Late Reviews Read online

In the first, “A Divided Ghost” (9 January), the skeptical Clara Grant sees a ghost, knowing intuitively that it is a ghost, and afterwards it is seen by many other people. Clara experiences it as a feeling of loss, as if part of herself has left her, and this short tale is wrapped up with the declaration that it is an apparition of the New Woman, which lays the ghost to rest. “The Clapham Theosophical Society” (23 January) tells the story of a supposed chela, Mr. Panting Prawle, who insinuates himself in with some society women, but who turns out to be a fraud who has pocketed all of the subscription monies. In “An Astral Engagement” (6 February), Miss Anna Slosson Mapes finds that her ability to project her astral body has brought her trouble, for as she and her double date two different men, both she and her projection accept proposals of marriage.

  In “The Fatal Marriage” (20 February), a newly married lawyer, Willie, recalls his mother-in-law’s visions of a disaster for him on his wedding day. He dreams of being kidnapped by a society for the punishment of men who encourage Advanced Women, but wakes up upon being administered their sentence of the kiss of death. “Dr. Anna Jekyll and Miss Hyde” (6 March) is a sequel to the famous Robert Louis Stevenson tale, in which the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, leaves to his friend Miss Anna Hyde the ingredients which make up the famous potion. Utterson believed that the potion would work differently upon a woman, and when Miss Hyde assays it, she turns into a new woman, who saves herself from being so forward as to propose to her suitor by taking another dose of the potion, thereby returning herself to normalcy. In “The Phantasm of My Grandmother” (27 March), a woman materializes the spirit of her grandmother, who died young and who is curious about the modern world, and takes her to her Club. The grandmother comments on the novelists and the ladies and the New Children, but when the modern artist wants to draw her portrait, she has had enough and disappears. In “The Crystal-Gazers” (pt. 1, 10 April; pt. 2, 17 April), twin girls use crystal-gazing in an attempt to find out which will receive a marriage proposal from the man they both love.

  The seven stories are well-written, and the characterizations well-drawn, but that is about the only attraction to them. The supernatural is usually incidental to the author’s commentary, which is clearly aimed to the magazine’s audience, and none of the stories is worth reprinting.

  Benson, Stella. Living Alone (London: Macmillan, 1919).

  The title “Living Alone” is the name of a house in Mitten Island, London, part of which is a shop run by a witch. The rest of the house is available rent-free to needy and eccentric characters, some of whom come to Mitten Island as a result of the witch appearing at the committee meeting (for War Savings) which opens the novel. Most of the characters are non-descript, and some are nearly caricatures, like Lady Arabel Higgins, who seems to find everything “dretful.” The story is set during the First World War. One night there is an air raid by the Germans, and in the aftermath the witch, riding her broomstick (named Harold) high over London, discovers and battles with a German witch who is part of the air raid. This is the only place where the story comes to life. The book has a style of its own, but the mix of whimsical portraits along with occasional and an often murky symbolism will for the most part dissatisfy the reader.

  Stella Benson (1892-1933) wrote some other fantasies, like The Awakening (1925) and several stories in her Collected Short Stories (1936), but was best known for her final novel, Tobit Translated (1931), a comic and romantic story of Russians in Manchuria. Though born and raised in England, she left it in 1918 for California, and visited China in 1920, where she met a customs official whom she married the following year. She spent much of her final decade in China, where she died after contracting pneumonia.

  Bernard, John. The New Race of Devils (London: Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company, [1921]).

  “John Bernard” was the pseudonym, used for two books, of Anne O’Meara de Vic Beamish (1883-1969), a writer and founder of language schools in Europe who normally wrote as Noel de Vic Beamish. Beamish was born in Dublin, but spent most of her life in France, where she lived with her companion Suzanne Allévy. In the 1940s her friend and neighbor in Cannes was the Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), and Beamish was the model for the elderly woman who would sing in the evenings in Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). She published over twenty novels, as well as two books on dogs. Robert Hale was her publisher from 1954 until her death, publishing some seventeen of her twenty-six books. The bulk of her fiction was in the form of swashbuckling historical novels, many set in the Middle Ages, for which Beamish did a good deal of research. In the 1920s, she had acted on the English stage, and translated two plays from the Italian.

