‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”’: An Edition of M. R. James’ Manuscript

  

Crumpled Linen Press, run by Mark Jones and Paul M. Chapman, is a new publisher devoted to ‘beautiful facsimile manuscript editions of great literary works, annotated by world-leading scholars’.

Their first project involves annotated editions of the ghost story manuscripts of M.R. James, starting with  ‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”’.

The edition will include a reproduction of James’ original manuscript for the story, with his deletions, amendments and second thoughts; a scholarly introduction, and notes; newly commissioned illustrations; and supporting articles.

Contributors include Jim Bryant, Peter Bell, Thom Burgess, Brian Corrigan, Jon Dear, Helen Grant,  Darryl Jones, Robert Lloyd Parry, Roger Luckhurst, James Machin, Rosemary Pardoe and Mark Valentine.

It will be published as a dustjacketed hardback in a limited edition of 250 copies. A fundraising campaign is due to be launched in March. The Press invite you to join their mailing list to be notified of this and other news.

The Press hope to follow this with an edition of the manuscript of ‘The Mezzotint’, and are working with the relevant libraries and archives on further James stories too.

 

Mothra

As a youth I enjoyed the various Japanese monster films that showed up on late night television. We didn't then know to call the monsters kaiju. Godzilla was most frequently encountered, but the monster and film that intrigued me the most was Mothra, because of its very surreal nature. I mean: an island in a radiation zone near Japan is found to be inhabited by savages, overseen by a pair of diminutive women who speak and sing in unison. After the women are taken away from the island by an unscrupulous businessman, in order to exploit them in a carnival-type show, they sing for rescue by Mothra, who, back on the island, hatches from a large egg, and as a larva swims gallantly over the sea, cocoons itself in Tokyo, and emerges as a very large moth with very slow-moving wings, which nonetheless compel hugely destructive winds. That is the kernel of the plot of the film Mosura, released in July 1961, with an English version released the following year as Mothra. 

I learned recently that the original novella (three connected stories by three different writers), made as a preliminary film treatment, was published in January 1961 in a periodical whose title translates to Asian Weekly Supplement. The story was titled "Hakko yosei to Mosura," the three parts written successively by Shin'ichiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukanaga, and Yoshie Hotta. It has now been translated into English for the first time, as The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. The slim book, published by the University of Minnesota Press, contains the translation (42 pages) and a Translator's Afterword, by Jeffrey Angles, which is almost twice as long as the original story. 

I picked this up to see if the original novella might have made more sense plot-wise, especially curious about the small singing women (played by twin sisters in the film). And there are interesting differences from the film. In the novella, the small singing women are two foot high, and four in number; in the film they are one foot high and two in number. In translation they are designated "luminous fairies" though no such terms are used in the film. An interesting back-story of the island savages ("dirt people") and their worship of the Mothra egg is given, but overall the plot of the novella follows the same trajectory as the plot of the film. 

The "Translator's Afterword: Hatching Mothra" tells much about the composition and cultural background to the novella and film, including the political aspects. It reveals an unexpected but fascinating relation to one of Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle books. There is also a discussion of Mothra's shifting gender. 

In 2023, Angles published a volume Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, including new translations (the first into English) of the first two Godzilla novellas, coincident with the first two films.  Both are by Shiguru Kayama.  This looks as much fun as the Mothra book. I look forward to reading it. 

Corvo's Appendix III - A Guest Post by Fogus

While perusing my pipe-leaf-haunted 1931 Modern Library edition of A History of the Borgias, I came across a footnote about the tribulations surrounding Baron Corvo’s original manuscript and its ill-fated Appendix III:

The suppressed “Appendix III on a suggested Criterion of the Credibility of Historians” was a vivid and virulent impeachment of five historians—Pontano, Infessura, Guicciardini, Varchi, and John Addington Symonds—in the matter of admitting the evidence of moral turpitude. Every copy save one was destroyed by a cautious publisher.

The footnote hopelessly compelled me to search for this elusive Appendix III, and a preliminary investigation quickly dispelled the convenient legend of a lone surviving copy. The second edition of Cecil Woolf’s A Bibliography of Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo (1972) states that the appendix was printed and numbered but suppressed before publication. Woolf says that the appendix was destroyed save for a few copies that circulated as unbound proof sheets of nine leaves and in three bound proofs. I found a listing in the Autumn 2014 Elysium Books catalog for a 1901 first edition proof from Grant Richards with the Appendix III bound into the book. That copy passed from Richards to Shane Leslie, through A.J.A. Symons and then to Donald Weeks, who owned it until his death in 2004 after which it was sold in auction in 2014. Woolf’s bibliography states that Weeks also owned the proof sheets of the appendix with annotations in Corvo’s hand, but it’s not clear where those leaves are today. A second bound proof passed from Richards to Oliver Brett Esher and was once held in the Martyr Worthy collection, Columbia University. Sadly, it’s not clear if that collection still holds that proof. The third bound proof appears to still be in the Bodleian Library’s special collections at Weston Library, Oxford.

