The Poison Book

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Nicholas Frankel. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,  2011 [1890]).

Robert W. Chambers. The King in Yellow. (London: Pushkin Press, 2017 [1895]). [This edition is out of print, but there are dozens of others available.]

The first of these two books was a major omission on my part until a few weeks ago. I don’t know how I hadn’t gotten around to Wilde’s classic, but I hadn’t. Chambers’s book was also familiar to me from long ago, from my teenage Lovecraft fixation (from which I have not entirely recovered). Chambers is an important influence on the Haunt of Providence, but it had never occurred to me to look for it before.

I had not expected the juxtaposition I found. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is supposed to be a play in two acts; the first act is disturbing, but reading the second act would radically alter your perceptions and put you in communication with a being known as Hastur, and the city of Carcosa, under black alien stars. Many of the stories in Chambers’s real book, the one we can read (published in 1895), begin with a short quote from the fictional book, enough to give us a sense of how off-putting it is, but, again, we can imagine reading it without being able to actually know what’s in it.

Though generally familiar with the outline of The Picture of Dorian Gray, I had no idea a book was involved in Dorian’s degeneration. Le Secret de Raoul is described as a poisonous book by Dorian, who finds it convenient to blame it for his slide into infamy. Chapter IX, a prose poem reflecting on the secret book, is a phantasmagoria of strange, esoteric and frequently scandalous topics. It too is a book you can imagine reading, but not quite fully picture. Even more interesting, the title of Le Secret de Raoul is only revealed in the original, unabridged version of Dorian Gray published in Lippincott’s magazine in America in 1890; it is suppressed and described only as a French novel bound in yellow in the British edition of 1891.

One of Wilde’s eminent biographers, Richard Ellmann (Oscar Wilde, New York: Knopf, 1987), finds the origin of Le Secret de Raoul in an actual book, A Rebours (Against Nature or Against the Grain) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. That book sounds a lot like Wilde’s Chapter IX: aestheticist, decadent, plotless. It describes the aesthetic/sensory experiences of its protagonist, des Esseintes, including explicit (by late 1800s standards) descriptions of a gay relationship.

It is possible that Chambers and Wilde came up with the idea of the poisonous book independently; there is no direct evidence that Chambers knew Dorian Gray. However, Dorian Gray’s being published in America five years before Chambers’s book, and the splash it made, as well as the interesting coincidence of the color yellow, strikes me powerfully as evidence for a line of transmission.

At first glance, the consequences of reading The King in Yellow are more cosmic and vertiginous than those of reading Le Secret de Raoul. However, Wilde describes the experience of reading Le Secret de Raoul as being accompanied by the sound of imaginary flutes; and a contemporary of Huysmans described his experience of reading A Rebours as opening up vistas of interplanetary space. (Wikipedia’s entry for A Rebours gave me these references. Once again, an excellent place to start!) This language is instantly familiar to anyone who has read Lovecraft’s descriptions of the experience of reading the Necronomicon: 

Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a black throne at the centre of Chaos. (Dreams in the Witch-House)

Looking over this tradition of the poison book, alongside Nicholas Frankel’s voluminous annotations on the Aestheticist movement in the late 19th century, I was struck by the purity of this idea: that one could write something that would completely transform a person’s mind. As a writer of fiction myself, it’s a heady idea, but I certainly can’t claim to have written anything so world-shattering myself. So I started thinking: does such a book actually exist?

Religious texts, of course, immediately leap to mind. Reading the KJV at a particular time in my life struck me with what certainly felt like supernatural force, and I’ve read plenty of accounts of people having similar experiences with the Torah and the Qur’an. No doubt the Vedas, the Analects, the Sutras and the Tao Te Ching have had as powerful effects on many people. To take a book I’ve talked about here, On the Origin of Species made a new world of thought possible. On the other hand, many people have read any or all of these and been quite unmoved. Wilde contemplates this possibility, since Dorian Gray receives the book from Lord Henry Wotton, who (to our knowledge) neither went mad nor murdered people. Chambers and Lovecraft wanted their books to go further.

Another thing that interests me is that all of these books, fictional and real, have a reputation. It is virtually impossible to encounter one of these books and not know that this is an object of power, at least for many people. You have to be prepared to have your mind blown to have it properly blown. But there’s different levels of preparation; how many Christians have set out to read the whole Bible, and pooped out somewhere in the second half of Exodus, with the interminable instructions for building the Tent of Meeting, followed by the nearly identical description of the actual construction?

There isn’t really any book like Le Secret de Raoul or The King in Yellow or the Necronomicon, that will have its predetermined effect on you whether you’re ready for it or not. So why do some of us wish there were? In my callow youth, I thought the Necronomicon was real and was determined to read it. I wanted there to be such a book, an aesthetic experience of total and irresistible power. A desire for such an absolute is a central religious wish: a being that simply and completely is, and that cannot be denied or resisted. In a world where everything is on a continuum, perhaps to contact such absolute Being is to be driven insane, just as Chambers and Lovecraft said. The Necronomicon is just the nightmare result of our fondest dreams.