While visiting my friend
Lloyd Currey this past fall, I noticed a copy of John Galton’s The
Stars I Kneel To (Herbert Jenkins, 1939) resting amidst a shelf
of uncatalogued books. The Stars I Kneel To is one of a number
of pseudonymous novels written by Evelyn Grosvenor Bradley, best
known for the lurid weird thrillers he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s
as R. R. Ryan. I asked Lloyd if I could read The Stars I Kneel To
in order to evaluate its content so that he could add the title to
his database and feature the book in his upcoming email list for that
week, which he happily allowed me to do.
There is nothing
substantial written about The Stars I Kneel To anywhere of
which I am aware. Conducting an online search for information about
the novel only retrieves a brief description of the book as a
“romance with typical Ryan theme of psychological torture,” a
statement that could apply to nearly any of the books Bradley wrote.
The most complete assessment readily available appears in the April
1939 issue of The Library World in a less-than-flattering
anonymous review under “New Fiction”:
"A rather terrible story of
a young genius, Kenneth, who is trained to be a barrister and becomes
an actor. His stern brother goes into his dressing-room and beats him
so mercilessly that he cannot act again and gradually deteriorates in
character. One imagines that if Kenneth had time to tell his brother
he was earning £50 a week instead of sitting still waiting for
briefs, the story might have ended differently."
As The Library World
review suggests, The Stars I Kneel To is a routine melodrama. The
main character, Ken Richmond, is studying to be a lawyer at Oxford at
the behest of his oldest brother Reade. Obsessed with restoring the
family estate of Little Heights to its former glory, Reade views
Ken’s future career as a lawyer as instrumental to securing the
funds necessary for Reade to reclaim the family’s squandered
property holdings. Ken, however, feels trapped by the path that has
been chosen for him and quits law school to become an aspiring actor,
a profession that better suits his artistic temperament. He discovers
his soulmate in Nan Leslie, the daughter of Sir Nigel Leslie, a
famous London gynecologist who is determined his daughter will not
marry Ken. Spurred on by Ken, Nan rebels against her tyrannical
father, and, with Ken’s assistance, they both become overnight
sensations on the stage. Reade eventually confronts Ken and nearly
beats his younger brother to death, damaging Ken’s face to the
extent that he is unable to speak. Doctors fear that Ken may never
recover mentally or emotionally from this incident, and when Ken
returns to the stage, he has lost his acting ability. After
being tricked by Sir Leslie into taking nerve pills that make him
appear completely drunk on stage, Ken later attempts to rob Sir
Leslie and is arrested after he accidentally shoots a police
inspector in the leg. The sensationalistic lurid details that
characterize the Ryan thrillers appear in the final third of the
novel after Ken is released from prison and falls in with Teresa
Bowles, a prostitute who is a former patient of Sir Nigel’s
suffering from an advanced case of syphilis. Teresa is prone to
parading around in the nude during her attempts to lure Ken into bed
after she falls in love with him as they navigate life on the streets
in the seedier parts of London. The novel’s title is a quotation
from Poe’s second “To Helen” poem (1848), which is addressed to
Sarah Helen Whitman to whom Poe was briefly engaged: “They fill my
soul with Beauty (which is Hope,) / And are far up in Heaven—the
stars I kneel to / In the sad, silent watches of my night.” The
“stars” to which Poe refers are Sarah’s eyes, and the novel’s
title emphasizes Ken’s idolization of Nan, whom he nicknames
“Star.”
Unlike the Ryan novels,
The Stars I Kneel To is not a thriller, nor does it contain
any fantastic or supernatural elements. It is essentially a work of
psychological and social realism. The plot is straightforward, and
overall, the novel is much more competently written than any of the
Ryan books. While I have not been able to read any of the novels that
Bradley wrote under the Cameron Carr pseudonym, they, too, are
reportedly less fantastic than the Ryan novels and characterized by a
greater depth of psychological insight. The speculation that Bradley
employed his different pseudonyms for what he viewed as very
different types of novels certainly seems to have some merit. I can
easily imagine Bradley viewing Ryan’s The Subjugated Beast
(1938) or Freak Museum (1938) as commercial hackwork and
Cameron Carr’s Gilded Clay (1938) or Galton’s The Stars
I Kneel To as his “serious” novels.
As such, The Stars I
Kneel To provides an interesting contrast to the Ryan thrillers.
Most noticeably, the novel’s protagonist is male, not female, and
Bradley’s characteristic concerns with the cultural and social
forces with which women must contend in a male-dominated society do
not take center stage. Bradley’s focus is entirely on Ken’s
struggle to define his own identity and career in order to free
himself from his oppressive relationship with Reade, his older
brother. Ken’s artistic and aesthetic temperament is also entirely
at odds with the lives lead by all his brothers, who, like characters
in a D. H. Lawrence novel, revel in hard physical labor in the
country and in their lusty, sensual relationships with their wives.
While Ken loves Nan, he is clearly not interested in sexual relations
with her. Instead, he longs for a more spiritual connection, a
melding of artistic souls not rooted in earthly physicality. Ken is
alienated by the lives his brothers lead and by all of them
essentially being “men’s men.” The efforts Ken later takes to
avoid having sex with Teresa despite admittedly being somewhat
aroused by her behavior are glaringly obvious.
Whether or not we are to
read Ken as a repressed homosexual is a matter for conjecture as is
the extent to which any autobiographical elements of Bradley’s own
life have informed the development of Ken’s character or the plot
of The Stars I Kneel To. Bradley was a theater manager, actor,
and playwright, and his novel A New Face at the Door (Herbert
Jenkins, 1937), written under the Cameron Carr pseudonym, focuses on
the members of a repertory company in a small theater. At the very
least, Bradley’s own theater experiences certainly shaped the
subject matter of The Stars I Kneel To and A New Face at
the Door.
The Stars I Kneel To
is fairly mediocre, but then again so are the more well-known novels
written under the R. R. Ryan pseudonym. Their primary points of
interest lie in the aberrant psychology of their main characters,
their frank treatments of sexuality and sexual violence, and their
over-the top plot conceits that would make even Harry Stephen Keeler
raise an eyebrow. Lacking the more macabre elements found in the Ryan
thrillers, The Stars I Kneel To is far less interesting
despite Bradley’s seeming ambitions to write a more serious work.
Boyd White
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