At the Sign of the Black Pterodactyl - George Hay and Books of 'Some Other Dimension'

The letters would arrive headed by a drawing of black pterodactyls in flight, and the typed legend FUTURES CONSULTANT, with an address in All Saints Street, Hastings. “I consider Hastings to be a metaphor for the more sinister (but also beautiful) aspects of the human condition,” their sender told me. I did not know what a futures consultant was or did, but I knew I enjoyed getting the letters. They were from George Hay, man of letters in the broader sense, to use a quaint term he might not have claimed.

We began corresponding when George sent for a copy of an Arthur Machen booklet I had co-edited with Roger Dobson. This led us on to discuss other neglected writers – Machen interest was then in one of its periodic doldrums – and how to get them appreciated anew and back in print. George, as I now realise, did indeed know something about futures, because he foresaw print-on-demand: “I believe new technology will fairly soon permit of ‘narrowcasting’ publishing based on the needs of individual readers,” he told me in May 1994, long before that came true.

Early on in our correspondence, George sent me a list of books “of the kind you mention”. What kind had I mentioned? I do not now exactly recall, but the thrust of it would have been books so good you want to tell other discerning souls about them. Undefinable books, the sort that have a curious, charged atmosphere to them, emphatically not of the purely realist school, but yet not necessarily definitely supernatural or strange. He said he had made out the list “years ago, for someone whose name, I’m afraid, now rings no bell at all”. The list is headed ‘Books for Robin Cooper’: and I think probably that it was a list for a small scale publisher: I have seen Robin Cooper paperbacks. Probably George was sending him suggestions for books he might reprint.

Any keen book collector will understand that I studied the list at once, and began sifting the titles in my mind. Some of the books I knew and appreciated already; Machen’s Hieroglyphics, E.H. Visiak’s Medusa, Walter de la Mare’s Henry Brocken. Others I knew about, but recognised as (then – before the technology George knew would come) fabulously rare: R Murray Gilchrist’s The Stone Dragon, Neighbours by Claude Houghton (now soon to be reprinted by Valancourt Books). Some I had tried, and liked well enough, but would not have placed quite so high as George perhaps did.

But then there were those I did not know at all. And these, of course, I then began to look for, in the days when the only way to get an out of print book was to go out and look for it. “You’ll be very lucky to find The Hours and the Centuries,” George told me, and explained he was “still trying to get someone to republish it” but the rights were complicated. In his next letter, he told me, “The plot is not important: the style is everything”.

The book was by Peter de Mendelssohn, and published in 1944, and I remember my delight when I at last found a copy in a Suffolk cottage bookshop. It was marked inside in pencil with the single word ‘France’ (evidently meant as an enticement) and the price was modest. It is indeed set in France, in a decaying clifftop city, to which inhabitants from many ages seem to return, for it is a sort of timeslip story. But what matters more is the unusual atmosphere of the book. I have found other copies since and given them to friends, and all are agreed about that peculiar tone to the book, which I can best describe by saying it is like the days when summer slowly gives way to autumn.

An easier book to find, but harder to “get” in another way at first was Gallions Reach (1927) by H.M. Tomlinson. Its hero, not quite the right word, Colet, is a dreaming, melancholy young man clerking in London’s docks, who commits what will look like a capital crime, and must flee. He takes ship for the Indies: the book is about his voyage and the development of his spirit, and the decision he in the end has to make. I was not sure what Tomlinson wanted us to understand at first: the violent incident seemed a forced device, and to strike a false note; but there was no doubt of the quality of the prose, and the haunting quality of the book once it is on the seas. And it is a book I have often come back to, as well as following up more work by Tomlinson.“His fiction and journalism,” said George, “was remarkable for vivid evocation of ‘some other dimension’, and I think deserves study by intending writers. His sentence and paragraph construction were quite unique”.

That phrase about ‘some other dimension’ was, I think, the code we had begun to use for books “of the kind” we both relished. Such books can perhaps only be conveyed by citing examples, as their common attributes are very hard to pin down, and indeed a stern critic might say there is no such group at all, other than “some books I like”: and there might be truth in that. But we were both clear that Claude Houghton also worked in the same form: we had each found our way to his work independently. George was hopeful that “a few interested souls” might be able to get together to encourage the reprinting of “lost jewels”, that “some valuable works might eventually appear”.

He had a theory too about why these authors still attracted keen readers, despite the difficulties in finding out about them, getting hold of their work, and making contact with anyone else who cared about them. Reading, he noted, is collaborative, but the more obvious sort of author takes complete charge, and directs the reader down one route only. These others, those who seemed to work in “some other dimension”, did not do this. He thought they “lay out their wares in a manner which permits the reader to expand outwards, creating [their own] response”. He went on: “Machen’s Gwent, for example, is not simply a recreation of the countryside concerned: it is Machen’s private Gwent, to which the reader responds by ‘playing back’ his own Gwent. This is a rare gift among authors…”. We needed it, too, he said, for “Magic must fight back against technology”.

Mark Valentine

The Original Tower of Moab?

The Original Tower of Moab?
Mark Valentine

L A Lewis’ ‘The Tower of Moab’ (from his Tales of the Grotesque, 1934) has in recent years received acclaim as one of the most original and striking supernatural tales of the 20th century. Championed by the eminent ghost story anthologist and scholar Richard Dalby, Lewis’ work has seen a revival which has included the hardback editions from The Ghost Story Press in 1994 and 2003, and now a paperback reprint (Shadow Publishing, 2014). Dalby, in his introductions, describes how he traced Lewis’ widow, and learnt from her of some of the author’s interest in the esoteric and occult, and also of the effect on him of certain hallucinations, and visions, which seem to have even led to spells in an asylum. The tower is also cited in the lyrics to ‘Lucifer Over London’ by Current 93, composed by David Tibet, who led the Ghost Story Press reprints.

