Late Reviews Read online

  Though the character of Lars would have been a suitable showcase for Henry Irving’s talents, the slim plotline doesn’t seem worthy of an actor of Irving’s stature, and though some of the dialogue introduces depth to the scenario, with discussions of free will and moral responsibility, for the most part it comes across as the simple speech of peasant folk, and it is not very interesting. It is hard to see how a successful production could have been staged, and perhaps Caine and Irving recognized this fact too.

  Carleton, S. The Forest Runner (London: Andrew Melrose, [1925]).

  I’ve been exploring the writings of “S. Carleton” since discovering the fine werewolf tale “The Lame Priest” several years ago (it was published in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1901; and retitled as “The Wolf” in The Pall Mall Magazine, also December 1901). “S. Carleton” was one of a number of pseudonyms of Susan Jones (1864-1926), née Morrow, whose husband was Guy Carleton Jones (1864-1950). She and her husband both came from distinguished families in Nova Scotia. Her literary output is confusing owing to the variations she used as her pen-names, one of which, “Helen Milecete,” is especially problematic because it was sometimes shared with one of her sisters, Helen Morrow Paske Duffus (1868-1936). ‘The Lame Priest” is set in pre-Revolutionary New England, where a lame wolf appears, scaring away the native Indians, and feeding on the young children of a remote settlement. It is skillfully written and nicely atmospheric.

  The Forest Runner, S. Carleton’s final novel (and final published work), has the same setting of the earlier story, and it includes a similar outcast priest who is here called the Half-One and who is believed by some to change into a wolf at sundown and back into a man at sunrise. The titular character is the novel’s narrator, one John Sark, a runner of dangerous errands between Albany and Quebec. His story comprises a small series of events where he has been targeted by an enemy who is using the various native peoples to further their own ends, and to foment conflict between the settlers, French and English, and the various native tribes. In this tense situation Sark saves an attractive young woman, known as Chou, and comes to love her, all the while suspecting that her father, if not she herself, is somehow involved in the plot against him. The tale is full of suspense, with various complications and revelations that move the plot nicely, while the main romance moves towards its predictable end.

  Carové, Friedrich Wilhelm, translated from the German by Sarah Austin. The Story without an End (London: Duckworth, 1912). Illustrated by Frank C. Papé.

  This is a meandering Child-in-Nature fable of the worst sort, in which an unnamed young boy has adventures with a dragonfly, a Will-o’-the-wisp and other charming creatures. The tone of the story says it all: “There was no end to his delight. The little birds warbled and sang, and fluttered and hopped about, and the delicate woodflowers gave out their beauty and their odours; and every sweet sound took a sweet odour by the hand, and thus walked through the open door of the Child’s heart, and held a joyous nuptial dance therein” (p. 57). And on, and on, and on. This tale by Carové (1789-1852) was apparently first published in German (as Das Märchen ohne Ende) around 1833, with the English translation by Sarah Taylor Austin (1793-1867) appearing in 1834. The book had many editions through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, when it seems finally to have attained its deserved oblivion.

  Carr, Cameron. Gilded Clay. (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1938).

  Between 1936-40, R. R. Ryan published seven lending library thrillers with the firm Herbert Jenkins. These novels attracted little notice outside of their intended audience and were long forgotten when, in 1983, Karl Edward Wagner championed three Ryan titles in The Twilight Zone Magazine in a series of lists of best horror novels of various types. Wagner’s enthusiasm made Ryan’s books, already rare, escalate in price, and the scarcity of copies, together with the high prices, has only added to their mystique while making critical assessment more difficult. In an article titled “Finding R. R. Ryan” published in All Hallows 37 (October 2004), James Doig and Theo Paijmans reported upon the discovery, via archived publisher’s contracts, that Ryan published four additional novels with the same firm and during the same time period, under two different pseudonyms. “Cameron Carr” was Ryan’s pseudonym for three of the four novels; “John Galton” was the pseudonym for the fourth.

