Originally published in 1933 by The Macaulay Company, Yesterday's Burdens is the second novel by Robert M. Coates, "Lost Generation" writer and long-time art critic at The New Yorker. Prior to publication, three chapters of the novel appeared in The New Yorker under the title "The Dada City" (1930), and another chapter in The American Caravan, a Yearbook of American Literature (1931).
Yesterday's Burdens was first resurrected in 1975 by the Southern Illinois University Press as part of their “Lost American Fiction” series, and included a new afterword by Malcolm Cowley. A paperback version of that edition was published the following year by the Popular Library. The novel has been out of print since.
"Coates composed the book like a collage, employing an experimental writing style that incorporated billboards, advertising slogans, and traffic signs to make immediate and vivid the perceptions and experiences of the characters. In Yesterday's Burdens, Coates's 'Dada' spirit brings to life the cacophonous, visually chaotic and mentally demanding life of New York City."— Mathilde Roza & Jack Mearns, "Collecting Robert M. Coates," Firsts, The Book Collector's Magazine, October 2007
REVIEWS OF THE ORIGINAL EDITION
"Yesterday's Burdens is certainly one of the most original books of the year... The strange thing is that, despite the confusion, despite stylistic vagaries unequaled since E.E. Cummings's EIMI, Yesterday's Burdens is an enjoyable book."— The New York Times, December 10, 1933
"An arresting, free, unique work of art which may possibly leave an effect on novel-writing in the next few years."— Vanity Fair, February 1934
"Not easy reading because it is done in the Dadaistic style but worthwhile as a kaleidoscopic picture of our present kaleidoscopic life. Fine humor and written with distinction."— Scribner's, February 1934
“The writing in detail is always fresh and frequently excellent; some of the isolated episodes . . . are no less than beautiful.”— The American Mercury, April 1934
This new edition of Yesterday's Burdens contains Malcolm Cowley's afterword from the 1975 Southern Illinois University Press edition as well as a new introduction by Mathilde Roza, associate professor of American Literature and American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and author of Following Strangers: The Life and Literary Works of Robert M. Coates (University of South Carolina Press, 2011).
Robert M. Coates, The Eater of Darkness, 1929.
American expat name of Charles Dograr is tricked into firing a laser death ray. Chuck is so in love with the idea, he helps the laser's maker plan a bank job. Then it gets surreal. First published by Robert McAlmon in 1929.
Considered
by many to be one of the most unique, avant-garde works published by
the Lost Generation, The Eater of Darkness is hailed as the first
Dada novel published by an American. Previously out of print for more
than fifty years, this new edition has been updated with a new
introduction and contemporary material that pays homage to the
groundbreaking life and career of author Robert M. Coates.
“One
of the cleverest tours de force ever contrived by the pen of a wit.”
Young,
charming, and fresh from a passionate jaunt in France, Charles Dograr
leaves behind his French lover and returns to America to spend a year
in New York City.
Eager
to make his year in New York one to remember, Charles leaves his
boarding house room one night in search of an adventure. As he
wanders, Charles stumbles into the living quarters of Picrolas, an
eccentric, crazed scientist who refers to himself as “the Eater of
Darkness.” Picrolas reveals his prized invention: a remote-control
x-ray machine, designed to electrocute and kill at random by shooting
“x-ray bullets” into the brains of Picrolas’ intended targets.
Tricked
by Picrolas into releasing the trigger, Charles is instantly taken by
the machine and the power it holds. After a string of murders ensue,
Charles agrees to help Picrolas plot an elaborate bank heist, using
the x-ray bullets to kill the bank’s guards and any unlucky
witnesses that happen to be on the street during the heist.
As
the city is terrorized by these mysterious murders, Charles becomes
entangled in the fallout. Characters disappear and reappear; events
spiral in a disorienting, antirealistic fashion; and genres collide
in an unpredictable, dreamlike conclusion.
Often compared to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, The Eater of Darkness is many things: both an acclaimed crime novel and a study in surrealist fiction; an experimentation of style, structure, and syntax; and an innovative, avant-garde concoction from an author who wrote years ahead of his time.
I stumbled upon The Eater of Darkness by Robert M. Coates while undertaking research into visual prose, sometimes also called visual writing, for a recent lecture. I had never heard of the novel, first published in Paris in 1926 by Contact Editions with the help of modernist matriarch Gertrude Stein, and the title alone would have been enough to compel my attention. From descriptions, the book appeared to be a genre-busting collision of science fiction, murder mystery, and Dada and/or Surrealism. A spread reproduced online — the same spread I show below — seemed to indicate that it featured artful typographic arrangements, with texts wrapping around each other and fragmented syntax. Even more promisingly, the website where I found it proposed that its interlocking passages anticipated the multi-voiced patchwork layout of Jacques Derrida’s Glas, meticulously designed by the late typographer Richard Eckersley.
