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  We are all ephemeral in terms of our allotted situation, and eternal in terms of the universe. . . . our substances, those which now make up ourselves, will infallibly scatter some day. Elements seem to grow tired at last of being confined in one special shape, to be weary of being so long a man, a stone, a river, a fire. (p. 143)

  This view of life and death has no religious orthodoxy, but it has plenty of wisdom. Originally published as La Gigantesque (1922), it was the first of the author’s three novels. Adrian Le Corbeux was one of several pseudonyms of Rudolf Bernhardt, who was born in Romania in 1886. Bernhardt moved to Paris around 1910, and worked in publishing following the Great War, during which he nearly died of typhus, an experience which influenced his second novel L’Heure Finale (1924). His third novel, Le Couple Nu (1931), appeared the year before his death in 1932. After his death it was revealed that he had hoaxed the French literary world with some memories of Maupassant purported to have been written by one Madame X, published in La Grande Revue in 1912 and 1913. The revelation went unnoticed by Maupassant scholars for many decades, and the hoax was for long accepted as revealing significant facts about Maupassant’s life.

  Lee, Vernon. The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915). Pictorial Commentary by Maxwell Armfield.

  As “Vernon Lee,” Violet Paget (1856-1935) was an enormously prolific writer, of novels, philosophical essays, and various “studies.” Her most enduring work will probably be her seventeen supernatural tales, recently collected by Ash-Tree Press in Hauntings: The Supernatural Stories (2002), with the addition of a few appropriate essays. These erudite and ironic tales resemble in some ways those of Richard Garnett, and in other ways they anticipate those of Robert Aickman. Additionally, Lee wrote an early anonymous volume of fairy tales (Tuscan Fairy Tales, 1880), and one allegory, The Ballet of Nations, which is really a short story published as a large-format book, with the text on each page surrounded by some very interesting framework drawings by Maxwell Armfield.

  The Ballet of Nations is an allegory wherein the well-known Ballet-Master Death, with the assistance of Satan, the Lesee of the World, revives his celebrated dances (i.e., war) that had gone rather out of fashion. Satan enlists the help of the Widow Fear, “squalid beyond all other Passions,” who brings along her shabby, restless twins, Suspicion and Panic. Lady Idealism and her young Prince Adventure join in. And “Death’s mother (or wife, for their family relations are best not inquired into) Sin, who the gods call Disease,” appears with her well-known crew, Rapine, Lust, Murder and Famine, followed by Hatred and Self-Righteousness.

  The above gives a little bit of the style of the piece, which is at times heavily didactic and at other times clever and witty. Madame Science and her dear Councillor Organisation help out too, even though, as Organisation states: “Of course Science and I are permanently in the Service of Life and Progress. But that firm is working slack at present, so we feel at liberty to take a temporary engagement.” Furthermore, Lee writes, “Nations, contrary to the opinions of Politicians, are immortal. Just as the Gods of Valhalla could slash each other to ribbons after breakfast and resurrect for dinner, so every Nation can dance Death’s Dance however much bled and maimed, dance upon stumps, or trail itself along, a living jelly of blood and trampled flesh, providing only it has its Head fairly unhurt. And that Head, which each Nation calls its Government . . . is very properly helmetted, and rarely gets so much as a scratch, so that it continue to catch the Ballet-Master’s eye, and order the Nation’s body to put forth fresh limbs, and even when that is impossible, keep its stump dancing ever new figures in obedience or disobedience to what are called the Rules of War.”

  Synopsis and brief quotation cannot capture the verve and flair of the story, which, like any of the early tales of Lord Dunsany, is better read on its own than explicated. In 1920, Lee published a volume entitled Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy with Notes and Introduction. “The Ballet of Nations” appears in it recast as the central third of a drama, the two other parts being a “Prologue in Hell” and an “Epilogue.” To this Lee has added about forty-five pages of an “Introduction,” one hundred and twenty pages of “Notes to the Prologue,” and another eighty-one pages of “Notes to The Ballet of the Nations.” Some year I may read this.

