Late Reviews Page 3

  While it remains an immature work, Panacea has a number of chapters of considerable interest to reader of Aickman’s fiction. These particularly include chapters 18 through 20, 59-61, 63-64, 66-68, 73 and 80. The chapters on economics and politics were of lesser interest to me (though this may reflect my own personal interests, or lack thereof).

  It is probably for the better than no publisher took on Panacea. If it had appeared in print, just as World War Two was beginning, it likely would have sunk without a trace, and Aickman might not have gone on to write the strange stories for which he is rightly acclaimed. Panacea remains primarily a curiosity by a writer remembered for vastly better things.

  Aiken, Conrad. Punch: The Immortal Liar: Documents in His History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921).

  I read this short book because I had seen someone refer to it as “an astonishingly creepy foretaste of Ligotti.” So I was expecting it to be prose, but actually it is a narrative poem, reworking the folklore of Punch from seventeenth century English puppet-shows. Certainly, there are Thomas Ligotti-like ideas and elements, but the tone of the whole is entirely unlike anything of Ligotti’s, being both colloquial and jovial in its manner. It is a development from Aiken’s earlier poem “Senlin: A Biography,” in his volume The Charnel Rose (1918), which is demonstrably an influence on another great writer of weird fiction, Leonard Cline. Cline was in 1918 a reviewer for the Detroit News, and Aiken sent him an inscribed copy of The Charnel Rose on 19 November 1918. “Senlin” seems to have been the inspiration for Cline’s poem “Mad Jacob” (first published in Midland in January 1924, and collected in After-Walker in 1930). There is no evidence that Cline read Punch, but the book, interesting though it is, doesn’t really belong on the shelf next to Cline or to Ligotti. Aiken’s work has its own integrity and interest.

  [anon.]. The Haunted Hunt (London: J.A. Allen, 1965).

  This short ghost story is here reprinted with new illustrations by Tom Carr in an edition of 500 copies. It is introduced by the 4th Viscount Knutsford, Thurstan Holland-Hibbert (1888-1976), who notes that “about fifty years ago I came across this story in The Badminton Magazine, and as far as I can remember the author’s name did not appear.”

  The story tells of Anthony Nunn—“a man born to hunt hounds, he lived hunting hounds, he died hunting hounds”—a bloodthirsty, obsessed bachelor who served as his own kennel-huntsman and who had an uncannily close relationship with his hounds. Nunn would brood over a missed fox, and he died during the pursuit of a particular grey fox he had missed several days earlier, crushed by the horse that had fallen atop him. About a year later, the unnamed narrator of this tale relates his own experience chasing the same fox. During this hunt he loses his horse, and the hounds and their quarry escape. Much later he manages to catch up to the horse, and he is horrified when he sees that it is directed by an invisible rider, and cheered on by the unmistakable voice of Anthony Nunn, who has apparently returned from the dead to lead the hounds to kill the one fox who had gotten away from him.

  The story appeared in The Badminton Magazine in January 1907, signed as by “Ralph John” with three illustrations by R.J. Richardson. That “Ralph John” and R.J. Richardson were the same person is confirmed by the appearance of “The Haunted Hunt” in Melton and Homespun: Nature and Sport in Prose and Verse (London: Chapman and Hall, 1913), by J. M. M. B. Durham and R. J. Richardson, with illustrations by Richardson. Here Richardson is identified as the sole author of “The Haunted Hunt.” This reprint includes only one of Richardson’s illustrations to the story. Little is known of Richardson, who seems primarily to have worked as an artist. He was born Ralph John Richardson in Seaton Carew, Durham, in 1876, the fifth and final child of John William Richardson (c. 1832-1882), who was born in Durham and who is listed as an “iron merchant” in the 1881 UK Census, and his Welsh-born wife, Letitia Adeliza Jenkins (1836-1920). Ralph John Richardson apparently never married, dying in Brentford, Middlesex in early 1937. Besides the handful of stories and illustrations in Melton and Homespun, Richardson illustrated only a few other books.