The inspiration for his most praised story was, Dalby reports, “based on a real tower which was being built by an American religious sect, but never finished, at the time Lewis first saw it, supposedly somewhere in South London.” Though the location is not quite right, it is possible that the Tower Lewis had in mind was Jezreel’s Tower, founded in Gillingham, Kent, in the late 19th century, but still under construction well into the early 20th century. There are clues in the story that point to similarities with this Tower. The first is that the narrator compares it to the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. And that was how contemporaries saw Jezreel’s Tower: a report in The Strand Magazine by E.J. Dark in 1903 was headed “A Modern Tower of Babel: The Jezreel Temple, Chatham”. The second is the shape of the edifice. Lewis describes it as “a gigantic hollow pillar…that was its simple form – four walls with a base perhaps fifty yards square and forming a plain, vertical shaft”. That was precisely what the Tower of Jezreel was meant to be: a huge cube. Even the dimensions Lewis describes are similar: the Tower was to have been 144 feet square, not far off the 150 feet in his story.

But perhaps the greatest evidence for Jezreel Tower as the original of The Tower of Moab is to be found in the beliefs informing the building of the real tower and the tower in the story. As John M. Court recounts in Approaching the Apocalypse (I B Tauris, 2008), the Jezreelians, who themselves preferred to be called members of the New and Latter House of Israel, were an offshoot from the Southcottians (more properly known as The Panaceans). The Jezreelians were founded circa 1875 by a soldier, originally James Rowland White, stationed at Chatham, who joined an existing small Southcottian breakaway group and soon took it over. He adopted the name James Jershom Jezreel.

Under his influence, they became an ardently millenarian group, who believed in the imminent end of all things, the Apocalypse prophesied in the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine. To hasten and welcome this, the group considered it was their duty to enact the signs of the end that the book described. Their Tower was the culmination of this duty, and was also to be the headquarters, refuge and sanctuary of true believers in preparation for the end.

The “obscure religious sect” in Lewis’ story had the idea of building until their tower “should reach heaven”. But the Tower of Moab is also inspired by Apocalypse: “The upper portion of each wall blossomed into a panel at least fifty feet high , representing some scene out of Biblical history or the Revelations…One looked like the Angel Gabriel sounding the Last Trump with an immense horn”. That image is of particular significance because James Jezreel was called by his followers ‘the Trumpeter’ and claimed that he was himself the sixth and last trumpeter of Revelation (9.13). Indeed, an excellent study of him, by P.G. Rogers, was entitled The Sixth Trumpeter: The Story of Jezreel and His Tower (Oxford University Press, 1963).

Jezreel’s teachings were gathered in a sturdy testament, The Flying Roll (roll meaning a scroll), dismissed by Church of England clergymen as a mere “Gnostic lucubration”. However, in this he proclaimed: “Blow the Trumpet in this land of England first, and say ‘England! The day of thy judgement is come: thou shalt be the first to be judged and the first to be redeemed. England!...All Israel shall be driven into this land.’” As this suggests, the Jezreelites also held an unusual form of British Israelite belief: not so much stressing that the Ten Lost Tribes had come to England (or Britain), as this belief generally involved, but that all the Saved would congregate in England at the End.

Though the foundation stone of the Tower was laid on 19 September 1885, the construction, and the funding of this, took many more years, and the actual elevation of the Tower could not begin until a vast subterranean vault was first made. This was intended to hold a printing press and depository for copies of the Flying Roll. Several upper levels were then added, but the group, never large in number, then began to falter. James Jezreel had died in March 1885, and his young wife Clarissa (“Queen Esther”), who succeeded him as head of the group, followed in 1888. Soon after, work on the Tower stopped.

In Lewis’ story too, “funds had become exhausted” and “the cult had also died out”: but the Tower remained, too expensive to demolish. His narrator learns this from a bus conductor when he asks about the unusually-named “Tower of Moab” bus stop. This is indeed interesting corroboration of the link to Jezreel’s Tower, because that too gave its name to a bus stop, even after the Tower was no more.

By 1913, the unfinished Tower was put up for auction in The Times. Over the years, the completed parts were adapted for use as factories or warehouses, and it is believed some members of the sect lived in rooms in other parts. Despite this descent from the original great plan, the Tower remained a major landmark for many years afterwards, and the final parts of it were only removed as late as 2008. Followers of the New and Latter House of Israel, not all of whom approved of the Tower, continued to be heard of long after work on it stopped, in various corners of England, but also, in several variant forms, in the USA, perhaps the origin of the recollection that it was an “American” sect that had built the tower that inspired the story. That aside, the numerous similarities between the real Jezreel’s Tower and fictional Tower of Moab do suggest that it must have been this vast apocalyptic edifice that L.A. Lewis had in mind.

The narrator in Lewis’s story notes that the scenes on the Tower of Moab are impressive because they show “a literal reading of what I had always vaguely regarded as allegorical”. A literal reading was precisely what the Jezreelites took from Revelation: even the design and dimensions of the Tower were inspired by images from the Book. The story ends powerfully with the narrator’s visions of the Tower as if it had been completed, and of the angels, demons and beasts that haunt it by day and night, echoing the trenchant eschatology of Jezreel’s teachings.

