John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) was an american humorist who lived in the New York suburb of Yonkers. He had a long and multifaceted career penning articles, satires, fantasies, as well as some genuine undiluted nonsense. He is typically cited for a kind of silly fantasy genre named after him involving interactions among famous dead historical figures in the afterlife. But his patented nonsense stories go well beyond that and include all sorts of inventions and lunatic humor, some of which broach actual surrealist themes.
A prolix heterogene, there is nevertheless buried among the tongue in cheek satire a genuine surrealist vein of inquiry, touching on the nature of dreams, nonsense, invention and poetic subversion. In particular there is a kind of off-handed inventiveness from many of his characters who have a habit of soap-boxing their very peculiar notions. He is also very keen on the upending of literary expectations and the introduction of bizarre constraints. These strange ideas and mechanisms are usually delivered as asides by characters in his more standard comic settings, but they patently steal the show. Consider the appeals of this intellectual “lobster shop” from his nonsense book Andiron Tales (1996), which is described but never actually visited:
“What’s the fun in the Lobster shop?” asked Tom.
“Purely intellectual, if you know what that means,” said the Bellows. “You get your mind filled there instead of your stomach. You meet the wittiest oysters, and the most poetic clams, and the most literary lobsters at the Lobster shop you ever saw. For my part I love the Lobster shop.”
Another interesting Bangsian penchant is the endowment of speech and opinion to various inanimate objects, fire pokers, engines etc. Not atypical for nonsense writers, but Bangs focuses intensely on the particular “subjectivity” of objects, imagining critiques of everyday life from their perspective. This is especially interesting in his nonsense novel Andiron Tales (which, in addition to its brilliant anti-plot is illustrated by the screwball cartoonist Dwig). On top of the finely grained nonsense, there are also elements of a poetic criticism delivered by some of the objects themselves. Like Carroll’s Jabberwocky, explications of nonsense in the story are also very pertinent to its non-interpretation. In this extract, an animate fire bellows gives his theory of the superiority of Unwritten Poetry:
“‘Unwritten Poems,’ eh? “said Tom, to whom the title seemed curious.
“Yes,” said the Bellows. “The book had three hundred pages, all nicely bound—twenty-six lines to a page—and each beginning with a capital letter, just as poetry should. Then, so as to be quite fair to all the letters, I began with A and went right straight through the alphabet to Z.”
“But the poems?” demanded Tom”
“They were unwritten just as the title said,” returned the Bellows. “You see that left everything to the imagination, which is a great thing in poetry.”
With regards to dreams, one work that deserves notice is the oneiric novel The Dreamers: A Club: Being a More or Less Faithful Account of the Literary Exercises of the First Regular Meeting of That Organization (1899).
This slapstick novel describes the formation of a club of hack litterateurs who decide to save the time and effort of writing individual masterpieces and instead collectively pool the resources of their dreams, typed out at meetings by a faithful oneirostenographer, into a regular literary journal.
“It’s a well-known fact,” said Bedford—“a sad fact, but still a fact—that if Poe had not been a hard drinker he never would have amounted to a row of beans as a writer. His dreams were induced—and I say, what’s the matter with our inducing dreams and then putting ’em down?”
That was the scheme in a nutshell—to induce dreams and put them down. The receipt was a simple one. The club was to meet once a month, and eat and drink “such stuff as dreams are made of”; the meeting was then to adjourn, the members going immediately home and to bed; the dreams of each were to be carefully noted in their every detail, and at the following meeting were to be unfolded such soul-harrowing tales as might with propriety be based thereon. An important part of the programme was a stenographer, whose duty it would be to take down the stories as they were told and put them in type-written form, which Dobbs was sure he had heard an editor say was one of the first steps towards a favorable consideration by professional readers of the manuscripts of the ambitious.
Nor were the others to whom the proposition was advanced any less desirous to take part. They saw, one and all, opportunities for a very desirable distinction through the medium of the Dreamers, and within two weeks of the original formation of the plan the club was definitely organized. Physicians were consulted by the various members as to what edibles contained the properties most likely to produce dreams of the nature desired, and at the organization meeting all but Billy Jones were well stocked with suggestions for the inauguration dinner.
The novel recounts the methods undertaken by the members to invoke the powers of dreaming. It then gives an account of the dream stories of each of the members. These read more like nonsense screwball narratives in the vein of a Marx Bros comedy than a strictly faithful dream narrative. Nevertheless they are full of thrilling black humor and a certain deranged smattering of genuine oneiric elements. Take for example the dream of the eccentric Van Squibbler (a satirical knockoff of a famous character named Van Bibber), who encounters a helpless girl in Central Park and is suddenly beset upon by an escaped lion. Van Squibbler does the right thing and runs off but leaves his shoes behind, the girl is devoured whole along with the shoes and the lion chokes to death on them (size 9 3/4 B).
