WORMWOOD 19

Wormwood 19 has gone to print and is available to order from the Tartarus website at http://tartaruspress.com/wormwood19.htm

Why didn't Bram Stoker write a sequel to Dracula?  Brian J Showers explores the question.

Name five great interwar fantasies. Henry Wessells' choices aren't the obvious ones.

Which writer with sales of over 50 million books has been disowned by his publisher? Roger Dobson on the colourful life and work of Dennis Wheatley.

Who was 'The Man in the Yellow Mask' ? Lucien Verval tells the story.

Mark Andresen discusses 'Women in the Gentleman's Club'; Jason Rolfe looks at Baron Corvo in 'The Weird of the Wanderer'; Reggie Oliver reviews a life of Alfred Jarry, a book on outsider writers, and more; Doug Anderson reveals a learned parrot called Clovis; Hall Caine's The Demon Lover; and more lost classics.

ROBERT NICHOLS - UNDER THE YEW

It’s about a young man who gets lost one night and ends up in a fancy dress party in a chateau and sees a beautiful woman and he spends the rest of the book looking for her. True enough, but not Le Grand Meaulnes. There are some books that paraphrase cannot capture. Readers know that they’ve been drawn into something strange and haunting, but they can’t say what: the grammarye can’t be conveyed. So, as to Under the Yew (1928) by Robert Nichols, a pleasing pocket-book in half-marbled boards and a buckram spine. It’s about a late 18th century rakehell who has a night of debauchery and gambling with cronies at a country house. There he meets a singular stranger, who wears a weird ring: they duel with the dice to the very end of their fortunes. Ruined, he has a single, shivering, uncanny experience beneath a yew tree, reforms, and rebuilds his fortune. Later he encounters the Faustian stranger again. All true, but yet not Under the Yew. It is a Gothick dream, a fantasia in firelight. It ought to be spoken about in whispers and passed by hand. Cabals should meet to discuss its meanings. And in certain wild, starlit nights, its characters might strut again, and dice, and laugh, and make the frightened candles gutter.

The author, Robert Nichols (1893-1944), wrote nothing else like it. He was known in his time as a poet of the Great War: his ‘The Burial in Flanders’ and others are still anthologised. He was a close friend of Philip Heseltine (who composed music as ‘Peter Warlock’). He did write a volume of Fantastica, including ‘The Smile of the Sphinx’: these are formalised tableaux, quite different to Under the Yew. The fine biography of him, Putting Poetry First (2003) by Anne and William Charlton, says that Nichols knew nothing of gambling, and he described the book as “a piece of imaginative virtuosity.” But, as his biographers note, it isn’t “about” gambling, but rather about anything “that can destroy its votaries, lyric poetry included.”

Mark Valentine

PHYLLIS PAUL - A CAGE FOR THE NIGHTINGALE

The bleak, precise, sombre novels of Phyllis Paul have been sought-after in recent years, ever since Glen Cavaliero discovered her work, recognised its strange qualities, and began to write about it. They remain quite hard to find, so it's welcome that The Sundial Press of Dorset have just reprinted her 'A Cage for the Nightingale' (1957), with an introduction by Glen Cavaliero, who points out that this is the first reissue of her work since her death nearly forty years ago. Her novels, he notes, "plumb spiritual depths as harrowing and violent as those of Jacobean tragedy": while Elizabeth Jane Howard, quoted on the dustjacket, reaches even further back, evoking "An almost medieval sense of good and ill". What distinguishes her books is the  contrast between the meticulous, correct, shrewdly-observed prose and the stark tragedies and villainies she describes so remorselessly. 'We Are Spoiled' was the title of another of her books, and this sense of humanity as doomed to an existence of sly little evils and weak acquiesence in viciousness permeates all her writing. 'A Cage for the Nightingale' has at its heart a young woman's hesitant quest for the truth about a mysterious death some years before, and the ambiguous roles and attitudes of those around her in the country house where she is a paid companion. The story is well-contrived, with the reader often left in doubt about any explanation. But what pervades the book most of all is a sense of so many shadows, not just in the house and its grounds, but in the conscience of each character - and of greater shadows in a half-lit world beyond.

Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe

In Wormwood no. 16 (May 2011), one of my "Late Reviews" covered Jules Verne's sequel to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), entitled Les Sphinx des Glaces (1897), based on reading the 1898 translation by Mrs. Cashel Hoey. I will copy my "Late Review" below, but here I'd like to call attention to "the first complete English translation" of the book, recently published by the State University of New York Press. Translated and edited by Frederick Paul Walter, it contains not only a full translation of the book (noting on page 387 that Mrs. Hoey's version is "heavily abridged, chopping some 36% of Verne's original", and that her edition "features a number of careless mistranslations, retitles chapters, interpolates passages, fabricates notes, and reorganizes Part Two by shoehorning sixteen chapters into ten"), but also includes the full text of Poe's short novel as one appendix, and a translation of the section on Pym from Verne's 1864 article "Edgar Poe et ses œvres" from the magazine La Musée des familles. Seventeen illustrations also appear, and I recognize most of them from the old translation I read.  The new complete text must now be considered the preferred edition.  Copies are available in an oversize trade paperback edition, very reasonably priced, via Amazon, click here, and Amazon UK, click here. I wonder whether reading the full text would alter my original opinion of the book, which I did not know was abridged at the time I read it. 

Verne, Jules.  An Antarctic Mystery (Philadelphia:  J. B. Lippincott Company, 1899).  Translated from the French by Mrs. Cashel Hoey. 

            In an article on the works of Edgar Allan Poe published in La Musée des familles, Avril 1864, Jules Verne (1828-1905) observed of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) that “the story of Pym’s adventures breaks off in mid-air.  Who will take it up again?  Someone bolder and more daring than I, who does not fear to launch himself into a sphere of the impossible.”  Thirty years later Verne himself did just that, in Le Sphinx des Glaces (1897), which first appeared in English as a serial, beginning in 1898, in The Boy’s Own Paper under the title Captain Len Guy; or, An Antarctic Mystery. It was subsequently collected in The Boy’s Own Annual for 1899, and also came out as a separate volume, re-titled An Antarctic Mystery, from Sampson Low, Marston and Company, London, around October 1898, with a U.S. edition, published by Lippincott, a month later (though it is dated 1899).  Sadly, none of these versions use Verne’s more poetic French title, which in English would be Sphinx of the Ice-Fields. 

            Poe’s masterful narrative is open-ended, deliberately lacking closure so as to leave the mysteries foremost in the reader’s mind. Inevitably this invites others to write continuations of the story, and the attempts made to explain Poe’s mysteries are inevitably disappointing. Verne’s sequel was the first published, beating out Charles Romyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899) by a matter of months, though it seems likely that both were being written around the same time. And both Verne and Dake hinged their sequels on the supposed reality of the character of Dirk Peters, Pym’s companion, who according to Poe’s note at the end of the book was still alive in 1838, a resident of Illinois.

            Verne’s story is set some eleven years after Poe’s.  Captain Len Guy of the Halbrane is the brother of the Captain Guy who sailed with Pym, and Len Guy has come to believe that his brother, and others of the ill-fated expedition, may still be alive.  The book is narrated by a Mr. Jeorling, who takes passage on the Halbrane and though initially skeptical becomes convinced of the truth of Poe’s narrative, supporting Captain Guy in his search for his lost brother.  Any sequel to Pym is almost by its nature bound to rehash familiar material, as the new expedition retraces the steps of the earlier one, moving farther and farther south towards the pole and Pym’s mysterious end.  Verne adds new hardships for the crew of the Halbrane to overcome, including mutiny and the capture of the Halbrane by a rolling iceberg, leading to its complete destruction. One mysterious crewman of the Halbrane turns out to be the half-breed Dirk Peters, Pym’s companion, who reveals that contrary to what Poe published, Pym never returned to America but drifted off in the Antarctic, after he and Peters had become separated.  Verne brings the story to an implausible conclusion.  Captain Guy eventually find his brother, and the enormous Sphinx they encounter is revealed to be a lodestone—an enormous magnet.  Pym’s frozen and dead body is discovered six feet up the Sphinx, magnetically bound by the iron of the gun which he carried over his shoulder.  Dirk Peters falls dead of grief.

            Both as a novel in its own right and as a sequel to Pym, Verne’s story is unsatisfying. A weak work written in Verne’s old age, his own earlier imaginative writings are much, much better. 

In Search of the Unknown by Robert W. Chambers

Our friends at Le Visage Vert have recently released the definitive French edition of Robert W. Chamber's fix-up, In Search of the Unknown (1904), which combines six previously published Chambers stories into a novel.  Here it is translated by Jean-Daniel Brèque, with a nice cover illustration by Marc Brunier-Mestas.  But the added material is what makes this edition special.  Michel Meurger contributes a forty-five page afterword on "The Lost World of the Bronx Park", which is heavily illustrated and gives the background for Chambers's zoological researchers in his novel.  Xavier Legrand-Ferronnière adds a bibliographical appendix which cites all of the appearances of the six stories, from their first appearances in periodicals on to reprints in later anthologies.  As usual with LVV productions, this is a bibliophiliac's delight.  Ordering information and other details at their website here (scroll down). 

