Late Reviews Page 13
Charles Francis Keary (1848-1917) was educated at Marlborough and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He worked for fifteen years in the Antiquities Department of the British Museum and published scholarly treatises and novels. ’Twixt Dog and Wolf was his only collection of short stories.
An expanded reprint, with one additional story, was published by Nodens Books in 2018.
Kilmarnock, Lord. Ferelith (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1903).
This book, which had only one printing and is now extremely rare, numbered among its admirers André Gide and Julian Green—at least according to the highbrow Concise Encyclopædia of Modern World Literature (1963) edited by Geoffrey Grigson. This encyclopedia has a significant entry on the book, located under a misspelling of the author’s real last name (“Hey” instead of the correct “Hay”), describing the book as “a highly original story of the supernatural which suffers from a curt stiltedness and melodrama of style, though its pattern is crystal clear. Then in the last part an interest emerges which makes the style irrelevant; and it ends by raising questions both psychological and metaphysical concerning evil in the human psyche and the world which, in their urgency, at least remind the reader of Wuthering Heights.”
The book is predominately the first person story of Anne Brambles, whose brutal brother William has returned after two decades abroad as an enormously successful businessman. The unmarried William convinces Anne to run his new London household, where he yearns to be accepted by society and to find a wife. His own gauche temperament undermines his chances, and eventually his money buys not only a remote Scottish castle from one Lord, but also—from another Lord—a wife, who accepts William mainly because he will pay the bills for her invalid mother. Lady Ferelith Sidlaw moves with her new husband and sister-in-law to the remote Scottish estate. There she is treated brutally by her husband, but sympathetically by her sister-in-law, who becomes her only friend. Matters grow worse until William’s business interests overseas reach a critical point, and he leaves in order to attempt to stave off financial ruin. He is gone for many months, but in his absence, and at his direction, one of his servants keeps his wife and sister in line. After more than a year, the sullen and beaten Ferelith becomes inexplicably happy, and over the next months she is discovered to be pregnant. Anne and Ferelith do their best to hide Ferelith’s condition, hoping against hope that William does not return unexpectedly, but the inevitable happens. Ferelith dies after giving birth. William reluctantly, but distantly, allows the child Jean to be raised in his house by his sister.
Yet William is haunted at night by Ferelith, and after some years he seeks to end it all by killing Jean. The spectral Ferelith and her equally spectral lover intervene, save their child, and William is stricken with madness and sent off to a padded cell where he dies. At this point, Anne discovers Ferelith’s diary, which is given in full over four chapters, and which describes Ferelith’s love affair with a ghost (an ancestor of the previous owner of the castle), who was brutal in life but who after a hundred years in death has become tender and loving.
The rest of the book concerns the child Jean, and the inward struggle of her two opposing natures—earthly, and spectral. A few chapters also give Anne’s theories of the after-life, based on her experiences, and page after page runs on with speculations like the following:
In short, I decided that ghosts were beings who had died, but whose souls had been so intimately and indissolubly commingled with their bodies, so utterly subordinated to the dominant flesh, that death itself had not sufficed entirely to destroy their union. In other words, that their spirits, though freed from the rough casing of external clay, were still encompassed by an outward and occasionally visible or even tangible impression of their corporeal form, and that a further period of probation, and a second violent cataclysm were necessary before they became purged of this clinging disfigurement. (p. 259)
Over all, this book has very little suspense, and the prose is curiously flat in tone even while it is at the same time melodramatic. The central idea is interesting, but the handling of it seems off. Clearly, the author was himself predominately interested in the speculations at the end of the book, and he contrived a story to lead up to them. But for the reader, the set-up and approach is more interesting than the banal and dull explanations. A true curiosity—I wish the result made for a better novel.
