Late Reviews Page 7
D
Dahl, Roald, ed. Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983).
A collection of fourteen ghost stories, along with a fascinating introduction by Dahl, who first read extensively in the ghost story genre in 1958 for a proposed but aborted television series. At that time he read some seven hundred and forty-nine ghost stories in order to come up with twenty-four good ones. His comments are illuminating: “The first batch of fifty or so stories I read were so bad it was difficult to finish them. They were trivial, poorly written and not in the least spooky . . . Some of the worst ones were written by the most famous writers. I read on. I couldn’t believe how bad they were.”
I have to confess that I’ve frequently felt the same way as Roald Dahl in reading various anthologies of forgotten ghost and horror stories. It’s refreshing to see someone being candid about their disappointment.
As to Dahl’s selections, I have to say that most of them are indeed first-rate. The standouts include Robert Aickman’s “Ringing the Changes” (perhaps the best story in the volume), “W.S” by L. P. Hartley, “In the Tube” by E. F. Benson, “The Upper Berth” by F. Marion Crawford, and “Afterward” by Edith Wharton. It is interesting to note that no tale by the illustrious M.R. James made it into the volume.
Dawson, Annie. The Edge of the World: Some Fancies and Fairy Tales (London: At the Unicorn Press, 1895). Illustrated by Zoffany Oldfield.
A collection of eight stories, mostly fairy tales aimed towards children. Some stories are built around personifications of the seasons (Spring as a gracious maiden, in “The Surly Dwarf”; or April as another maiden, who makes a fool of March as he returns back to the home of Mother Nature in “April and Her Fool”; etc.). The best story is “The Kiss of Lady May,” in which the Lady May offers young Griselle the choice of two gifts: “Earthly Beauty, which is robbed by the stealthy years, or the power to earn the only true beauty—Soul Beauty” (page 60). Griselle lets the Lady chose for her, and, in a tragic way, earns both. The longest story in the book is “Prince Stragvart’s Choice,” in which the good-natured son of a tyrant king secretly loves the peasant girl Blumelda. When his father decides to abdicate, so long as Stragvart marries, the boy turns down the princesses his father offers, and then must abide by his father’s cruel choice of a cup of poison or a marriage to the first peasant girl his father finds. Luckily, it turns out to be Blumelda. Of this book one reviewer wrote, quite accurately, that “some of Annie Dawson’s ‘fancies and fairy tales’ almost succeed, but most of them obviously fail. Probably she will do better if she writes for adults. There is originality in the book and capacity too. The author must try again” (The Academy, 28 December 1895, p. 565).
Annie Cecilia Dawson was born in Chester on 10 November 1875, the third child and only daughter of the Reverend Joseph Dawson (1842-1935) and his wife Mary. Joseph Dawson also published a number of books, mostly on religious subjects, including Peter Mackenzie: His Life and Labours (1896) and an edition of the writings of John Wesley on Preaching (1904). Joseph Dawson also founded, with Ernest Oldmeadow (1867-1949), the Unicorn Press, which existed as a publisher from 1895 through 1905. Besides Annie Dawson’s book of fairy tales, the Unicorn Press also published works by its founders, including a novel, The Face of a Soul (1896), and a collection, The Light That Came and Other Dreamings (1896) by Joseph Dawson, and Ernest Oldmeadow’s pseudonymous first book, Lady Lohengrin: A Wagnerian Romance (1895), as by J. E. Woodmeald. Oldmeadow also published a volume of verse with the firm, and edited The Dome from 1897 to 1900, in which appears work by himself and by Annie Dawson. Other significant titles published by the Unicorn Press include T. W. H. Crosland’s delightful Literary Parables (1898), and Arthur Symons’s Aubrey Beardsley (1898).
In the summer of 1897 Annie Dawson and Ernest Oldmeadow were married, and by 1900 they had both converted to Catholicism. Oldmeadow published many books, some of which have elements of fantasy, including The North Sea Bubble: A Fantasia (1906), and The Town To-Morrow: Five and Twenty Imaginary Broadcasts (1937). From 1923-1936 he edited the well-known Catholic review, The Tablet. After her marriage, Annie Dawson published as Cecilia Oldmeadow. Her writings include a tale, A Box of Chocolates (1913), a work of nonfiction, The First Red Cross (1923), and two plays, Cæcilia: A Play in Four Acts (1927) and The Rose Celestial: A One-act Play (1930). Her final publication was a children’s book, Guttergrin the Gargoyle (1934), in which a friendly gargoyle transports a young heroine into various fairy tales. It was illustrated by Marie Keane. Annie Oldmeadow died in the summer of 1970.
de Comeau, Alexander. Monk’s Magic (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1931).
