Laurence Housman's Early Fantasies

Along side of writing fairy-tales, Laurence Housman wrote more serious fantasies. I discussed his early fairy tales in a previous post. This makes for a companion post to the first.

Laurence Housman published three books which fit into the category of early fantasies, two short story collections, and one short novel.

The first collection was All Hallows: Seven Legends of Lower Redemption with Insets in Verse (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., [November] 1896).  It contains  seven tales, and a short preface which notes that is only a portion of a projected whole, and “it does not go more than half-way to the final realisation of its scheme, and remains so far the statement of an essentially incomplete phase of spiritual emotion.” It also contains several wood engravings by Clemence Housman, which make the book special and, in the modern sense, collectible.  Unlike Housman’s fairy tales, these stories are more mystical and often have hermits, priests or priors as characters.

Wood-Engraving by Clemence Housman

Housman sent a copy of this book to Oscar Wilde after his release from prison in the late spring of 1897. Wilde thanked him in a letter from that August, and singled out three tales as “quite beautiful”—noting that “their mysticism, as well as their meaning, touches me very deeply.” The three tales were “The King’s Evil,” “The Tree of Guile,” and “The Heart of the Sea.” Housman himself thought well-enough of “The King’s Evil” that he selected it as his best story in The Novel Magazine, June 1906, where he stated “I do not think it is an author’s business to publish criticisms of his own work, but as ‘The King’s Evil’ of all my stories is the one that I feel the greatest satisfaction at having written, I regard it as my best.” Even his brother A.E. Housman admired it, calling it “a good deal the best of this set.”

I found “The King’s Evil” to have some good aspects but it was in some ways inscrutable. The most interesting story for me in the volume was the final tale, “When Pan Was Dead,” which concerns a woodling (a tree-spirit) who sees that the nuns in a convent worship pain,  so the woodling gives them mandrake roots to make them happy. The nuns frolic for one eve, and return to the convent.  The disappointed woodling turns into a mandrake. I also especially liked “The Heart of the Sea,” which tells of an unlucky fisherman who hauls in a young babe, which is then raised by a priest to become a priest, but when the youth grows up, he goes back down into the sea to pray for the sea-dwellers. This story has some similarities with his sister Clemence’s novel, The Unknown Sea (1898).

The second collection, the completion of Housman’s scheme, appeared (without any inset verse, or illustrations) as The Cloak of Friendship (London: John Murray, 1905).  It contains a further seven tales. Overall the stories in this volume are more interesting than those in the first.  And “Damien, the Worshipper,” the longest story in the book, is among Housman’s best tales. It tells how Damien is forced to suffer for the sins of others.  A few other tales are intriguingly odd, one (“The House of Rimmon”) about Koshi, who reverts to his old worshipping of Rimmon, who answers Koshi’s prayers in visions, foretelling of the new god that will replace him. And in “Little Saint Michael” some peasants get an evil fire-stick, but the child Christopher does not feel its hurt, and instead sees an evil salamander.

The two books were combined (including Clemence’s engravings for All Fellows), with contents rearranged (possibly to distribute the illustrations more evenly through the volume) and one story added at the end, in All-Fellows and the Cloak of Friendship (London:  Jonathan Cape, [November] 1922). The new tale is “Inside-Out,” reprinted from The Century Magazine for August 1917. All fifteen stories are reprinted, in precisely the same order, in Housman’s late retrospective collection The Kind and the Foolish: Short Tales of Myth, Magic and Miracle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952). 

The short novel, Gods and Their Makers (London: John Lane: The Bodley Head, [April]  1897), has child protagonists, but it is not a book for children. Peeti is a young tribal boy on some sort of tropical island (cocoa-palms and banyans are specifically mentioned).  His best friend is Aystah, who is followed around by her younger brother Daz. Peeti has devised his own god, Katchywallah, as Aystah has with her Hoosh (Peeti’s father’s god is named Glu-glu). The two children fall afoul with the priestly authorities, and are banished, put on a raft  and sent away, finding another island where old forgotten gods are sent. Daz is later banished similarly, with his god-devouring god, Champ-pum. It is an engaging story with some unconventional insight for its time.  For instance, Peeti comes to realize that “our gods are ouselves—the greedy parts of us, the lust, the cruelty, the love of evil!” And later he notes “Are we all devils that our gods have nothing but hatred and cruelty in their dwellings? Ah! It was our priests! They taught us to embody our first imagination of evil, our lust, our passion for cruelty, and to set that up, and all our lives long to worship it.”

Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana (1905) is often cited as the first story of invented gods, but Housman’s tale preceded it, having been written in 1889, and first published in 1897. One wonders if Dunsany might have read it, for the gods in his story “Chu-bu and Sheemish” seem cut from the same cloth, and Housman’s odd and slightly juvenile god-names seem to be echoed by Dunsany, even in Gods of Pegana. Interestingly, Dunsany sought out Sidney Sime as the illustrator for Gods of Pegana (and Sime did a brilliant job of it).  Sime had previously illustrated a proto-Dunsany-esque story by Laurence Housman, “The Mountains of the Moon,” in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1899.  Dunsany’s own first appearance in print was a poem “Rhymes from a Suburb” published in the very same magazine in September 1897, so Dunsany was certainly familiar with the magazine. These associations between Housman and Dunsany are tenuous, but they do feel significant. And a few other Housman tales have proto-Dunsanian feel. For instance, two tales from A Farm in Fairyland (1894), “The Green Bird” and “The Shadow-Weavers,” hint at being springboards for Dunsany’s respective later tales “The Bird of the Difficult Eye” and “How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None’s Desire,” both collected in Tales of Wonder (1916). Tales by Housman and Dunsany appeared in the same issue of E. Nesbit's short-lived The Neolith for February 1908--Housman's tale being "Little Saint Oogh" and Dunsany's being "The Highwayman."

Each chapter of God and Their Makers is headed by a poem. When Housman reprinted the short novel, he moved all of the poetry to the end of the tale, noting that the poems have very little to do with the story, and “they are only reprinted here in order to deprive readers of nothing that they might legitimately expect in a re-issue.”  Housman also added four other interesting tales (read one of them here, a truly strange creation myth; one of the others is "Little Saint Oogh" mentioned above), retitling the book Gods and Their Makers and Other Stories (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920).

Later on in his writing career, Housman published some further collections of fantastical stories, and I hope to cover them in the future.