Le Fanu Le Fanu Le Fanu

Recent publications by and about J. Sheridan Le Fanu deserve some attention here. Tartarus Press has just published Some Strange Disturbance: Selected Ghostly Tales, edited by Jim Rockhill, who contributes a twelve page introduction to the selection of thirteen stories by Le Fanu. There is a long tradition of publishing selections of Le Fanu's tales (some of which were originally published anonymously, with posthumous attributions to Le Fanu of varying degrees of certainty), from M.R. James's Madam Crowl's Ghost (1923), through two volumes from Arkham House, Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories (1945) and The Purcell Papers (1975), through two volumes edited by E.F. Bleiler for Dover Books, Best Ghost Stories of J.S. Le Fanu (1964) and Ghost Stories and Mysteries (1975), on to single volume collections like Michael Cox's Illustrated J.S. Le Fanu (1988), Leonard Woolf's Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (1996), and Aaron Worth's volume in the Oxford World Classics series, Green Tea and Other Weird Stories (2020). But the sort-of father to Rockhill's selection is none of these volumes; instead, it is the three volume set Rockhill himself edited about twenty years ago, Schalken the Painter and Other Ghost Stories, 1838–61 (2002); The Haunted Baronet and Others, Ghost Stories 1861-70 (2003); and Mr. Justice Harbottle and Others, Ghost Stories 1870-73 (2005). Rockhill's 2025 selection contains five stories from the first volume, five from the second, and three from the third.

 

In terms of Le Fanu scholarship, Rockhill's lengthy introductions to the three volumes from twenty years ago have long needed to be collected into a volume on their own, and Swan River Press has also just published Rockhill's A Mind Turned in upon Itself, which includes updated versions of the three introductions plus several stray writings by Rockhill, including one on stories mis-attributed to Le Fanu ("The Faux and the Spurious: False Ghosts and Doubtful Le Fanu") and another which discusses "Lovecraft's Response to the Work of Le Fanu." This makes for an essential volume for anyone wanting up-to-date views on Le Fanu.

 

Finally, Swan River Press has also just published The Green Book no. 26 (Samhain 2025) which collects a number of oddities about Le Fanu (including a story by his sister, and extracts from a volume by his brother, as well as a survey of his contemporary obituaries and a discussion of the very faded inscription on the capstone of Le Fanu's grave). Issue 26 is a follow-up to The Green Book no. 25 (Bealtaine 2025) from earlier this year, which is also entirely concerned with Le Fanu.  

 

 

 

At Moon's End: Francis Ashton's 'The Breaking of the Seals'

The Breaking of the Seals, the first novel by Francis Ashton (1944), is an unusual timeslip fantasy. The dustwrapper flap notes: ‘A brief description cannot do justice to this astounding novel, which has an affinity of dimension with C.S. Lewis’s fiction, and makes the early chapters of Genesis and the Book of Revelations [sic] come alive. It is also distinctive in being set in a modern framework of the latest scientific knowledge.’

In his preface the author notes: ‘When H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine he provided a precedent for using a novel as a vehicle for its author’s opinions about the nature of Time’. The reader may wonder, he continues, if this is the case here. Not so: the theories outlined ‘have been advance for the purposes of the novel and not as a contribution to the solution of metaphysical problems.’

However, he goes on, he is serious about some of the propositions in the novel. He distinguishes, if I follow him correctly, between time ‘as presented to consciousness’ and the Time ‘of physics and dynamics’. To the consciousness, Time and Space are intuitively different and cannot be merged in a four-dimensional world. But to physics, he avers, Time is Space. He discusses theories of time in both Einstein and J W Dunne, who had a great success with his An Experiment With Time (1927), a study of precognitive dreams. Dunne’s theory was that all time is simultaneous: our perception of past, present and future is an artificial construct of consciousness. As my physics teacher once remarked that a monkey would have performed better than me at the multiple choice exam paper by selecting answers at random, I may have got some of this wrong. However, as the author avers, it is not strictly necessary to tangle with it for the enjoyment of the yarn.

The novel has an entertaining beginning in which the narrator, a callow, lovelorn youth, joins a salon house-party. The tactless hostess has invited a former flame of his and her current beau, and equally awkwardly the guests include two rival scientists who are bitter rivals. Hot dinner-table debate is followed by the revelation of a recent archaeological find which puts a new light on prehistory.

