Eric Ericson

Eric Ericson (b. Blaby, Leicestersire, 23 June 1925; d.reg. North Surrey, Oct-Dec 2006)

In the short span of five years, between 1978 and 1983, Eric Ericson published four books, and then the name disappears from the public record. Three are occult novels, and the fourth is occult nonfiction. The only known facts about him, for many years, were that he was born in 1925 (sourced from the US copyright registrations), and, according to the short biographical note on the rear flap of one of his books, that in 1981 he lived in Sunbury-on-Thames (in North Surrey). Many have suspected that the name was a pseudonym; that is correct. An online commentator has noted that Eric Priestley Towers left his research papers for his 1986 biography of Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-1781) to the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, and an accompanying biographical file records that he wrote novels under the pseudonyms Roderick Milton, Eric Ericson, and Tony Caxton.* I believe this is correct. 

Eric Priestley Towers was the son of Sidney Towers (1900-1968) and Winnifred May Priestley, who were married in Blaby in Leicestershire on 22 June 1924. The couple settled in nearby Wigston Magna. Eric was educated at Newton's Grammar School and at Jesus College, Cambridge. During W.W.II he served in the army in Italy and Austria, and supported the Allied Military Government in Vienna. His first known writings were all published under the name Roderick Milton. These include contributions (stories and articles) to Lilliput magazine throughout the 1950s. His first two books were published by Rupert Hart-Davis, Magic City: Three Stories of Vienna under Allied Occupation (1950), per the title on the dust-wrapper, and The Lightning That Struck Me (1951), the story of a man who wants to escape from behind the Iron Curtain. Tell Them in Sparta (Methuen, 1962) is a historical novel of the Battle of Thermopylae. It came out in paperback from the New English Library in 1964. 

author photo from a Tony Caxton book

 

Towers married Edith Alexandra Kuhnova Bartosch (1917-1977) in 1947, and after her death he married again in 1978 (his second spouse was named Helen: Towers dedicated two books to her). Towers worked professionally in corporate and public relations, so his use of pseudonyms for his secondary interest in writing may be seen as showing discretion. Certainly, for his next brace of books, with their details of the inner workings of sex-magic cults, a pseudonym would have been necessary. These are the four books published as Eric Ericson, three of which are mass market paperbacks from the New English Library. The first, The Sorcerer (February 1978), begins interestingly, with a young scientist introduced into a sex-magick cult by his latest lover. He quickly learns it is a coven of Satanistic witches, led by the sinister Frazer. The writing and plotting are over-the-top in many ways (particularly the sex scenes), but the supernatural powers are real and used mercilessly. 

The second Ericson novel, The Woman Who Slept with Demons (January 1980), continues along the same line, following a young veterinarian who sees a woman having sex with a demon. The book quickly becomes a kind of exploration of various types of sexual debauchery.

The third Ericson book is not a novel but a dictionary of people associated with the dark arts, from artist Aubrey Beardsley to Aleister Crowley, Gilles de Rais, Rasputin and Gerald Gardner. The full title is: The World, the Flesh, the Devil: A Biographical Dictionary (1981). This book was dedicated to Helen.

Master of the Temple (March 1983) is the final Ericson book, and its narrative is interrupted with various info-dumps of occult history (Ericson has even added eleven pages of notes about the story, chapter by chapter, at the end of the book). The main character is both a sales manager for a biscuit company and a sex magician. The narrative alternates between business meetings and sex with women, first in Europe then in America. Back in England it gets even weirder, about which the less said the better.

The three novels published in mass market format have rather garish covers (see below). One can't recommend any of them; they are pulpish, crude, cringe-inducing, and sexist in dated ways. The first two Eric Ericson novels were published in hardcover in the US by St. Martin's of New York. 

Towers published his next book under his own name, as by Eric Towers. It is a reconstructed biography of Sir. Francis Dashwood, an eighteenth century politician around whom legends of black magic and devil worship grew, making up the myth of the Hell Fire Club at Medmenham Abbey in Buckinghamshire. Dashwood: The Man and the Myth (1986) is the second book dedicated to Helen. 

For his last two books, Towers returned to St. Martin's Press of New York, who had published hardcovers of two Eric Ericson novels. These two mystery novels were both set in England, but published only in the US, under the Tony Caxton byline. Murder in a Quiet Place came out in July 1994;  Bowker's Bonfire in March 1996. Both feature Police Inspector Denis Bowler.

* This information appears in the Comments added by "Ged"  to a post on the Ericson novels located here.

