Erik Satie Starts His Own Church: A New Study by Sam Kunkel

Sam Kunkel, scholar of Symbolist literature and editor of Faunus, the journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen, has just announced pre-orders for his study Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything—Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor (First to Knock Books & Records), due to be published in October.

In fin-de-siecle Paris, the 26 year old Satie, feeling his highly original, prismatic piano work unappreciated, decided to launch his own autocephalous church instead. Announcing his bohemian apartment was now an abbey, Satie issued proclamations and hurled maledictions on his artistic and magical rivals, in a campaign bizarrely mingling the spiritual and the satirical. This remarkable episode in Satie’s career was a prophetic precursor of Surrealism and its rituals and banishings.  

Sam Kunkel told me what had drawn him to this subject:  

'I suppose what appealed to me first an foremost about the project was the humour of it. Satie’s letters and writing are incredibly funny, but it’s a very wry, nearly impenetrable sort of humor that could pass for sincerity. When I looked into it further, I saw that his acerbic letters of excommunication, despite their ludicrous framing, rested upon a bedrock of sincerity due to what he perceived as a lack of recognition. I thought it would be interesting to not only present them, but to flesh out the context at the same time, to show both sides of the coin rather than simply presenting the letters as isolated objects where they could be simply passed off as the scribbling of an eccentric pianist.' 

 The publisher notes: ‘Drawing upon a multitude of firsthand sources—including documents held in the Erik Satie archives in Caen—the book includes new English translations of all known Church publications and correspondence by Satie as the Parcener. Facsimilie translations of Satie’s Church publications are reproduced herein as well, capturing, for the first time in English, the design and typography of the original productions.’

For orders from the publisher's website only, the book is accompanied by a limited-edition flexi-disc recording of Satie’s Leit-motiv du Panthée performed, as intended, as an accompaniment to a reading of Joséphin Péladan’s Le Panthée. 

(Mark Valentine) 

The Centenary of "The Smoking Leg and Other Stories" by John Metcalfe

 The 1925 Jarrolds dust-wrapper

John Metcalfe (1891-1965) is remembered primarily as a writer of “strange stories”—a precursor to Robert Aickman in terms of subtlety and ambiguity. Metcalfe’s first book, The Smoking Leg and Other Stories (Jarrolds), reached its centenary on September 18th. It came out when Metcalfe was a few weeks shy of his 34th birthday. He would go on to publish five novels (including the slow and subtle My Cousin Geoffrey), two novellas (Brenner’s Boy and The Feasting Dead, published as slim books), another short story collection (Judas and Other Stories), and a good number of uncollected tales. The Smoking Leg and Other Stories was unusual in that only five of its eighteen tales are known to have had previous periodical publication, and that as a book the volume was reprinted not once, but twice, in 1926 and 1927 respectively.

The earliest story was “The Bad Lands” published in Land and Water, 15 April 1920. The other four previously published stories all date to March-May of 1925, the most significant being the title story itself, published in The London Mercury for May. A US edition, with a striking dust-wrapper, was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on 14 November 1926.

In England, The Guardian noted:

To make an improbable story plausible is often the most difficult problem of the historian of the psychic or the macabre, and it is even more often an insoluble problem. Mr. Metcalfe has discovered a most paradoxical solution: in this volume of mysterious adventure he makes no attempt to account for anything; he simply poses as an impartial observer of strange happenings  who does not particularly care whether he is believed or not. And one must admit that by ignoring the difficulty he overcomes it. . . .  Mr. Metcalfe may congratulate himself that he has succeeded in keeping up a very uniform standard throughout the book. (16 October 1925)

 The 1926 US dust-wrapper

A few other contemporary reviewers made  another important point—that  “The Smoking Leg,” the lead story in the book, is not Metcalfe’s best, and it distracts from the higher quality of the bulk of the book. Frederick P. Mayer called it “a deal of rattling clap-trap and machine-made horror” (The Literary Digest International Book Review, August 1926). In the TLS, Orlo Williams noted that the story  “illustrates the chief weakness from which Mr. John Metcalfe, its author, suffers. He too obviously strains after the shocking, the horrible, the unexpected” (1 October 1925).  “The Smoking Leg” begins in Burma, and follows a lascar with a magical jewel implanted in his knee together with an amulet, the latter to restrain the jewel’s power. The other pulpish story in the volume is “Nightmare Jack,” which also deals with  a Burmese god and magical rubies. Such stories are by no means poor, but they do not show off Metcalfe’s real talents, which lie in psychological subtleties inherent in his descriptions.

Most of the collection is less exotic that the two pulpish tales, and more focused on England and London.  To me, one of the very best is his first published story, “The Bad Lands,” where a patient on his walks encounters an alternate, truly evil land.  “The Double Admiral” is a baffling tales of a quest to find a blur on the ocean horizon—the admiral ends up dead, and the others in the boat see a vision of themselves in another boat with the admiral apparently alive. “The Flying Tower” deals with the haunting at a cliffside folly. “The Grey House” shows, apparently, a house in more than one world.  The ambiguities and the borderline supernaturalisms make the collection as a whole especially intriguing.

