Fitz-James O'Brien's Own Book of His Stories

Francis Wolle (1889-1979) was the pioneering scholar of Fitz-James O’Brien (1826?-1862). His 1933 Ph.D. thesis (Columbia) was the basis for his only book, Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties (1944), an impressively-researched consideration of O’Brien and his writings, most of which had been published anonymously. Wolle’s work was the basis for Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s selection of O’Brien’s stories in her two volume set The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien (1988), republished in one volume in 2008. Wayne R. Kime (b. 1941) expanded O’Brien’s bibliography considerably in his “Checklist of Fitz-James O’Brien’s Published Writings, 1852-1864,” included as an appendix to his edition of  Fitz-James O’Brien: Selected Literary Journalism, 1852-1860 (2003). Despite some extensive research, both Wolle’s and Kime’s listings have many problems, and modern research tools have proven a number of instances where they have wrongly attributed some story to O’Brien when it can demonstrably be shown to have been written by someone else. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is Kime’s Thirteen Stories by Fitz-James O’Brien: The Realm of the Mind (2012), in which five of the thirteen stories are not by O’Brien. (Kime’s 2011 collection, Behind the Curtain: Selected Fiction of Fitz-James O’Brien, 1853-1860, fares better, as it contains one misattributed story.) Even the recent three-volume edition of O’Brien’s fiction from Swan River Press, edited by John P. Irish, contains at least one story not by O’Brien (with a few more under research). 

Of course O’Brien published no collection of his stories during his short lifetime, so it is interesting to see in Wolle’s book the description of a table of contents made by O’Brien himself for a proposed collection. Wolle notes that at the time of his research, the manuscript  of the contents listing was owned by Albert F. Goldsmith, a bookseller of New York City. Where it may be now is not known. 

Here follows a transcription of the listing of twenty stories, to which I have added the year of publication (in parentheses), and asterisks to ten tales (the reason is described below): 

“The Diamond Lens and other tales By Fitz James O’Brien”

*The Diamond Lens  (1858)
*Duke Humphrey’s Dinner (1855)
*The Golden Ingot (1858)
*The Pot of Tulips (1855)
*The Lost Room (1858)
Three of a Trade (1858)
*My Wife’s Tempter (1857)
Jubal the Ringer (1858)
Belladonna (1854)
Hard Up  (1854)
Mrs. Macsimum’s Bill (1854)
*Mother of Pearl (1860)
*The Bohemian (1855)
*The Dragon Fang Possessed by the Conjurer Piou Lou  (1856)
*The Wondersmith (1859)
Bird Gossip (1855)  
Lost (1857 or 1858)
One Event (1852)
Carrying Weight (1852)
The King of Nodland and his Dwarf  (1852)

Wolle notes: "In front of each of the last four titles is a small circle, which might indicate that he preferred not to include them, 'Lost' I have not been able to locate. 'Amy Scudder,' the title of a poem, is written in much lighter at the end, and after 'other tales' of the heading, is written in '. . .& poems' (p. 230-231).  

Wolle suggests that the listing dates from late 1861, but I would question that for two reasons, The first is that the latest item on the list, "Mother of Pearl," was published in February 1860. And the second reason is that it leaves off one of O'Brien's best tales, "What Was It?" published in March 1859. (We have no dates of composition for his stories to help us judge here.) 

The first O’Brien collection, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O'Brien (1881), was put together by William Winter and others of O'Brien's friends. Winter’s volume includes ten stories from the above list, plus three additional ones ("Tommatoo", "Milly Dove", "What Was It?). Most of the remaining stories are familiar from later O'Brien collections, but Wolle didn't know of the story "Lost." Kime found two anonymous stories of this title, both of which he ascribes to O'Brien.* "Lost: The Story of Four Young Men," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for November 1857, Kime describes as recounting "the decline and death of an amiable and multitalented young man who has squandered his natural gifts" (Behind the Curtain, p. 191, n. 1). The second story is titled simply "Lost" and it appeared in The New York Tribune, 9 October 1858. It is the story of a young girl who gets lost in New York and the poor old woman who pretends to help her steals her money and fineries. If O'Brien meant either of these stories, it is unclear. The other outlier on this list is "Bird Gossip" which is an essay (on  birds, an interest of O'Brien's), which Wolle describes as "a rambling essay of miscellaneous information about birds" (p. 10). 