Unfortunately, the American paperback edition in question, published by Putnam in 1959, was not immediately accessible to me in London, and it was also expensive. But it seemed there was an alternative. Out of print for decades, the book was republished in 2012 by the latest incarnation of Olympia Press, notorious Parisian purveyor of narrative pornography and literary landmarks such as Lolita and The Naked Lunch. This cheap edition I could obtain at once. Alas, this screen dump of a book makes a complete hash of the typography and treats the spread that had interested me as though it were a linear text. No way around it: I found the cheapest copy of the 1959 edition available and waited for it to turn up.
In the meantime, I contacted Milton Glaser because the other thing that made The Eater of Darkness a book I wanted to see was Glaser’s cover design. The website with the spread also reproduces the back cover where he has a credit. It doesn’t look like Glaser as we came to know him as designer-illustrator — he was then around 30 — but it is still an enticing design. The uncanny atmosphere and disorientating compositional style of the book, described on the back as “the first surrealist novel in English,” are signaled by the vertically positioned title and author’s name (surely unusual on a novel at the time) and by the curious device of the reader-beckoning, centrally placed exclamation/question motif with the gothically styled points — a graphic “what the heck.”
The illustration, a black-and-white photo of a Joseph Cornell-like surrealistic box, to which vibrant color has been applied at the printing stage, is not at all Glaserish. The mechanical elements and optical discs reminiscent of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs represent the machine that the inventor and self-styled “Eater of Darkness” in the novel devises to kill people at a distance by means of a deadly, invisible “X-ray bullet.” “I very rarely ever use any art other than my own, so it may in fact be mine,” says Glaser, “but I have absolutely no recollection of having made it. I do, however, recall designing the cover.” I couldn’t find any occurrences online of the box as a freestanding work of art, suggesting that the piece was indeed made for the cover, and most probably by Glaser since there is no other credit.
The properly typeset 1959 edition of The Eater of Darkness turned out to contain fewer departures in visual prose than I had hoped. (My lecture was prepared for a one-day event at the Royal College of Art about the British experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose, and I included examples such as Glas, Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, and Mark Z. Danielewsi’s House of Leaves, alongside Brooke-Rose’s Thru.) From a layout point of view, the spread shown here, where the central character, Charles Dograr, learns from a newspaper report that the first victim has been found mysteriously dead, is the most adventurous in typographic terms. Still, this is a book saturated with the anti-conventional artistic ambitions of 1920s Paris where much of it was written. Just before the killing, the narrative devolves into a three-page list of objects that the X-ray bullet passes through before destroying its target’s brain, which reads like a gleefully sustained exercise in Surrealist chance encounter:
. . . a pack of cards
a glass eye
two felt slippers
the C in a Chop Suey sign
a cigarette holder
an umbrella
Reginald Marsh
a bottle of gin
[etc.]
Other devices include a chapter broken into sections labeled (a) to (i) like a textbook; footnotes (years before Nicholson Baker); an annotated diagram of the “engine of death”; conjunctions that lead on to empty spaces followed by other conjunctions; and a lengthy passage rendered as if describing a movie, with interpolated captions summarizing the scene in the manner of intertitles. It is worth adding that Coates felt it necessary to update some of the more obscure references for the 1959 edition. These changes can be spotted easily because the lines of type are lighter; the unsatisfactory Olympia Press edition has the original text.
The Eater of Darkness is shot through with bizarre incident, antic humor and unexpected swerves, and comparisons have been made with Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. The novel seems like perfect material for Exact Change, Dalkey Archive, or Atlas Press, and it deserves a proper reissue. Robert Myron Coates (1897-1973) had a long relationship with The New Yorker, where he was a contributor and art critic from 1937 to 1967, and he wrote other novels and short stories, but he has tended to be regarded as a “minor” writer and most of his fiction is out of print. His most committed advocate, Dutch academic Mathilde Roza, published the first biography about him in 2011 so a revival of interest may already be mounting. - Rick Poynor
https://designobserver.com/feature/on-the-trail-of-the-eater-of-darkness/37857
One of the advantages of being a student again is having access to a good library. I’ve long been intrigued by an obscure little book called The Eater of Darkness, a sci-fi pastiche and early example of Surrealist fiction in English, written by an American expatriate in Paris who later became a well-known art critic (to whom we owe the term ‘Abstract Expressionism’)—and what could be more intriguing than that? My curiosity about had been frustrated for years by the scarcity and expense of available copies: first editions are on sale for about £300 at the lower end of the scale, and more than £1,000 at the higher end, while even the 1959 reissue would set you back by about £30—all for a slender paperback of less than 200 pages.* When I learned that my university library has a copy of the first edition, I was delighted, but there was also a touch of trepidation that the high expectations I’d been building up would be confronted with a dry, justly-forgotten period piece, a curio of strictly academic interest. In fact, the book is a hoot from beginning to end.