Nettled by challenges to his theories, one of the scientists reveals that he is trialling a form of time travel and the young hero volunteers to undergo a journey under hypnosis into the antediluvian past, when the disintegration of the moon Bahste led to deluge and disaster on Earth. We are then plunged into an imaginary society before this catastrophe occurred and at this point the novel becomes similar to lost race or classical age fantasies, essentially a costume drama of power struggles, erotic rivalries and scheming priesthoods. Some relationships in the antediluvian world are presented as the precursors to those back in contemporary times, suggesting a reincarnation dimension too.

The chapters setting-up the time travel are entertaining, in an almost Wodehouse sort of way, with the obtuse hostess, the awkward social complications, and the bristling professors. The triumphant introduction of an object from the distant past is also neatly handled, and the method of access to deeply ancient time is deft and does not involve any elaborate scientific apparatus. The drama in the ancient society is perhaps a bit predictable, with the likely influence of Rider Haggard, and seems somewhat out of line with the thoughtful introduction: a more complex society or greater mystical elements would have enhanced this part. The book seems to belong with a cluster of novels in the Forties and Fifties involving reincarnation and/or Atlantis.

The idea that there is or was another moon orbiting Earth besides the one we now see occurs in various forms in occult and astrological circles. The astrologer Walter Gorn Old, known as ‘Sepharial’, claimed to have identified a second moon which he named Lilith. He said this was a 'dark' moon invisible for most of the time, but that he had observed it as it crossed the sun. He included Lilith in his star charts and prophecies.  Old was a friend of Yeats and Arthur Machen: the latter recalled that when Old and Yeats once speculated together on Machen’s star sign, they were both wrong (he was born under Pisces). 

According to online sources, Francis Leslie Ashton was born at Chapel-le-Frith, Derbyshire, on 24 June 1904 and died at Ely in July 1994. The Enyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as an ‘analytical chemist, painter and author’. He also wrote Alas, That Great City (1948), set in Atlantis, with a similar theme, and, with his brother Stephen, Wrong Side of the Moon (1952), about space travel. Moons were evidently a preoccupation. Three short stories, by Francis Ashton only, are recorded in periodicals in 1950-51. The Breaking of the Seals is a lively tale evidently informed both by knowledge of occult thinking and scientific theories, which give it, as it were, extra dimensions. 

(Mark Valentine) 

The Centenary of 'The Region Cloud' by Percy Lubbock

The Region Cloud (1925) by Percy Lubbock celebrates its centenary this month. An epigraph gives the source of the title, Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxxiii: ‘But out, alack! He was but one hour mine,/The region cloud have masked him from me now.’ We are prepared, therefore, for a story of transience and loss.

There is a slow, meditative opening in which the protagonist, Austin, notices as he dines in a French café a haughty figure seated in an alcove who is treated with high respect by the patron and the other guests. He finds he cannot help but steal looks at him, though at first these do not seem to be returned. He assumes he must be some aristocrat. The opening sets up an elegant sort of mystery, but is perhaps rather too measured, at times verging on the ponderous.

At length, however, the object of his fascination joins him at his table and discourses to him. It emerges that he is a famous artist, Channon, who is pleased that the protagonist apparently does not know of him, so that they can converse naturally: he takes to him, and calls him his ‘ghostly friend’. The revelation of the stranger’s identity does not quite live up to the mystique built up: we might have looked for something more unusual and elusive. Still, there is a certain curiosity about what happens next, and how their relationship develops.

The scene shifts from France to Bintworth, the artist’s country house estate in England, where Austin becomes part of the menage and negotiates his position via a vis the rest of the household. There is an air of gentility and formality which conveys a certain graceful quality. We observe how he melds into the rather studied, poised ambience of the place. In a sense, he almost becomes a sort of emanation of the great artist, and we seem to be witnessing a very subtle, visionary, type of haunting. In other hands, this might have turned into a tale of emotional or spiritual vampirism, but that is far from Lubbock’s idea.

There are, however, to my view two weaknesses in the book. Firstly, we are not told enough about the artist’s work, so the portrait of him as a great figure lacks depth or detail: we have to take it on trust. Though Channon is the focus of the narrative, his work seems oddly unrealised. Secondly, the novel over-elaborates its narrative. The same point is repeated in variations over several pages without taking matters much further forward. This might be seen to impart a measured, meditative quality to the prose, with a scrupulous care to convey the finest shades of meaning, but it does not make for compelling reading. There is neither strong incident nor even the sense of the ethereal that might be found in, say, a Walter de la Mare story.