Joyce Carol Oates: Xavier Kilgarvan’s casebook - Roger Dobson

There are some novels one does not wish would end. Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) by Joyce Carol Oates is such a one. This is a glorious, almost Dickensian feast of a novel. The principal mystery is why the book isn’t better known to crime fiction addicts in Britain, since it stands head and shoulders above most modern offerings in the genre. Mysteries is a tripartite novel laced with Gothicism, relating the cases of detective Xavier Kilgarvan. It’s written in parodic, genteel Victorian style, with authorial asides to the reader, pious interpolations in italics and forests of exclamation marks.

In the first adventure, ‘The Virgin in the Rose-Bower; or, The Tragedy of Glen Mawr Manor’, we find Xavier (‘our hero’), a callow youth, investigating a locked-room murder in an opulent bedroom at the manor house of his estranged Kilgarvan relations. The tale is enriched with hints of the supernatural: dark angel figures, or ‘angel-demons’, are rumoured to haunt the neighbourhood of Glen Mawr. The ghost of the ‘Blue Nun’, who had poisoned several husbands at Winterthurn in the 1790s, has been seen. Xavier penetrates the cellar and attic of the manor, wins the heart of his young cousin Perdita and discovers the secret curse of the Kilgarvan family, though the truth is so loathsome that he eventually burns his notes, keeping the revelation from the world. The sensitive Xavier never really recovers from the horrors of the case. It’s a story one really has to read at least twice before one can grasp all its twists and subtleties.

The next time we encounter Xavier, just before the end of the 1890s, he is twenty-eight, a veteran of a number of celebrated investigations and acclaimed by the Hearst press as a ‘Detective of Genius’. Like Sherlock Holmes, he is a master of disguise. In ‘Devil’s Half-Acre; or, The Mystery of the “Cruel Suitor”’ five girls are found ritually murdered over a period of months in a desolate rock-bound region south of Winterthurn. An innocent Jewish mill manager is hanged for the crimes but Xavier suspects the decadent dandy Valentine Westergaard. Advances in detection leads Xavier to look forward to the day when evildoing will cease — a forlorn hope, but one which illuminates his noble character.

The final story, ‘The Bloodstained Bridal Gown; or, Xavier Kilgarvan’s Last Case’, is the most intriguing mystery of all. A red-haired spectre, carrying an axe, is seen running away from a rectory where two people have been slaughtered and the rector’s wife, Perdita, Xavier’s great love, has been ravished. Curiously, even before the horror occurs, a telegram is sent to Xavier’s home at 38 Washington Square, New York City, pleading:

XAVIER KILGARVAN RETURN TO WINTERTHURN IMMEDIATELY
YOU ALONE ARE OUR SALVATION

Quite a few clues as to the identity of the murderer are planted along the way, and Ms Oates plays fair with her readers. Being a revisionist (and feminist) detective novel, events do not unfold as in a conventional crime story, and the author delights in wrong-footing her readers and mischievously usurping the conventions of the genre. Victorian piety, respectability, hypocrisy and cant are mercilessly ridiculed in Ms Oates’s mock pompous style. The parody and satirical episodes, however, are kept firmly in place and do not injure the novel’s suspense. The jacket blurb refers to the book’s ‘romantic ending’ — and this is one way of putting it. It is enough to say that the book’s climax rivals that of Psycho. Apparently Xavier’s cases echo, in dreamlike fashion, authentic and infamous murders.

Bellefleur (1980) is another splendid Gothic family saga by Ms Oates. A mysterious curse lies on the Bellefleurs — they never die in bed, it is rumoured, or their menfolk perish in absurd ways. However the real ‘curse on the Bellefleurs, it was said, was very simple: they were fated to be Bellefleurs, from womb to grave and beyond’.

Joyce Carol Oates knows the field of supernatural fiction well: she described Lovecraft as ‘bizarre, brilliant, inspired, and original, yet frequently hackneyed, derivative, and repetitive’: a fair summing-up. And she once claimed that Muriel Spark’s ‘The Portobello Road’ and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’ are the most accomplished British ghost stories of the 20th century.

Dulcie Deamer, The Devil's Ball

Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972) is an undeservedly neglected Australian writer of supernatural and fantasy fiction.  The "Queen of Bohemia," a long-term resident of Sydney's cosmopolitan King's Cross district, sprang to literary attention as a teenager when she won a lucrative short story contest run by the literary journal, The Lone Hand for a story set in prehistoric times.  The following witch story, similar in style to her werewolf tale, "Hallowe-en," was lifted from her novel, The Devil's Saint (T. Fisher Unwin, 1924) and published in Vision: A Literary Quarterly in November 1923, with illustrations by the great Australian artist and writer, Norman Lindsay.

The Devil's Ball.

IT was midnight of Hallowe'en.

Sidonia, the witch's daughter, blew out the sickly flame of the lantern, and the loft was in darkness, save for the faint, pink phosphorescence of the hearth and a greenish rumour of moonlight struggling through the thick glass lozenges of one small leaded window.

Quickly the girl stripped herself to the skin. Wan as a ghost she stood before the hearth between the embers and the moon. She shuddered, and the quailing sensation of gooseflesh came over her. But she was determined to fly, and equally convinced that she was about to do so.

With her forefinger she began, gingerly, to rub upon her body a little of a foetid-smelling salve. Over and over she repeated the names of the four aerial demons, adding, "Help me to fly! Help me to fly!" Her whispering voice was insistent, though her teeth chattered. Her faith was absolute.

The dim figure of the naked girl, that had stood for a number of seconds rigid as a figure of wood or a person hypnotised, gave at the knees and fell suddenly to the floor, lying crumpled before the chilling hearth. The yellow cat disturbed by the thump of the fall, started awake, stood up, stretched, and settled down again. The black cat slept on. The strengthless, diffused ray of livid moonlight was the only thing that moved in the loft.

