"Mr. Godly Beside Himself" by Gerald Bullett

Gerald Bullett's novel Mr. Godly Beside Himself* celebrates its one hundredth anniversary this month. Its history is almost as odd as the novel itself is. The concept for the book had a trial run in a short story, “The Enchanted Moment,” which appeared in Bullett’s collection The Street of the Eye and Nine Other Tales (published by John Lane in October 1923); no magazine publication is currently known. The novel itself came out from John Lane in November 1924 (and from Boni & Liveright in the US in 1925). It received some good reviews, but apparently did not sell well in either country. But Bullet wasn’t done with the idea yet. In 1926, Ernest Benn published Mr. Godly Beside Himself: A Comedy in Four Acts.

I read the novel before I knew anything of the idea’s other incarnations. I discussed it in a talk in 2013, “Fairy Elements in British Literary Writings in the Decade Following the Cottingley Fairy Photographs Episode” (later published in Mythlore, available online here), finding it an interesting idea but one somewhat diffusely executed (some of my points from this talk are quoted or reworked below).

It is a remarkably bizarre book. Mr. John Godly is a bored, married, middle-aged marine insurance official, who hopes to have an affair with his secretary, Maia, who is gradually revealed to be a fairy. Pursuing Maia leads Godly to meet a number of grotesque characters, some of whom seem to be competing for Maia’s attention, and with them he enters Fairyland. Meanwhile, his double from Fairyland, called Godelik (a stage direction in the play notes that this should be pronounced Go-de-lik), enters the human world and replaces Godly in his own life and work, with disastrous results. The build-up of the novel is slow, the style alternates between whimsy and burlesque (in a manner reminiscent of James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold), and the writing style is at times especially verbose, so it’s not really a book one can recommend without reservations. E.F. Bleiler, in his Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), noted that “the episodes in Fairyland are very nicely handled, but the overlong preparatory sections are likely to discourage the reader, who may find the character-grotesques unnecessary and pointless.” In a brief autobiographical statement in Twentieth Century Authors (1942), Bullett (1893-1958) sums up his personal ambivalence about life: “I belong to no church and to no political party. I believe that no culture, no real civilization, is possible without freedom of thought and expression; but I do not believe in economic laissez-faire, the doctrine that every man has a right to beggar his neighbor if he can.” It seems that this kind of ambivalence shaped Bullett’s Fairyland as well; yet there is some sort of revolution brewing there, but it is rather nebulous.

Gerald Bullett

Aspects of the novel have stayed with me over the years in ways that many books I have read don’t. Particularly, I enjoyed the mild (but occasional) satire, as in where Godly meets Old Fairy Fumpum, the King of the Ancients, and learns of political factions in Fairyland. Fumpum describes The Noo Party, of comparatively recent growth, as the most formidable power for evil in the world.

These god-abandoned and unprofitable persons had succeeded in setting themselves up in authority in a land where authority had never been known. They established an absolute autocracy, and ruled the country, through their Dictator, with an iron hand. . . .  They were known, these creatures, as Yewman Beans . . .  and they were the evident source of all the political evils of the day. . . . They invented marriage ceremonies [the fairies had no such vows] and made mock-laws of astonishing ferocity. They pretended to eat strange prehistoric beasts, such as the pig, the cow, the mutton-chop. . . . There was, for example, the extraordinary vogue of a pantomime piece, invented by a certain Berry, about a fairy who grew up and died—manifest absurdity [for fairies do not die]. . . . Immature fairies were very entertained by tales of death, though what interest they could find in such silliness Old Fairy Fumpum could not imagine. (163-5)

Overall, though, I don’t think Bullett knew just where he wanted to go with this idea. Hence the three variations. The short story tells of Mr. John Pardoe, a middle-aged insurance man, dissatisfied with his life, with a wife and young son. In a single moment, Pardoe appears in fairyland in the company of Dionysus, and spends the day there quite happily before suddenly returning home, a changed man.

The plot of the play hews closer to the novel. It comprises four acts, with two scenes in each of the first three acts, but only one scene in the fourth. The first two acts show Mr. Godly and his wife, and with Maia at work, then Godly goes to dinner with Maia’s family and quarrels with them. In a forest in Fairyland, Godly meets Maia, and sees himself traveling in the opposite direction. Thus Mrs. Godly is enchanted by Godelik, and everyone in the everyday world thinks he has suffered some kind of shock. Godelik, however, chafes in his London clothes, and departs, just as Godly returns.

The plays seems unlikely to have been a success on stage (I do not know if it was ever attempted). The short story is too brief to do justice to its themes, and the novel meanders without enough focus. It is a pity that Bullett never managed to find an apt way to make his themes and plot more compatible. The novel is occasionally compared to Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), but Mr. Godly Beside Himself is not quite of a similar high quality. Still, I am glad to have read both the short story and the novel.

*The UK editions do not use a full stop after “Mr” while the US edition does.