  [anon., ed.] An Introduction to Islandia: Its History, Customs, Laws, Language, and Geography as Prepared by Basil Davenport from ‘Islandia: History and Description’ by John Perrier, First French Consul to Islandia, and Translated by John Lang, First American Consul. With Maps Drawn by John Lang. (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, [1942]).

  This curious hardcover booklet of sixty-one printed pages relates to the country of Islandia (part of the imaginary Karain continent, somewhere in the southern hemisphere), as envisioned by the American law professor Austin Tappan Wright (1883-1931). Wright’s invention evidently began in childhood, and continued through his education at Harvard University (A.B. 1905; LL.B. 1908), apparently crescendoing in composition during the decade of the 1920s. At Wright’s death, following an automobile accident, several large and complete manuscripts were discovered, including a novel of over six hundred thousand words, as well as a history of Islandia comprising around one hundred and twenty-five thousand words, and a volume of appendices nearly as long, as well as nineteen hand-drawn and finely detailed maps, some colored. Wright’s novel was edited down by over a third by his daughter Sylvia Wright (1917-1981), and seen through publication by Farrar & Rinehart editor Mark Saxton (1914-1988), who would himself later write and publish three Islandian novels. The novel Islandia was published on April 9th, 1942. Two weeks later, as part of the publicity campaign, this companion booklet was published. Intended primarily for reviewers and booksellers, some copies were also sold to the public, but it survives as a rather rare book today.

  Basil Davenport (1905-1966) was commissioned to write for this booklet an essay covering the ancillary manuscripts, including the volume of Islandian history (designated by Wright as Islandia: History and Description, supposedly authored by the fictional John Perrier and translated by the equally fictional John Lang) and the volume of appendices. Davenport’s essay comprises half of the booklet. Mark Saxton selected material by Austin Tappan Wright to comprise the second half, including photographs of three maps, and selections from the volume of appendices, including the bibliography of books on Islandia; a section on population; notes on the climate of Islandia and its calendars; some specimens of Islandian literature; and a glossary of certain Islandian words and usages.

  What makes this booklet especially significant is that in May 1942, the original holograph manuscripts of the novel, the history, the appendices, and the maps, were lost in transit on return from a successful exhibition at the Philadelphia Ledger Book Fair. (The final typescript—the abridgement prepared by Wright’s daughter and used for the typesetting of the published text—was also lost at this time.) Rewards were offered for their return, but nothing ever surfaced, and some of these important items—in particular the volume of appendices and the nineteen maps—were lost forever. The texts of the uncut novel, and the full history, survive in typescript form (now held in the Harvard University Library). Around seven of the maps survive as photostats or photographs. The materials in this booklet from the volume of appendices, along with Davenport’s essay, are important in understanding the extensive scope of Wright’s creation, for these amount to our only accounts of the lost matter.

  The novel Islandia is often called a utopian novel, but that is not strictly true, for while the novel has utopian aspects, it can not really be viewed as an ideal society owing to its long history of problems, many dealing with outsiders. Davenport opens his essay with a long passage worth quoting:

  Islandia is something which is absolutely unique. It is the imaginary country of a schoolboy, which was not abandoned as he grew up. Instead, he continued to fill in the outlines until he had created a country with its own history, worked out in detail for a thousand years; its own geology and climate; its neighbors, and relations with them; its towns and regions, with maps; its nobility, with a complex peerage; its language and literature, and its characteristic art forms (the fable in letters, and the amateur
carving among the plastic arts); its own costumes, customs, and constitution; its own calendar and mathematics; its own religion and national character; its own relations, though scanty ones, with the outside world. All these are entirely consistent with each other and with history; its wars are affected by its weather, just as they ought to be under the conditions laid down; during the great period of the Saracens’ conquests in the Mediterranean, they almost conquer Islandia also. And the whole has that higher, less definable consistency that one feels in any period that one knows thoroughly. (p.1)

  The scope of Islandia as an invented world rivals (and in some aspects exceeds) that of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Yet Islandia has no imaginary creatures or magic beyond that of the everyday world, so some critics do not consider it to be fantasy in the same sense as used to describe Tolkien’s world. Nevertheless it is accomplished world-building on a nearly unequalled scale, and Wright’s novel can itself be called a classic of the same order, though of an entirely different flavor, as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

  [anon., ed.] My Grimmest Nightmare (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935).