…

“UP! Up! ‑ Look, little sister!”

Sidonia opened her eyes which she seemed only to have closed for a minute.

Oh!

Moonlight, wide, feathered pinions, height, hurtling speed ‑ and company. The shock was as though a pail of cold water had been flung over her. She nearly lost her balance on the back of the winged sable horse whose sides her thighs gripped, and she caught at the mane to steady herself.”

"Don't fall, little sister! If you fall, and are afraid, you will instantly return.

"Where‑where?"‑‑Sidonia did not know who it was that had spoken to her, nor why she questioned. Her mind whirled: it was like a swarm of gyrating silver sparks.

A wonderful wild laugh answered her. It was inhuman, beautiful, terrible. There was the whoop of the wind in it, the chime of water, the scarlet of fire, the sonorousness of earth. Her body, borne dizzily upward, seemed itself light as a wing ‑ she could race on the air, she could run with the winds! Her hair streamed about her like a mermaid's in the swirl of the tide.

Moonlight, beating pinions, faces and swift shapes. Faces that had in them, something of the eagle‑wide golden eyes that were soulless; arched brows and noses. Hair like tongues of fire, limbs flaked with golden scales or feathers. There were four ‑ two upon either hand. Straight‑standing in the air, they bore her steadfast company as the black horse rose. Oh, but the others! They darted like swallows, they circled, they poised, they drifted ‑ they were uncountable. Black imp-things, wickedly grinning, that whizzed and somersaulted; translucent maiden-shapes, linked hand to hand and dancing wreath-wise in the void; bird-like creatures, sapphire-blue, white, rosy or sable ‑ men's thoughts, plumaged in accordance with the emotion that had shaped and speeded them; the naked selves of men, women and children, sleep-released, drifting like vapour, dreaming, half-conscious; wandering flames, bat-thoughts ghosts. Overhead the full moon, an inexhaustible, round lake of blinding silver, drenched everything in light.

Sidonia looked down. The town was a patch of darkness from which the needle points of a couple of moon-touched spires rose. She had no giddiness, just as she had no sensation of cold. But she wanted to descend ‑ to sweep above the roofs that had witnessed her sad, trudging fatigues. Like a bolt from a cross-bow aimed at the zenith the black horse with his mighty raven-feathered wings still hurtled upward.

“You shall fly down, little sister. Speak to the horse which your desire has shaped for you."

It was one of the four beautiful demons who spoke.

"Down, down!" breathed Sidonia, leaning forward and again twisting her bands in the lavish blue-black mane. The mad upward rush instantaneously ceased. The horse hung for a second on pulseless wings, and then plunged earthward down the dizzy lapis lazuli precipice of the night.

It was heart-stopping ‑ a swoop of utter horror if a grain of fear remained. But Sidonia shrieked with the pure joy of it.

Oh, the wind of the cloven air!

Now the shingled roofs rushed up to meet them, and the church spires were like cross-tipped javelins thrown at them from the earth. Now swept with a train of attendant sylphs, spectres and globular, will-o-the-wisplike flames over the gables and the winding clefts of the streets. Weathercocks crowed shrilly at them. Gargoyles yelped like dogs. A stone griffen clasping a stone coat of arms between its claws hissed out fire and lashed its forked tail, unable to join the flight. Cats clinging to thatch or shingles glowered with flattened ears. But one ‑ a black wer-cat ‑ leapt into the air with a of joy and followed the fleeing rout. The figures of saints enshrined in niches along the front of the Cathedral glowed with a soft, bluish light. The wer-cat sheered widely away from them, its fur bristling, its swollen tail as stiff as a ramrod. But Sidonia felt only the innocent interest of a kitten in church.  She was elemental, and therefore in perfect accord with the aerial demons, who might harry the soul that feared them in sheer sport, but were the strong playmates of their own kind, and would fawn like gentle and puzzled hounds at the passage of an angel or a discarnate saint.

A nude, red-haired young woman astride of a bearded he-goat, whose horns she gripped, came hurtling over the roofs. She waved to Sidonia, and in a moment was flying with her. Her green eyes were elfish and had an irresistible sidelong shine. Her mouth, wide and laughing, was of a ripe, animal fullness.

"You're new!" said she. "I often fly, but I haven't seen you before. Do you live in this town?"

"Yes," said Sidonia, "near the Street of the Martyrs."

"How funny! My father is the head of the Goldsmiths' Guild, and we have a house that faces the Church of St. Saviour. Yet you and I are really good friends because we do the same thing."

They smiled unreservedly at each other.

“How did you learn to fly?" asked Sidonia.

“Oh, I heard a wandering friar preach a sermon in the market place against witchcraft. He described the devils, the broomstick rides, and the wild times they had at the witches' Sabbath. It all sounded so exciting, and I was feeling so dull, that I thought I'd try to do what they did ‑ just for fun! So I stripped naked at midnight and called on all the devils I could think of ... and now it's easy."

There was something infectious in the sidelong twinkle of her. She was bubbling with life-joy, and utterly candid. But several of the creatures that followed her were unpalatable. There was a hog, a leering faun with furry cars, and a thick-lipped, hermaphrodite thing with woman's breasts and the hindquarters of a dog.

“Up! Up! Let's see the world, and then dance with the others at the Devil's Ball!" cried the red-haired daughter of the godly master goldsmith.

“Let's see the world!" echoed Sidonia. She was wild with the excitement of speed and freedom.