Its author, Victor Alexander Sereld Hay (1876-1928), was the 21st Earl of Erroll and the 4th Baron Kilmarnock, as well as a godson of Queen Victoria. Ferelith, published in February 1903, was his only book, but one short story of fantastical romance, “The Dreamers,” has been traced in the Pall Mall Magazine for late 1901, and in the 1920s he had produced three of his plays, “The Chalk Line” (1922), a study of the “eternal triangle” during quarantine in a small bungalow in Shanghai, “The Dream Kiss” (1927), a comedy of somnambulism, and “The Anonymous Letter” (1927). He married in 1900, and had two sons and one daughter. His eldest son and heir, Josslyn Victor Hay (1901-1941), was murdered in Kenya. The crime has given rise to several books, including White Mischief (1982) by James Fox, which was made into a film in 1987.
Ferelith was reprinted, with a new introduction by Mark Valentine, by Nodens Books in 2018.
Kirk, Russell. Old House of Fear (New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1961).
Old House of Fear is the first novel by Russell Kirk (1918-1994), who was widely know during his lifetime as a writer on conservative political and social issues. But Russell also wrote fantasy literature, most notably some twenty-two short stories that have appeared in various arrangements in several volumes, beginning with The Surly Sullen Bell (1962). Kirk also published two other novels, A Creature of Twilight: His Memorials (1966) and Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979).
In his dedication, Kirk refers to Old House of Fear as a “Gothick tale, in unblushing line of direct descent from The Caste of Otranto” but this is overstatement. While the novel does indeed utilize elements of the Gothic, it is better characterized as a romantic spy thriller. Set on the imaginary island of the Hebrides named Carnglass (based on the Isle of Rúm, one of the Small Isles of the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland), it primarily concerns the MacAskival family. Hugh Logan is an American lawyer who is sent by his employer in Michigan, Duncan MacAskival, to purchase the ancestral home. What Logan finds on his arrival is that the Old House itself (including the elderly Lady MacAskival) is dominated by criminals who have some sort of personal and political plans, and who are led by the smartly sinister figure Edmund Jackman. Jackman has an old wound on his forehead that gives the locals a reason to believe he has a third eye and second sight. Jackman has designs to marry Lady MacAskival’s young niece, Mary MacAskival, and thereby take complete control of the estate and the family fortune. In true thriller fashion, within thirty-six hours of his arrival, the dashing Logan has won the heart of Mary MacAskival, and there follows the suspense-filled intrigue of how he can rescue her from Jackman and his minions. Overall, despite certain contrived elements (e.g. the hasty love interest), the book is well-written and engaging. There is no real fantasy to the book, though folklore elements and superstitions are occasionally used to good effect.
A “Second Edition” of Old House of Fear was published by Fleet in 1965, using the same plates as the 1961 edition, but with the addition of chapter titles. These chapter titles are the only difference from the 1961 original.
Knapp, George L. The Face of Air (New York: John Lane Company, 1912).
This short novel purports to be the memoirs of John Harkness, written as an old man and concerning a mystery with which he was involved as a youth. In September 1871, a schooner named the Nancy Hanks left New York harbor for Brazil and subsequently disappeared. Harkness was then a twenty year-old orphan from South Carolina who, after being rescued in a brawl on the New York streets, took up with some revolutionaries on the Aurora, a ship which was to bear arms and ammunition to Venezuela. After leaving port, the Aurora happens upon the Nancy Hanks, de
serted, with no trace of her crew, no sign of violence, and with all her life boats present. The Aurora puts a prize crew on the vessel, intending to salvage it, but a day later, after a squall parted the two vessels, the schooner is again found empty, with no trace of the prize crew. Harkness, along with a handful of others—including Rudolph Steinmetz, an older German who takes Harkness under his wing, is part of the second prize crew that takes over the Nancy Hanks.