  The New Race of Devils is especially rare and presumed to be her first book. The undated A Woman of Fire, also published by the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company, is even rarer and presumed to be slightly later. The New Race of Devils begins with a polemical preface signed W.N. Willis, who was the controversial publisher behind the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company. William Nicholas Willis (1858-1922) was an Australian opportunist who had been tried twice for corruption before he prudently removed himself to London. Around 1912 he established the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company, through which he issued books with salacious titles like White Slaves in a Piccadilly Flat (1913) and Wedded Love or Married Misery (1920). Willis’s preface to The New Race of Devils begins with fraud, claiming the male author John Bernard was for years a prisoner of war in Germany, and from there it moves quickly to yellow journalism: “This work is woven around the Germans’ temperamental hatred of their conquerors, and shows their professors, subordinating science to patriotism, laboriously experimenting to breed, by insemination, a race of men but one stage removed from the Gorilla of the bosom of darkest Africa—a new race of devils bred scientifically and relentlessly for the one purpose, revenge upon their enemies.”

  The novel itself is divided into three main sections, preceded by a short prologue. The first section, “The Mother,” is set, like the prologue, in 1915. The second section, “The Boy,” is dated 1926, and the final section, “The Man,” which is itself as large as the first two sections combined, is set in 1934. The story basically concerns an experiment in eugenics—Professor Werner and Major von Hartweg conspire to breed immoral and efficient soldiers for the next uprising of Germany. To this end, in one instance, they choose for the father a man of exceptional physique who has no culture of any kind, and who has a remarkable capacity for drink and a vicious mean streak, while for the mother they select a beautiful cabaret girl who has only contempt for love. By means of a surgical procedure, the woman is impregnated against her will, and she dies soon after giving birth to a son. In her final days she was filled with feelings of hatred and revenge, which Werner and von Hartweg hope are passed on to the son. Though similar experiments have taken place all over Germany, this novel follows this one particular boy, who is raised by Major von Hartweg as his own son, Arnauld.

  The second section tells of his elite schooling, his conditioning to hate England and to revere and obey without question the German Emperor, and later of his murder of the beloved dog of his neighbor and playmate Elsa. In the final section, the young man Arnauld sees competition for Elsa’s affections in the person of her cousin, so he rapes her as a claim upon her. Soon afterwards, Elsa is made a companion at the royal household, where Arnauld is similarly the chosen companion of the Crown Prince, and in high favor with the Emperor. From here the plot descends into melodrama, as Arnauld’s affections for Elsa are rekindled and he finds further competition and intrigue at the court. Plans for Germany to invade England via an undersea tunnel are uncovered and publicized, leading to popular unrest, for the German people themselves, unlike some of their leaders, want no more of war. In the end a bomb kills Elsa, and Arnauld takes away her body with him in a small plane. Sentiment has at last overcome Arnauld’s breeding, and his plane is shot down over the Baltic Sea.

  Overall, this is not a very good book, and not only because of the deluded eugen
ics and the fact that most of the characters are one-dimensional caricatures. The earlier parts of this novel are pedantic and, in the explication of the racial theories, quite silly, while the later part of the book reads merely like pulp melodrama. Beamish wrote one novel under her usual pen-name that is fantastic in nature. This is The King’s Missal (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1934). George Locke, in A Spectrum of Fantasy Volume II (1994), notes that it is “badly written” and calls it “rubbish.”

  Birnstingl, Edgar Magnus. Destur Mobed and Other Stories (Oxford: Printed for Private Circulation, 1915).

  A memorial volume of a precocious boy who died at the early age of sixteen, complete with a photographic frontispiece and a memoir signed E.L. [Elizabeth Lee]. Edgar Magnus Birnstingl (1898-1915) was a student at St. Paul’s School in London from 1911 until his death. The fifteen stories in this volume all date from the last two years of his life. Some are short sketches, others are somewhat longer. Many concern the author’s fascination with gemstones. The “Destur Mobed” (translated as “Complete Master”) of the title story concerns a Babylonian brass statuette of a lion, which grants wishes along with curiously twisted side effects so that the ill effects dwarf any good fortune. (A second story, “The Case of Galstone’s Eyes,” also concerns the Destur Mobed.) The stories, mostly all imaginative fantasies dealing “with the marvellous, the mysterious, the unusual” (to quote the preface writer), are well-done and worth reading, bringing on the inevitable regret that the young writer didn’t live a long productive life. The volume earned (and deserved) the trade edition of one thousand copies, published by Elkin Mathews in December 1916.