  Though edited anonymously, this anthology is sometimes mistakenly attributed to Cynthia Asquith, presumably because her story is positioned first in the book. However, the editor seems likely to have been Cecil Madden (1902-1987), the radio and (later) television producer who initiated the radio series upon which this volume is based, and who also contributed one story.

  The book contains twenty-two stories by twenty-one authors—Algernon Blackwood being the contributor of two stories. And Blackwood seems to have been the impetus for the radio series, for he read “The Blackmailers,” an original story written for the radio, on the BBC London Regional on 11th July 1934, and appeared on the Gossip Hour, a chat show overseen by Madden on the BBC Empire programme on 1 August 1934. When the “Nightmare” series itself debuted on 4th September 1934, Blackwood was the first selection, adapting an old story, “A Haunted Island,” which was first published in Pall Mall Magazine for April 1899 and collected in 1906 in The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories. For the 30th October 1934 broadcast, Blackwood adapted his tale “By Water,” which had appeared in the Westminster Gazette (and the separate Saturday Westminster Gazette) for 18 April 1914 and was collected in Day and Night Stories (1917). Two of these three stories—“By Water” and “The Blackmailers”—are reprinted in My Grimmest Nightmare. Other contributors known within the genre include Lady Cynthia Asquith and Marjorie Bowen. Asquith’s contribution, “The Follower,” is unexceptional, and can be found collected in This Mortal Coil (Arkham House, 1947). Bowen’s “Incubus” is otherwise uncollected but it was reprinted in August Derleth’s anthology The Night Side (1947) under the new title “Nightmare” and with no mention of previous publication. Other stories were contributed by less familiar names, including H. de Vere Stackpoole, Noel Langley, and Theodora Benson.

  It is perhaps no surprise that the Blackwood and Bowen stories—all of which can be read elsewhere—are the best in the volume, with the other contributions ranging from the undistinguished to the completely forgettable. For the American edition published in 1936 by the Telegraph Press of New York, this volume was retitled Not Long for This World.

  Antrobus, C.L. The Wine of Finvarra and Other Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1902).

  This is the only short story collection by C. L. Antrobus (1846-1919), author of three novels, Wildersmoor (1895), Quality Corner: A Study of Remorse (1901), and The Stone Ezel (1910). Born Clara Louisa Rogers in Grantham, the daughter of a surgeon, she was raised in Bowden, Cheshire. In the winter of 1871 she married Arthur John Antrobus, an old playmate, and was widowed soon afterwards. In the early 1880s she moved to Fulham, where she lived with her cousin Miss Alice Hanslip (1851-1907), an artist, until Hanslip’s death, after which Antrobus dutifully tended her cousin’s grave on a daily basis. Antrobus reportedly died from the consequences of a chill contracted at the graveside. Her obituary in The Times (12 February 1919) aptly noted that she “excelled in presenting sad and wistful aspects of life, and in scenic descriptions, particularly of woods and moorland.”

  The Wine of Finvarra contains thirteen stories, nine of which are collected from popular magazines dating from 1896 through 1901. Four stories are published for the first time. Few of the stories have any supernatural content (such content is mostly to be found in associations with devil legends), and many of them are set in Lancashire, with dialectical speech that is fairly easily understood. The best stories are the title story (original to the collection), in which a man who disappeared thirty years earlier returns to his old hometown to die, finding there a final comfort with his former fiancée; and “The Garden of Attalus” (The Temple Bar, June 1901), in which a man meets an artist and his wife at their cottage in a secluded woodland. The critic Stewart Marsh Ellis, who befriended Antrobus late in life, considered five selections from this volume to rank with the finest short stories in the English language.

  Armour, Donald. Swept & Garnished (London: Laidlaw Books, 1938).