Harkness and others witness strange events, and the tension builds for the second prize crew to abandon the schooner. Steinmetz is intrigued by some quotes from Goethe about “The Face of Air” that are found in the galley. Harkness finds his bed warm but there has been no sleeper in it, and a hand is seen by some sailors as reaching out towards them from the fog. A scene erupts after a candle flits across the forecastle, as if carried by a child’s ghost. Unfortunately, Knapp has neither the interest in atmosphere and mystery, nor the skill of a writer such as William Hope Hodgson to pull off such a story of strange happenings at sea. These scenes of mystery are flatly recounted, and the book is merely adequate commercial fiction of its day until it reaches the end, when it becomes plainly silly. Steinmetz is struck through by the sword of a crazed sailor, and the candle, having descended into the hatch, has started the ship on fire. As the second prize crew abandons the Nancy Hanks, a Thing follows them, made visible by the water in which it swims. It is an African ape, somehow invisible. It is shot and killed, and the sailors escape, though Steinmetz dies of his wound. Later Harkness pieces together a theory that some German chemist had found a way to make the beast invisible.
George Leonard Knapp was born in Minnesota in 1872. Though he received an M.D. from Dunham Medical College in Chicago in 1902, he practiced medicine for only a few years before becoming a writer and newspaperman, traveling extensively around the United States. With Frank J. Cannon he wrote an early book on Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire (1913). In the early 1930s Knapp was settled around Washington D.C., and here for a time he lodged and supported his nephew Leonard Knapp (the birth name, soon to be renounced, of the science fiction writer who called himself Lester del Rey). Knapp published a mystery novel, The Scales of Justice (1910), and in the 1920s wrote some short stories for Blue Book magazine. After his last book, The Story of Our Constitution (1936), Knapp seems to have disappeared from public view. He died in 1950.
L
Lamkey, Rosemary. The Lonely Dwarf (New York: Henry Holt, 1939). Illustrated by the author.
A small illustrated picture-book telling the story of Grutchty, a lonely dwarf who lives in a castle by the sea and who wants companionship. (Eventually, a storm washes up a stray baby in a boat, and Grutchty happily takes care of it. Ugh!) This negligible tale would be utterly worthless but for the fact that some of the illustrations by the author are marvelous—still, even the illustrations range from the mawkish (particularly the ones of the characters in the story) to the striking (especially the first illustration of the tall castle by the sea).
Leather, Robinson K., and Richard Le Gallienne. The Student and the Body-Snatcher and Other Trifles (London: Elkin Mathews, 1890).
A collection of thirteen very short stories, put out in a small edition of five hundred copies in September 1890, with an additional fifty numbered copies on large paper. The publication was arranged by Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947), whose Volumes in Folio Elkin Mathews had published in 1889, it being the second volume of Le Gallienne’s verse, and the first Bodley Head book published by Mathews.
Le Gallienne initially hoped that the Bodley Head would publish The Student and the Body-Snatcher, for his collaborator was dangerously ill, suffering from some sort of paralysis, and Le Gallienne wished for him to see the book in print. But the Bodley Head turned it down, and Le Gallienne financed the printing himself, with Elkin Mathews agreeing to the use of his name on the imprint.
The nature of the collaboration is not given in the book itself, but the copy that Le Gallienne inscribed to Elkin Mathews is held in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library, and in this copy Le Gallienne added to each title on the contents page the initials of who wrote it. I am grateful to Mark Samuels Lasner for sharing this information, and am thus able to say that Le Gallienne wrote five of the thirteen items, and Leather the other eight. In terms of wordage, Le Gallienne wrote just under half of the book.
The tales are clever, at times morbid and frequently tragic. In ways they anticipate the artful decadence by which the 1890s is now historically characterized. “Trifles” they may be, and summaries do them little justice, but one wishes this slim volume contained a lot more of them. Le Gallienne’s five tales are “Indigestion,” “A Miracle,” “Hinc Illae Lacrimae,” “That Face!”; and “My Mad Poet.” In “Indigestion” a man on a railway moves from one carriage to another to avoid a person, finding an invisible companion. In “A Miracle,” Brother Ambrose works on making a great golden copy of the Gospels. He has a vision of Christ pointing out to him a particular passage of the Bible, and following the words, Brother Ambrose goes out to preach, abandoning his work. Many years later he returns to die, finding his work miraculously completed. In “That Face!,” a man is haunted by a woman’s face in a portrait, and comes to meet her when she next comes in to sit for the artist. She is the man’s own dead wife.