Monk’s Magic is the delightful story of Brother Dismas, in search of the elixir of life on behalf of his Abbot, who has absolved Dismas of sin in advance for his extensive research into the black arts. When all of his experiments fail (coincident with the possibility of the Grand Provincial making an inquiry into the true nature of Dismas’s studies), Dismas decides that he must venture out into the world and search for the successful philosophers who had found the elixir. He soon gathers as companions a teenage boy named Gabriel, and the stout ally Thomas Brackenridge (“more like a barrel than a man, so small was his stature and so marvellous his girth”). After the learned Ibrahim summons his dead great-grandfather for advice for Dismas, the three travel to Germany in search of the philosopher Lucius Germanicus, whose cryptic formula for eternal life was Dismas’s most recent failure. With that set-up, the story follows a small and circumscribed scope, centering upon Dismas and the growth of his character and his love for the young woman Radegonde, who was formerly disguised as the boy Gabriel. Eventually, returning to the Abbot to report his failure, Dismas calls up the Prince of Darkness, who Dismas learns may also in fact be God, and the Prince gives Dismas the following timeless advice:
Here in this pleasant world are millions of vile creatures intent, if you please, on “saving their souls”, by which they mean, apparently, stifling every natural desire, clean and wholesome though it may be, and substituting notions foul and deformed, in hope by such paltry meanness to enjoy hereafter a disproportionate reward for everlasting. To this end they exercise every vile, pettifogging miserable vice of the spirit, persuading themselves that such vices are virtues, they interfere with their neighbours’ pleasures, cheat themselves into unwholesome beliefs. Why, even their body, the only possession of which they can be secure, and that a possession of which at any moment they may be deprived, even their body, I say, they will torment and neglect and starve, and, when the stench of their uncleanness offends the nostrils of all decent men, they call it the odour of sanctity. (p. 246)
The secular message is refreshing. And if Monk’s Magic is not quite as clever as Mervyn Wall’s The Unfortunate Fursey (1946), which in terms of plot and character traverses a similar area, it remains very entertaining and well-written.
Alexander de Comeau was born Ernest Alexander Commo in 1894, the son of Isaac Jarvis Walter Commo (1865-1939) and his wife Elizabeth Jones (c. 1868-1958); he seems always to have gone by his middle name Alexander. Around 1900, his family began to spell their surname Comeau, and by the time of his marriage in 1913 to Constantia Louisa Beck Bedingfeld, daughter of the artist Richard Thackeray Bedingfeld (a descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray’s great aunt), he (alone of his family) went by the last name of “de Comeau.” In the 1920s, Alexander de Comeau entered the Consular Service, and in 1925 became the Vice Consul at Colon, in the Canal Zone in Central America. His first novel was Fires of Isis (1927). After the death of his wife in London on 5 June 1930, Comeau killed himself at his London residence by inhalation of coal gas, causing carbon monoxide poisoning. His brother Reverend Percival Comeau (1888-1964) tended to his estate, and presumably oversaw the posthumous publication of the novel Monk’s Magic by Methuen in London in the spring of 1931.
A new edition from Nodens Books was published in 2018.
de Hamong, Count Leigh. A Study of Destiny (Lo
ndon: Saxon & Co., [1898]). Also published as The Hand of Fate, by Cheiro (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1898).
The writer and occultist known as Cheiro predominately went by the name of Count Louis Hamon (1866-1936). This novella, his only work of fiction, appeared in England under the pseudonym “Count Leigh de Hamong” and in the US under his regular byline Cheiro.
A Study of Destiny is basically two stories: a frame narrative, and an imbedded revelation of the past of one character. In the frame story, the unnamed narrator and an elderly Egyptologist, Professor Von Heller, are in Egypt searching for a lost tomb. Frequently they observe a strange isolated man who comes gradually to assist them. Eventually, all three are trapped in the lost tomb they have discovered, and in their final hours, the strange man, Chanley, tells of the personal history of his family and himself in India, how he came to be cursed, and of the strange manifestation of this curse in the form of a snake that has grown like a tumor within his body. Both the frame narrative and the imbedded story propound a view that Destiny is inevitable. The frame-story itself is a bit plodding, but Chanley’s personal history is unusual and gripping, raising the level of the whole.
