One Thousand Posts (a co-post by Mark Valentine and Douglas A. Anderson)

It was on 19 June, 2009 that Doug approached me with the idea of a blog to augment Wormwood, a journal of the fantastic I had started editing for Tartarus Press. I at once agreed: and it was also Doug that came up with the name. Just three days later the new blog began with a post by Doug, and my own first post, appropriately enough, was on the forgotten writer J.C. Snaith, whom Doug had drawn to my attention the previous year.

Ever a slow adopter, I had no notion of how to set up a blog, and it wouldn’t have happened without Doug’s inspiration and impetus. Ever since then, Doug has carried out all the admin and backroom work that goes with the blog, handling comments (and lots of spam) and resolving technical issues. Let it be stressed that this shared blog only happens because of all his work.

It seems astonishing that we have now reached our one thousandth post. We have covered lost authors, lost books, lost artists, classic authors, books in their centenary year, important new publications, events and exhibitions, obscurities and oddities, archival and bibliographical records, and a fair number of quite unclassifiable things.

I’d also like to venture another claim. The average length of a post is, I think, about a thousand words: certainly, that’s what I aim for when I’m writing about a forgotten author or book, a book-collecting expedition, or some discovery I want to share. Of course, some posts are much briefer, but others have been quite a bit longer. So 1,000 posts at an average of 1,000 words means that we must have around one million words here: one million words of free-to-read commentary and news on fantastic literature. If anyone wants to count them just to make sure, you are most welcome.

As well as the regular posts by Doug and me, we’ve also been fortunate to receive excellent contributions by guests, and I’d like to thank all those who have enriched the blog in this way. The same goes for our readers, whose comments have often offered new information, ideas or perspectives. Thank you for your interest and support: your comments are always read and welcomed. Finally, Doug maintains the Blog Roll which lists fellow blogs in similar fields of interest to us, and these continue to offer encouragement and camaraderie in our mutual interest in the fantastical.

Mark Valentine

 

Mark has said above almost all of what I might say in observing our one thousandth post in our fifteenth year of this blog. I might add that I chose the name Wormwoodiana because I felt it echoed and expanded upon the field as covered in the (now sadly defunct) journal Wormwood, which Mark edited. I felt a blog could cover lots of topics that were too small to make the fuller coverage of an essay as usually found in Wormwood. Plus there would also be opportunities to give attention to various books, zines, music, authors, artists, blogs, etc. Initially, the comments were open and unmoderated, but as the spam increased I felt the need to moderate—which means primarily to approve real comments and junk the spam, when I get to it, which is usually fairly quickly (save for during my sleeping hours).

I would also add a large thanks here to Mark, and express my gratitude as well to our various guest bloggers and contributors. Overall, I think we have carved out our own tiny corner in the web, and I am grateful too for the readers and commentators who join us here.

Douglas A. Anderson

The Centenary of "Ghosts and Marvels" edited by V.H. Collins

Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, published in December 1924, is a small pocket-sized book of some 506 pages plus some xvi pages of front-matter. It is one volume of "The World's Classics" series published by Oxford University Press (the imprint was begun in 1901 by Grant Richards, and purchased by Oxford University Press in 1906). While the stories included are top shelf, making for an excellent anthology in and of itself (see the contents pages reproduced below), that is only a small part of the reason for celebrating this book's centenary. The main reason is that the editor or publisher had the inspired idea to get M.R. James to write the nine-page introduction. James begins with a statement that he is not responsible for the stories included, which gives him the chance to criticize or praise freely.  James continues:

Often I have been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvellous, the mysterious, the supernatural. Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre  is too small and special to bear the imposition of far-reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them. Those rules, I imagine, no writer ever consciously follows. In fact it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success.

Then James continues with his views and personal impressions. It is a valuable introduction because it is one of the few essays by James on the type of literature in which he himself would achieve great acclaim, with his antiquarian ghost stories.