  Gilded Clay was the second Cameron Carr title to appear, and the sixth of Ryan’s eleven novels. It begins slowly and unpromisingly, with an awkward and repetitious stream-of-conscious narrative, but gradually the story begins to cast a spell. It is basically a tale of ruined lives, centering around two characters, the first being Helen Transport, a young up-and-coming doctor with a problematic family. Helen’s beloved sister Primrose is a nymphomaniac, whose behavior is watched with a kind of sinister pleasure by their widower father. The second main character is Doctor Robert Renfrew, a brilliant surgeon and cancer researcher who is at first Helen’s mentor and subsequently her love-interest.

  Gilded Clay is entirely non-supernatural, but as with Ryan’s other books it leans towards both horror and melodrama. The first two thirds of the book details Helen Transport’s fall from her ideals. After Primrose becomes pregnant and threatens to end her own life rather than carry the baby to term, Helen reluctantly performs an illegal abortion. Primrose still causes her own death in the aftermath of the abortion; her actions are somewhat ambiguous, but described as follows: “Primrose died of her own panic. Of that there could be no doubt. Her clumsy efforts to precipitate results had produced the inflammation, fouled the delicate tissue . . .” (189). Helen is sentenced to prison for three years and stripped of her medical credentials. In prison her calm and beneficent nature enables her to make plans to help the poor after her release.

  In the meantime, Renfrew has fallen for the superficial but beautiful Crystal Fairlawn, who manipulates him into marriage, and with her social ambitions distracts him from his true calling of medical research. Renfrew publicly and caustically criticizes Helen Transport for her ethical transgression, later realizing that he still loves her, and that Helen should have been his ideal partner in work and in life. Renfrew, injured in an accident shortly before his marriage, is unable to father children. Eventually, after Helen has been released and has begun her philanthropic work, Crystal becomes pregnant through an extramarital affair and Renfrew find himself following Helen’s previous path. He performs a secret abortion on his wife, but she, like Primrose, dies for similar reasons. Renfrew at last turns to Helen, and she, recognizing that his superior talent would be wasted in prison, accepts the blame for his crime so that his reputation can remain untarnished. She returns nobly to prison, but after a while the hypocrisy eats away at Renfrew, and he publicly admits his guilt and thus suffers the consequences of his actions. The novel ends with Helen looking forward to his release from prison in seven years, when they might be together at last.

  The parallel descents of Helen Transport and Robert Renfrew are handled with some skill. Renfrew’s wife Crystal is likened to the disease he specialized in studying: “Crystal had him as a cancer has the flesh, with claws tight in . . . That was what it amounted to, he could not leave Crystal. He must forever carry her with him, unless released by a Knife of insuperable competency” (251). The title of the book refers to Renfrew realizing that, with the exposure of his crime, his golden reputation will be seen through as a sham, exposing the clay underneath the gild.

  Ryan’s familiar themes of sexual depravities recur, and though there are hints of lesbianism and incest, none of the sexual matters are handled with prurience. Some philosophizing is given for each side of the abortion issue, and while this must have seemed daring in the 1930s, many of the arguments expressed make the novel feel dated to modern readers, or as (more charitably) cumbersomely tied to the time period in which it was written.

  Gilded Clay was the only one of Ryan’s eleven novels to receive a review in the Times Literary Supplement. Beyond a brief and sanitized summary of the plot, th
e reviewer offered no criticism other than calling it “an improbable novel” (26 March 1938). In The Observer, “Torquemada” (Edward Powys Mathers) was less kind: “This is a plain-but-badly-spoken book. I feel that if one wants to bring home to the world [such] startling relations . . . one should either serve an apprenticeship in acceptable writing or else blast one’s readers with the powers of starkness” (6 March 1938). This judgment is a bit harsh, though it must be admitted that Ryan’s novels, interesting and intriguing as they are, never seem to live up to praise like that of Karl Edward Wagner, nor do they seem entirely satisfactory in their own right.

