The Centenary of 'The Rector of Maliseet': A Guest Post by John Howard

One of the most appealing ways to start a story is with a leisurely journey by train. For the author it provides the ideal opportunity to introduce the protagonist, set the scene, and hint at what might be in store; for the reader the sense of movement and progression can foster a pleasing anticipation. Useful information may be gained through casual or overheard conversation in the confined space of the railway carriage, or at the station when the destination is at last in sight. Although the journey is over, for the story it is merely the end of the beginning. Now read on… As did those who opened The Rector of Maliseet by Leslie Reid, first published one hundred years ago in February 1925.

It is late summer, a warm September. Leonard Carr has been engaged as secretary to St John Clare, an old college friend of Carr’s father. Clare is a clergyman of the Church of England and Rector of Maliseet, a quiet and remote village in ‘unvisited Raithshire’: a perfect situation for a young man recovering from illness. The sun is already low when Carr changes trains for the final part of his journey. Although there is plenty of lyrical description of the landscape under the slowly dying light, here and throughout the novel it also possesses a ‘brooding’ aspect. It is certainly beautiful to look at – yet there seems more to it, something lying just beneath or beyond what can be seen.

Apart from his liturgical obligations and duties in the parish, the Rector has spent his time ‘collecting material for a large work dealing with the lesser-known saints of early Christian times’ (36). This fills several drawers in a cabinet; Carr’s job is to arrange the notes so the Rector can make them into a coherent narrative for his book. Carr quickly warms to his task and enjoys reading the material. He finds one account particularly intriguing. Ambrose, abbot of the nearby but long-ruined Pellerin Abbey, had been pious and zealous, but fell under the influence of Satan. Ambrose had periods of remorse which did not last. He finally decided to commit suicide and throw his soul on the mercy of God – but there the document ends, incomplete, the remainder torn away.

Carr attends church on Sundays, and sometimes in the evening, when he is the only member of the congregation. He had previously observed that candles are kept continually burning on the altar: an ancient tradition. Carr slowly begins to find parallels between Ambrose and the Rector. Each has two sides, spiritual and sensual, which are at war with each other (157). The Rector continues to be reticent and mysterious; Carr explores the disused part of the Rectory and finds that his employer uses a room there, which he keeps permanently locked.

Carr had become acquainted with Forbes, the village doctor. Over dinner Forbes explains that he found some old documents, including the conclusion to the story of Ambrose. The abbot, intent on killing himself, had climbed the steps cut into a huge rock outcrop known as The Stone – and at the top had been forgiven by God. Now permanently reformed, he went on preaching tours. He was appointed Rector of Maliseet and began the custom of perpetually burning candles on the church altar.

Several weeks later, Carr asks the Rector about the missing conclusion to the story. He talks about Ambrose before he degraded himself: ‘To such men there may come a time when they are as nearly on an equal footing with God as it is possible for men to attain. […] God made his presence known in a way that had been denied to any other individuals in history. There was the utterance of a spoken compact – made between the Almighty and a human creature. The Lord made a promise to Abbot Ambrose, which, for His own good reason, he did not fulfil’ (233).

It seems the promise was that Ambrose should ‘have the privilege of seeing God’ (239). This would be granted on Midsummer Day – that same day – at The Stone, which is first place to catch the rising sun. Carr gets to The Stone just as the sun rises and sees the Rector at the top. Then the priest vanishes from sight. Carr observes that the Rector, in death, looks untroubled for the first time (270). A connection or bond between two remarkable men over some seven centuries has come to a tragic but appropriate conclusion.

Just as the initial situation of a young man travelling to stay and assist with the work of an unusual clergyman is reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s novel The Human Chord (1910) so Reid’s invocation of landscape and certain features within as the ‘awful loveliness of paganism’ often reaches the intensity that was such a characteristic feature of Blackwood’s best work. There are ‘secret forces in nature’ which he cannot say are evil or good, but are certainly powerful, belonging to an ‘ultimate world beyond good and evil’ (197f).

In The Rector of Maliseet the priest does not, as in The Human Chord, seek the Divine in order to harness and control it for his own purposes. Rather, it is the reverse: he wishes only to see, to be transformed. Yet both men of God are impious; they find there is a price to pay for their quests. From the outset it is clear that Carr is narrating the entire sequence of events many years later. There was one at least who emerged from that time wiser – even if not, as it would seem, sadder.

The Rector of Maliseet - Leslie Reid

The Rector of Maliseet (1925) by Leslie Reid is an atmospheric mystery in the Machen and Blackwood vein. A young man takes up a post as the secretary to an eccentric cleric in a remote parish in the West, helping him compile a book about the legends of obscure saints. The rector’s household includes his aged mother, young daughter and a servant. The narrator is beguiled by the lonely landscape and also by the daughter.