The editor V. H. Collins was Vere Henry Gratz Collins (1872-1966), who was born in Windsor of an Irish father and a Canadian-Jewish mother, and who studied at Balliol College, Oxford, receiving Third Class degrees in 1892 and 1894. After some years as a schoolmaster, he worked for many years at Oxford University Press in London. He edited singly, and with others, more than a few dozens books for Oxford University Press, including Poems of Home and Overseas (1921), co-edited with Charles Williams, the poet and novelist who was later a member of the Inklings. Collins does not seem to have been much interested in the weird fiction genre (it was his boss, Humphrey Milford, who instructed him to compile the anthology), but he knew whom to ask for advice and recommendations. Charles Williams is thanked by Collins in both Ghost and Marvels ("the compiler owes thanks to . . . Charles Williams, from whose wide reading and judgement he has benefited throughout the preparation of the book") and its sequel, More Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Sir Walter Scott to Michael Arlen (1927, with an identically worded acknowledgement to Williams). 

In 1952, Collins published under the pseudonym Mark Tellar, A Young Man's Passage: An Intimate Autobiography of the Victorian Age (London: Home and Van Thal), which told (with identities disguised) candidly of his passionless first marriage (in 1897) and subsequent divorce, his numerous affairs with prostitutes and his sharing his personal sexual history with Havelock Ellis, the pioneer sexologist. The first chapter tells, sympathetically, the tragic story of Collins's father, Dr. William Maunsell Collins (1844-1926), whose increasing money problems led to charges of forgery in 1892, and in 1898, he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of a upper class married woman upon whom he had performed an illegal abortion, a crime he had been suspected of at least once previously. The TLS noted that "Mr. Tellar conceals little. . . . He rarely passes judgment on those who condemned him. His invented dialogue is seldom artificial. . . . And yet, on closing the book, the reader is left with wondering--without malice--what impelled him to write it" (6 June 1952).

Arthur Machen and the Sherlock Holmes stories

Arthur Machen suspected that he was not invited to contribute to the flagship journal of the Eighteen Nineties, The Yellow Book, by its editor Henry Harland, after he had praised Conan Doyle’s The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893) while sitting next to Harland at a dinner.

This, apparently, was infra dig. He knew other Nineties figures quite well: he dined several times with Oscar Wilde, who praised The Great God Pan as ‘un grand success’, was a friend of Max Beerbohm and of the poet Theodore Wratislaw, was for a time a neighbour and friend of M.P. Shiel, and knew W.B. Yeats both through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and at literary soirees. But these contacts were evidently not enough to overcome his literary faux pas.

Machen’s admiration for the Holmes stories was returned by Conan Doyle, after a fashion, for the Welsh writer’s tales of the macabre. Jerome K. Jerome recalled that he lent Conan Doyle a Machen volume, and the creator of Holmes said: ‘Your pal Machen may be a genius all right, but I don’t take him to bed with me again’. Machen was, however, later to be rather scornful of Conan Doyle’s spiritualism and belief in the Cottingley Fairies. But this was, of course, a metaphysical matter, not a literary one: it did not affect his admiration for the stories.

Machen’s early fiction shows the unmistakeable influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, and not of Henry James, who was the ‘lion’ of The Yellow Book. One of his earliest stories, ‘The Lost Club’, is a Stevenson variation, ‘The Great God Pan’ owes somewhat to the atmosphere of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and My Hyde, and the framework of The Three Impostors is borrowed from Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, as Machen freely admitted. He was well aware of the influence and records later how he had to work hard to break the Stevensonian manner.

But was there also a Conan Doyle influence? The first Sherlock Holmes story, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, appeared in 1887 when Machen was 24, a young man trying to make his way in literary London. The Sign of the Four appeared in 1890, and the short stories in The Strand from 1891. These are around the time that Machen began trying his own hand at contemporary fiction, after the antiquarian setting of The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888). His earliest short stories began to appear in periodicals from 1890 onwards. They were thus being written very much in the context of the success of the Holmes adventures.

Some Holmes influence may be seen in the technique of having two contrasting investigators who play off each other, as in the pairing of Machen’s connoisseurs of the curious, Villers and Clarke in The Great God Pan, Dyson and Phillips in The Three Impostors, and various duos in other stories.  It is true that Machen’s men-about-town are not the same as the Holmes and Watson set-up, where the expert leads the mystified deputy. Machen’s characters are more evenly matched, and they typically represent rival philosophies, Romance versus Realism. But that may be simply Machen’s own variation of the detecting duo formula.