The explanation for the novel’s theme and its style is that Lubbock was an earnest disciple of Henry James, indeed for a while his literary secretary and then the editor of his letters.  The novel seems to depict their relationship and to convey the great respect he had for James, as well as their mutual attraction. But the author emulates rather too closely his master’s elaborated style, without the concomitant narrative qualities: there is no aspiration towards the elements of mystery and suspense in The Turn of the Screw. 

Percy Lubbock had earlier published a somewhat lighter and more engaging novel, Roman Pictures (1923). Here, the narrator is in a reverie in a square in Rome, delighting in the dreamy mood he is in but ready, after his stay of a few weeks in the city, for some new experience. As if conjured up, an old school-friend saunters across the square towards him. He had never been a close friend but always seemed an unusually assured individual, and even now makes the narrator feel somewhat gauche. 

The friend has taken lodgings far away from what he calls ‘the English ghetto’, where all the tourists stay. Along with his air of effortless superiority, he also has charm and appeal. Guided by him, the narrator finds himself introduced, as the title suggests, to a fascinating gallery of people, each with vivid personalities. There is almost a sense here of a Ronald Firbank novel, though without quite the oblique wit and satirical zest. This book is more successful as a novel than The Region Cloud, part of the genre of the rather awkward Englishman abroad encountering new aesthetic and bohemian dimensions. 

Percy Lubbock’s first editions were always nicely produced, with good quality paper and fine printing, and such touches as paper labels, and they exude discernment and fastidious taste, as does his prose. They do not seem to be greatly pursued today, but may still attract readers of the rare and recondite.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: World of Books.  

The Centenary of "Sandalwood" by Clark Ashton Smith

Sandalwood was the fourth collection of poems by Clark Ashton Smith, published on October 25, 1925, preceded by The Star-Treader and Other Poems (San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1912), containing fifty-five poems; the sumptuous Odes and Sonnets (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1918), containing fifteen poems; and Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose (self-published and printed by The Auburn Journal press, 1922), with ninety-four poems in verse and twenty prose poems.

Sandalwood (also self-published and printed by The Auburn Journal press) contains forty-two poems and nineteen of Smith's translations from the French of Charles Baudelaire. It was limited to 250 copies, and bound in dark green wrappers.

Smith first characterized it, in a letter to George Sterling  of 11 April 1922, as it being "made up entirely of love poems." On 10 July 1925, Smith wrote to  Donald Wandrei, "most of the poems are not in my best style . . . 'Rêve Parisien,' one of my Baudelaires, is the best poem in the book."

The translations from Baudelaire are the highlight of the book. Smith noted, in the same letter to Wandrei quoted above, that "as far as I know, I am the only translator who has done them in their original metres. It is far harder to write good alexandrines in English than in French." 

Donald Wandrei paid half the cost of the printing ($50), and about six months after publication Smith wrote to George Sterling that his own stock had dwindled to about thirty. 

I quote here not one of Smith's Baudelaire's, but a poem from the main portion of Sandalwood that kind of introduces the Baudelaires.  In Sandalwood it is titled "On Reading Baudelaire"--it was later retitled "On Re-Reading Baudelaire"

Forgetting still what holier lilies bloom
Secure within the garden of lost years,
We water with the fitfulness of tears
Wan myrtles with an acrid sick perfume;
Lethean lotus, laurels of our doom,
Dark amarant with tall unswaying spears,
Await funereal autumn and its fears
In this grey land that sullen suns illume.
Ivy and rose and hellebore we twine.
Voluptuous as love, or keen as grief,
Some fleeing fragrance lures us in the gloom
To Paphian dells or vales of Proserpine. . . .
But all the flowers, with dark or pallid leaf,
Become at last a garland for the tomb. 

Sandalwood can be celebrated as the first gathering of some of Smith's translations of Baudelaire. 

 

The "Not at Night" Centenary

In October 1925, the first of a new series of weird stories appeared in the form of a volume edited by Christine Campbell Thomson entitled Not at Night (London: Selwyn & Blount). It contained fifteen stories, mostly by authors unknown then and unknown today (the exceptions being Frank Belknap Long and Greye La Spina). All of the stories were originally printed in Weird Tales magazine in the U.S., in issues dating from November 1924 through September 1925. 