 Of course an author is rarely the best judge of their own writings, and we are left viewing O'Brien's list of titles merely as a diverting what-if.  

* I note that the Index to Harper's New Monthly Magazine: volumes I to LX, from June 1850 to June 1880 (1881), compiled by Charles A. Durfee, ascribes the November 1857 story to John Esten Cooke, and see no reason to disagree with it. 

 

Sleeping Dogs

Books are usually forgotten for a reason, and perhaps a common one is simply that a book failed to find an audience on publication. There can be many and varied subsidiary reasons. 

With G. & M. Hayling's Sleeping Dogs  (London: J.W. Arrowsmith, [October] 1923), it seems certainly the case that the book failed to find much readership at all, and it has remained virtually unknown for over a century. Sleeping Dogs is the title stamped on the spine and upper cover of maroon cloth. On the title page it reads: Sleeping Dogs with The Chair and The Burning Glass. That covers all three stories in the book. "Sleeping Dogs" and "The Chair" are both signed M. Hayling. They comprise half the volume, with "Sleeping Dogs" being twice the size of "The Chair." "The Burning Glass" by G. Hayling comprises the second half of the book. 

All three stories are weird fiction. In the title tale, a fifteen-year old boy, Cecil Ware, goes home from school with an unexpected guest who is concerned about the boy's safety, as a number of the boy's father's servants have all gone mad, and there are hints that the father is experimenting on the boy. The story evolves slowly, and gradually reveals that Mr. William Ware has "some rather unusual power which enables him to vitalise inanimate objects such as chairs and tables, and make them move" (p. 74). The implications goes further, in that Ware has stirred up the core of nature, which resents the interference and creates an atmosphere of antagonism. 

"The Chair" is the most straightforward of the three tales. During the Great War some children are evacuated from London and settle into a mysterious house (which works on the nerves of most people, especially the servants). In one room is a carved armchair. The youngest boy Ambrose is drawn to it, and through it he disappears for stretches of time without ever leaving the house. After a long disappearance, drastic efforts are made to defeat the spirit of the chair and save the boy. 

"The Burning Glass" is the most complex of the stories. A young man is sent to help the librarian at an estate catalogue the library, after the owner's death and the inheritance of it by a relative. The librarian is a cleric with hidden and apparently sinister motives. What deepens the mystery of the story is that the causes of actions by the people involved are left murky, and when explained, they do not always satisfy the reader. After the cleric has a seizure, it is discovered that he has defaced a large number of books and written parodies of the contents inside the volumes. Eventually confronted he gives a long patient religious monologue about the soul and what led him to do the things he had done, ending with: "I am not surprised that you sum me up as insane" (p. 263).  Yes, but the story goes on a bit further. 

Sleeping Dogs is an odd collection, and while it doesn't quite earn the status of lost classic, it is worthy of further study and attention. Strangely, I know of no reviews of the book from the time of its original publication. 

I am grateful to Boyd White for recommending the book to me. He also discovered in the January 1, 1921 issue of The Author that  "G. & M. Hayling" was the pseudonym of Misses Gertrude and Mary Shepherd, presumably sisters, with a common enough surname that make them more difficult to track down. Hayling, on the other hand, is uncommon, and perhaps references Hayling Island on the south coast of England in Hampshire, east of Portsmouth. Or perhaps not. 