Unlike Conan Doyle, Machen may have made a tactical mistake when he did not stick with the same pair of characters throughout his mystery stories, to win readers’ continuing interest and affection. It is surprising that John Lane, the shrewd publisher of The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895), did not make the point to him. Machen did, however, later begin to settle on the immortal Mr. Dyson as his lead.

Perhaps the stories that may show some particular echoes from the Holmes fiction are two that were written in the Summer of 1895. The first of these, ‘The Shining Pyramid’, pairs Dyson with a different colleague, Vaughan, a friend who lives in the West. He comes to Dyson with a mystery, rather like a client consulting Holmes. As in many of the Holmes stories, the puzzling affair at first seems more incongruous than sinister: a minor sequence of oddities. Dyson uses a Holmes-like phrase about needing more data: and, like the Great Detective, his attention to detail and inspired speculation soon suggest murkier depths.

In the second of the stories, ‘The Red Hand’, the interplay is between two flâneurs, Dyson and Phillips, and is highly enjoyable; the London streets are well-evoked; Machen’s own lodgings in Great Russell Street opposite the gates of the British Museum are given to Dyson; and the latter’s improbability theory is ingenious. But most of all Dyson’s following of clues and reasoning-out of them is a gentle play on the Holmes stories. ‘The Red Hand’ has the authentic Baker Street atmosphere.  

Machen also wrote other stories in this period which he destroyed. He recalled one in which a respectable city clerk turns at night into a werewolf. That doesn’t on the face of it sound like a very Holmes-like plot, but the essential idea, of sinister secrets lurking beneath a conventional veneer, does occur quite often in the great detective’s cases.

The main difference to the Holmes stories is that Machen also introduces an unearthly and folkloric element: in the first story, hints of atavistic survivals linked to legends of the Little People, in the second the idea of a treasure hidden in hills in the West, which still has subterranean guardians. Even this is not all that much of a departure: the Holmes stories have uncanny elements too, but Machen does not explain these away, as Conan Doyle does.

The supernatural is not permitted in the Holmes stories, even where it appears to be present, as in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901). Much as I admire that yarn, I can’t help thinking that a genuine ghostly Black Dog, as in the East Anglian legends, might have made a better story than the actual explanation, which irresistibly reminds me of Edward Lear, slightly adapted: ‘The Dog!—the Dog! The Dog with a luminous Nose!’ Arthur Machen was, I think, wiser to realise that a promise of the supernatural in a tale should not be betrayed by improbable rationalisations. Indeed, he made the mystical the essence of his tales: Mr Dyson is an insouciant advocate of the fantastical and strange. 

After these two stories, Machen made a conscious change in his writing style and to some extent his themes. ‘I shall never give anyone a White Powder again,’ he said, referring to an episode in The Three Impostors. The Stevenson and Conan Doyle influences were never wholly discarded, but they gave way to the struggle to express his vision in his own way. All his energies were now focused on the idea of the Great Romance, first with The Hill of Dreams, then with the unfinished work of which ‘The White People’ and some of the Ornaments in Jade were fragments, and later with The Secret Glory.

(Mark Valentine)

An Arkham House Shadow History

Arkham House was founded in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish a memorial volume of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Soon afterwards Wandrei's participation diminished, and Arkham House was ruled by Derleth until his death in 1971. Afterwards, others stepped in, and the publisher morphed a number of times. After Derleth's daughter, April Derleth, died in 2011, the firm published no new titles, though the backlist was sold via its website, but the website disappeared around 2022. Whether the firm will ever rise again is anyone's guess. But Arkham House has had a gloried history, particularly through the Derleth years.

Just released is a new oversized book, some 186 pages (i-xii in front matter, 1-174 in the main torso) which covers not so much the books that the firm published (other books have already done this), but how Arkham House sold their books --those just being published, and forthcoming-- to their customer base through the ephemera that they regularly sent out. This includes not only the catalogues, but also announcements, and various other aspects of Arkham House's dealings with the book trade. 