Notes: Barry Hughart

Barry Hughart (his surname is pronounced  hew-gert) died in 2019 at the age of 85.  His career as a writer of fantasy was short-lived, but his work was acclaimed. His first novel, Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was (1984), was the co-winner of the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (along with Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock), and it won the 1986 Mythopoeic Award for Best Fantasy Novel. It was the first of three novels in a series. The second book was The Story of the Stone (1988), and the third, Eight Skilled Gentlemen (1991). Subsequently, all three were collected as The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox (1998). With increasing disappointment with his publishers, he left the field. He gave few interviews, and for the most part didn't say much publicly about himself. But these stray comments can be used, along with genealogical resources, to give somewhat of an overview of his life.

He, and a twin brother Peter, were born in Peoria, Illinois, on 13 March 1934. He had a sister one year older, and a half-sister from his father's first marriage. His parents were John Harding Page Hughart, Jr. (1899-1963) and Annie Veronica Barry (1907-1977), who were married in Chicago in 1931. In the 1930 US Census, his father was listed as the manager of a lumber company, and in the 1940 US Census as a salesman for a pipe manufacturing company, while Hughart's Contemporary Authors entry notes his father was "a naval officer." (The father became a Captain in the U.S. Navy in World War II.) His mother (known familiarly as Veronica), according to her obituary in the Arizona Daily Star for 4 August 1977, was an artist, architectural designer, and former journalist. She had attended school in North Carolina, and lived in Illinois and Connecticut before moving to Arizona in 1941, where she operated a guest ranch near Bonita, Arizona, beginning in 1948.  She and her family moved to Tucson in 1951. In the early 1950s she wrote a syndicated newspaper column titled "What a Woman Thinks." 

Barry and his brother are known to have attended the Greenfield school in Arizona, and Barry also attended Andover in Connecticut, in the class of 1952. He went to Columbia University (A.B., 1956), and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1956-60. From 1960-63 he worked with a military surplus weapons supplier in the Near East, and from 1963-65 in the Far East. From 1965-70 he was manager at the Lenox Hill Book Shop in New York City, after which time he became a writer.

Hughart characterized his early life as follows in the flap copy of the 2008 Subterranean Press edition of the omnibus of The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox:

Barry Hughart, Fear magazine 1989

When I got out of Andover in the 1950s I suffered from fairly severe depression, but this was back when the only such term recognized by the medical profession was 'depressive' following 'manic' which was one bad gig until some genius renamed it 'bipolar disorder' and after that it couldn't harm a fly. Since I wasn't lucky enough to qualify for manic and clinical depression didn't exist they diagnosed schizophrenia and packed me off to a booby hatch. (Which was not entirely a bad thing. Man, the scene at Kings Count Psychotic Ward was like awesome!) Then I was promoted to a slightly less odorous asylum where Doctor Oscar Diethelm expounded upon the delights of going snickety-snick on my frontal lobes, and while it would take too long to explain I managed to escape to Columbia University. There I found myself groping through weird landscapes obscured by clouds of pot behind which pimpled prophets of the Beat Generation shrieked, 'Our minds destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging through black streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, or what the fuck, something like that. Yo, daddy-o!' and I said to myself, 'Barry, you have found a home.' 

When I wafted back into the world a few years later my depression was still there but I was allowed to prove my sanity by blowing things up for the U.S. Air Force. No, not Vietnam. Planting ingenious and mostly illegal mine fields around the eternal DMZ in Korea. Time passed but not much else. I moved to the Arizona/Sonoran Desert where I could live quietly, surrounded on all sides by prickly pear, cat's claw, devil's horns, barrel cactus, jumping cactus, and illegal immigrants. I still occasionally dreamed of bright flashes followed by BOOM! which was a shame because I had other memories of the Far East: good memories, warm memories, and in 1977—ten years before Prozac—I decided to use those and whatever else I could come up with to create an alternate world into which I could creep on dark and stormy nights and pull over my head like a security blanket. So I read a lot and scribbled a lot and gradually the land of Li Kao began to take shape. But the first draft of Bridge of Birds didn't really work and I couldn't see what was wrong, so I dumped it into a drawer for a few years. Then one day I read Lin Yutang's The Importance of Understanding and found the prayer to a little girl that I mention in a footnote in the final version. It made me realize that while I'd invented good things like monsters and marvels and mayhem the book hadn't really been about anything. I opened the drawer. 'Okay!' I said to myself. 'This book is going to be about love.' And so it is, and so are ones that followed

The original draft of The Bridge of Birds is online here.  It was printed as a standalone trade paperback volume to the slipcased edition, limited to 200 copies, of the 2008 Subterranean Press omnibus, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

According to Hughart, the rewritten Bridge of Birds was turned down by 17 publishers before it finally sold to St. Martin's Press as a straight novel. A reader at Alfred Knopf returned the manuscript with a haughty comment: "This is not historically accurate!"  Hughart noted: "Paperback rights were sold to Del Rey thanks to Anne McCaffrey, who was solicited for a comment on the hardcover, loved the book, and later pressed it on to Judy-Lynn Del Rey in a New York taxi" (Locus, December 1985). Thus, rather reluctantly, he became a fantasy author, though he felt that his books were more adventure or detective stories. 