G. & M. Hayling are known for only one other publication, the novel Tryfield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [October] 1912). The book has seven long chapters, each devoted to one day of a momentous week. The plot centers on Al Wainwright, the spoiled and disagreeable eleven-year old owner of the country house Tryfield. He has a sister and brother, and they are faced with their widowed mother remarrying a widower surgeon with a son just younger than Al, so Al sets out to ruin everything. The point of view is that of the child, but, as observed by The Bookman, it fails in the depiction of the grown-ups as "irritating unco' guid* and pious" (November 1912). The Argus of Melbourne said: "It is an excellent story, relieved with touches of true humour, and thoroughly wholesome in its study of childhood" (20 December 1912).  The Times Literary Supplement noted "the authors can draw characters. . . . The touch is, here and there, a little uncertain, but it is a sound, wholesome, responsible story, with plenty of humour, the precursor, we hope, of others by the same hands" (16 October 1912). 

 * unco' guid (Scottish) "the rigidly righteous" 

Additions, 23 June 2025:

David Tibet notes that two of the three stories in Sleeping Dogs will appear in his forthcoming anthology,  Dark Indeed, Sorrel, from Strange Attractor Press (see here for details), after which will come a reprint of the full volume. 

David has also shared with us some things from his collection. First up is a short review of Sleeping Dogs:

The Courier (Dundee), 16 November 1923 

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

“Sleeping Dogs,” by G. and M. Hayling (Arrowsmith, London) contains three stories, two of them written by M. Hayling, and one by G. Hayling. We are continually on the borderland of mystery, and are reminded of Le Queux’s stories or some of Conan Doyle’s. Surprises come in where you don’t expect them, and thought the solutions are slightly more than improbable, they are all amusing. It is the kind of book many a young lad will revel in. 

I don't know which of Le Queux's stories (Stolen Souls?) the reviewer is reminded of, and I doubt the idea that young lads will revel in the book!

And here are some book covers from David.  The maroon cloth with white lettering on Sleeping Dogs seems to be the first binding, with the slightly orangey one (with black stamping) a later one. 

side-by-side for better color comparison

Thanks, David! 

Borderlands and Otherworlds - A New Book of Essays

Tartarus Press has announced publication of a new book of essays, Borderlands and Otherworlds. The title derives from a contemporary publishing term for stories by E.F.  Benson, May Sinclair and others that explored the uncanny, mystical and visionary.

The essays discuss in particular supernatural fiction of the Nineteen Twenties, occult thrillers of the Thirties, and the English Fantastic in the Forties and Fifties.

Authors surveyed include Mary Butts, Dion Fortune, Claude Houghton, David Lindsay, Charles Williams, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, as well as less well-known writers.

Other subjects include the Black Horse inn sign, wanderings on England’s waterways, the pleasures of ephemera, the Tarot in England, the bookseller W. M. Voynich (the discoverer of ‘The Voynich Manuscript’) and bygone booksellers.

There are over a dozen substantial new essays, as well as work newly collected for the first time here. Some pieces have featured on this blog in earlier versions, but this is their first book publication.

Each piece is accompanied by book photography by Jo Valentine, and the cover design is by R B Russell.

Borderlands and Otherworlds is in a limited edition of 350 signed hardback copies.

(Mark Valentine)

 

An Evening at The Larches

I believe I first cued in on the name J.C. Trewin for his June 1956 review in The Listener of the radio adaptation on the BBC Third Programme of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, wherein after declaring himself "having been for years President, Honorary Secretary, and the entire membership of my own Arcturus Club," he goes on to note some of the omissions and alterations in the BBC script yet still praising the radio adaptation overall.  Clearly J.C. Trewin (1908-1990), who was mostly known as a journalist and drama critic, was a byline to watch out for. 

More recently, I read a number of his short stories published in William Kimber ghost and weird anthologies of the 1970s and 1980s--in particular those edited by Denys Val Baker, or Amy Myers (the "After Midnight" series). Having enjoyed them, I looked for any novels by Trewin, and only found one: An Evening at The Larches, co-written with Harry Hearson. 

