Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Montague Summers's Ghost Stories

After Montague Summers died in August 1948, a number of his manuscripts and personal papers disappeared, including (it was believed) the manuscript of Six Ghost Stories, which Summers had listed in a Who's Who entry for 1938 as having been published in 1937. Of course it hadn't been published in 1937, and the reference remained a tantalizing bibliographical ghost for the next several decades.

Tantalizing, especially because of Summers's clear knowledge of the whole ghost story field, as evidenced in his three anthologies of such stories, The Supernatural Omnibus (Gollancz, September 1931; the US edition from Doubleday, Doran, March 1932, has different contents)*, Victorian Ghost Stories (Fortune Press, October 1933; no US edition), and The Grimoire and Other Supernatural  Stories (Fortune Press, November 1936; no US edition). All three anthologies have extensive introductions by Summers. And the first anthology reportedly went through multiple printings in both England and America.  Yet in the third one, Summers also included, under his own name, a ghost story entitled "The Grimoire," as well as another he had written, "The Man on the Stairs," published anonymously.  "The Grimoire" is excellent, and "The Man on the Stairs" pretty good, so there would be considerable interest in a volume of Sunmmers's own ghost stories.

A bunch (but not all) of Summers's missing manuscripts and papers turned up about a decade ago in Canada. The whole story is told in an article "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers, Revisited" by Gerard O'Sullivan, published in The Antagonish Review, Fall 2009.  In brief, Summers had left the papers to his live-in companion, Hector Stuart-Forbes, who in turn died in 1950, and whose brother retrieved the papers and shipped them to Canada where he lived. And thus they passed out of public knowledge. The archive was later sold to Georgetown University.

Now, at last, Six Ghost Stories has ceased being a bibliographical ghost and become an actual book, published by Snuggly Books in trade paperback (Amazon UK listing here;  Amazon US listing here), with an introduction by Daniel Corrick. This edition is based on a hand-written manuscript in the Georgetown archive. It includes the two Summers stories mentioned above ("The Grimoire" and "The Man on the Stairs") and four more which have never been published before, and a short introduction by Summers. Being based on manuscript versions, the texts of the two previously published stories are thus slightly different.  (A "Note on the Text" rather confusingly circles around these facts, but I think I've got it sorted out correctly.  The Note reads, in part, "The current versions of those stories, therefore, presented in the current volume, have been significantly amended, comparing the previously published versions to the original hand-written version and, in the case of 'The Man on the Stairs', to an existing typescript as well.")

The four newly published stories have some fine moments, as well as some exasperating ones (e.g., some instances of run-on dialogue, like one passage stretching out over four pages in "The Governess") but none challenge "The Grimoire" in terms of quality.  It's good to have the chance to read this volume at last, though some modern readers might find the prose a bit too Victorian. Summers's own introduction notes his preference in stories against the beneficent ghost and for Spirits that are "no kindly commonplace apparitions but veritable powers of darkness, grisly evil things of terror and dread and doom."

The editorial introduction, however, is barely adequate. It give no account of the discovery of the Summers papers in Canada, deferring the reader to a forthcoming second volume of Summers's fiction, and then refers the reader to Gerard O'Sullivan's article without saying when or where it was published. (Fortunately, I already had a photocopy in my files.)  The title of the second forthcoming volume is given as The Bride of Christ and Other Fictions, and the title story is subsequently described as a "Catholic symbolist novella" without the additional information found in O'Sullivan's article that its sixty pages of holograph manuscript "appears to be unfinished because it lacks a signed and dated colophon page," something found in other Summers manuscripts. The introduction also notes that "Six Ghost Stories does not represent the entirety of Summers' ghost oeuvre." One wonder if some other organization of the two volumes of Summers's fiction might have been better.

Some curious statements are also made about the manuscript. We read that from "recently discovered correspondence, we learn that [M.R.] James himself read and commented favorably on the collection in draft form." M.R. James died in June 1936, so how does one square this with the statement that "addresses given on some of the manuscripts allow us to date its completion to the last part of the '30s, although the stories originated at the very least a few years earlier."  What addresses on the manuscripts?  Are they just submission addresses?  It seems likely that Summers had completed the stories by the time he submitted his Who's Who entry for the 1938 volume, which would have been published sometime in 1937. Summers likely had the already-named volume done by early 1937, if not at least a year earlier for it to be shown to M.R. James. (And certainly two of the stories appeared in the November 1936 publication of his third and final ghost story anthology.) Probably Summers expected Six Ghost Stories to be published by the Fortune Press, who had published his second and third ghost stories anthologies in 1933 and 1936. Summers first met R.A. Caton, the niggardly and eccentric owner of the Fortune Press, in February 1927, and through 1940 he published seven books with the Fortune Press, but he had planned or even completed other volumes for the press that never appeared (like Summers's edition of A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, by William Perkins, which Summers had similarly and optimistically listed as published in 1934 in his Who's Who entry for 1935.)  Presumably after his failure with getting the Fortune Press to publish Six Ghost Stories, Summers is known to have offered it in late March 1939 to the very short-lived firm Laidlaw and Laidlaw (initially Laidlaw and Butchart), an eccentric publisher of fantasy and modernism that managed to release eleven books in 1938 and early 1939 before dissolving. (My article on Laidlaw and Laidlaw is forthcoming.) After the Second World War began, Summers apparently kept the manuscript to himself.

