provincial divisions of the time. Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, and the Rio de la Plata region (near Buenos Aires) are all covered. In each district, de las Casas details how the Spaniards subdued, persecuted, and tortured the Native population. De las Casas traveled to quite a few of these locations himself, so much of his testimony is based on first-hand knowledge. Some chapters, however, are drawn from letters or previous documents written by other sympathetic clergymen. De las Casas cites a lot of population and death statistics, but his figures should be taken with a grain of salt considering the difficulty of achieving accurate numbers in those times.

The historical importance of this document is immeasurable, but is it a pleasant read? Of course not. It’s horrifying and demoralizing, but that goes with the territory of this subject matter. De las Casas, as an author, also has some shortcomings. If you’re expecting an eloquent philosophical essay condemning slavery, like someone might have written in the Enlightenment Era, you’ll be disappointed. The text is basically just a catalogue of atrocities listed one after the other, with very little pausing for reflection and almost no conclusive summation. Some of the more interesting passages relate how groups of Indians fought back against the conquistadores. Although such efforts were ultimately crushed, they do indicate that the Native Americans were not merely passive and ignorant victims. One odd authorial choice that de las Casas makes is to omit the names of the perpetrators of these war crimes. Instead, he’ll use phrases like “a certain tyrant” or “this captain” or “that pirate.” In some cases, one can tell when he’s talking about Columbus, Hernán Cortés, or Ponce de Leon, for example, but one would have to be a professor of Latin American history to identify all of the unnamed persons he accuses in this book.

De las Casas has his share of critics. One measure he advocated to lesson the oppression of the Indians was to increase the African slave trade. Whether or not the Brief Account really brought about tangible changes in Spanish America, his speaking truth to power and exposing these crimes is commendable. If nothing else, we owe de las Casas a debt of gratitude for the historical documentation he has provided of this time and place.   

Dynamo by Eugene O’Neill

Failed attempt at profundity

I’m gradually working my way through the complete works of Eugene O’Neill, great American playwright and winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill also won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, but this lesser-known play was definitely not one of his award winners. Dynamo premiered on the stage in 1929, with future movie star Claudette Colbert in one of the lead roles. The production ran for 50 performances, but that was considered a failure compared to O’Neill’s more successful efforts. After the stage debut, O’Neill made significant revisions to the text—including adding some new scenes and deleting a few characters—before publishing Dynamo in book form.

As the curtain rises, the set consists of a pair of two-story houses on the stage. Living rooms are on the bottom floors, bedrooms above. In some scenes, the front-facing wall of a house is removed; revealing the occupants within; in others, the walls remain, and the rooms are concealed. Characters frequently lean out of windows and converse with other individuals outside. In the house on the right lives the Light family: the Reverend Hutchins Light, his wife Amelia, and their son Reuben. In the house on the left lives the Fifes: Ramsay Fife, his wife May, and daughter Ada. Hutchins Light is a sanctimonious Christian, and Ramsay Fife is a confrontational atheist. The two fathers, therefore, have a natural and intense antipathy for one another. Ramsay Fife works at the local power plant, but Mr. and Mrs. Light look down on the Fife family as if they were trash.

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the two young adults, Reuben and Ada, are in love with each other. Mother and father Light in no way want their son involved with Ada. Fife, on the other hand, seems to view the relationship as a satisfying prank—his daughter dating Reuben is a great way of sticking it to that pompous self-righteous Reverend Light. The play is primarily concerned with Reuben’s growth into manhood. As he pursues his relationship with Ada, and witnesses some hypocritical behavior by the adults, Reuben’s ideas on love, sex, and religion change over the course of the play.

A debate between Atheism and Christianity would seem like a good premise for O’Neill, the master of dramatic realism, but here in Dynamo he takes it in such a weird direction, the play often feels like a comedy. Electricity is a theme that runs throughout the play, in the imagery of lightning, the power plant and its dynamo, and as a symbol for materialistic atheism. One character sees electricity—or in a larger sense, atomic forces—as the higher power in the universe. That’s not too far off from what many materialists, determinists, monists, or pantheists believe. When said character starts worshipping electricity as a god, however, O’Neill has taken that idea too far into silly territory.

We generally remember O’Neill for his classic plays about dysfunctional families, alcoholics, or sailors, but he occasionally wrote plays that were more experimental in nature. While some of those forays into more avant garde fare are interesting, this is one of O’Neill’s failed experiments. Dynamo might have had something worthwhile to say about the place of faith in the modern world, but O’Neill paints his symbolism with too broad a brush.