Not at Night was unusually successful, and it had six printings in its first year, and more subsequently.  Also, it inspired a further ten volumes in the series (not just from Weird Tales, but using many sources), and a final "Not at Night" Omnibus in 1937, which presented the editor's selection from previous volumes. The omnibus also included a short introduction (dated February 1936) by Thomson in which she described the origin of the first volume.

The idea had been conceived on the top of a bus (they were open-decked buses in those days) just as it pulled away from its Oxford Circus stop about six o'clock one evening, I was on that bus with the Director of Selwyn & Blount, Ltd. He was, I remember, lamenting, like every other publisher, that he wanted something new and couldn't find it . . . and something popular. I believe that he claims the bright moment when Not at Night took birth, but I think it was a case of two minds on the same thought at the same moment--at any rate, I know that I am responsible for the title of the Series!

The price of the projected book was a matter of fierce argument. Finally we agreed upon two shillings in the belief that Not at Night would be the kind of book that a man would buy at a railway-bookstall, throwing down a single coin and running for his train. We wanted, above all, to produce books that would be within the reach of a very large number of people . . . 

The jacket for the first volume (and for many of the later ones), was designed by that clever advertising agent, Betty Prentis, who was then working as a freelance artist under her trade name of Eliza Pyke. It was "Eliza", with her sense of dramatic colour, who contributed not a little towards a "brighter bookstalls" movement!

Publication-day dawned and we held our hands in trepidation. Were we backing a wrong horse? Within a week we knew that we were on the right one. Not at Night was launched and we daringly planned a second and a third to follow in the ensuing years. For originally this was a one-book scheme. The popularity of the Series never waned, and it became a matter of price to make each subsequent volume equal the quality of the previous one; for--in our modest opinion--it was impossible to surpass it! 

And thus the first multi-volumed series of weird stories came about. It even sparked a short revival of three Not at Night volumes in paperback in the early 1960s.   

 

The Centenary of ‘Portrait of a Man with Red Hair’ by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

 

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) gave his novel Portrait of a Man with Red Hair the subtitle ‘A Romantic Macabre’ and referred to it as a ‘penny dreadful’. According to Rupert Hart-Davis’ biography Hugh Walpole (1952) he wished to write a ‘simple thriller’ for relaxation. On the strength of a synopsis he sold the story for serialisation in the United States, and within days of acceptance had made a start. Always a fast writer, Walpole completed a quarter of it in ten days, finishing the whole story in about two months. However, the magazine editor then repudiated the arrangement, calling the novel ‘distinctly gruesome and unpleasant’. It was with no such qualms that the house of Macmillan took on Portrait of a Man with Red Hair and first published it one hundred years ago in October 1925.

In a ‘dedicatory letter’ Walpole described the book as ‘a simple shocker which it has amused me like anything to write, and won’t bore you to read.’ Perhaps he had decided to prepare his readers for something ‘gruesome and unpleasant’ with what would now be called a trigger warning. Throughout most of the novel dreadful things, and more so the fear of them, would never be far away: touches of sudden sadistic violence, episodes in a pervasive gothic atmosphere of psychological intensity, come scattered throughout Walpole’s many novels.

Even to a reader who skipped the dedication the opening sentence should seem set to suggest an unusual novel: ‘The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away.’ It takes a moment more to see that Walpole has used a most traditional device: the protagonist on a leisurely train journey, followed by a walk to the final destination. Here, Harkness, who is soon revealed as a young American tourist, is going to visit the Cornish seaside town of Treliss.

When Harkness sees Treliss for the first time it is ‘absolutely the town of his vision’ yet gives him ‘a clutch of terror as though some one was whispering to him that he must turn tail and run’ (30). Once in his hotel Harkness accidentally overhears the distress of a young woman, Hesther, and resolves to himself to help her against her heartless husband and father-in-law. Wandering in the hotel garden before dinner, Harkness observes, fascinated, a man with red hair ‘standing straight on end as Loge’s used to do in the old pre-war Bayreuth “Ring”’ and whose eyes ‘were alive and beautiful, dark, tender, eloquent…’ (52). Introducing himself, the man, Crispin, invites Harkness to join him and his family for dinner. Harkness then realises who the girl was – and the identity of her husband’s dominating father. Crispin now comes to dominate the story, even when not directly appearing on the page.