Despite finding locations for the bound proofs, I still found myself in the soup. Given my present circumstances, Oxford and Columbia might as well be on the moon. However, after digging a bit further I came across a reference to P.H. Muir’s Points: Second Series 1866-1934 (1934) which is a collection of disparate bibliographic materials for a wide range of authors. Inside I found a bibliography of Rolfe’s works containing more information about the suppressed appendix, including a facsimile of the first page having deliciously Corvine passages such as: ‘Great men in the world’s history, chiefly men of intellect and men of sovereign rank, have been its victims. At one time or another time, they inadvertently have trodden upon some human worm; and the worm has turned, and stung them.’ The quote starts a scathing attack on the credibility of the aforementioned historians, but it’s difficult to garner the trust of the attack in this singular page. Finding this did nothing but make me yearn for more.

Eventually, my search led me to a revised version of the appendix published as "Suggestion for a Criterion of the Credibility of Certain Historians" in volume 160, issue 4 of the Westminster Review (Oct 1903, pp 402-414). Corvo’s critique starts by stating that claims of homosexuality by the aforementioned historians against Pope Sixtus IV were based on vagueries like “ut fertur vulgo” (as is commonly reported) and “ut dicunt quidam” (as some say) rather than on testimony from credible witnesses. Corvo then takes great pains to refute the accusations against Sixtus IV of favoring his “pages of the bed-chamber” by examining a long list of the people who were promoted. By enumerating proof of age and station for each, Corvo attempted to disprove the accusation that Sixtus rewarded his “puelli delicati.” Corvo then spends numerous paragraphs relitigating the charge of lustful motivation for the promotion of family members to a lesser charge of common nepotism. Finally, he tackles the accusation that Sixtus IV promoted his supposedly base-born young valet Giangiacomo Sclafenati to cardinal. Corvo masterfully uses the historical record to show that Sclafenati was not base-born, nor young when he was promoted, and indeed that he was not even a valet. In short, the essay was clearly an Edwardian-era manifestation of Brandolini's law.

From a modern perspective, Corvo’s linguistic games around the homosexuality charges seem needlessly baroque, but I found that the byzantine use of Latin served two purposes. First, since the original accusations often were in Latin, Corvo’s use serves to give the essay an air of academic precision. Second, Latin formulations like “puerorum amator et sodomita fuit” serve as a linguistic mechanism to navigate fraught taboos of the time. Corvo directly attacks the way that the historian Symonds used “mollific suggestion” and euphemisms to distance the accusations from historical fact. By using the original Latin accusations, Corvo deftly avoids euphemism by using learned distancing instead. In the cases where he felt an absolute requirement for obfuscation he turned to Greek spellings of certain terms that were “too gross” to print outright.

If such veiled utterances were unprintable, then Corvo's appendix, in light of its inevitable suppression, may hint at a form of courageousness on his part. However, I'll try to avoid conjuring virtues that can't be proved, and instead express my admiration for his fiery attempt to contest calumnies typical of the "weapon with which spite is wont to stab the back of scorn." Indeed, the accusations and his defense must have struck very close to home for him and his linguistic devices in the essay are diagnostic of the age in which it was published and indeed the author himself.

(Fogus) 

A New Edition of 'Picture of Nobody' by Philip Owens

In August 2019 I wrote about an unusual interwar novel, Philip Owens’ Picture of Nobody (1936). As I noted, in this ‘Shakespeare is recreated as an impoverished young poet in Nineteen Thirties London. It is not exactly a reincarnation or timeslip fantasy – the book simply takes the character, story and work of the 16th century playwright and reframes them in a setting over three hundred years later.’ Readers contributed helpful information about the author, and I posted further on this in a follow-up note, ‘Picture of Somebody’.

Now, the independent bookseller McNally Jackson has announced pre-orders for a new edition of the book, due out in April, with a foreword by Allen Bratton. This includes an encomium by David Tibet: ‘Truly unlike any other book I have read. Shakespeare and AntiShakespeare, a timeslipping tragicomedy of errors . . . a masterpiece, and a very strange one too.’

The publisher describes it as: ‘A comic yet credible reimagining of the milieu of Elizabethan London in modernist dress, it transcends its premise to provide a poignant portrait, of a Shakespearean mind coming to grips with the twentieth century. Populated by an assortment of characters familiar from Will's life and writing both, it is as much a loving parody as a grim prophecy regarding the fate of genius in "interesting times." ‘

The book is very uncommon in its original edition, so it's good to see this audacious and inventive work rediscovered and newly available, a fitting tribute to Philip Owens' literary legacy.

(Mark Valentine)