Whatever the case, we can now read the former bibliographical ghost, Six Ghost Stories. And I look forward to the follow-up volume.


* The UK edition has 38 stories, the US edition 36. They have thirty stories in common, with eight appearing only in the UK edition, and six appearing only in the US edition.

15 comments:

  1. Doug,
    Many thanks for all the bibliographic background to Six Ghost Stories. I've got the book and did notice that a second volume was forthcoming. Do you have any sense of when that might be? I've only read "The Grimoire," which--as you say--is excellent, so I'm sorry that the rest of the book doesn't quite measure up to that minor classic. Still, Summers is such an odd and fascinating character. I'd love to read the O'Sullivan essay. "Revisited" implies that there is a previous essay on the manuscripts. Have you seen that earlier account? --md

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    1. Yes, Brocard Sewell did the original "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers" published in 1970 in The Antagonish Review. (Early issues of that magazine are not common in US libraries, so I've never seen it, though I've wanted to.) I don't know when the second volume is to come, but I'd suspect some time in 2020, since the publisher has gone so far as to announce it.

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    2. At least some back issues of The Antigonish Review are available for purchase in digital form. I haven't checked, but it's worth enquiring whether the one containing Brocard's essay can at least be bought on line.

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    3. Some selections from issues are online there (https://antigonishreview.com) but they go back only as far as 1991, not as far as 1970, alas.

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  2. I will confine myself to a couple of brief notes to satisfy curiosity:

    1. The addresses. The manuscripts for the pieces that make up Six Ghost Stories and another unpublished ghostly piece are signed with Summers' Hove address (47 Montefiore Road), at which he lived for a couple of years at towards the end of the 30s. The remark about James commenting favourably on the contents of the collection stems from one of Summers' letters to a publisher in which he comments “that a couple of the stories, it is true, were written a few years ago, and I am complimented to think that they were warmly praised by the late Dr. M.R. James of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary fame, who read their MS. and who, although a personal friend, was ever the most candid of critics.”. In his introduction to The Grimoire and Other Supernatural Tales Summers mentions that both the his pieces (“The Grimoire” and “The Man on the Stairs”) had been read to friends at gatherings for some time, a statement echoed in his autobiography, The Gallanty Show, in which he writes about reading his ghost stories at New Year and other occasions to friends. With this in mind the stories James’ saw most likely included those two.

    2. Summers’ probably did offer the manuscript to the Fortune Press though, as yet no direct correspondence on the subject has come to light. The publishers he did offer the manuscript to were Robert Hale Limited and – yes – Laidlaw and Laidlaw, both in 1939. If it’s of interest for your article I have scans of the Summers/Laidlaw correspondence. As Summers had a habit of announcing works which never saw print in his Who’s Who entries I am inclined to think any publication date intimated there was wishful thinking on his part.

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    1. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. So it appears that James read "a couple of stories" (presumably the two named which appeared in The Grimoire &OSS), not necessarily the whole manuscript. Per Laidlaw and Laidlaw, thanks, yes, I'd be interested in the scans of the letters. I'm not sure when in 1939 the publisher closed its doors, and wonder the reason they turned down Six Ghost Stories. Perhaps they saw the writing on the wall at that time. Check my profile and you'll find a contact email for me. Laidlaw and Laidlaw did some interesting and ecclectic books. Thanks.

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  3. I think the second volume is indeed projected for early 2020, and the editor hopes Snuggly will publish further material from the Canadian cache if these two do well. The Six Ghost Stories is available also in hardcover limited to 100 copies directly from the publisher. The only issue of Antagonish Review I possess is Autumn 1970 which has articles on Summers and Restoration theatre and his autobiography The Galanty Show, both by Brocard Sewell.

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    1. Thanks, Sandy. I didn't know about the hardcover issue, but here's the link at the publisher's website (scroll down to bottom):

      https://www.snugglybooks.co.uk/six-ghost-stories/

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  4. Does anyone know if Summers saw and/or commented on early horror movies? It would be fascinating to know what he thought of Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) or even the 1922 Nosferatu? Although I'm not sure Nosferatu would have been available to him. But movies in general - did Summers ever write about them?

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    1. Summers was certainly aware of cinema. In his autobiography The Galanty Show, on p160 he writes about Carl Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943), an adaptation of a Norwegian play by Wiers-Jenssen, which had inspired John Masefield's adaptation The Witch.

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    2. Thank you, Sandy Robertson. Good information!

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    3. I would love to read The Gallanty Show. Copies are expensive!

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    4. I just checked Amazon and Abe and can't believe the absurd prices asked for Galanty Show. It's usually priced a lot more reasonably in physical bookshops. I picked up a copy with the bookplate of Summers's old school (presumably donated by the publisher), without dust jacket, a few years ago for £15 or so. I also have the slipcased limited edition of 30 signed copies which cost way less than any of the ordinary copies online. I guess Montie is more collectable these days. In the 80s Edwin Pouncey and I seemed to be the only people asking dealers for his books, which seemed to have the regrettable effect of making prices rise!

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    5. PS the first copy I ever had of The Galanty Show cost me 50p in dust jacket from a bargain box in the old Compendium Bookshop in London decades ago. Sadly sold during a period of extreme poverty along with my entire book collection of the era!

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  5. If he did, I don't recall. Interesting question. Perhaps someone else can fill us in.

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