Further examples from before World War Two include John Kendrick Bang’s Roger Camerden: A Strange Story (1887); Stanley W’s The Cassowary: What Chanced in the Cleft Mountains (1906); Alfred Noyes’s Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1914), a set of narrative poems told in Shakespeare’s pub; Zeppelin Nights: A London Entertainment (1916) by Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt (1866–1942), and Foe-Farrell (1918) by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944): these two later examples both being tales which come close to representing World War One as something not amenable to solace (see below); H Rider Haggard’s Hew-Heu; Or, the Monster (1924); Cameron Blake’s Only Men on Board (1933); The Salzburg Tales (1934) by Christina Stead (1902–1983), which evoke Boccaccio, as does a slightly earlier Anthology series, The New Decameron (1919–1929); and Wyndham Lewis’s Count Your Dead—They Are Alive!; Or, a New War in the Making (1937), whose puppet-like disputants augur World War Two. Of more established genre interest are Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis (1907), though much less uniformly cast in the club story format than his nonfantastic Reginald (1904); John Buchan’s The Runagates Club (1928); and T H White’s Gone to Ground (1935), which—as these tales are told by survivors of a final Holocaust—resembles the Ford/Hunt and Quiller-Couch volumes cited above by stretching to its limit the capacity of the form to comfort (again, see below).
In “Sites for Sore Souls: Some Science-Fictional Saloons” (Fall 1991 Extrapolation), Fred Erisman loosens the argument made above that the club story can be understood in terms of denial; he suggests that sf club stories—or in his terms saloon stories—respond more straightforwardly to a human need for venues in which an “informal public life” can be led. Although Erisman assumes that the paucity of such venues in America is reflected in the UK, and therefore significantly undervalues the unspoken but clearly felt ambience of the pub in Arthur C Clarke’s cosily Recursive Tales from the White Hart (1957), his comments are clearly helpful in understanding the persistence of the club story in US sf. Beginning with L Sprague de Camp’s and Fletcher Pratt’s Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (1953), it has been a feature of magazine sf for nearly half a century, partly perhaps because imaginary American saloons and venues like conventions—where the genuine affinity groups that generate and consume American sf tend to foregather—are similar kinds of informal public space. Further examples of the club story in the USA, not all of them set in “saloons,” are assembled in Poul Anderson’s Tales of the Flying Mountains (1970); Sterling Lanier’s The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (1972) and The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (1986); Isaac Asimov’s several volumes of nonfantastic Black Widowers mysteries, starting with Tales of the Black Widowers (1974); Spider Robinson’s Callahan books, starting with Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon (1977); Larry Niven’s Draco Tavern tales, which appear mostly in Convergent Series (1979) and Limits (1985); and Tales from the Red Lion (2007) by John Weagly (1968–). A further Poul Anderson example, the Nicholas van Rijn story “The Master Key” (July 1964 Analog), pastiches Rudyard Kipling’s use of the club-story format. There are many others; some individual stories are assembled in Darrell Schweitzer’s and George Scithers’s Tales from the Spaceport Bar (1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (1989). Almost certainly the most important sf novel to have been organized around a club story frame is Dan Simmons’s Time Opera, Hyperion (1989), which is very loosely based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales [see above]; and Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled (2005) very effectively applies the model to the contemporary world.
2. But there is more to the club story form than its capacity to fix tall tales into sanctums where it is safe to pretend to believe them. Fixing a tale into place can be a double-edged sword. Superficially, locking a story into the moment of its telling may seem to constitute a narratological insistence that the meaning of the story is itself locked down by the visibility of its telling; but for at least three reasons, it is in fact dangerous to make a story visible. One: each and every club story represents a bringing into the present tense of witness a story which, it is claimed, has already happened, which is to say the world of the auditors was in some sense false or incomplete before the truth was told. The Club Story brings together the past and the future. Two: it could be argued that the more visible a story is, the less reliable any paraphrastic abstraction of that story will be, for what is almost inevitably exposed by paraphrase is the essential elusiveness of Story, what might be called the polysemy of the visible when narrated. Three: it seems clear that to make a story visible within a club story frame is primarily to enforce not meaning but witness, for the story has now been told to auditors whose very attentiveness affirms the storyable world: it is, in a clear sense, impossible to deny the existence of a story once told in this fashion, in this context. The club story is a vessel explicitly shaped for the mandatory reception of raw story. There are few genuinely great club stories, but all of them are threatening.
It may be more than a rhetorical gesture to note that at least two paradigm creations in the nearly new-born realm of the fantastic, the Frankenstein Monster and the Vampire—both transgressive figures central to the evolution of sf, and fantasy, and horror—were created within the context of the club story. In the middle of a famous 1816 walking tour in Switzerland, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892–1822) were forced by rain to stay inside at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. After an evening recital of readings taken from an assembly of Schauerroman tales told in a club story frame—Das Gespensterbuch [“The Ghost Book”] (1811–1815) by Johann August Apel (1771–1816) and Friedrich August Schulze (1770–1849) writing together as Friedrich Laun—Byron suggested that each member of the party make up a similar tale to be told on a subsequent night. Though there is no clear evidence as to what was actually recounted aloud, both Polidori’s and Mary Shelley’s eventually published narratives—The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) and Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818)—came out of that club-story moment, and both stories exhale the intrusiveness—the first words spoken by Frankenstein’s “monster” are “Pardon this intrusion”—of tales that enforce witness. (It might be noted that Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted: A Novel of Stories (2005)—which suggestively treats a writing workshop/retreat in club story terms—is set in a “theatre” referred to as the Villa Diodati.) In Germany at about the same time, transgressive authors like E T A Hoffmann—whose Die Serapionsbruder [“The Serapion Brothers”] (1818–1821) is a club story assembly—and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)—whose Phantasus (1812–1816) is also presented in club story form—were publishing work of oneiric power that hit, as it were, below the belt.