Cheiro is remembered chiefly for several books on palmistry. It’s a pity he didn’t write more acknowledged fiction.
Drake, Burgess. Hush-a-by Baby (London: Falcon Press, 1952). Re-titled: Children of the Wind (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1954).
Henry Burgess Drake (1894-1963) was born in Chowping, in northern China, of British missionary parents. He had three brothers and two sisters, and the Drake family was lucky to escape safely from the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, when Chinese pro-nationals murdered thousands of foreigners, particularly missionaries. The Drake family came to England, and three of the boys, including Burgess (or Bur, as he was known familiarly), were educated at a school for the sons of missionaries, Eltham College in Blackheath (the school moved to Mottingham in 1912). Drake served in the Royal Field Artillery in France and Flanders during World War I, and in 1921 he and his youngest brother Eric Drake (1898-1988) returned to teach at Eltham for five years. One of their students was Mervyn Peake, and the friendship between Peake and the Drake brothers grew significantly as they got older. Burgess left Eltham to teach for two years at what was then the Imperial University in Seoul, Korea. He had married Irene Beatrice Bowker (1899-1963) in 1922; their two sons were in turn educated at Eltham College. Much of the rest of Burgess’s professional career was in teaching, save for a time in World War II when he was sent to China as a Major in the Intelligence Corps. Between 1925 and his death he published ten novels, a children’s book (illustrated by Mervyn Peake), and several books on teaching English in secondary schools (some published by Oxford University Press, and these, too, have some illustrations by Mervyn Peake), as well as an account of his impressions of Korea, titled Korea of the Japanese (1930). His first book, the horror novel The Remedy (London: John Long, 1925), is remembered as an influence on H.P. Lovecraft, who knew it in its re-titled U.S. edition, The Shadowy Thing (New York: Macy Masius, 1927). Drake’s earlier books were bylined “H.B. Drake,” but after World War II he signed them all as “Burgess Drake,” Several of his other novels have elements of fantasy or the supernatural, but in his penultimate novel, Hush-a-by Baby, the supernatural returned to the forefront.
Hush-a-by Baby is ostensibly written by a ghost—or some manifestation or poltergeist of one of the aborted twins of Mary, Lady Hilary. The narrator is Trixy, the boy, and his twin sister is Janet. The story takes place entirely at the vast English estate of Chelling Close, where Mary lives with her mother, Bess, and a host of servants. Her husband, from whom she has been partially estranged since the first night of their marriage when he learned that Mary was not a virgin, is a cabinet minister in London, and occasionally visits. Other regular visitors include the Brigadier, who had been in love with Bess when they were young, and the Doctor, who had performed the abortion on Mary. Only Mary, Bess, and the doctor know the details of Mary’s past, and the story and its complications are unraveled by Trixy as he grows to understand them, reporting in his narrative on conversations he has overheard. Another regular visitor to Chelling Close is Mary’s nephew Osbert, a young artist. Mary alone sees his talent and encourages him. Here Trixy describes Osbert’s art:
Osbert made pictures, sometimes little pictures in his pocket-book when he was in the house or garden, and sometimes big pictures when he was in the studio, and sometimes they were in pencil and sometimes in colour. And some of them were of things we had seen so that we knew what they were, and some of them were of things inside him so that we had to guess at them because there was an oddness in them and a mischief and a twist; and some of them were of things we had seen but with a twist in them too, such as trees with the knots like eyes and the bark like faces and the branches like arms and the roots like claws, or the tower and that like a face too, very tall and grim and deep-within and staring against the night.
But mostly he drew the faces of people, and that was what we liked best, because whether they were faces we knew or didn’t know he drew them from the inside so that we could tell what the lips were thinking and what was behind the eyes, and if the ears and hair and chin were rather squiggle-about that didn’t matter, and if the bodies and arms and legs were rather scratch-around or even if they weren’t there at all that didn’t matter either, because you heard what the faces were saying which wasn’t like the portraits in the house which shut like doors whenever you looked at them for all that they knew and remembered . . . And when he drew faces from the inside, that was better still, because these had scares looking from them and whimpers and chuckles and shudders so that each one was like the picture of its own name.