The winged horse and the he-goat, with their clinging riders, shot upward, The unhindered moon drenched them with its arctic silver. Forests unrolled below them like the undulations of a sable cloak, rivers resembled shimmering girdles, mountains lifted their snowfields, like peaked canopies of blue-white satin, and the blue shadows of the fliers flitted across the printless snow. Continually they were joined by others ‑ solitary beldames with thinly streaming white hair, whizzing on broomsticks, young girls riding sows or goats, and a sprinnkling of renegade monks, and of students of the forbidden sciences, mounted on hay forks, staves, or black dogs. One man ‑ an aged wizard ‑ rode a dragon with peacock-coloured scales.

The company was mixed, indeed! ‑ and Sidonia was so interested that she wanted to look two ways at once. The red-haired girl cried shrilly to this or that one, with whom it seemed that she was acquainted.

Now the moonlit sea glittered beneath them. Huge sable shapes towered and weltered, spasmodically shutting out the moon – cloud-giants. A hurricane wind arose; thunder bellowed, lighting glared, and to the right and left of them the thunderous torches of volcanoes painted the rolling vapours with auburn light.

"The Earth wakes, little sister! The Earth is alive as we are!" cried the demons of the air, and they darted hither and thither like summer swallows through the chaos of storm and speed.

"Yes!" shrieked Sidonia.

Everything lived, everything was in motion. How could one be afraid of that of which one was a part?

Higher and higher rose the blast of the hurricane. The moon was gone, Sidonia, clinging to her horse's mane, was whirled like a grain of dust, through a roaring blackness that had swallowed witches, wizards, neophytes, wer-cats, and all the strung-out train of following devils created by gross, lascivious malicious or hateful thoughts. . . . Then sudden silence. Stillness that was dizzying. . . . A gradual greenish light, grateful and limpid. Sidonia saw that she was astride of a smooth tree trunk, sunk in grass, and that as she lay forward upon it, it was two tufts of grass that her hands clutched.

She sat up straight. Great trees surrounded her. Water fell in crystal sheets from cool cavern mouths. Everywhere there was movement – goat-legged fauns peeped; a young female centaur trotted close, her mare's body cream. white. Here were play‑fellows! But the light was dimming, the tree shapes became obscure. An intense red flame shot up and pulsated, nearly blinding her. Red! She had always loved it. It was, after all, a better colour than green. It was excitement.

Oh! what a blare of sound! ‑ mewing, yelping, howling, screaming, laughing, grunting neighing, whooping. Sheets of fierce fire beat upward‑a breathless conflagration, and against the scarlet, dark shapes pranced, mingled, or were swept pell‑mell by veering currents of the maddest confusion.

Someone caught her arm. By the fiery light Sidonia saw that it was the daughter of the master goldsmith.

"The Devil's Ball! Dance with us at the Devil's Ball!" she screamed, her voice barely audible above the babel.

Hogs capered upon their hind legs. There were horned and beaked things, sealed things, bloated things smooth as slugs, obscene things with the shrivelled breasts of a hog, things with the heads of skulls, cocks, baboons or dogs. Stripped girls danced with man-shaped devils. Shaven-headed monks ‑ glimpsed for a moment between the red-lit eddies of the dance-parodied the sacred rites of Christendom with the assistance of grotesque acolytes, long-tailed and cloven-hoofed. Flutes made of dead men's bones were being played upon, with bag-pipes and drums. Soft mouths were nuzzled by the loathly snouts they hid desired. White arms embraced the metallically glistening bodies of tall demon-husbands. The whistling flames that streamed up like broad banners illumined a cauldron of chaos.

Sidonia was amazed. The noise deafened her, the glare dazzled her. She was horrified yet attracted. Something urged her to plunge into the fantastic debauch and mix herself with it ‑ her starving hunger for excitement, perhaps. . . . Shrinkingly, like a bather stepping into water, she made a slight forward movement. . . . Oh! they were all round her ‑ they surged, and jostled. Feelers touched her, whiskers tickled, sleek fur rubbed. She had no feeling of kinship with these monstrosities‑these obscenities. She shuddered, with arms crossed over her bosom.

"Dance! Take a partner!" came the high-pitched, laughing voice of the red-haired girl. She herself had been grappled by a shaggy satyr, and they reeled together, breast to breast.

"You shall dance with me, Sidonia."

Whose voice was that?

The tangle of creatures parted and a tall man was before her. He was masked. He was all in black. Red‑lit, the height and the proportions of him seemed of a strange splendour.

"Are you afraid, Sidonia?”

"No!" she said.

He caught her to him. Together they moved through the seethe of Hell. Premonitions of abandonment thrilled through the girl's body. They seemed be descending. The furnace-glare was above them. Below was a sullen flame the colour of dragon's blood. Thick tentacles reached, and appeared to

beckon. But Sidonia, with closed eyes embraced the Master.

“Mine!‑mine!”

His.. .,Yes.. . .But she was suffocating! Strangling smoke enveloped them. Her flesh encountered the touch of tentacles, slimy as snails. The quick grunt of hogs came from every side ‑ surely a herd surrounded them! An unhuman leathery hand was laid on her.

"Give me air! Let me go!"

“Never, Sidonia." And he laughed.

…

In the loft where the livid moonlight moved imperceptibly the yellow tom cat, disturbed a minute or two before by the collapse of a girl's stripped body, had just begun to doze comfortably with his front paws tucked in beneath his chest. The girl, lying upon her back, twitched, shuddered, moaned. Then there was the sound of a long relaxing sigh, and her breathing became gentle and regular. The mother of the girl, patch-work-shrouded, drowsed upon the three-legged stool. A pallid pumpkin hung from the rafters. The pot containing the noisome unguent had rolled into a corner. It was about ten minutes past the hour of midnight.

