William Ashbless, CSUF’s Own Romantic Poet

Origins

William Ashbless is a fictional Romantic-era poet invented by Tim Powers and James Blaylock, both CSUF alums, and award-winning authors. THis poet would have known Mary Shelley. Here’s the story: Dr. Brendan Doyle is a CSUF Romanticism Professor in the English Department who time travels back to the early nineteenth century. When he tries to meet William Ashbless, a minor Romantic poet he studies, he discovers that he is himself Ashbless, and so writes all his poetry down from memory.

Initially, the poet was conceived in reaction to “low-quality poetry” circulated in the CSUF magazine during the 1970s. Blaylock and Powers co-authored poems submitted under the pseudonym “William Ashbless,” and, ironically, his work received high praise from the magazine’s readers and publishers. Though originally considered an inside joke, their work as Ashbless developed alongside each of their literary careers.

Appearances

The character of Ashbless has appeared in all of Tim Power’s novels, including The Anubis Gates; likewise, Blaylock’s The Digging Leviathan. From there, others began to include Ashbless in their own works, some even believing that he was a real life poet. A few notable works in which Ashbless has appeared include The Pit (1993) by Neil Penswick, and Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull. Ashbless remains a very mysterious character throughout The Anubis Gates even if his role is significant.

Print Appearances

  • The Digging Leviathan (1984) by James Blaylock
  • Offering the Bicentennial Edition of The Complete Twelve Hours of the Night (1785-1985) by Tim Powers & James Blaylock – A prospectus for non-existent collection of Ashbless’ poetry, published by Cheap Street Press.
  • Last Call (1992) by Tim Powers – includes a poem attributed to Ashbless in the introduction to Book One. The poem is “from” a later time period: it mentions airplanes, cars and blue jeans.
  • The Pit (1993) by Neil Penswick
  • The Anubis Gates (1994) by Tim Powers
  • Freedom and Necessity (1997) by Steven Brust & Emma Bull’s
  • On Pirates (2001) by William Ashbless – with an introduction by Powers, an afterword by Blaylock, and illustrations by Gahan Wilson
  • The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook (2002) by William Ashbless/Tim Powers
  • Pilot Light (2007) by William Ashbless/Tim Powers

Biography of Ashbless

Some biographical information can be found in James Bailey’s “Life of Ashbless,” written in the 1830s. According to Bailey, he was born in Virginia at an unknown date. Ashbless arrived in London in 1810, and then traveled to Egypt in 1811 for unknown reasons. Later in 1811, he married Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy. In The Anubis Gates Doyle often analyzes the timeline of events he knew from public records in order to understand how to find Ashbless, however the timeline proved to be incorrect. This moment could be a reference to the issue that facts counted as “proven” are potentially still incorrect and that we know nothing of solid. It seems like Ashbless is a manifestation of the romantic persona or of a byronic figure. He is significant in these stories because he functions as a link between the Romantic Era and current times. Additionally, Ashbless could be a representation of the many famous writers who have led mysterious lives that the public really knows nothing about. Without this character, Powers and Blaylock would not have produced the poems and novels in the same manner, from the perspective of a romantic poet. He has also been “memefied” by the fact that he appears in so many other works by different authors, consequently becoming more real because of this phenomenon.

The details of William Ashbless’ life are mostly a mystery. What little information we have is from James Bailey’s “Life of Ashbless,” written in the 1830s, though that work is no longer in production or found in any known in library collection. We do know that his published works are cherished by a small, devoted following, and have been publicly recognized in reviews such as William Hazlitt’s Appraisal of Ashbless’ Works (1825). William Ashbless was born Virginia, but exact date cannot be confirmed. He arrived in London in 1810 and traveled to Egypt in 1811 for unknown reasons. Some Ashbless scholars believe he was there on secret business. He also married an Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy in the same year. Following his visit to Egypt, there is a gap in information therafter of his whereabouts, or “whenabouts.” 
According to sources like Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates (1993), Ashbless was involved in the “Dancing Ape Madness” in 19th Century London. However, he was also known to have made an appearance in mid 19th-century California. It has been said that this was indeed the same man, but a chronological impossibility. Some have suggested that Ashbless had discovered time travel. Then, some time in the mid 1960s, he went missing after strange and never fully explained events took place in Southern California. An Ashbless scholar Brendan Doyle also went missing in 1983. Since then, another Ashbless “incarnation” has appeared in Long Beach, CA. It is believed that Ashbless died in April or May of 1846, “his partially decomposed body was discovered (‘with a single sword thrust to the belly’) on Woolwich Marshes. The strangeness of these events remain an enigma to modern Ashbless scholars and enthusiasts.