  Blackwood, Algernon. Sambo and Snitch (New York: D. Appleton, 1927).

  From 1927 to 1936, Blackwood published a number of children’s books of varying lengths—some as small as four thousand words, others longer. Sambo and Snitch was the first of these, and the only one of these books, originally published by Basil Blackwell in England, to have an American edition. This story is around the size of a novella. It concerns a small boy named Sambo, who befriends a lizard, whom he calls Snitch. They have adventures in the garden at night, when Snitch reduces Sambo (and his younger sister Topsy) to a very small size. The adventures continue until Snitch must go underground for the winter.

  This volume has none of the special qualities that make Blackwood’s supernatural writings so good. Instead it attempts to recapture a child’s view of the world, and in this area Blackwood bores me to no end.

  Blakeston, Oswell. Boys in Their Ruin and Others (London: The Fortune Press, 1949).

  “Oswell Blakeston,” the pseudonym of Henry Joseph Hasslacher (1907-1985), was a prolific writer and artist who had had his start in film—in the late 1920s as an associate editor on the staff of the film magazine Close-Up, and as an experimental film-maker (including the 1929 film I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, with Paul Robeson, and the 1930 abstract film Light Rhythms). His many books include fiction, poetry, travel writing, and cookbooks. During the mid-1930s, writing in collaboration with his friend Roger Burford under the pen-name “Simon,” he authored some mystery novels and weird short stories. In the field of supernatural literature, Blakeston is remembered as a staple contributor to various horror anthologies of the 1930s, including the various volumes anonymously edited by John Gawsworth (in some of which he published stories as by both Blakeston and Simon). He also contributed to two volumes of the Creeps series, edited by Charles Birkin, and to one volume of the Not at Night series edited by Christine Campbell Thomson.

  After the Second World War, Blakeston published two small collections of short stories with R. A. Caton’s Fortune Press. The first, Priests, Peters and Pussens (1947), is a collection of about three dozen very short pieces, with decorations by Blakeston’s partner, Max Chapman. Boys in Their Ruin and Others (1949) contains three longer stories, and a fourth section, headed “Divertisement,” containing nine short shorts (including one in French), similar to those comprising the earlier volume. The title of the volume comes from a Dylan Thomas poem from his first book, 18 Poems (1934), which was reprinted several times by the Fortune Press. The poem begins: “I see the boys of summer in their ruin . . .”

  Gay themes recur in a number of Blakeston’s works, and are subtly present in the stories in Boys in Their Ruin. The first, “Geoffrey and Peter,” tells of the cruelty the sensitive boy Geoffrey encounters, and in turn enacts upon Peter, in order to prove himself a man. In “Edmund and Christopher” two boys compete for the favor of a cleric. And in “Helen and Veronica,” a nurse attends to the final months of the life of an old woman, anticipating the financial reward she expects to receive from the family, all the while her spirit is bolstered by her memories of her friend Veronica.

  There is nothing fantastical or supernatural in these stories, but they cast a spell on the reader with their obliqueness and with their hints at the “ruin” in the disaffected lives of the various characters.

  Butler, David. The Men Who Mastered Time (London: Heinemann, 1986).

  This is the only fiction published by David Butler (b. 1941)—a regrettable fact, as the novel, though it has flaws, is of considerable interest. Though partly set in the years just before its publication, it looks back to the tradition of scientific romances of the early twentieth century, and parts of it are set in the distant past, as befits a novel of time travel.