A Mystery-Haunted Landscape: The Novels of Mary Webb - Roger Dobson

Even polymorphous littérateurs have their prejudices and blind spots. Anthony Burgess ungallantly sneers at Mary Webb in Little Wilson and Big God (1986), claiming that his first wife, Llewela Isherwood Jones (‘Of Christopher Isherwood . . . neither the Jones father nor daughter had heard’), was ‘unliterary, a fact confirmed by her liking for Mary Webb’. While at Manchester University in the late 1930s, around the time Burgess, then plain John Wilson, had discovered Finnegans Wake, Llewela gave him The House in Dormer Forest (1920) as a birthday present, though ‘she had overcome her devotion to that writer in a way that Stanley Baldwin never did’. Presumably Burgess never attempted to read the Shropshire author (perhaps he grew tired of listening to Llewela sing her praises), for he would have discovered that here was a visionary much concerned with harnessing language for artistic and symbolic ends:

"Well, it is all gone over now, the trouble and the struggling. It be quiet weather now, like a still evening with the snow all down, and a green sky and lambs calling. I sit here by the fire with my Bible to hand, a very old woman and a tired woman, with a task to do before she says good night to this world. When I look out of my window and see the plain and the big sky with clouds standing up on the mountains, I call to mind the thick, blotting woods of Sarn . . . There was but little sky to see there, saving that which was reflected in the mere; but the sky that is in the mere is not the proper heavens. You see it in a glass darkly, and the long shadows of rushes go thin and sharp across the sliding stars, and even the sun and moon might be put out down there, for, times, the moon would get lost in lily leaves, and, times, a heron might stand before the sun."

Precious Bane, from which the above is taken, is a triumphant brew, mingling folk wisdom, eroticism, mysticism, superstition, romance, the macabre, poignancy, tragedy, death and humour — quite an achievement for a ‘sub-literary’ author. Ghosts even materialize near the end, though they are of the psychological rather than genuine variety. Mary Webb’s poetic language elevates her books from rural melodrama into a higher sphere, ensuring they will always have readers — perhaps when A Clockwork Orange is forgotten. As Robert Lynd observed:

"If it is necessary to classify novelists — and we all attempt to do it — Mary Webb must be put in a class that contains writers so different as Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy, for whom the earth is predominantly a mystery-haunted landscape inhabited by mortals who suffer. To class her with these writers is not to claim that she is their equal: all that we need claim is that her work is alive with the fiery genius of mystery, pity and awe. It is not too much, indeed, to say that in her writings fiction becomes a branch of poetry . . ."

Mary Webb was born Mary Gladys Meredith at Leighton, near Shrewsbury, below The Wrekin, in 1881. She came of Celtic stock: her father, George Meredith, was a teacher and gentleman farmer. A tender portrait of him appears in Mary’s first novel The Golden Arrow (1916), where he is the kindly, mystical sheep farmer John Arden, father of the heroine Deborah. Mary’s mother, Alice Meredith (née Scott), was related to Sir Walter Scott. Like Arthur Machen, bidding farewell to Gwent eighty miles to the south in the year she was born, Mary had a living spiritual relationship with landscape. In her novels and poetry this is expressed in metaphysical terms:

"For indeed every tree and bush and little flower and sprig of moss, every least herb, sweet or bitter, bird that furrows the air and worm that furrows the soil, every beast going heavily about its task of living be to us a riddle with no answer. We know not what they do. And all this great universe that seems so still is but like a sleeping top, that looks still from very stillness. But why it turns, and what we and all creatures do in the giddy steadfastness of it, we know not." (Precious Bane)

In 1912, two years after the death of her father, which affected her severely, she married Henry Bertram Law Webb (1885-1939), a Cambridge graduate, writer and philosopher, who taught at Meole Brace, the village where the Merediths lived. He was Mary’s soulmate, and much of his strength and integrity are reflected in Kester Woodseaves, the hero of Precious Bane. Henry’s teaching career took them to Weston-super-Mare, where Mary began writing The Golden Arrow, set against the primeval, brooding backcloth of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones (called Wilderhope and Diafol in the novel). Returning to Mary’s ‘hills of heaven’ in 1914, they lived idyllically at Pontesbury, near Shrewsbury, and later built Spring Cottage on Lyth Hill, one of Mary’s beloved viewpoints. The couple subsequently moved to London, living from 1923 at 5 The Grove, Hampstead (now 12 Hampstead Grove). ‘Transplanting to London did not suit her,’ Henry later confessed, and Mary escaped to Lyth Hill at every possible opportunity; but it at Hampstead, in three months in 1923, that Mary wrote Precious Bane: an amazing tour de force.

That ‘book in a thousand’, as one US reviewer referred to it, is Mary’s best-loved novel. Set in south-west Shropshire around the time of the Battle of Waterloo – thought he book has a timeless quality as it deals with eternal verities – it tells the story of Prudence Sarn’s struggles against rural superstition and the fear of witchcraft. Prue’s wisdom, tenderness and courage make her one of the most memorable heroines in romantic literature. She is cursed with a ‘hare-shotten lip’, a witch-mark supposedly caused when a hare crossed her mother’s path, and this has condemned her to a lonely spinsterhood. ‘Being as how things are, you’ll never marry, Prue’, her brother tells her. In Prue’s girlhood she is innocent of her ‘bane’; only the insensitivity of those around her finally brings it home to her. Prue is granted a deserved fairy tale ending in the arms of Kester, who sees through her disfigurement to the soul within. He rescues her from villagers at Sarn who accuse her of witchcraft, and rides off with her into a blissful life together.