The hero or anti-hero is Charles Dograr, a young man who becomes involved for no discernible reason in a murderous crime wave masterminded by ‘the old gentleman’, the many-aliased inventor of the ‘oculascope’, a machine which can kill at great distance and to a high degree of accuracy by means of what Dograr calls an ‘x-ray bullet’ (the diagram Coates includes of this apparatus is less Heath Robinson and more Joan Miró). When Dograr first looks through the oculascope, his vision is directed through a series of things, the series becoming one of those long, amusingly miscellaneous lists that seldom come as a surprise in modernist literature:**
a cigar humidor
the mechanism of an alarm clock
a roll of toilet paper
the chain of an electric light fixture
four pages of the New York Journal
the hand of the reader
an orange
an El station turnstile
a goldfish bowl.
a cushion
the calf of Fannie Brice’s leg
two kissing lips
an iron handrail
a corset string
a garbage can
a plate of ham sandwiches
Laurence Vail
Peggy Vail
a pack of cards
a stiletto
a glass eye
two felt slippers
a cigarette holder
an umbrella
an art-bronze bookrack
Harold Stearns
Floyd Dell
a clogged drain pipe
a sheaf of Shulte Cigar Store coupons
Malcolm Cowley
a tree
a bottle of gin
a street lamp in an open park. . .
You might expect to find some of these objects in fragmentary form in a Cubist painting, but while many of them can be visualized individually, the action that is supposed to link them is all but inconceivable—the curiosities and wonders of modern physics travestied into utter nonsense. The old gentleman’s expression of his scientific and philosophical creed, which defines ‘homo physico-philosophicus’ as a person to whom physics and metaphysics are synonymous, becomes ever more pseudo-scientific and nonsensical (‘And Form, therefor, is capable of indefinite projection through space—provided that the co-related energy be entirely endogenous !’).
It is entirely appropriate, then, that the figure at the centre of these shenanigans is an absurd bundle of mannerisms, attitudes and behaviours that can in no way be contained within a psychologically convincing character, even an insane one. Charles Dograr: the sensitive soul who murders without pity or motivation, who impersonates the relative of one of his victims, who fantasizes that innocent pedestrians are bent on robbing and killing him, who buys a bunch of silk shirts and music records before abruptly dumping them in the trash, who delivers a solemn hymn to plant-life (‘The vegetables are not vindictive’). At the centre of a nonsensical plot is a nonsensical protagonist, nothing but an occasion for authorial fun and games:
For Charles Dograr was one of those rare souls whose spirit seems to have been compounded, as it were, of more fragile substance, of emotion more volatile, perception more finely tunable than the rest, so that he rode currents of intuition that others sank through seeking the rock-bottom of logic, and was uplifted and exalted by the transcendental vapors of a perhaps earthly—even, to continue the figure ad locandum, miry—concept into which others, trudging, stuck bogged and bemisted.
So sound moved him more than hearing, vision more than sight, and his instinct sucked Truth, like honey, from the flower of Life, disdaining the syllogistic distillation of the comb. Briefly, he listened to the melody, not the words, of the Eternal Song, and he was just the person—perhaps the only one alive—to imagine there was any discoverable meaning in such a passage as this, when he found it in a book.
The punchline is anything but subtle, yet it made me laugh. Funnier still are the crazed antics that ensue from Dograr’s encounters with life in a 20th-century metropolis, a mode of existence which cannot accommodate a walking absurdity such as Dograr without chaos being the result. And yet from that chaos, there emerges a critique of the hidden absurdities of technological, capitalist modernity, in all its strait-laced humbug. Take, for instance, the moment when Dograr bumps into a total stranger on a busy street—an everyday occurrence in a major city, but one transformed into an extraordinary moment when Dograr, instead of exchanging the customary apologetic looks and walking on, beats the man senseless. A crowd of passers-by gathers around him to provide an audience for a rousing speech that extricates him from any unpleasantness (the idiosyncrasies of punctuation have been retained):
“This man would drag down the Fair Name of American Womanhood into the Mire of Infamy,” he proclaimed, pointing to his recumbent antagonist. “Bearing the outward semblance of Honor, Uprightness, and the Spirit of Fair-Play that is typical of American Manhood, he worms his way into the sanctity of the American Home ,and there works his foul way unobserved. That man—”, he drew himself to his full height—“was trying to get my wife to run away with him. And besides, he’s a Bolshevist !”