  Leech, Joseph. Ghosts and Glamour (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith; London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., [1886])

  Joseph Leech (1815-1893) was born in Ireland but spent much of his life in Bristol, where he became a prominent businessman. Ghosts and Glamour is his only volume of fiction; today it is a legendary rarity. It consists of seventeen stories, with a short preface in which Leech notes of the tales: “most of which turn upon some local or family tradition or popular superstition, and in not a few instances may be said (much as the phrase is abused) to be ‘founded on fact’ ” (p. iv). Reviews were mixed. The Western Antiquary noted that “the stories are as blood-curdling as the most inveterate ghost lover could desire, and are, moreover, well and graphically told” (February 1887), while The Bookseller called it “a capital selection of spectral literature, based chiefly upon local or family traditions” (8 January 1887). A few years later The Literary World said “We cannot congratulate Mr. Leech on his performance. It strikes us as somewhat poor. . . . His stories are somewhat mild, and have a local flavour—interesting to the local reader rather than the general public” (18 December 1891).

  Of the seventeen stories, only four are actually set around Bristol. Six are set in Ireland, with the rest set vaguely in various parts of England. Not all are ghost stories; one (“The Watchman of Traitor’s Bridge”) is the story of murder. A few have only slight teases of the supernatural, including “A Warning” in which a minister has a midnight dream which rouses him to his church and thus prevents a murder, and “The Red Chrysanthemums” in which two flowers turn red in remembrance of a doomed love. Of the actual ghost stories, most have to do with some past tragedy at various manor houses. The histories of various deaths are supposed to account for some kinds of mild hauntings, as in “The Spectre Skater,” in which an unsuccessful and ill-tempered suitor for a young woman is believed to have caused her and her fiancé’s death while skating near the thin ice on a pond. The man’s spirit supposedly haunts that part of the lake in winter. In two stories (“Hazle Court” and “Summer Hill”) the plot revolves around a second wife’s attempts to do away with her husband’s son from his previous marriage in order to elevate her own son to be the heir. In “The Family Bible” the narrator notes of the tragedy of this story that “the lamentable event possessed too many elements of a ghost story for the rough and rustic population who dwelt around the place not to make a tale of terror of it” (p. 170). Too many of the stories in this book fit this remit—of a family tragedy giving rise to some not-very-noteworthy supposed haunting. Indeed, the author is not interested in atmosphere or literary style—the prose quality shambles between awkward and amateurish to the base quality of local journalism. The hauntings are mostly underdeveloped, and the collection as a whole is unremarkable. Not a single one of the seventeen stories seems to me to be worth reprinting.

  Leiber, Fritz. The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich: A Study of the Mass-Insanity at Smithville (New York: Tor, 1997). Illustrated by Jason Van Hollander.

  A slight, posthumously-published novella by Leiber (1910-1992), evidently plotted around 1936, when Leiber was in correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft. The dust-wrapper blurbs comment obliquely that the manuscript of this story was lost in the 1950s, and has only now been found in the 1990s. The story of its history, with the Lovecraft association, and of the loss and rediscovery of the manuscript, is by far the most interesting part to do with this novella, but nothing more about it is said. What we are left with is a pleasant, second-rate Leiber tale, that one would be happy to read in an anthology (or in an old issue of Unknown Worlds, where it would have fit perfectly), but which doesn’t bear up under the weight of being published as a stand-alone
book. It is a tale of time-travel, with some philosophical underpinnings, as well as a number of mysteries which never seem to be adequately resolved. A pleasant coda to Leiber’s career, but not one of his best efforts.

  Leman, Bob. Worms (unpublished, circa 30,000 words)

  Bob Leman (1922-2006) is rightly renowned for his short stories, published between 1967 and 1988, mostly in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Fifteen short stories were collected in Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories (2002), edited by Jim Rockhill, including one sold in February 1981 to Harlan Ellison’s legendary unfinished anthology, Last Dangerous Visions, and never-before published.