The color frontispiece, showing the original cover

Illustrations from the magazine appearances of "The Harbour-Master"

Another Peter Haining Fraud

The prolific anthologist Peter Haining (1940-2007) is known not only to have cut corners in filling up his anthologies, but to have gone so far as to make up references and fabricate texts.  Both of these serious problems are especially visible in his collections of Bram Stoker materials, where he has given deliberately false citations as well as having significantly re-written some of the texts he has supposedly reproduced. I’ve written elsewhere of a few other instances of his outrageous frauds (for one, where he lifted one author’s story from an early Weird Tales and claimed it was by Dorothy Macardle and from an Irish magazine, see here).  

Now I’ve happened upon yet another example of Haining’s premeditated deceit. I’ve recently been looking closely into the writings of Guy Endore (1900-1970), author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933).  In Haining’s anthology Werewolf: Horror Stories of the Man-Beast (London: Severn House, 1987) there is a story “The Wolf Girl” bylined “Guy Endore”.  Haining notes:

“The werewolf theme had evidently fascinated Endore for some years for, when barely out of his teens, he wrote the story, “The Wolf Girl”, which is included in this book.  It was originally published in The Argosy magazine in December 1920 and, despite its stylistic failings, is interesting in that it is based on an Alaskan legend, as well as demonstrating an early stage of Endore’s exploration of the narrow dividing lines between horror and sexual attraction.”

All of which sounds well and good.  But it doesn’t bear scrutiny.  No story of such title appeared in any of the December 1920 issues of The Argosy (nor in any of the surrounding years), nor did Endore’s byline appear at all in The Argosy, as can be confirmed in Fred Cook’s The Argosy Index 1896-1943. In any case, Guy Endore’s earliest known works all appeared as by “S. Guy Endore”, the first initial standing for Samuel.  This byline appeared on several novels he translated—including Alraune (1929), by Hanns Heinz Ewers—beginning in 1928.  Endore’s first known short stories published in periodicals appeared in 1929. He stopped using the initial around 1930.

The story “The Wolf Girl” also poses questions. First, it reads nothing like Endore’s much more polished and literary style.  Second, it is basically a pulp-styled retelling of a portion of Clemence Housman’s “The Were-Wolf”, first published in 1890, with the setting superficially shifted to Alaska (though there is nothing about “The Wolf Girl” that makes it characteristically Alaskan). It is possible that Haining found "The Wolf Girl" in some obscure magazine, and thought no one would contest his claim of source and author. It is also possible that Haining himself adapted the Housman story into this inferior filler, which he then passed off as by Guy Endore (whose name might help to sell a few more copies of Haining’s anthology).  A few things are, I think, certain, and one is that the story did not appear where Haining said it did. Another is subjective but (I think) no less certain: Guy Endore didn’t write “The Wolf Girl”.  Finally, it has become increasingly apparent that you can’t trust Peter Haining on anything. 

Wormwood and Tartarus Press on World Fantasy Award Ballot

I'm not sure when the World Fantasy Award Ballot was released, but I learned of it today, and found the nominations for Special Award Non-Professional, especially interesting:

Special Award Non-Professional
•  Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan & Sean Wallace, for Clarkesworld
•  Cat Rambo, for Fantasy
•  Raymond Russell & Rosalie Parker, for Tartarus Press
•  Charles Tan, for Bibliophile Stalker blog
•  Mark Valentine, for Wormwood

Congrats to Ray and Rosalie, for the nomination for Tartarus Press, and congrats to Mark for the nomination for Wormwood.  Their competitors are also to be commended and recommended. It's too bad that only one can win the Award. 

The full list of nominees can be found here. 

Shiel in Penguin Classics

How interesting, at last, to see M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud enter the canon of Penguin Classics.  This new edition has a lengthy introduction, and notes, by John Sutherland, whose Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989; revised 2009) is as useful and wonderful as his more recent Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (2011) is glib and disappointing. 

Sutherland's Introduction to The Purple Cloud repeats and echoes some of the unfortunate glibness of the Shiel entry in Lives of the Novelists (e.g., where the latter refers to "the excessively minor poet John Gawsworth", this dismissal is lightened in the Introduction by the addition of parentheses to "the (excessively) minor poet John Gawsworth"---is such snideness really necessary?). But overall, his Introduction is informative and up-to-date---it is especially rewarding to see the pioneering biographical work of Harold Billings frequently cited, and the work of Kirsten MacLeod as well.  Billings's two volumes (the third is in progress) on Shiel's life are presently available only in the fine small press editions (here is the publisher's webpage for the first volume), and MacLeod's revelatory article is in an academic journal, so it is very good to see the excellent results of years of research being utilized in the mainstream. 

The book is out in England (click here for the Amazon.co.uk link), and should be out soon in the US (click here for the Amazon.com link).