Late Reviews Page 6
In 1904 Chambers published In Search of the Unknown, which in modern terms would be called a fix-up. It is basically a collection of short stories (all previously published separately), stitched together with some extra bridging passages in order to make it seem like it is a novel. Modern editors and anthologists like E.F. Bleiler, Hugh Lamb, and S.T. Joshi have mined this book for their volumes collecting Chambers’s supernatural literature, and when faced with the fact that the stories in In Search of the Unknown are untitled, they have made up titles for the stories. Here, for the first time, I can give Chambers’s own titles, and the sources of original publication for each of the stories in the book.
In Search of the Unknown consists of twenty-five chapters, comprising overall six previously-published stories, most of which were slightly revised for re-use in the new format. Chapters I-V originally appeared as “The Harbour Master” in Ainslee’s Magazine, August 1899 (and in The English Illustrated Magazine, Christmas Number 1899). Chapters VI-VIII were published as “The Spirit of the North” in The Saturday Evening Post, volume 172 no. 18, 28 October 1899. Chapters IX-XII appeared under the title “The Uxen: The Truth about the Great International Scandal” in Collier’s Weekly, volume 26, 8 December 1900. Chapter XIII through the middle of chapter XVII was originally a two-part serial “The Sphyx” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, part one in volume 108 no. 645, February 1904, and part two in volume 108 no. 646, March 1904. Text from the middle of chapter XVII on through chapter XXI originally appeared as a two-part serial “A Matter of Interest” in Cosmopolitan, part one in volume 23 no. 3, July 1897, and part two in volume 23 no. 4, August 1897. “A Matter of Interest” was also previously collected by Chambers in The Mystery of Choice (1897). Finally, chapters XXII through XXV, originally titled “The Man at the Next Table,” are reprinted from another Chambers collection, The Maker of Moons (1896); most of the stories in The Maker of Moons were serialized in the Sunday edition of the newspaper, The New York Press (whose Sunday edition was titled The New York Sunday Press), in the months leading up to the December 1896 publication of the book. At present it is unknown in which specific issue of The New York Sunday Press that “The Man at the Next Table” appeared, but it was probably in the month of September or October 1896.
In Search of the Unknown is framed as the adventures of a young man named Gilland, employed by the Bronx Park Zoological Gardens, who follows up on interesting leads about rare or extinct species passed on to him by his boss, Professor Farrago. The best of the six stories is the first, “The Harbour Master,” in which Gilland pursues a breeding pair of great auks and encounters something stranger, an apparently supernatural creature called locally the harbor-master. In other stories, Gilland pursues some creatures called dingues (“The Spirit of the North”) and a bird called an ux (“The Uxen”) and some invisible creatures (“The Sphyx”) and a kind of dinosaur named a Thermosaurus (“A Matter of Interest”). As a fix-up novel, the structure really falls apart with the final story being a light satire on reincarnation and theosophical beliefs. It seems intended primarily to fill up space, for it is merely a story related by someone whom Gilland meets on a train, and the content is unrelated to Gilland’s usual naturalistic exploits.
As a novel In Search of the Unknown can only be considered a failure, and if Chambers couldn’t be bothered to come up with an overall plot and a sufficient conclusion to his fairly simple scenario, it might have been better aesthetically to have jettisoned at least the final story (“The Man at the Next Table”), which had previously been collected by Chambers, and to have added at least one new story of Gilland’s adventures. But of course Chambers didn’t, and what’s left is an unsatisfying volume. Police!!! (1915) is a kind of sequel, with a new main character, Percy Smith, also from the Bronx Park Zoological Society, replacing Gilland.
Childe, Wilfred Rowland. Dream English: A Fantastical Romance (London: Constable & Co., 1917).