Original Works

  • “Antlered Man Dangles”
  • “A Short Poem”
  • “Unicon XIII”
  • “Accounts”
    • “London Philosophers”
    • “London Madmen”
    • “London Scientists”
  • “Ode to those Lost at Sea”
  • “Slouching Toward Mauritius”

Excerpts

Ode to those Lost at Sea

“Bursting his gravity chains with a full-throat cry,
From his eeled grotto, lunatic, Neptune
Has flung his emerald arms into the sky.
I, afloat with Zephyrous a-billowing the cloth
Am flung into a no-man’s land of spray
And crack and hoot amid roiling demons
That twitch our floundering vessel roundabout.
Then, just when that guest of spring winks in,
Helios, calming the waves with an outflung hand,
We rocket off on a mad bedraggled couch,
Our makeshift lifeboat, borne directionless.
What salt-encrusted, green-sea vision is this,
This multitude of disinherit souls
That nest like sea birds all about me?
One speaks: “We are the men Direction scorned
When he handed round charts
Of destiny … our dooms were preordained
And we’ve no commerce with those of you
Whose courses from the outset were drawn straight
And whose bloody corpses, goggle-eyed, approach us!
Ah! Now at last they come, the Vegetable Gods…
Piping through, with banners
On which are stitched the humiliation of us all.”

The Twelve Hours of the Night

Selections of this collective work of poetry appears throughout Tim Powers’ novel The Anubis Gates, and has characteristics of romantic poetry.
“…They move in dark, old places of the world:
Like mariners, once healthy and clear-eyed,
Who, when their ship was holed, could not admit
Ruin and the necessity of flight,
But chose instead to ride their cherished wreck
Down into darkness; there not quite to drown,
But ever on continue plying sails
Against the midnight currents of the depths,
Moving from pit to pit to lightless crag
In hopeless search for some ascent to shore;
And who, in their decayed, slow voyaging
Do presently lose all desire for light
And air and living company-from here
Their search is only for the deepest groves,
Those farthest from the nigh-forgotten sun…”
(Powers The Anubis Gates, p.  )
He whispered, “And a river lies
Between the dusk and dawning skies,
And hours are distance, measured wide
Along that transnocturnal tide–
Too doomed to fear, lost to all need,
These voyagers blackward fast recede
Where darkness shines like dazzling light
Throughout the Twelve Hours of the Night.”

On Stranger Tides

…And unmoor’d souls may drift on stranger tides
Than those men know of, and be overthrown
By winds that would not even stir a hair…

Last Call

I watched her fly away for Vegas,
I waved the plane out of sight,
Then I tried to drive home without stopping at a bar,
but I
Didn’t make it, quite.
And sitting with those blue-jeaned shadows there, that
had
Been there all night,
I found myseld shivering over my chilly drink,
Half dead of fright.

What Ashbless Signifies

It seems like William Ashbless is merely a manifestation of the Romantic poet persona. In Powers’ The Anubis Gates, he becomes somewhat of a Byronic hero, gaining notoriety as an American infiltrator. His significance in these stories is that he acts as a sort of linkage between the Romantic Era, and modern readership. Without Ashbless, Powers and Blaylock would likely not have produced such successful poems and novels. Ashbless adds texture to their stories by giving readers a perspective of a romantic poet. Also, it appears that across these works Ashbless has been “meme-fied.” This is evident by his many appearances in so many other works by different authors. As a result of this memeification, He has become more real because of this phenomenon.