  Leman once tried his hand at a novel, titled Worms. The manuscript consists of six chapters, five typed (88 pp.) and one handwritten (9 pp.), with a small number of pages of notes. It was begun on January 22, 1987, and it was abandoned around June 1st of the same year.

  The story begins with Walter Siebert returning after many years away to Sturkeyville, Pennsylvania, because of the death of his reclusive and very elderly uncle Hubert Tolliver. Siebert is the only heir to Tolliver’s old mansion and some rural property. Approaching Sturkeyville, Siebert stops at a gas station in nearby New Gall, where he observes a kind of maggot or white worm slide across the attendant’s cheek and into his nostril. The whole town of New Gall seems to Siebert a model of decay.

  Siebert meets with the local lawyer and learns that the rural property he has inherited abuts a strange religious commune on Cobb’s Mountain called “The Settlement.” His uncle had previously owned much of the land around Cobb’s Mountain, but some twenty years earlier had deeded it over to one Bailey Higgs, and Hubert Tolliver had been funding the developing settlement for years, to the near depletion of his fortune. Siebert visits the dusty Tolliver Mansion, where he and the lawyer find two desiccated corpses.

  The subsequent chapters introduce the reader to Dave MacDowell, an engineer at a nearby refinery, his wife Greta and daughter Cassie, who is a favorite of old Will Crews, a wealthy self-made financier of unknown origins (a foundling at the age of nine, adopted by a kindly couple). After the funeral of Hubert Tolliver, Bailey Higgs shows up at the Tolliver Mansion looking for something he claims to own, but his entreaty is rebuffed because the Mansion is now a crime scene owing to the discovery of the long dead corpses. Later that night, Higgs breaks into the mansion and tries to save a small white worm, but when a policeman catches him, he struggles and releases the worm which crawls into the policeman’s nostril.

  All the mystery and the decay of the area seem to point towards the strange Settlement. Siebert and Will Crews go to inspect the property nearby it, only to discover that Crews remembers from his youth the old house they find, and Crews is taken back by the man they meet, who is identical to the man Crews recalls meeting in that house seventy years earlier.

  Thus the story is set-up, and as Siebert and Crews prepare to visit the Settlement, the fragment ends. Why Leman gave up is unknown, for the story is building suspense and enticing the reader’s interest. It may perhaps be that Leman was unfolding a larger canvas than he was used to exploring when writing short stories, but the fragment is skillfully done, and one really wishes that Leman could have seen the novel through to its completion. The writing and storyline is typical Leman, and thus engrossing.

  A few stray details from the abandoned novel (the town name, a street name, and the concept of worms, though used very differently) found their way into Leman’s subsequent short story, “The Time of the Worm,” published in the March 1988 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Otherwise that story is very different from the abandoned novel. One hopes the fragment will be included in the planned Centipede edition of Leman’s writings. I am grateful to Jim Rockhill for letting me read his copy of the unfinished novel, and to Bob Leman’s daughter Nancy Leman Steinberg for allowing me to publish this account.

  Lindsay, David. Devil’s Tor (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932).

  David Lindsay (1876-1945) wrote only seven novels, and his first, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), is the one by which he is most remembered today. His entire writing career was spent in trying ways to accommodate his interest in philosophy, religion and morals within a novelistic format. A Voyage to Arcturus melds metaphysics with science fiction in the mold of H. G. Wells. In Lindsay’s other novels he tried different ways to introduce his philosophical considerations to the public. Unlike with A Voyage to Arcturus, Lindsay’s other novels are very bound to this earth. The Haunted Woman (1922) brings metaphysics to the haunted house story. Sphinx (1923) adds music and dreams to the philosophical mix in the form of a society novel of the 1920s. Adventures of M. de Mailly (1926; US title A Blade for Sale, 1927) attempts a lighter mix of philosophy within a story of France during the reign of Louis XIV. None of Lindsay’s novels were successful for his publishers. Two remained unpublished at his death, appearing only years afterwards. The Violet Apple (1976) is an explicitly Christian fantasy, not dissimilar to those written by Charles Williams. Lindsay’s final novel, The Witch, has so far been published only in a severely abbreviated form in the American edition of The Violet Apple.