A confused murmur rose from the hoarse throats of the crowd—a mingling of cheers for Charles, and threats for the unconscious victim. Charles, with charming modesty, raised a deprecative hand, and vanished in the direction of the Grand Central.
Naturally, Dograr is unmarried. His puffed-up rhetoric, parodying that of the red-baiting press and of the blustering politicians who operate symbiotically with it, is all too effective; the unfortunate pedestrian becomes one of the novel’s several hapless victims—ordinary, unremarkable citizens who become entangled at random in the mechanisms of events beyond their comprehension. This fellow gets off relatively lightly; others are blown up or have their brains fried. The political reading that is available here is concurrent with the sense of a writer enjoying himself, messing around with meaningless non-lives and goofily disposing of them. The skewering of rhetorical clichés is expertly done, but fairly elementary; what gives the joke its kick is the little absurd touch at the end—the ‘deprecative hand’ raised ‘with charming modesty’—and it is this that caused me to disturb the peace of the library’s Rare Books reading room with one of several very audible giggles.
This is a funny book, as funny as Flann O’Brien in full flight. The highpoint of its humour is, I think, when the author promises to describe the habitation and person of a young lady, only to withhold most of the detail on the grounds of decency:
In fact, had the reader been led actually to open the door of that chamber at the hour mentioned, the first glance about the walls of the room would have led him (if he be as mature in experience as we suppose he is) to close the door softly and make his way out to the street again (if he be as decent and upright a man as we pray him to be).
Once again, Coates is not content with the joke as it stands, hilarious though it is, but takes it to even greater heights of comic invention:
In other words, the lady was a prostitute. In the flesh, the reader must have fled from her—or paid ten dollars to investigate her charms. We see no valid reason why the readers of this book should be otherwise dealt with. On receipt of ten dollars we will forward in plain wrapper a complete and catalogued (illustrated) description of Madame Helène Montmorency.
At this point, I dissolved into something far less controlled and dignified than mere giggles.
The book is full of such delightful tricks: a column of a newspaper report running alongside the novelistic narrative, the report degenerating into gibberish; a purple-prosed Scotland Yard report (‘the heavy-shouldered, the ruffian sea, the ruffed and petticoated, creaming sea, its void immensity’); sly cracks at the conventions of pulp sensationalism (‘beautiful and unashamed in the curving redundancy of her body’s loveliness beneath the unconcealing silk chemise’); mimicry of cinematic technique (captions accompanying short, ‘montaged’ scenes, references to irises closing); unhelpful mock-scholarly footnotes, including one which abuses the author for his ignorance of the elementary principles of plot construction. These tricks alone would be enough to make the book a comic masterpiece, but Coates can do more besides, for there also marvellous passages that strike other notes, notes that convey something of the wonderment and anguish of being alive, of being surrounded by questions that have no answer. I will say nothing of the narrative frame into which Coates inserts his ludicrous thriller plot, except to note that it leads to an ending that is at once audacious, unsurprising, appropriately anti-climactic and oddly beautiful. It is a sad quirk of literary history that this book has so little reputation; it will be a minor tragedy if this situation continues.
*There is a cheaper reprint from 2012 by Olympia Press, but to judge from the Amazon reviews, this seems to be best avoided.
**The people named in this list are all historical figures. Fannie (or Fanny) Brice was a stage and radio star; Laurence Vail was a writer and artist; his wife Peggy (better known as Peggy Guggenheim) was an art collector; Harold Stearns, Floyd Dell and Malcolm Cowley were all writers.
https://mimichootings.wordpress.com/2019/12/30/the-eater-of-darkness-robert-m-coates-1926/
For more on his life and works, check out “Collecting Robert M.Coates” (PDF) by Mathilde Roza and Jack Mearns.
Robert Myron Coates was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on April 6, 1897. He graduated from Yale University in 1919. During World War One, his studies were briefly interrupted by naval aviation ground training at M.I.T. and flight training on Long Island. In the winter of 1921, he moved to Paris, where he befriended such “Lost Generation” writers as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, and Ford Maddox Ford. Coates returned to New York in 1926 with two completed novels, the first still in manuscript and the second, The Eater of Darkness, already published by Contact Editions in Paris with help from Stein. It was released in the U.S. in 1929 by The Macaulay Company and is considered the first Dada novel in the English language.
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