Of Leather’s tales, “The Student and the Body-Snatcher” concerns a faithless student who lives in an apartment above a body-snatcher, from whom the student had acquired a skull. The student obsesses over what the man was like whose skull he has, and eventually commits suicide. His grave is soon debauched by the body-snatcher, earning his living. In “The Poet and the Fishmonger” a poet finds true love in a fish-seller, and on the day of his marriage writes a poem that is printed “from the press of good Master Caxton.” The poet sends a copy to his mother-in-law, who uses it to wrap up the three mackerel she sends on as a wedding gift. The moral is given: “True love knows no law.” “Tinderhook” is the longest piece in the book, concerning a man who has come to England and hidden the fact that he was born to a Mormon polygamist by one of his wives, and thus would be viewed by most people as illegitimate. His past in the end catches up to him, and in an unusual twist, he find happiness himself in embracing polygamy.
Robinson Kay Leather was born in West Derby, Lancashire, in the summer of 1864, the fourth son of five children of Sarah and Joseph Leather, a cotton broker and landowner. He attended the Liverpool Institute and then University College (also in Liverpool), achieving an M.A. in 1889. Around this time he was stricken by some sort of mysterious paralysis. On the recommendation of doctors he sought a warmer climate, and his travels around the Mediterranean improved his health. Besides his book with Le Gallienne, he published two small collections of verse and a collaboration (also in verse) with a schoolmaster, Norman Rowland Gale (1862-1942), entitled On Two Strings (1894). Leather married Amelia Hensley Foster in Newton Abbot, Devon, in the summer of 1892, and after suffering a relapse of his paralysis, died there on 20 April 1895.
Le Corbeau, Adrien. The Forest Giant (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935). Translated by J.H. Ross (T. E. Lawrence). Wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker.
This is basically a contemplative narrative, following the progress of a seed of a great sequoia tree from its dissemination through its sprouting and growth, and its long (thousand year) existence, until it topples over and decays, rejoining the elements.
The translation by T.E. Lawrence (under the pseudonym J. H. Ross) first appeared in 1924, only two years after the original publication in French. It is a very free translation, and at times expansive (Lawrence noted that he occasionally went to the level of “throwing in a sunset or two”). The style is lush and meditative.
A handful of quotations will give its flavor:
Love is the strongest of our passions, but also that which we hide the deepest: whereas we exhibit our ambition, our pride, our frenzies, openly. (p. 77)
Our superstitions take p
recise shape more especially when we are in bodily pain and perturbed in spirit. (p. 89)
Time may be imaged as a mirror, a confused mirror across whose impassive face tens of thousands of scenes chase each other in a mazy dance: for in it are reflected the innumerable and never-closing consequences of all action, with all the lights, all the shadows, all the extent and motions of the universe. (p. 98)
“What is this Death?” a sempiternal, unanswered, fresh and vital question. No one has yet solved it, and probably no one will, for we cannot experience death and retain our power to register its effects. . . . We continually strain to realize the flavour of death by heaping up a confused mass of ides, by strange and inordinate imaginings, by deliberately forcing our thoughts and dealing to a point beyond control. . . . Death is the non-existent, made not out of silence (which noise explains), nor out of darkness (which light would explain), but out of something inconceivably absolute. Sleep implies an awakening, dreams imply the powers of seeing, thinking, hearing, inertness implies the power of movement; so that nothing in our range of experience, from complete peace to utter terror, can plant in us a true sense of death. (pp. 129-131)