This is the only novel by the Catholic poet Childe (1890-1952), from early in his career. It is borderline fantasy, and it is mainly, as its title suggests, a romance about some unreal (or dream) English people. It centers around Aurelia, a beautiful young woman who lives in a house called Thessaly, in the High Street of Moresby in the Marsh, nearby the villages of Swilling and Cheoping. (All of these towns are evidently imaginary.) At a party she meets a young man, Sigurd Andersen, who is visiting a college friend. Sigurd falls in love with Aurelia, and unbeknownst to him, Aurelia falls in love with him. Eventually they meet again, and they are married. That is the entire plot of this short book, but it is the highly poetic style which gives the novel its dreamy and almost fantastical feel. Certain passages are exquisitely written, but after a while, the unrelieved high style begins to drag, and passages like the one given here become somnolent:
Beautiful flowering trees, laburnum and lilac and rosy chestnut and crimson may, lifted their bright burning torches, half-lost in the green gloom of their leaves, about the drowsy amber-coloured commune. A few cygnet-bosomed nebulae floated, silvery naked, in the chasmy hyalines of the sky. All the fields were silver and golden with sheets of lacy arrased flowers. Faery cuckoos made music in the white astonished dawns. Procne, queen of the swallows, was flown back to the northern folk with her children from Hellas and Egypt; or in another image, Hirundo, the enchanted swallow-maiden, born in Hans Andersen’s Danish garden and fed on ambrosia by Prester John himself beneath the golden Paradise tree in that immortal kingdom, twittering her magical runes, flickered about the sunlight-spattered High Street of Moresby and made even more lovely the long rosy evening that cast the soft Hesperian benediction of sunset over the darkening, faint-smoking, lamp-glimmering, bat-haunted town, delicious now with bugles and faint Ave-bells. (p. 41-42)
That’s an extreme example, which in one instance shows both the writer’s strengths and his weaknesses.
Christmas, Grace V. What Father Cuthbert Knew (London and Edinburgh: Sands & Co.; St. Louis, Missouri: B. Herder Book Co., [1920]).
A collection of twelve stories, some reprinted from The Magnificat, The Catholic Fireside, and The Irish Rosary. All are tales of Father Cuthbert, a Catholic priest, as told by his young friend Dudley (who is referred to as Leslie in a single story, “The Return of Mrs. Glyn”), and written up for publication. According to Montague Summers in his “Introduction” to The Supernatural Omnibus (1931), one story, “Faithful unto Death,” about a long-dead priest who comes back to say Mass at his old church, is based on an event in the life of the mystic Teresa Higginson (1845-1905), when she lived at the village of Neston in Cheshire.
Nearly all of the stories concern ghosts, but the motivations are always related to expiation and spiritual salvation. The author is uninterested in atmosphere or stylistic effect, beyond the basic element of setting (several of the tales take place in Italy). Though well-written, and not without subtlety, the stories sometimes descend to feel-good spirituality (Cuthbert explains: “Death is a continuation not an ending . . . We say that we believe in the immortality of the soul, but it seems to me that a good many people mourn their dead as though their existence ended with that of their bodies. They do not realise the nearness of those who have passed behind the veil—they seem unable to grasp the fact that he whom they loved is in reality quite as much alive—more so in fact—than when he was on earth” p. 38). At times Cuthbert’s attitudes seem doctrinal to the point of proselytizing, but the stories were clearly written not to engage with non-Catholics, but to affirm the beliefs of those already members of that religion.
Little is known about the author. She was born in Tramore, on the southeast coast of Ireland, around 1862, and she died in Wiltshire in late 1945 at the age of 84. The earliest known of her many publications in Catholic World was a story, “Fatal Friendship,” in November 1897. What Father Cuthbert Knew was her only book, though she also had five pamphlets published by the Catholic Truth Society of London between 1919 and 1924.
Cline, Leonard. The Dark Chamber (New York: Viking Pres
s, 1927).
Leonard Cline’s third novel, The Dark Chamber, is perhaps best remembered today due to its mention by H. P. Lovecraft in his famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” where he calls it “extremely high in artistic stature.” The novel may also be seen as a precursor to Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States (novel: 1978; film: 1980), for it tells the tale of a man, Richard Pride, who, in attempting to recall the lost moments of his life, resorts to stimulation by means of music, smells, and drugs, until he taps into hereditary memory. The story of Richard Pride is framed by a scenario which intentionally recalls the legend of Ernest Dowson; for the novel’s narrator, Oscar Fitzalan, is a musician who has been summoned to play various types of music that will stimulate Pride’s memory. Fitzalan also has his own ambitions, and he is writing music to accompany a forgotten poet’s prose poems that were written to a barmaid who didn’t understand or appreciate them.