For Prue’s creator there was no happy ending. By 1926 Henry had drifted out of love with her, transferring his affections to a girl he was coaching for university entrance. Henry was the centre of Mary’s world, and this betrayal devastated her. Her health, never robust after a childhood thyroid complaint, broke down under a starvation diet of tea, ‘bread and scrape’ and self-neglect. She died, of pernicious anaemia, at Quarry Hill Nursing Home at St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, on 8 October 1927, and was buried at Shrewsbury.

Fate conspired against her in death as if life. Her five completed novels had been well received — Rebecca West, no mean critic, stated after the publication of Gone to Earth (1917) ‘Mary Webb is a genius’— but sales were disappointing. After her death the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin praised her novels at a dinner of the Royal Literary Society Fund; she was, he said, ‘one of about the three best writers of English today, but nobody buys her books’. The resulting press coverage aroused public interest, her neglected books were revived, with Introductions by G. K. Chesterton and John Buchan among others, she was widely translated and her works sold in their hundreds of thousands. Then, in 1932, came Stella Gibbons’ parody of the rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm. The book also satirized the works of D. H. Lawrence and T. F. and John Cowper Powys, but Mary Webb was viewed as the principal target. Critics were already hostile to the concept of Mary as a writer of importance. How could a woman from a rural backwater have any artistic merit when the common herd adored her books? Who could trust the opinion of a Tory politician on literature? Thus for many years Mary Webb was facilely dismissed as old fashioned, a mere ‘woman’s writer’. But her books are surely too rewarding to languish long in the shadows.

Daphne du Maurier's ‘Monte Verità' - Roger Dobson

Towering ‘Monte Verità’ by Roger Dobson

Saying anything about Daphne du Maurier’s story ‘Monte Verità’, in an attempt to whet readers’ appetites, risks ruining its spellbinding effects. The only injunction necessary is: Don’t miss this one. More haunting than Rebecca, more bizarre than ‘Don’t Look Now’, with echoes of Picnic at Hanging Rock and ultimately as enigmatic, this novella is one of the most enchanting productions of du Maurier’s pen.

A fantasy, dealing with the quest for truth in the modern world in the form of an unforgettable love triangle, the tale opens in New York, the skyscraper blocks of which reflect the ‘holy mountain’ theme of the story, with the unnamed narrator (à la Rebecca) musing on the strange events that unfolded in his youth many years earlier, in 1913 and in the 1930s. To the luminously beautiful faces he sometimes sees in the New York crowds he longs to cry, ‘Were you among those I saw on Monte Verità?’

Years before, the narrator’s great friend Victor has married a Welsh beauty, Anna, who possesses ethereal, unearthly qualities and cares nothing for material possessions. Staying with them at Victor’s estate in Shropshire, the narrator finds Anna’s bedroom is as bare as a nun’s cell. One night he sees Anna standing barefooted on the frosty lawn gazing at the moon. Her peace affects the house itself. The narrator tells her:

‘You have done something to this house. I don’t understand it.’
‘Don’t you?’ she said. ‘I think you do. We are both in search of the same thing, after all.’
For some reason I felt afraid . . .
‘I am not aware,’ I said, ‘that I am in search of anything . . .’
‘Aren’t you?’ she said.

The story, as can be seen, has echoes of Rebecca, in that the heroine becomes the lady of the manor, but we are never allowed into Anna’s mind. She is more unfathomable than the first Mrs de Winter. Victor and Anna holiday in a mountainous region of Europe, but the narrator cannot accompany them, and regrets his decision for the rest of his life.

Du Maurier’s narrator is deliberately vague about the setting: ‘There are many mountain peaks in Europe, and countless numbers may bear the name of Monte Verità.’ When the couple scale the Mountain of Truth, Anna leaves Victor behind and climbs to the summit alone. It is her destiny, and Victor’s undoing. Once the reader has encountered those who dwell on the mountaintop, the sacerdotesse, they will never be forgotten. A young village girl tells how she met the beings:

"I was with my companions on Monte Verità. A storm came, and my companions ran away. I walked, and lost myself, and came to the place where the wall is, and the windows. I cried: I was afraid. She came out of the wall, the tall and splendid one, and another with her, also young and beautiful. They comforted me and I wanted to go inside the walls with them, when I heard the singing from the tower, but they told me it was forbidden . . . They were more beautiful than the people of this world. They led me back from Monte Verità, down the track where I could find my way. Then they went from me. I have told all I know."

And that is more than enough . . . At the finale the mystery at the heart of the story remains intact and unexplained, but many readers will find this welcome rather than regrettable; just as a woman in a swimsuit can be more alluring than one naked as Eve (though, of course, it all depends on who the woman is).

Du Maurier herself perhaps gives too much away in the prologue, for the story begins with the climax and then flashes back. The reader would be better starting the story several pages in, at the paragraph beginning ‘We were boys together, Victor and I . . .’ (This pioneering Lost Club technique is known as ‘creative reading’. You should hear about the impudent and blasphemous manner in which we recommend The Lord of the Rings be read.)

‘Monte Verità’ was first published in The Apple Tree (Victor Gollancz, 1952), retitled, for obvious commercial reasons, in Penguin, Pan and Arrow paperback, as The Birds and Other Stories. Though superior to ‘The Birds’ and ‘Don’t Look Now’, not much critical attention seems to have been paid to the story. Margaret Forster’s biography Daphne du Maurier (1993) devotes half a page to it, focusing solely on its erotic aspects (yawn), suggesting that intimacy between men and women was, in du Maurier’s eyes, unsatisfactory: a facile tie-in with the theory concerning her (unconsummated?) affair with Gertrude Lawrence. Fiction writers create scenarios at their peril. Some critic will always arise to take the themes of a story literally and apply them psychologically to the author’s life.