Online Sources

“The Mystery that is William Ashbless”

The Interviewer with Mister William Ashbless

This is the part of the interview from TP’s website that specifically talks about Ashbless.
JB: Tell me now about the birth of Ashbless and how this all came about at college.
TP: Well, the school paper would print poetry written by the students and it was still close enough to 1968 that the poems were all free-verse, unpunctuated, unrhymed hippie drivel. Very pretentious though. Kinda Donovan Leitch after a lobotomy, if you could picture that effect! So Blaylock and I decided we could write stuff that would be way more pretentious and portentous but totally nonsense. And so we started and I would write a line and pass it to Blaylock. He’d write a line below mine and we’d pass it back and forth ’til we had got to the end of the page and the person who saw his line would be the last would make sure to tie it up. And then we cooked up a name for him. I said the last name should be one of those two syllable, two word things… Mitford, you know. And so one of us came up with Ash, the other came with Bless and our friend William was sitting right there, so we took his first name.
And so we sent these to the paper and they did publish it and we had given them Blaylock’s phone number, so they called him and said “Golly! We love your poetry. Is this William Ashbless?” And Blaylock said “Uh, Yah!“
“We love your poetry. Can we know some biographical details about you?“
“Ummm… I don’t get out much.“
And so we began bringing Ashbless’ poems in fact to this little writers group that the old Irish lady hosted and we would say “Our friend William Ashbless gave us these to read here and he wants to know what the company thinks of this work.” And people would go “Why couldn’t he come on his own?” and we’d go, “He’s hideously deformed! Terribly crippled!” and everybody would go “Oh, good heavens! That’s so sad. Do, do read his poems.” And so Blaylock and I would start reading but we couldn’t get more than four lines in before we’d start laughing real hard. And everybody thought we were just totally insensitive to be laughing this way at the work, no doubt painstaking, laboured work of this tortured cripple. Ha! And some of these people, of course, would claim to see huge significance in Ashbless’s work. Just vast, you know, layer on layer of meaning. And Blaylock and I would try subtly to indicate our contempt for the people who thought this, but of course after a few pitchers of beer your estimate of what is subtle diminishes, you know? So by the end of the evening it was usually pretty disgraceful!
But anyway after that, anytime Blaylock or I were writing a book that involved a crazy bearded poet or any kind of poet, we would use the name William Ashbless and I had used Ashbless in my book The Anubis Gates and while it was still in production, Blaylock sent them sent them his book The Digging Leviathan, in which Ashbless was a character. And the editor wrote to Blaylock and said “What is this Ashbless stuff? Do you know this Powers guy?” and Blaylock said, “Oh! I’m sorry. Does he have Ashbless in his? We use it a lot. I’ll take mine out.” And she said, “No. Leave it in. Leave it in. But talk with Powers and try to make it consistent.” And so ever since then, in fact in all my books I had been referring to Ashbless and now I almost have the idea that it would be bad luck for me to leave him out. In the last few books I haven’t used the name Ashbless, I’ve used Ceniza-Bendiga, which of course is Spanish for “Ash-Bless”. But I kind of think maybe I’ll move to German or something next, but I think it would be bad luck to leave him out.
JB: The evolution of Ashbless… he’s almost become in the consciousness of your readers, a very real figure. You must be quite delighted that the hoax as it were, has permeated everywhere!
TP: That’s true. Every now and then I get on the net and I do a search for William Ashbless. One place I found him was in a totally serious non-fiction article on how to get a PhD. They’re saying how to apply to colleges, how to organise your thesis, what a thesis should consist of… and the example they used was “Let’s say for example you’re doing your thesis on the works of William Ashbless…” and there’s no further reference to like me or anything, and I’m not sure the person writing the article knew that Ashbless was made up. And I have heard of people who went trying to look him up in Britannica or Books in Print and things like that.
JB: But the two of you have perpetuated the hoax over the years. There is something wicked in what you’re doing. You quite obviously enjoy making him that real!
TP: Yeah. We’ve even written a cookbook! – The William Ashbless memorial Cookbook – which we have never published. It’s all of Ashbless’s recipes excerpted from Ashbless’s correspondence. We say “Excerpted from a letter to Marcel Proust” and translated into English. So we’ve excerpted Ashbless’s favourite recipes from his correspondence with famous people.
JB: Is it going to see the light of day, do you think?
TP: Eventually! It’s disgusting that it’s gone this many years!

External Sites

This site features a bibliography of William Ashbless’s works, gives a brief explanation of each work, and also talks about Powers’ works altogether. Most of the links on this website are dead. 
There is also a page that links to other fan pages and a short description featuring some of 
Ashbless’ works.

The Digging Anubis (Worst Website Ever Award Winner)

Tardis.Wikia.com