Another involves a man high on opium engaged in detailed discussions with the animate donkey engine and other garrulous mechanical club of this and that known as the Techincalities on a steamship.
One member who was unable to dream is represented in their journal by blank pages. The drily delivered but bizarre invention-as-joke-or-not seems to be his specialty:
“I don’t know about that,” observed Monty St. Vincent. “Tom hadn’t anything to do with it—it was the dinner. Honor to whom honor is due, say I. Praise the cook, or the caterer.”
“That’s the truth,” put in Billie Jones. “Fact is, when this book of ours comes out, I think, instead of putting our names on the title-page as authors, the thing to do is to print the menu.”
John Kendrick Bangs clearly sees potential in the exploitation of dream life. He returns to the theme in his novel Inventions of the Idiot (1904). Here, the eponymous Idiot explicates his idea for an oneiric stimulant called “Dreamaline”:
“Ah—just what is this Dreamaline?” asked Mr. Whitechoker, interested.
“That, sir, is the question which I am now trying to answer for myself,” returned the Idiot. “If I could answer it, as I have said, I could rule the world—everybody could rule the world; that is to say, his own world. It is based on an old idea which has been found by some to be practicable, but it has never been developed to the point which I hope to attain…”
And then:
On each bottle of what I should call ‘Literary Dreamaline,’ to distinguish it from ‘Art Dreamaline,’ ‘Scientific Dreamaline,’ and so on, I should have printed explicit directions showing consumers how the dose should be modified to meet the consumer’s taste. One man likes a De Maupassant story. Let him take his Dreamaline straight, lie down and dream. He’d get his De Maupassant story with a vengeance. Another likes the modern story in realism—a story in which a prize might be offered to the reader who finds a situation, an incident in the three hundred odd pages of the book he reads. This man could take a spoonful of Dreamaline and dilute it to his taste. A drop of Dreamaline, which taken raw would give a man a dream like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, put into a hogshead of pure water would enable the man who took a spoonful of it before going to bed to fall asleep and walk through a three-volume novel by Henry James. Thus every man could get what he wanted at small expense. Dreamaline for readers sold at a dollar a quart would give every consumer as big and varied a library as he wished, and would be a great saving to the eyes. People would have more time for other pleasures if by taking a dose of Dreamaline before retiring they could get all their literature in their sleeping hours. Then every bottle would pay for itself ten times over if on awakening the next morning the consumer would write out the story he had dreamed and publish it for the benefit of those who were afraid to take the medicine…Then I should have Art Dreamaline. You could have it arranged so that by a certain dose you could have old masters all over your house; by another dose you could get a collection of modern French paintings, and by swallowing a whole bottle you could dream that your walls were lined with mysteries that would drive the Impressionists crazy with envy. In Scientific Dreamaline you would get ideas for invention that would revolutionize the world…
…In short, Dreamaline would go into every walk of life. Music, letters, art, poetry, finance. Every man according to his bent or his tastes could partake. Every man could make with it his own little world in which he was himself the prime mover, and so harmless would it be that when next morning he awoke he would be as tranquil and as happy as a babe. I hope, gentlemen, to see the day when Dreamaline is an established fact, when we cannot enter a household in the land that does not have hanging on its walls, after the manner of those glass fire hand-grenades, a wire rack holding a row of bottles labelled Art, Letters, Music, and so on, instead of libraries, picture-galleries, music-rooms, and laboratories. The rich and the poor alike may have it. The child who loves to have stories told to him will cry for it; the poor wanderer who loves opera and cannot afford even to pass the opera-house in a cable-car, can go into a drug-store, and for a cent, begged of a kind-hearted pedestrian on the street, purchase a sufficient quantity to imagine himself a box-holder; the ambitious statesman can through its influences enjoy the sensation of thinking himself President of the United States. Not a man, woman, or child lives but would find it a boon, and as harmless as a Graham cracker. That, gentlemen, is my crowning invention, and until I see it realized I invent no more. Good-morning.””
We get a sense of poetic revolution and the real earth-shattering consequences of dreaming, a utopian cataloguing of the pleasure principle unbounded, arm in arm with the limitless prospect of the dream. Such passages are worth blundering through the exchanges of dry/zany humor that usually precede them. While much of Bangs’ writing skirts the cartoonish satirical jockeying typical of his era, it will certainly be well worth scouring his (many) books for more such inventions.
Jason Abdelhadi