Having involved himself with the Crispins, Harkness has no choice – and would not want one – except to follow through on the consequences of his promise. He agrees to go along with a plan already hatched by David Dunbar, Hesther’s previously rejected suitor, and Jabez Marriot, a local fisherman, to rescue Hester from Crispin’s house. Harkness has been invited there to view Crispin’s collection of prints and other precious objets d’art. During the visit Crispin tells him his own terrible story: an upbringing that taught him that it was necessary to suffer pain in order to understand the true heart of life – and to control. To inflict pain and then tend the victim is to be greater than God. ‘I myself am increasing my power every day. First one, then another. First through Pain. Then through Love. […] I should myself be superior to the suffering of others, because I know how good it is for them to suffer’ (135).  

The rescue of Hesther goes to plan until a sudden and very thick fog prevents the party from escaping across the bay. In a hushed and haunted journey the fugitives attempt to walk to another village, but in the fog find themselves back at Crispin’s house. Wholly in a madman’s power, Harkness and Dunbar are told they can ‘Make your adieus then to the lady. Your eternal adieus’ (234). The two men are eventually led, stripped naked, to a large room at the very top of the house and each tied to a pillar as Jabez already is. Their prison is ‘a high white place with a round ceiling softly primrose. One high window went the length from floor to ceiling, and this window, which was without bars, blazed with sun and shone with the colours of the early morning blue.’ What should be an exalted place in the heights has been corrupted by Crispin’s sadistic madness; his intentions are obvious. But there the story reaches its climax perhaps rather too simply, too easily. The headlong pace sustained throughout comes to an abrupt end and peters out in the few pages remaining – leaving the reader to realise that the entire exhausting action has taken place over less than a single day.

In Portrait of a Man with Red Hair the reader is surrounded and carried forward by Walpole’s sense of place, his gift for describing landscape, weather, and the ever-changing light. The great and heavy fog that descends and occupies most of Part III serves to maintain the tension, if not to increase it, but when the fog has cleared and the novel finished, all seems somehow to have been curiously insubstantial, as if the glowing countryside and enveloping fog had never quite been experienced after all. Perhaps this is appropriate for a ‘simple thriller’ written to provide a few hours’ vivid entertainment – which it certainly does.

(John Howard)

"Ordeal by Beauty" by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942) is a name familiar to readers of older weird fiction primarily for his single volume of ghostly stories, Black Spirits and White (1895), published early in his career, after which he abandoned the writing of fiction for his profession as an architect, specifically of the gothic type. He still wrote, and Darkly Bright Press has just reprinted his 1921 lecture (the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University) titled "Ordeal of Beauty"--which was published in a volume of lectures and essays, Convictions and Controversies (1935). 

Cram's lecture begins:

Staggered by the shattering of our hopes for the civilization in which we had taken such pride of ownership, and bewildered by its failure to avoid the old pitfalls of war and its apparent inability to lift itself from the chaos that followed thereon, we fall to a searching of conscience for the finding of the reason of it all, and to a scanning of history in the hope that there we may discover some assurance against its happening again. 

The sentiment expressed still reverberates today. From there Cram narrows his consideration and turns anti-modernist and spiritual:

Gothic is not a passing phase of the building art already completed and dead, it is the voicing of an eternal spirit in man, that may now and then withdraw into silence, but must reappear with power when, after long disuse, the energy emerges again. Gothic is the fully developed expression of Christianity, but it is even more the manifestation of Christianity applied to life, that is to say Christian civilization.  

One suspects Cram's contemporary, Arthur Machen, would agree with a lot of this. Today, however, some of these views seem long out of fashion.

The lecture makes for a slim book, and as with many Darkly Bright Press titles, it has a small limitation. Interested readers should act quickly. Details here. 

The Centenary of 'God Head' by Leonard Cline

Leonard Cline's first novel, God Head, appeared on 10 October 1925, on the first list of books published by the newly founded Viking Press of New York. 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 was translated into Finnish by Juri Nummelin as Jumalan Pää (2020). 

God Head is the single-best forgotten novel that I have ever encountered.*

A special Centennial edition God Head, with extra content, is forthcoming.

*Most of this piece is adapted from my entry on the book in Late Reviews (2018).