An Evening at The Larches was published in 1951, with illustrations by Ronald Searle. It is a slim book of some fourteen chapters covering eighty-some pages, and most chapters have a full-page Searle illustrations (a couple of very short chapters have no illustration, but other chapters have two, and including  the frontispiece and endpage, make for a total of sixteen delightfully macabre drawings).  All of Searle's drawings can be seen at Perpetua, a Ronald Searle Tribute site.

The set-up and plot is fairly simple. The Ghastlys, headed by Lord Jasper and Lady Lucrezia, live in a castle called The Larches (so-called because no larches grow within ten miles of it) in the Swampshire town of Blackwater, which has a reputation for the design and manufacture of hearses. Family members include a "revolting" little daughter named Paranoia, who is known for her knife-throwing skills and her staged executions of her platinum blonde dolls, and the elderly Dowager Countess of Endor, and cousin Sir John Ghoul, as well as the inventive (in ways of murder) butler Beetle. The plot centers on a dinner party hosted by the Ghastlys through which they plan to maintain The Larches by doing away with wealthy friends and relatives. The other guests include Count Dracula, and two mundanes, the local bank manager and his wife. The dinner party does not go as planned, and the result is told in a darkly humorous manner. 

If all this sounds like a take-off on the Addams family comics by Charles Addams (many of which appeared in The New Yorker), or the 1964-66 tv series, or the later movies, this might not be the case chronologically, for though the first comic by Addams appeared in 1938, the characters went unnamed until around the time of the tv show, when they coalesced into the family as we know it today. An Evening at The Larches appeared in print in October 1951, long before the Addams family came together on the other side of the Atlantic. 

And anyone who enjoys the Addams family in its various incarnations --Paranoia and Wednesday are very much cut from the same cloth-- will enjoy An Evening at The Larches, with Searle's illustrations providing sinister atmosphere in much the same way that Addams's drawings do. And Hearson and Trewin keep the story short enough that the idea is not overdone. 

The first Addams family comic, 1938

 

The Girl Green as Elderflower

Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) is one of the oddest novels I have encountered in years. And I do not mean the term "oddest" to be a putdown. Rather, it's a bit of an attraction, for how often does one encounter a book, a personal vision, that is completely unexpected to the reader at almost every turn? For me the oddness of this book extends from its contours to its incidents and its plot.  Meaning: I never knew in which direction the story might turn, nor did I feel secure in knowing where the story had been. Details unfold slowly and often subtly 

The author, Randolph Stow (1935-2010), was born and raised in western Australia. He wrote poetry and novels, settling in the 1960s for over a decade in Suffolk, England, where his ancestors had lived. During this time he wrote The Girl Green as Elderflower, which takes inspiration from many elements in Stowe's own life. 

On the surface, the novel is centered on a young man Robin Clare, who after some time in the tropics, settles for a while in Suffolk, near some very distant cousins who befriend him. He is recovering from some kind of illness, possibly after a suicide attempt. In playing with his young Clare cousins, he learns of an invisible sprite named Malkin who knows all sorts of local secrets. Clare himself is also enamored with Suffolk's medieval past, which includes stories of a similar sprite at Dagworth, a wild man at Orford, and the more famous story of the two green children of Woolpit. The novel is mainly set in the early 1960s, with four sections dated January, April, May and June. In between these four sections are three historical sections, interlacing the modern Clare family with the medieval legends. The reader gradually comes to understand that these are writings by Robin Clare. The dislocations in time, both in the modern sections as well as the legendary ones, gets a bit confusing, and the story really only comes to vibrant life in the long, penultimate section, "Concerning a boy and a girl emerging from the earth," reworking the green children story.  Stow helpfully includes as an Appendix four of his own translations of the twelfth or thirteenth century legends--three from Ralph of Coggeshall, one from William of Newburgh. 

A second reading of The Girl Green as Elderflower would doubtless help to better understand what Stow was up to, but for now, the first of his eight novels, The Haunted Land (1956) looks intriguing, as does his final novel, The Suburbs of Hell (1984), after whose publication Stow ceased writing. Perhaps these will afford clues to a better understanding how Stow's art worked.