  The story is told by an elderly professor of English at Oxford, Dr. Hawkesworth, about his adventures with two of his friends and former pupils, mathematician Lord Augustus Steerforth and Pakistani physicist Inayat Khan, both of whom are the men of the title who have mastered time travel. (Both are also cricket players, which allows the author to go in for some extended scenes—sometimes a bit too extended—from their memorable cricket matches.) The two men become rivals and opponents when Khan’s ambitions of power conflict with the more sensible ideas of Steerforth. The story moves back and forth in time, and the literary allusions to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” point to the idea that Inayat Khan has gone back in time to become the thirteenth-century Mongolian ruler that inspired Coleridge’s famous poem. Steerforth, Hawksworth, and a few other colleagues seek methods to spoil Khan’s plans. This makes for an engaging literary tale that spans the centuries.

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  Cadnum, Michael. Invisible Mirror (Chicago: Ommation Press, 1987).

  Since 1989, Cadnum has been building up a considerable underground reputation with his adult horror novels, written mainly in the older tradition of Blackwood and Machen, as well as with a handful of distinctive and disturbing young adult novels. His prose is poetic, which is not surprising because he was a published poet for many years before he turned to novel writing. His poetry collections were mainly published as small collections, often in very limited editions, and they are not easy to find. Invisible Mirrors has sixteen poems by Cadnum, and also includes nine completely unrelated illustrations by Mary Hatch. The poems are much less interesting than one would expect having already read Cadnum’s prose. They are perfectly adequate modern poems (with all the good and bad that such a statement implies), having a few memorable lines and images here and there, but as a whole they don’t add up to much.

  Caine, Hall. The Demon Lover.

  Though pretty much forgotten today, Hall Caine (1853-1931) was an immensely popular novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This unpublished play, apparently written in 1895, was based on Caine’s narrative poem of the same title, also unpublished. An edition of the play, titled An Edition of Hall Caine’s “The Demon Lover,” was prepared as a Master of Arts thesis at Texas A&M University by Joan Linnstaedter in 1993. Though Linnstaedter’s thesis also has not been published, I was able to read it by borrowing a copy through interlibrary loan.

  The Demon Lover was intended to be another starring vehicle for Henry Irving (1838-1905), one of the preeminent Victorian stage actors. By 1895 Caine and Irving were old friends, as were Caine and Irving’s manager, Bram Stoker (1847-1912). In 18
90, Caine had written a previous play for Irving. This play, “Mahomet,” about the founder of Islam, was forbidden to be performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, who felt that any play about the founder of Islam “would give offense to many of Her Majesty’s subjects,”

  It is believed that The Demon Lover was never performed because Caine was not satisfied with the play, as the sole manuscript shows some of Caine’s notes for revision. The play consists of two acts, with a short interlude in between. The play begins in Reykjavik, in the late 1840s. The story centers on Thyra, the daughter of the landlord of the Hotel at Reykjavik, and her family and friends. Into this circle comes Lars, the captain of the ship called “The Demon Lover.” The plot is very basic. In the first act, Thyra is haunted by thoughts of Lars, while the new local Sherriff arrives to ask for Thyra’s hand in marriage. His proposal is interrupted by the arrival of Lars, whose presence and interests dominate the room. When he gets Thyra alone, Lars tells her that he is leaving on an expedition, and will be gone perhaps for many months, and he tells Thyra that she must not marry the Sherriff. He professes his own love for her, and Thyra, though frightened by him, swaps rings with him and vows not to marry anyone.

  Two years pass, and in the Interlude we see Lars and his men nearing death on an iceberg near their wrecked ship. Sigurd, one of the few men still alive, tells Lars of a vision: that it is Easter Day in Reykjavik, and he sees the wedding of the Sherriff and Thyra. The crushing and crashing of the icebergs begin again, and Lars and the last of his men die.

  For Act II, the scene returns to Reykjavik, showing the wedding of the Sherriff and Thyra that was seen by Sigurd in his vision. Afterwards, Thyra is troubled and restless, and she retires alone to her bedroom. In the moonlight, Lars comes to her, and she admits that she believed him to be dead. Lars tells her that he died this very day, in the frozen north, citing an old saw (the second part of which Bram Stoker would reuse a few years later in Dracula): “the dying see far—the dead travel fast.” Lars brings death to Thyra and the couple passes outside “to the white world yonder—to the great sea and silence.”