In an interview with Jerry Kuntz from January-February 2000, Hughart reflected: 

The master Li books were a tightrope act and hard to write, but not, alas, very remunerative. Still, I would have continued as originally planned if I'd had a supportive publisher: seven novels ending with my heroes' deaths in the battle with the Great White Serpent, and their elevation to the Great River of Stars as minor deities guaranteed to cause the August Personage of Jade almost as much trouble as the Stone Monkey. Unfortunately I had St. Martins, which didn't even bother to send a postcard when I won the World Fantasy Award; Ballantine, which was dandy until my powerhouse editor dropped dead and her successors forgot my existence; and Doubleday, which released The Story of the Stone three months before the pub date, guaranteeing that not one copy would still be on the shelves when reviews came out, published the hardcover and the paperback of Eight Skilled Gentlemen simultaneously, and then informed me they would bring out further volumes in paperback only, meriting, of course, a considerably reduced advance.

That put an end to the series, and one can't really blame Hughart for stopping.

There remain some mysteries of Hughart's bibliography yet to be solved.

In the Locus profile from December 1985, it states: The Bridge of Birds was “the first novel Hughart published under his own name, but he had previously written two pseudonymous novels which he now dismisses as ‘terrible—I’ve done with them and want to forget them.’” He clarified this a bit in his 1992 Contemporary Authors entry, noting he was "also author of screenplay for Bridge of Birds, and 'a couple of early novels under pseudonyms: out of print, unlamented, and the author prefers to forget them." But what are they about, and what are the pseudonyms?

In the profile of Hughart in the May/June 1989 issue of Fear, it is noted: “Despite the odd-job existence in the Far East, Hughart enjoyed writing: he did not intend to be a novelist but would have liked to have been a poet and, indeed, some of his verse did see publication.” Publication where? His Contemporary Authors entry notes that he was a "contributor of articles to periodicals, including Village Voice."  But none of these contributions are known.

Also in his Contemporary Authors entry, Hughart noted that he “worked as dialogue writer for films, including Devil’s Bride, Honeymoon with a Stranger, Man on the Move, The Other Side of Hell, Welcome Home Johnny Bristol, Snow Job, Special Effects, and When the Bough Breaks.  Some of these were released as films---e.g., Honeymoon with a Stranger (1969), Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol (1972), Snow Job (1972), but Hughart’s input was likely minimal. 

He did, however, write three known screenplays in this time period, whose copyright was registered with the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C.  These include “The Idol’s Eye” 68 pp., October 1970;  “Sing along with Billy Blake” 121 pp., including lyrics for one song, November 1971; and “Enemies of the People”  150 pp. March 1973.  All three are unproduced.

Again from his Contemporary Authors entry, he noted as his "work in progress": "Writing a novel, Dancing Girl, and preparing a screenplay for the work; continuously researching ancient China."  None of these ever appeared.

Finally, a recommendation for the Barry Hughart Bibliography, a website maintained by Mike Berro, an invaluable resource.  See here.  And it also hosts the interview with Hughart by Jerry Kuntz, January-February 2000, cited above.  Accessible here.

 

 

Richard Hodgens

Richard Hodgens (b. New Jersey, 7 August 1936; d. New Jersey, 23 June 1990)

Richard Hodgens is primarily remembered for his one book, a translation of part of Ariosto’s Orlando Furiosa that was published under the Ballantine Adult Fantasy imprint in 1973. Yet his wide-ranging interests and writings deserve more attention.

Richard Milton Hodgens was the middle of three children of Milton Gore Hodgens (1903-1972), a teacher at a trade school, and his wife, Loretta Loehnberg (1908-1988), who were married in Manhattan on 29 April 1929. Richard had a sister, Barbara, three years older, and another sister, Dale, seven years younger.

Richard was educated from the Glen Ridge High School, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and at New York University (B.A. and M.A.). Around 1959 he had started working on the staff of a trade journal, Quick Frozen Foods, edited by Sam Moskowitz, who brought Hodgens into contact with more science fiction enthusiasts.