It may seem odd that while Cline's novel has been most often read and appreciated as one firmly placed within the weird tradition in literature, this approach is not the best for an understanding of Cline’s work. There is no doubt that Cline knew well the pleasures of the weird in literature, music and art. Indeed, the references within The Dark Chamber tend to be exclusively on the macabre side, and Cline uses these references to build character and atmosphere, making for some striking associations (e.g., what can one think of a character like Miriam Pride who “reads Baudelaire endlessly”?). Cline’s other work is remarkably varied, and it is a striking body of work for such a short life (Cline died in 1929 at the age of thirty-five).
Thus, the best approach to The Dark Chamber is from outside the genre rather than from within it. And in taking such a view, we see that Cline has taken all of the stock elements of the Gothic—the crumbling mansion with its eccentric family, the mad scientist, his estranged wife, the ghostly daughter, the pathetic servant—and placed them in a contemporary setting, with talk of jazz and free love, in a place just far enough away from New York City (in fact, just up the Hudson River) that the cold light of realism is dimmed by the shadows of the hills and woods. Cline’s novel attempts to portray, as realistically as is possible, the kind of eccentric modern people who might inspire suspicions of witchcraft, vampirism, and lycanthropy. Nothing overtly supernatural happens in the book, but there is a hovering tenseness and horror apparent throughout, even from the very first line.
Like other Gothics, the story takes place in a closed society, into which comes a stranger, here a musician who tells the tale in a beautiful prose with a measured cadence. It is a quality of prose worthy to sit on the shelf beside that of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. And it is perhaps Cline’s ultimate tongue-in-cheek that such a tale of brooding horror be written in such a polished and beautiful prose. Occasionally, Cline’s grasp falters a bit, perhaps when intending to burlesque some elements of the Gothic, such as in naming the mad scientist “Richard Pride,” the crumbling mansion “Mordance Hall,” and the dog “Tod” (the German word for death, a joke which Cline even felt he had to point out). Yet Cline’s control is otherwise unwavering, and precisely on target.
The Dark Chamber is a masterpiece of weird atmosphere—intelligent, well-crafted and well-written, and one of those books that earns subsequent readings by revealing further depths on each encounter.
Cline, Leonard. God Head (New York: Viking Press, 1925).
Leonard Cline’s first novel, God Head, is not fantastical but it is mythopoeic. It is set in northern Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior, vaguely during the First World War. Cline’s narrator, Paulus Kempf, is a labor agitator, and after the police break up a strike he was fomenting, Kempf flees into the woods for his life. There, at length, he comes to a small settlement of Finns, who take him in and help him regain his health. During his recovery, Kempf is told tales from the Kalevala, of Kullervo, Lemminkainen, and Väinämöinen, and these stories shape the narrative and influence Kempf’s developing ideas. Thereby he comes to think of an immortality of the flesh through the masterdom of humanity, and Kempf tests out his ideas on the Finns, lusting after the wife of his host, playing on the superstitions of the old people, and creating of the frowning face on the cliff a chanting god head to symbolize his dominance. This bald précis does not convey the majesty of this work, nor the brilliance of its style. On original publication Laurence W. Stallings wrote of it in The New York World: “It would be eminently fair to believe that Leonard Cline could write rings around half a dozen of our ten best novelists” (21 October 1925); and Donald Douglas wrote in The Nation: “More than anything else it is Mr. Cline’s prose holding light like a steel net which transmutes a wild melodrama into an ordered and thrilling rhythm of word and scene and folklore” (6 January 1926). An English edition was published by Jarrolds in 1927, under the title Ahead the Thunder.
God Head is the single-best forgotten novel that I have ever encountered.
Corwen, Maxwell [pseudonym of Louis Maxwell Cohen]. Ole Man Swordfish (New York: Falcon Publishing, 1931). Illustrated by Ferdinand Huszti Horvath.