  This slim book has slipped under the radar of most weird fiction readers for far too long. Back in 2007, the now-defunct small press Thomas Loring announced a re-issue as forthcoming, but unfortunately it never came to pass. At least their announcement called attention to this work, and we can be grateful for that.

  Swept & Garnished tells of two rivals in Kestrel St. Luke, a small town in the West Country of England: the “modern” vicar, the Reverend Robin Blandford, who lives comfortably with his wife and two daughters in the vicarage next to the ancient church right downtown, and the Roman Catholic Priest Damian Biddy, who lives in a boarding house over the shoulder of the hill near the great slate quarry where his little chapel of asbestos and corrugated iron had been built. Biddy openly envies Blandford his church.

  Two sinister strangers, a brother and sister, visit the church, looking for “a house for a friend.” They are intrigued by the legends of the Devil’s Oak tree, by which a demon had escaped imprisonment in a gargoyle when the tower was originally built. The vicar reads to his visitors the account of a cleric written on parchment long ago: “in my cell the devil spoke: ‘Even though I wait a thousand years I will return whence I was driven forth. Of the house of God swept and garnished I will take possession.’ ” After this the Reverend Bladford undergoes a change. The family dog is found killed, its remains laid at the foot of the bed of one of his two daughters. Next, one of the daughters is murdered and her body hung from the church’s tower. Father Biddy, though himself a suspect in the crimes, realizes that something truly evil is afoot, and he works to save the townspeople and the Blandford family.

  Swept & Garnished is an extremely promising first novel, and if it falls short of being a lost masterpiece it is primarily because it aims low, even though it nicely accomplishes what it sets out to do.

  Donald Armour (1908-1988) was the only son of a Harley Street surgeon. He was educated at the Downside School, and at Cambridge University (Pembroke College, BA, 1929). Through the 1930s he worked in London as an ad copywriter, and during WWII he served in the Royal Corps of Signals. From 1947 through 1959 he was joint managing director at an advertising agency in Capetown, South Africa, after which time he moved to Alicante, Spain. In 1972 he settled in Devonshire, and around 1986 relocated to Hindhead, Surrey, where he died in July 1988. Swept & Garnished was his first book, followed by only one other, the more ambitious So Fast He Ran (1940).

  B

  Baum, L. Frank. The Wizard of Oz (dramatization by L. Frank Baum, 1902; unpublished).

  Long before Judy Garland and Hollywood reinvented Baum’s classic children’s novel into a musical motion picture in 1939, Baum himself had recognized the dramatic potential of his story and had written a stage play. In fact, he wrote two versions, the first of which follows the book fairly closely. The second, however, diverges wildly from the book, making the story into a three-act musical extravaganza. And this second version, staged in 190
2, became an enormously popular entertainment, touring the United States for most of the decade following its premiere. Oddly, the script for this extravaganza has never been published. After many years of not too diligent searching on my part, I learned that a copy of the script is held in the Baum collection at the Syracuse University Library. So I eagerly ordered a photocopy. Now, having read the script I can say why it has never been published: frankly, it is terrible.

  In this version Dorothy is a young lady who lands in Oz with her cow Imogene; she attracts the amorous attentions of Sir Dashemoff Daily, the Poet Laureate of Oz. Numerous new characters are introduced and familiar ones are re-imagined for a performance filled with topical references and not-very-funny puns. Seeing the drama performed on stage, replete with special effects, songs and vaudeville comedy, may likely have been an enjoyable experience, but none of the charm possible through such a performance is apparent to the reader of the unadorned script. Certainly, this play may seem interesting as a historical document because of the changes from the book-version, but in reading it these changes seem arbitrary and even pointless. Baum was a much more interesting writer of prose.

  Bennett, Arnold, writing as Sarah Volatile. “Strange Stories of the Occult,” a series published in Woman, between 9 January and 17 April 1895.

  In 1895 Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was not yet an established novelist. He then worked as a journalist, doing everything for weekly magazine Woman, editing it, writing book reviews, and even writing pseudonymous stories. Seven “Strange Stories of the Occult” appeared under the byline Sarah Volatile.