Previously, as he was finishing high school, Hodgens had published two short science fiction stories, “The Claws in Clausmas”(with John Kirwan, a close high school friend) in Universe Science Fiction for January 1955, which is a parodic look at the attempts to disrupt the sacred commerciality of the Clausmas (as a counter to Christmas, the religious holiday); and “For Glory and the Empire” in Spaceway for June 1955 (which had been submitted to the magazine in 1953). He also wrote and illustrated a children’s story set on Mars for his younger sister. He continued writing occasional science fiction through the 1960s, leaving a small number of unpublished stories and novellas. His final published story was “One by One” in the Magazine of Horror, no. 23 (September 1968), in which the final of the twelve men dedicated to Good is pursued by Evil.

Hodgens had more success with nonfiction. His first significant publication was “A Brief, Tragical History of the Science Fiction Film” in Film Quarterly, v. 13 no. 2 (1959). In 2016, when reprinted in Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz, the editors wrote that Hodgens’s essay was “one of the first sustained critical attacks on the science fiction film as a debasement of the genre in comparison to its literary counterpart” (p. 150). Ray Bradbury wrote to Hodgens about this article on 17 December 1959: “When you speak of the film [The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms] as a ‘foolish fancy of Ray Bradbury’s’ you do me a terrible injury. The producers of that film purchased a short story of mine, ‘The Fog Horn’ … and only twenty seconds of my short story—I repeat, twenty seconds—appear.”

Hodgens in 1974

Hodgens contributed “Down with Dr. Strangelove and Other Political Science Fictions” to Tom Reamy’s Trumpet, no. 5 (April 1967) and “Notes on 2001: A Space Odyssey” to Trumpet, no. 9 (1969). Arthur C. Clarke commented on the latter in the next issue that “Hodgens’s article is one of the best I’ve read on the subject” (Trumpet, no. 10, 1969, p. 13). Hodgens had several letters of comment in Trumpet from 1965-1969, and contributed to Reamy’s other magazine, Nickelodeon, “Aristotle’s Word for Science Fiction Was Poesis” no. 2 (1976). In the late 1960s, Hodgens put together a portfolio of letters by and about Neil R. Jones (1909-1988), who is credited for the first use of the word “astronaut” in a story in 1930. This was never published.

Hodgens’s other significant body of criticism is on the science fiction stories of C.S. Lewis. Hodgens joined the New York C.S. Lewis Society at its founding, on 1 November 1969, and was a member for the remainder of his life. He contributed frequently to its Bulletin, both articles and book reviews.

Hodgens contacted Lin Carter in 1969 with a fan letter about Carter’s recently published Tolkien—A Look Behind “The Lord of the Rings”. They also discussed Carter’s anthology Dragons, Elves and Heroes, which came out in October 1969, and this brought about a casual discussion of the possibility of Hodgens translating a section of Orlando Furioso into prose for Carter’s in-progress anthology Golden Cities, Far. This, in turn, came out in October 1970. Carter included as the final selection a twenty-two page portion of Hodgens's translation of a section titled “The Palace of Illusion.” Carter also noted that if all were to go well, then Hodgens’s English prose translation would appear in 1971. But Ballantine’s precarious financial situation precluded this. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition of Orlando Furioso: The Ring of Angelica, Volume 1 finally came out in January 1973 (a reworked version of his “The Palace of Illusions” appears as part of chapter 12), the same month that the publisher was sold to Random House. A UK Pan/Ballantine edition appeared in September 1973. Carter’s introduction announced that Hodgens was now translating the entire book, and that “our new edition of Orlando Furioso will appear in several volumes, of which this is the first” (p. xvi). No further volumes were ever published, though rumors persisted that more of the translation had been completed. However, Hodgens's two sisters recall that while he had correspondence about other volumes, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series was discontinued before anything was contracted. Hodgens felt that the published book should not have been credited as “translated” by him but rather as “paraphrased in English prose” by him. And though he had been schooled in Latin and Spanish, he had taught himself Italian via records that he checked out from the library in order to do the translation. 

Mark Valentine has written an appreciation of Hodgens's book at Wormwoodiana. 

Hodgens died on 23 June 1990, after having been diagnosed with a brain tumor. A piece by Mary Gehringer of The New York C.S. Lewis Society, “In Memory of Richard Hodgens,” noted his “wide range of interests, which also included kung fu movies, junk food, much early science fiction and the correspondence of Byron. . . . More than one of us discussed with Richard a favorite, long-remembered, and longed-for book only to have the volume arrive in the mail as a gift from Richard. . . . Richard’s humor was droll and could catch you unaware. He had unexpected whimsy. In a children’s story he wrote, the characters grow new clothes with each change of season, shedding their old ones, and thus never have to take baths” CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, no. 244 (dated February 1990, but not published until months later), p. 4.

*I am grateful to Dale F. Hodgens for sharing her memories of her brother.