  Based on internal evidence in the novels, there had been some speculation that “R. R. Ryan” was a female author, though correspondence with the publishing contracts identify Ryan as male. The contracts also clearly distinguish Ryan as the author’s name with Carr and Galton as the pseudonyms. The coincidental fact that there was a real life, minor British actor named Cameron Carr, active particularly in the two decades before the first Ryan novel appeared, has given rise to the unwarranted supposition that “Cameron Carr” was the writer’s real name and Ryan and Galton the pseudonyms. The actor Cameron Carr (1876-1944) is known to have lived at 3 Minerva Road, Kingston, for the last ten years of his life; this address does not correspond with Ryan’s contact information in the publisher’s contracts. More recent research has identified the author as “Rex Ryan,” the pen-name and stage-name of Evelyn Grosvenor Bradley (1882-1950), who wrote plays and other novels under further pseudonyms.

  Carroll, Jonathan Samuel. Looney Tunes: A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts (unpublished, dated June 1973).

  Yup, here it is: the unpublished thesis —a piece of fiction, no less— by Jonathan Carroll, written seven years before his first novel, The Land of Laughs, was published. This typescript contains forty-eight pages, but it is clearly only a part of a work-in-progress (the last page states that it is the “end of part one”). As such, it is difficult to judge it in comparison to Carroll’s other finished and more mature works. However, its style is slick and assured, like Carroll’s other works, and one does sense that the work will soon deliver one of those unique Carrollian coherences, that blending of disparate ideas into one thread of a riveting and fantastic story. But part one on its own doesn’t quite get that far.

  Ostensibly, what this fragment tells in the way of story is a number of vignettes about various oddballs in a Virginia town. On the stylistic side, there are verbal plays on numerous then-current pop culture things, particularly songs (which is probably part of where the title comes from).

  It is remarkable to note that in 1992, nearly twenty years after this thesis was written, Carroll published a portion of this fragment— slightly rewritten but essentially the same tale— as the short story “The Art of Running Bare” in the all-original anthology In Dreams, edited by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman. This anthology is a sort of celebration for the musical single, and Carroll’s story, which plays upon the 1960 Johnny Preston single “Running Bear” and the early 1970s Ray Stevens single “The Streak,” is so perfect for the stated aims of the anthology that Carroll must have recalled this part of his old novel and just lifted it out and retouched it.

  A few further minor comments need to be made. On the thesis’s title page, Carroll’s two readers at the University of Virginia have signed their names: Peter Taylor, and John Casey. One really wonders what they made of this early effort. And last, it seems to me a real pity that the novels Carroll is known to have completed before The Land of Laughs—titled Looney Tunes and Popeye Money— remain unpublished.

  Cartmell, Esmé. Rescue in Ravensdale (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, [February 1946]). Illustrated by Drake Brookshaw.

  This is a children’s book, telling of a fortnight-long family holiday in Yorkshire in August 1939, just before the start of World War II. (One suspects that the book might have been written around that time, with paper shortages delaying publication until after the war.) The plot is minimal. It centers on the Levington family, father and mother, their four daughters (the youngest are twins), and cousin Roger who joins them. The father, Brand, is an author and publisher’s reader of books for older children, and the whole family is rather bookish, making their conversation one of the more enjoyable aspects of the book. Brand brings home some manuscripts for the opinions of his children, and even their evaluative banter is amusing. When one child complains of the “very dull beginning of very dull Ivanhoe,” the father responds: “Scott wrote Ivanhoe for grown-ups . . . He had to describe everything so carefully because no one had tackled the Middle Ages like that before.” His daughter sensibly replies: “M’m. I see. But I wish he wouldn’t make his people say Hark ye, villain, I’ll give ye a bonk on thy nose, and things like that” (p. 106).

  The family holiday includes a good amount of hiking and sight-seeing, attractively described, but a tone of seriousness comes in when they find a supposed German spy—actually a sculptor and artist who had come to England via Denmark to flee Hitler—who is hunted by a local figure the Levingtons have christened Oswald Poop. Oswald Poop ends up having a sinister agenda (assisting the Nazis), and the Levingtons are able to save the artist and thwart his adversary.