The rector keeps two tall candles burning on the altar of his church at all times and also retires at times to a secret room in a disused wing of his house. In the course of his duties, the secretary discovers the legend of a medieval abbot of sinister reputation, whose abbey lies in ruins in a deep forest nearby, and sees a connection between the abbot and the rector.

Reid's prose is beautifully assured, gradually unfolding the mystery and strangeness with brief, subtle foreshadowings, and the descriptions of the lonely country are marked by keen and evocative observation. This is a highly accomplished first novel which remains largely unknown. I found it entrancing.

Reid wrote three other novels, Saltacres (1927); Trevy the River (1928); and Cauldron Bubble (1934); and two books of non-fiction on geology and natural history, Earth’s Company (1958); and The Sociology of Nature (1962).

Saltacres has a more conventional and less mysterious plot: a young woman, a farmer’s daughter, is torn between the wealthy squire who offers marriage and another man she really loves. Although there are evocative scenes set in the marshes and on a holy island, and a stone circle is mentioned, the romantic tangle, which ends in tragedy, is the main theme. This is really Thomas Hardy country.

In Trevy the River, a young man, the son of a miller’s daughter and a mysterious stranger, makes a living first as a farm labourer, then in a bookshop in a lightly-disguised Wells, Somerset, then as an under-gardener and under-footman at a country house. From childhood he has an affinity with the river that runs through the watermill where he was born, and whose name he shares: and this has led to village tales about him, with hints of the supernatural.

He also has a recurring dream of a hilltop with five pine trees upon its summit and, when he finds the hill, discovers that it is below here that his river has its source. He determines to follow the whole course of the river and has various curious encounters on the way. These episodes read like short stories linked together. The lyrical passages of delight in nature have a pagan element to them like those in the work of Algernon Blackwood. But the work is an odd sort of mixture of Dickens (adventures of an orphan) and this Blackwoodian mysticism. Even so, it is an original and distinctive book.

Reid's fourth and apparently last novel, Cauldron Bubble (1934) is quite different to the other three. In Part 1, ‘The Mixing’, a young man, Lowrie Blane, hiking in the hills of the imaginary nation of Edwal makes for a remote inn at the ruins of the ancient Rhiannon Priory: this reads remarkably like Llanthony Priory, near Abergavenny. Here, he overhears a conspiracy for an uprising against Grendel, a nation to the east that has occupied the smaller country for 500 years. There is a contiguous country also to the west of Edwal, called Belmark, which is to support the revolt.

Some obvious parallels are clear here, but they are not exact. Edwal is geographically and culturally a thinly-disguised Wales, but with elements of Ireland in its history: for example, it is largely Roman Catholic, not (like Wales) Nonconformist; and its nationalist movement is more like that of Ireland too. Grendel is not exactly England, either: it is a republic. Nor is Belmark like Scotland, as might be supposed: it is more like Germany.

The atmosphere is at first quite like that of J B Priestley’s little-known romance of a Jacobite conspiracy, Adam in Moonshine (1927), but not so whimsical: or of John Buchan’s slightly later Ruritanian novel The House of the Four Winds (1935). There is to begin a breezy, adventurous tone, but this soon changes in the second part, ‘The Heating’, which is much darker.

Reid describes the well-planned uprising itself with crisp, convincing detail, and the book becomes tenser, more urgent. The idealistic hopes of a bloodless coup are soon disappointed. There are scenes of battle between the two sides in the capital city, with stark, unflinching detail about the casualties, like the first hand accounts of the First World War. The change from the lighter first part is a distinct jolt, and we see that Reid’s book is no high-spirited costume romp. This continues in the third part, 'The Cauldron Boils', when Grendel and Belmark are at war.

Leslie Hartley Reid was born in India on 17 November, 1895, the elder son of Robert Newby Hartley Reid of the Public Works Department, Madras, India. He attended Rugby school from September 1909 to 1914. He was a Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, attached to a Trench Mortar Battery, and wounded in action. In 1921 he lived at Foxlease, Swanage, Dorset. He gained a Diploma in Forestry from the University of Toronto, and from 1922 worked for the Canadian Forest Service. (Source: Rugby School Register, Annotated, 1892-1921).

Earth’s Company provides a biographical notice on the dustwrapper which offers further details. Reid served in “France and the East in the First World War”, then worked in the Ontario Forestry Branch. “In 1928 he left Canada and took up teaching after gaining a degree in History at London University. Then came a teaching career of some twenty years, including thirteen at Stowe. In 1956 he retired.”

It adds: “He has been interested in Natural History since boyhood and after the Second World War began writing articles on geological and biological subjects for The Scottish Field, Countryman, Contemporary Review, and Quarterly Review. This is his first book of this kind.” That last phrase, of course, is carefully worded not to include his novels, which are not mentioned at all. Even so, they are worth rediscovering, and, of the four, The Rector of Maliseet in particular.

Mark Valentine

Photo: From 'The Treasures of the Cope Chest' exhibition, Mark Valentine.