The title is grandiose: Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years 1937-1973: A Pictorial History & Guide for Collectors. The authors are Don Herron and John D. Haefele, both of whom have collected such ephemera for decades, and both have published earlier checklists of Arkham ephemera in the magazine Firsts. The book is in full color throughout, and admirably published by The Cimmerian Press. 

I give below a handful of phone-photos of the front and back covers (do read the copy on the rear cover which gives an excellent overview; clicking on the photos will make them larger), as well as the beginnings of a few of the essays interspersed within the 137 numbered entries. I also include the page by Roderic Meng (item 122) telling Arkham House patrons of Derleth's death, and the note about the famous October 1972 catalog (item 130), created by Donald Wandrei, which announced a number of books by Donald Wandrei and his brother Howard as forthcoming, much to the surprise of Arkham House fans.

A fine production overall, and highly recommended. 

A Victoria County History Ghost Story

The Victoria County History is a distinguished series of chronicles for the old shires of England, weighty volumes in venerable bindings. Professor Catherine Clark, the Director of the series, recently posted on their website a 'VCH Ghost Story', which begins: 'This curious and disconcerting letter was found recently in the archive of the Victoria County History of England (addressed to then-General Editor, William Page) and is published here for the first time.' 

There follows an excellent yarn in the Jamesian antiquarian tradition. Like an earlier notable Jamesian tale, 'The Face in the Fresco' by Arnold Smith (London Mercury 104, June 1928; and in The Second Mercury Story Book, 1931), the story involves a now incomplete medieval doom painting, to which are added in the VCH story enigmatic Latin inscriptions and a veritable slough of despond. The tale also has a poignant resonance for the date of its setting, 1914.

In an end-note, Professor Clarke explains: 'The piece above is a homage to both M.R. James and the early history of the VCH', marking the 125th anniversary of the VCH series and the 120th anniversary of M.R. James' Ghost Stories of An Antiquary. 

Readers are invited to celebrate these too: 'Are you inspired to write your own VCH ghost story? We’d love to see your stories, of any length, and to share them (with your permission). There might be a prize for the best . . . We invite you to email them to Catherine Clarke, VCH Director, or share on social media with #VCHGhostStory.'

(Mark Valentine)

'The Book Lovers' by Steve Aylett: A Guest Review by Bill Ectric

The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett (Snowbooks, 2024) is a steampunk noir masterpiece. It’s a detective story about rare, fantastic books, human relationships, and a kidnapping.

The story unfolds in a dystopian city where the populace barely notices a planned book-burning initiative. It’s like Fahrenheit 451, or Nazi Germany, or present-day Florida. People who still read are referred to derisively as “book eaters.” They meet in out-of-the-way arcane bookstores that require secret passwords to get in. Of special interest are “forked books,” which change plots halfway through depending on who reads them. Books become both mythological symbols and comic props. While intelligent rebel types rendezvous in a basement library, men of wealth and power control the city unscrupulously.

Unlawful politicians consorting with greedy industrialists is a durable trope in Aylett’s fiction. In The Book Lovers, the backroom banter advances the plot with hilarious hyperbolic machinations. Metaphors become dynamic machine parts. Fear and denial produce enough energy to illuminate a city.

“Take a look at these ordeal cylinders,” says Jay Brewster, showing off his factory to Detective Nightjar. “Fitted with diachronic-suppressive valves. Solid state, you could say.”

Diachronic refers to how language develops and evolves. Diachronic-suppressive would mean hindering the development of language. This, and the planned book burning, all to keep the populace from getting any ideas. He continues, “The mounting tension avoids these junctions and transpires through pipework to the ramification plate, which stops it dead.” The punishing ramifications of dissent make people afraid to protest. They swallow their voice and keep quiet. This result is a vat full of “denial so stale and baked-in it stinks to high heaven, though we don’t notice.”

In an interesting twist, the book purports to feature one or two sapiosexual characters. Because sapiosexuality is sexual attraction to another person’s mind, it was not easy to tell who was making out. All I know for sure is that I read the book twice and I loved it.

The Book Lovers

Steve Aylett

Snowbooks (2 Dec. 2024)

Paperback‏ ‎ 336 pages

ISBN-10 ‏‎ 1913525325

ISBN-13 ‎ 978-1913525323

(Bill Ectric)