The Star Called Wormwood

Morchard Bishop was the pen-name of Frederick Field Stoner, who also wrote as Oliver Stonor. He is mostly remembered today in the literary field as the friend and champion of Arthur Machen. He compiled ‘The Table Talk of Arthur Machen’, a record of conversations with the Welsh author. This currently remains unpublished, though a chapter was issued as a chapbook, Dreams and Visions: A Brief Journey Into the Remarkable Imagination of Arthur Machen (Caermaen Books, 1987). 

I corresponded briefly with Oliver when Roger Dobson and I were compiling the Dreams & Visions booklet. He seemed to me, from his letters, a meticulously courteous, diffident gentleman, kindly interested in and supportive of our fledgling Machen publications. Here we were, two young, inexperienced Machenites, able to publish only a card-covered, stapled booklet of one part of his work in a small edition: and yet this distinguished man-of-letters, with a dozen books to his name, treated the project warmly and seriously.

At Machen’s suggestion he had translated, in his mid-Twenties, Le Moyen de Parvenir (as The Way to Succeed), a rambling, Rabelaisian work by a 17^th century canon of Tours, a ‘gargoyle of a book’, as Machen put it: the latter had himself attempted a translation which could only be issued in a censored form. Bishop’s edition was his first book, in 1930.

As Bishop, he was the author of a biography of William Blake’s patron in Blake’s Hayley (1951), which was well-received, and as Stonor he compiled A First Book of Synonyms (1963). But he also wrote (as Bishop) seven novels, from 1932 to 1948, which have not received very much attention. One of these at least is highly original and peculiar, and also shows a courageous independence of mind. It was an anti-war book published in 1941 by that great maverick and connoisseur of the singular, Victor Gollancz.

The oddity of the book begins with its title, which is in full The Star Called Wormwood. An Investigation of the possible reasons for its Decline and Fall as described in the VIIIth chapter of the Apocalypse. The dustjacket description, in bold black letters on the publisher’s trademark pale yellow colours, announces: ‘Mr Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Mr William Blake in the war-world of 2839 (or is it 1939?)’.

(We may note in passing that this use of a future year to satirise a current one predates George Orwell’s 1984, which was originally going to be called 1948 until his publishers dissuaded him.)

Bishop follows Beroalde’s practice of having elaborate literary apparatus before the narrative of the book begins. In his introduction, Bishop says that it has been drawn to his attention that the book might be seen as criticising the current war and might even harm the war effort: he notes wryly that he is touched by such faith in the book’s influence. He explains that it is aimed rather at the futility of war generally than this specific one, and adds that, once embarked on a war, it is better to get it done with despatch.

The novel begins in the early Victorian period: a stable lad, accidentally shot, hovers in his consciousness. The shock of the injury, and a surgical intervention on the brain, catapult him into the future. This device is somewhat reminiscent of the effect of the lesion on the brain made by Dr Raymond on Mary in Machen’s The Great God Pan, and with similar cosmic effects.

But instead of meeting the ancient Greek deity, the stable boy meets two great poets and visionaries, Coleridge and Blake, and is regaled by their recondite conversation. The author is obviously steeped in their work and thought, and any admirer of these will enjoy his portrayal of them.  The boy, who is uneducated, has to try to interpret what they say in ways he can understand, which makes for a whimsical effect.

The Star Called Wormwood is a learned, thoughtful, unusual novel that will not be to every reader’s taste. It does not attempt to offer the usual narrative satisfactions, nor does it try to emulate, for example, Machen’s lyrical, enchanted prose. It is perhaps closest, in the Machen canon, to such works as The Chronicle of Clemendy and Hieroglyphics.

Yet it has a distinctive character and certainly stands out from the run of fiction of the day, or any day. It has a certain oblique, eccentric quality. The Star Called Wormwood is one of those completely original books that ought to appeal to the adventurous reader. It would not have been out of place in Gollancz’s ‘Rare Works of Imaginative Literature’ series, alongside Lindsay, Shiel, Visiak and Le Fanu.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Peter Harrington Books