 The 1927 Jarrolds 3rd Printing 

The Centenary of 'Thus Far' by J.C. Snaith

 

Thus Far (1925) by J.C. Snaith, which celebrates its centenary this month, is an uncanny SF thriller written in a vigorous and vivid style by this versatile writer of popular fiction and eccentric fantasies. Snaith was 49 years old and already the author of about 28 novels from 1895 onwards.

I wrote about him in my essay 'Possible Masterpieces: The Novels of J.C. Snaith’ (Haunted By Books, 2015). In this I noted that several critics thought he had almost written a masterpiece, but did not agree which of his books that was. They include Willow the King (1899), a Pickwickian cricketing yarn, Henry Northcote (1906), about the sensational defence at a seemingly hopeless capital trial, and William Jordan Junior (1907), about a mystical young scholar completely innocent of the modern world.

Thus Far is not in that category: it is unaffectedly commercial fiction which uses some very familiar devices but which the reader can still rather relish. The narrator receives an urgent summons from an old friend, an eminent but erratic scientist, who feels he is in ‘terrible danger’ but does not say why. He hastens to his friend’s remote house, The Hermitage, in the New Forest, Hampshire. (The ‘New’ Forest is 900 years old and not a forest in the usual sense but mostly heath. It was new when the Normans designated it as a royal hunting estate).

He arrives too late. A gruesome discovery is soon made and, because of the intricate, delicate nature of the case, Scotland Yard sends in a semi-official amateur detective, complete with monocle and rowing club silk tie, who proves to be a Cambridge varsity chum of the narrator. A romance interest is offered through the young niece and ward of the doomed scholar, who seems to be holding back a secret. Later, an Aunt in the tradition of Bertie Wooster’s redoubtable relations, ‘as English as an east wind’ and with ‘the astringency of home-grown apples or cranberries’, enlivens the scene.

A few clues emerge about the scientist’s work in his private laboratory: he had brought back from deepest Africa a new species of ape that might be the Darwinian ‘missing link’; he was on the verge of discovering a new element; he was studying the stars; he thought science might be about to make disastrous discoveries and should hold back (‘thus far shall ye go and no farther’). But which of these contributed to his fate?

There are some distinctly Conan Doyle-like aspects to the novel in its combination of keen-eyed detection with a macabre theme, and the plot in particular might appear to suggest ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’, first published in The Strand Magazine in March 1923, two and half years earlier. Whether Snaith was inspired by this to try an even wilder, stranger version, or made his own way to a similar theme is not clear. There are two literary allusions in the text, one to Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, with its Borneo ape, and the other to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both may shed light on what has happened. I’d add that there is a third literary predecessor in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, also about a scientist’s unwise experiment and its monstrous outcome. Indeed, some aspects seem to echo the figure of Helen Vaughan.

It will not, I hope, be giving too much away to say that Snaith’s book, while drawing on all these tales, also reflects his own particular preoccupation. The theme of the individual set far apart from his fellows by extraordinary powers or eccentric perspectives clearly interested Snaith greatly, since he returns to it often in his fiction. But whereas his protagonists are often benevolent, albeit ill at ease with the rest of humanity, in this plot the prodigy is an intensely disturbing figure. He has hypnotic powers, including through thought projection at a distance, preternatural physical strength, merciless cunning and an utterly amoral outlook. This egoistic mastermind foresees that Nature will find it necessary to eliminate humanity before it wreaks too much damage, and is not averse to giving it a helping hand.

A criticism that might be made of the book is that some of the plot mechanics are a bit creaky: characters behaving in ways that seems improbable but which are needed for the plot to work. Indeed, Snaith was evidently uneasy about this himself, as he has his narrator say several times that his actions must in retrospect seem unlikely, but he puts this down to the high tension of the situation or the need to honour competing allegiances. It’s a good try, but it doesn’t quite convince. However, if every character in a thriller always acted entirely cautiously and prudently the genre would lose quite a few classics ('Whatever you do, sir, don't go across that there moor at night!' 'Oh, all right then, I won't. Thanks for the advice').  The reader will just have to indulge this aspect.

And the book does have some effective qualities. It is pacy, the prose is brisk, succinct, even curt, and the atmosphere of brooding menace is well-established. The debonair detective is attractive, in the Lord Peter Wimsey mode, and the fantastical elements are deftly handled. It is a bit of a pot-boiler, but the stew is savoury and sharply-seasoned. It would have made a splendid black and white science fiction B movie with wobbling sets, gloomy lighting, extravagant make-up and ham acting. Perhaps some moody avant-gardeist might still discover it. 

(Mark Valentine)