  The book has an added interest because Esmé Cartmell was a one-time pseudonym of Leslie Barringer (1895-1968), author of Gerfalcon (1927) and its two sequels, Joris of the Rock (1928) and Shy Leopardess (1948). Besides being an author, Barringer was, like Brand Levington, a publisher’s reader of books for older children, and the father of four daughters (the two youngest being twins). One suspects that the physical description of Brand may also apply to Barringer (of whom I know of no published photographs): “He is tall, thin, mild, with bushy grey hair, grey eyes, horn-rimmed spectacles (the whitish kind), and tweed clothes” (p. 12). Rescue in Ravensdale was reprinted once, in February 1955, in the “Triumph Series” published by Thomas Nelson and Sons.

  Cearnach, Conall. The Fatal Move and Other Stories (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1924).

  This slim volume contains six stories, most of which have some kind of fantastic element. The title story is the best in the volume, and it involves two inseparable friends, both devoted to the game of chess, who are rivals for the hand of a woman. One of the friends devises a chessboard with a random but rigged square that will complete an electrical circuit when an uninsulated chess piece is positioned on it, resulting in the electrocution of the player who moved that piece. Both friends, one unwillingly, play the game, and the winner will have the woman he desires as his wife.

  Of the other stories, the most interesting is “The Homing Bone,” which concerns a femur, dug up in a Dublin graveyard, that causes a haunting and returns to its grave. “The Fiend That Walks Behind” tells of a medical doctor at a lunatic asylum who succumbs to “opisthophobia,” or the fear of something indefinable and immaterial, a rare disorder discovered by the doctor’s late mentor, and appropriated by the doctor as his own discovery. “The Vengeance of the Dead” tells of the school rivalry of a Hindoo and a Mohammedan, and of the posthumous revenge the latter apparently acts upon the former. “Professor Danvers’ Disappearance” tells of the seeming de-materialization of the body of the eponymous Orientalist and theosophist after receiving a death threat from a secret society in India. The last story in the book, which is also the shortest, is “The Rejuvenation of Ivan Smithovich,” a humorous tale set in a future England which has been Russificated, wherein the former John Smith, now Ivan Smithovich, fears that the English language will die with him, and has an operation to do with the grafting of ape-glands in order to make himself younger. Though partially successful, he experiences unexpected results.

  “Conall Cearnach” was the pseudonym (it is also the name of a legendary hero of Irish mythology) of the Reverend Frederick William O’Connell (1876-1929), who was Lecturer in Celtic Language and Literature at Queen’s University in Belfast. His scho
larly books, as by F.W. O’Connell, include A Grammar of Old Irish (1912) and Irish Self-Taught (1923). Under the pseudonym “Conall Cearnach” he published three collections of essays, The Writings on the Walls (1915), The Age of Whitewash (1921), and Old Wine and New (1922), followed by his only volume of fiction, The Fatal Move and Other Stories. His translation into Irish of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde appeared in 1929.

  Chambers, Robert W. In Search of the Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1904).

  Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) is renowned for his second book, the classic collection The King in Yellow (1895), which contains ten stories, several of which are cornerstones in the literature of the supernatural. Chambers quickly moved away from writing about the supernatural to produce mainstream commercial fiction, though some of his follow-up collections, including The Maker of Moons (1896) and The Mystery of Choice (1897), gather up further examples of Chambers’s weird fiction. And Chambers did throughout the rest of his career return occasionally to the use of fantastical tropes, though often in a lesser manner than he had previously. By 1912 Chambers had a reputation as a best-selling writer of society novels, with over forty published volumes to his credit. That year, in what is perhaps the most revealing interview he ever gave, he was asked specifically about his early success with The King in Yellow, and he replied: “No, I shall not return to any of my earlier styles of writing. Does a man ever return to a thing he has outgrown? He has a feeling for a certain subject, he writes about it, he gets it out of his system, and that’s the end of it. I am writing society novels at present because that is what I see all around me and that is what happens to interest me now. I began writing them because I felt attracted to the subject, not because I thought it would be popular. No one can tell you what subject people will like.”