A children’s book, telling of a large swordfish living under the sea who has a series of episodic adventures with three little bluefish, Johnny, Billy and Bobby. It is a moderately fun children’s book, but it is episodic and rather predictable. The illustrations by Horvath (one color frontispiece, plus numerous ink drawings) add a very pleasant dimension to the book, but even these illustrations are not Horvath’s best.
Counihan, Daniel. Unicorn Magic (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953).
Daniel John Patrick Counihan (1917-2001) was primarily a journalist and broadcaster at the BBC, which he joined just after serving in World War II. As foreign correspondent he traveled all over the world. Later on, in the early 1970s, he became the Commonwealth correspondent and then the Court correspondent at Buckingham Palace. After his retirement in 1976, he regularly wrote a column in The Catholic Herald, and took over the paper’s editorship for about a year beginning in 1982.
Unicorn Magic is his only published novel, dedicated to three of his children. It centers around four children who, while holidaying at a relative’s farm, meet a cockney fairy godmother called Betsy Brass, who involves them in a number of magical adventures, some to do with a hidden room in the farmhouse where a special picture frame allows those who step into it correctly to enter the scene in the picture. Among the various creatures they encounter are a rather formal and pompous miniature Unicorn, and an effete Dragon called Alf. One adventure takes them to seventeenth-century Venice. The book clearly did not sell well on publication in the 1950s, for it is a very rare book today. Counihan’s obituarists reassessed it as “the missing link between E. Nesbit and J.K. Rowling” but this is generous and not very accurate, for the style—as well as the dated behavior of the child protagonists—is far closer to the whimsical world of Nesbit than it is to the more modern Rowling. While not in any sense a lost classic, Unicorn Magic does have charms and attractions, and it ill-deserves its long obscurity. Counihan penned a sequel, but it has never been published.
Crawford, F. Marion. Wandering Ghosts (New York: Macmillan, 1911).
Posthumous collection of seven stories (also published in the UK in 1911 under the title Uncanny Tales), representing nearly all of the author’s supernatural short fiction, written over a period of some twenty-plus years, including: “The Upper Berth” (1886, from the anthology The Broken Shaft: Tales in Mid-Ocean, edited by Henry Norman); “By the Waters of Paradise” (1887, from the anthology The Witching Time: Tales for the Year’s End, edited by Henry Norman); “The Doll’s Ghost” (The Illustrated London News, Christmas 1896); “The Dead Smile” (Ainslee’s, August 1899); “Man Overboard” (Strand Magazine, June 1903, also published as a small volume in the U.S. in 1903); “For the Blood Is the Life” (Collier’s, 16 December 1905); and “The Screaming Skull” (Collier’s, 14-21 July 1908).
All but two of these stories are told as first person narratives, the exceptions being “The Dead Smile
” and “The Doll’s House,” two of the shortest stories in the whole book. All of the tales, however, suffer from long-windedness and a sameness in style that becomes more than a bit tedious if the stories are read one after the other.
“The Upper Berth” is an undoubted classic, and the best story in the book. “For the Blood Is the Life” is an interesting vampire tale, with the local color of southern Italy adding nice touches to the story. But the rest of the stories are all failures of a sort—alternately mawkish and sentimental, or overly predictable and with elements that are now recognized as clichéd. Yet most of the stories in Wandering Ghosts appear singly and frequently in various modern anthologies, and perhaps that is the best way to read them. Individually, each story is at least entertaining, while collectively they are representative of the time in which they were written, and a few have some especially nice touches.
A new edition of Wandering Ghosts, augmented by one story and re-titled For the Blood Is the Life and Other Stories, was published in paperback in 1996 by White Wolf. Darrell Schweitzer contributed an enthusiastic introduction, but the ending to the additional negligible story (another first person narrative), “The King’s Messenger” (Cosmopolitan, November 1907), was inexplicably dropped. The Tartarus Press edition, published under the British title Uncanny Tales (1999) and edited by Richard Dalby, is by far the best, for it contains the complete contents of the 1911 volume, plus the full text of “The King’s Messenger,” and three additional uncanny tales by Crawford’s two sisters.