Hush-a-by Baby is dedicated to Mervyn Peake and his wife Maeve, and it is hard not to see descriptions like the above as apt for Peake’s own artwork.
Mary keeps a locked room as a nursery for her unborn children, who manifest in pranks (some very serious) played on members of the household and a number of the servants. The house acquires a haunted reputation, and Mary is seen as mercurial if not unbalanced. Mary finds that Osbert has drawn pictures of Janet’s face, and this strengthens the bond between them. Complications ensue as Janet comes to love Osbert, and she tries to manifest herself, but difficulties compound when he brings a young woman he intends to marry to the house. Meanwhile the local vicar has coaxed Mary and her husband to allow the occult specialist Dame Geraldine to study the house. Such events bring matters to a head, with tragic results.
In Hush-a-by Baby the supernatural content may be slight, but it is central to the plot, and the major interest in the story for the reader is in the unfolding psychology of the characters. Though it starts slowly, the novel picks up narrative drive and pulls the reader in thoroughly. Hush-a-by Baby may be just short of being considered a lost classic, but it is a compelling and well-executed novel-length story of the occult and its effects on the human psychology, and for that alone it deserves renewed and continued attention from readers of supernatural literature.
Drake, H.B. Shinju (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, [1929]).
Shinju is the fifth and rarest of H.B. Drake’s ten novels (after 1950 he used the byline “Burgess Drake”). It is mainly comprised of an autobiographical manuscript (with an editorial prologue and epilogue) of one Peter Wayte, who was born in Japan and raised there until around the age of fourteen, when he was sent to an uncle in England after his father’s disappearance and his mother’s death. His father had been a novelist, but he was mostly absent, wandering the Japanese countryside, until at last he disappeared and was presumed dead.
The manuscript tells Peter own story of returning to Japan in the early 1920s in order to discover what had happened to his father. Peter becomes enamored with a young Japanese girl named Fumi. Peter eventually follows Fumi to her home at a remote temple haunted by past thievery. The complicated situation contrasts the traditions of East and West with regard to honor, family, tradition, and soc
iety. That the story is a tragedy is foreshadowed early on: during a discussion of “wonderful passionate tales of sweethearts who sacrifice everything, even honour, loyalty and truth,” one person explains: “Death atones for all. . . . And such lovers as you speak of, when they find union impossible and separation unbearable, will die together, committing shinju, as we say.”
Shinju is basically a mainstream novel that attempts to explain to Westerners some of the mysteries of Japanese behavior. It has no fantastical content save for a few hallucinations. It is a well-written and engaging read.
Dunn, Gertrude. The Mark of the Bat (London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, [1928]).
This is the second of three novels, published by Gertrude Dunn (1884-1949) between 1926 and 1929. It has achieved the status of an almost legendary rarity. This is sad, because had the book been reprinted occasionally over the last century it might have achieved some small recognition of its merits. It is no lost classic, but it has considerable interest and anticipates a number of later aspects of the familiar vampire novel.
Basically, it is the story of a young woman named Elma Barry. While staying at the Royal Hydro in Westbourne with her convalescing mother, she comes to know Lilian Gresham, a woman of similar age who is wasting away rapidly with some sort of “pernicious anæmia.” Lilian’s husband Owen is strikingly attractive and full of vitality. Lilian soon dies, and some months later, Owen Gresham calls upon Elma back in London to renew their acquaintance. This leads inevitably to an engagement, and soon Elma begins to suffer from enervating nightmares where she is surrounded by a malicious mist. Her family friend, Paul Larabee, who secretly loves Elma, suspects Gresham is somehow involved. Larabee has an associate Owen Dease who is coincidentally an authority on Transylvanian folklore and superstitions. What complicates the book, and indeed makes it more interesting, is that Owen Gresham is revealed to be a hereditary living vampire, one who does not bite his victims but still depletes them of both life energy and blood. Owen has this hereditary “mark of the bat” in the form of a purplish birthmark, shaped like a bat, near the elbow of one arm. Meanwhile, Lilian has returned from the dead as a traditional vampire, and stalks Owen, confounding his plans. This contest between hereditary vampire versus traditional vampire makes for an interesting wrinkle. Nonetheless, it leads to a traditional ending with both vampires dead and Paul Larabee engaged to Elma. Some of the final chapters are handled less adeptly than those in the first half of the book. What is left is an interesting if not entirely successful early vampire novel in the post-Stoker mode.