  Devil’s Tor (1932) was the last novel Lindsay published in his lifetime, and he made a considerable effort with it. The novel was actually an extensive reworking of an earlier, unpublished Lindsay novel, entitled The Ancient Tragedy, written around 1923. The story concerns an ancient amulet associated with the worship of the Great Mother. It was broken into two halves in antiquity, and Lindsay’s novel concerns the rejoining of these two halves in modern times, by a man and a woman, from whom will come an uplifting of the whole of humanity. This bald summary does not do the book justice, so let me quote Lindsay himself on his novel:

  There are two orders of imaginative writers—those who describe the world and those who explain it. The first—by far the larger class—are the poets or poetic-minded, even though their merchandise be cynicism or sordidness: they aim only at setting familiar things in new and striking lights. But the second have the

  musical temper—between metaphysics and music is this inexplicable link of consanguinity. Their aim is the presentation of passion, emotion, and the elemental forces generally. They wish to get down to the roots of the world. Thus the references of poets to music rarely reach the heart of the matter, while

  the musician of any depth probably never deigns to measure his art-form by the standard of mere descriptive words.

  Devil’s Tor was conceived in a spirit of music . . . To the curious in such matters I should have to refer Devil’s Tor, as to its primary origins, not to any master of prose, living or dead, but to the tremendous creator of the Ninth Symphony. The first movement of that work has generally been more or less in my head during the book’s writing.

  But the story’s actual themes—Fate made visible, the Great Mother, the mystic stones belonging to a world of other dimensions, the part of the Northern races in history, the supernatural bringing-together of a chosen pair for the uplifting of humanity, the purpose of the creation of the universes—these belong not to one time or one mental birth, but have been built up of infinite darkness and confusion. The eye caring to discern will see in them the evident traces of an astronomical parallax: by which I mean a progress of the story, not only from the first chapter to the last, but across the sky-space of thought itself.

  The above description demonstrates a few of Lindsay’s strengths and some of his weaknesses, his high ambition and his complete sincerity, as well as his slow-moving, reflective prose (which some have called ponderous), and his lack of conscious humor. Yet the breadth of this novel is staggering, and to a reader who can appreciate its mood, the rewards are similarly boundless. Whereas A Voyage to Arcturus impresses initially by its flights of imagination and the quickness of the plot, Devil’s Tor gives the feeling of the slow movement of a mountain. E.F. Bleiler has written that “it is not easy reading, but for massive power there is nothing comparable in English fantastic literature.�
� An astute description for one of Lindsay’s undervalued masterpieces.

  Lindsay, David. The Witch (unpublished novel, written between 1932 and 1942).

  Of David Lindsay’s seven novels, his first, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), now acclaimed a classic, is a masterpiece, and in my view Lindsay wrote three additional masterpieces, each distinguished in very different ways. Two were published in his lifetime, The Haunted Woman (1922) and Devil’s Tor (1932), the latter his swansong to publishing. Lindsay’s final novel, The Witch, though unfinished, is his fourth masterpiece, and it has a remarkable history itself.

  Lindsay first mentioned it in 1929, as he was yet again revising Devil’s Tor (first written as The Ancient Tragedy in 1922-23) in the hope of finding a publisher for it. Lindsay wrote to his friend L.H. Myers (1881-1944), the novelist and fringe member of Bloomsbury, on 23 November 1929: “You will be interested to know that I am always (if slowly & painfully) accumulating sketch-notes for a book in the manner of ‘Arcturus’, which I should like (but of course no Publisher would consent for a moment to such a thing) to call ‘The Evil Dream of Ourania Oneira’—the Evil Dream in question being life itself—the illuminating transactions taking place after life. Please say not a word about it to me at any time; as it grows increasingly certain as a part of my particular evil dream, that the creation of further literature is to be denied to me for ever.” Despite Lindsay’s pessimism, after Devil’s Tor was published in April 1932, he turned his full attention to this new idea, soon titled The Witch. It is worthwhile to compile here Lindsay’s own stray comments on the progress of the book.