As Kingsley Amis commented — and his words should be inscribed in letters of gold above every critic’s desk — ‘Where there are no mysteries or hidden cross-references in a writer’s work they must be invented. The favoured technique is that of trivial/accidental association, whereby anything in the text that reminds the critic of anything else, however uselessly, is fair game.’ Amis relates the story of the student ‘who is supposed to have remarked that the first two words of the phrase “to be brutally frank” was reminiscent of Hamlet’s soliloquy’. Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre without the necessity of keeping a mad wife in the attic at Haworth. Tolkien spent half a century writing about elves; does this mean he believed in their existence? As Anthony Powell has a character say in Books Do Furnish a Room (1971): ‘X. [Trapnel] said that no reader ever believes a novelist invents anything.’

The only really significant revelation in the du Maurier biography regarding ‘Monte Verità’ is that Victor Gollancz suggested a rewrite when, in the original version, Anna was transformed into a — but see the biography. Some hints of du Maurier’s original plot twist appear in the story, but revealing them would spoil readers’ pleasure.

(This is the first of a planned series of short articles by the late Roger Dobson, originally intended for further issues of The Lost Club Journal, and, so far as we know, previously unpublished. Thanks to Ray Russell for converting this material from obsolete disks).

Ambrose Bierce’s Final Words

Ambrose Bierce in 1892

One hundred years ago today, December 26th 1913, is that last day that Ambrose Bierce was known to be alive.  During the previous months Bierce had wrapped up his affairs, and in October he left his home to re-visit a number of civil war sites, wending his way from Washington, D.C., to Mexico and then, so he said, on to South America.  That is, he planned to get to South America if he lived so long.

On October 1, 1913, he wrote to the Lora Bierce, wife of his nephew Carleton: 

I go away tomorrow for a long time, so this is only to say good-bye. I think there is nothing else worth saying; therefore you will naturally expect a long letter. What an intolerable world this would be if we said nothing but what is worth saying! And did nothing foolish—like going into Mexico and South America. . . .

Good-bye—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!

Other letters over the next few months say much the same thing.  And then, after December 26th, the letters ceased.  We have the gist of two communications from Bierce of that date, both purportedly from Chihuahua, Mexico.  The first, from a letter to Carrie Christiansen (1872-1920), Bierce’s secretary, survives only in the form of Christiansen’s summary in a log-book.  Here is the entry in full.

Chihuahua Mexico
Dec. 26, 1913
Ridden in four miles to mail a letter. Ride from Juarez to Chihuahua hard—nights cold, days hot. Allusion to Jornada del Muerta (journey of death) of thousands of civilian refugees, men, women and children. Train load of troops leaving Chihuahua every day. Expect (next day) to go to Ojinaga, partly by rail. Mexicans fight "like the devil"—though not so effectively as trained soldiers. Addicted to unseasonable firing, many times at random. Incident at Tierra Blance—Refuge behind a sharp ridge—Story of Gringo—present of sombrero

The final words from Bierce’s pen are a typically Bierceian outburst to a longtime friend.  It is worth reproducing here in full, for its kaleidoscopic range shows the usual mixture of nuance, complexity, pettiness, and brilliance that made up Bierce’s personality.  Particularly noteworthy for its prescience is the final sentence in Bierce’s postscript:  “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.”  That destination has remained unknown for a century. 

To Blanche Partington
Chihuahua, Mexico,
December 26,1913.

My dear Blanche,

    I have been regretting my harshness to you in my letter from San Antonio, Texas—or was it from Laredo? I wrote in anger, having just read your letter forwarded from Washington, and was doubtless unjust. My anger was caused partly by your destruction of Miss Soulé Campbell's new portrait of me, which I had had made more to please you than for any other reason. You had asked me for a picture.
    But also you asked me in the letter to "confess" that I cared for human sympathy, sentiment and friendship. This to me who have always valued those things more than anything else in life! —who have the dearest and best friends of any man in the world, I think, —sweet souls who have the insight to take me at my own appraisement (or, perhaps you would say, to pretend to). You don't know any of them; it would be better for you if you did. Evidently you share the current notion that because I don't like fools and rogues I am a kind of monster—a misanthrope without sentiment and without heart. I can not help your entertaining that view, but you might have kept it to yourself. The "popular" notion of me I care nothing about, but when it is thrown at me by one whom I supposed immune to it by reason of years of friendly observation it naturally disgusts me. Still, I ought to have made allowance for the pressure of your social environment and for (pardon me) your limitations.
    I was also impatient of your foolish notion that in the matter of my proposed visit to "the Andes" I was posing. I do not know why you think the Andes particularly spectacular—probably because you have not traveled much. To me they are no different in grandioseness from the Rockies or the Coast Range—merely a geographical expression used because I did not care to be more specific. The particular region that I had in mind has lured me all my life—more now than before, because it is, not more distant from, but more inaccessible to, many of the things of which as an old man I am mortally tired. What "interpretation" you put upon my letters regarding that spot you have not seen fit to inform me, which before rebuking me (I am not hospitable to rebuke) you should have done. I suppose you have a habit of "interpretation". You worship a god who (omniscient and omnipotent) has been unable to make his message clear to his children and has to have a million paid interpreters, and you are one of them. (Pardon me; you invited me to "convert you from the error of your ways.") So little do I know of your "interpretation" that I was not even aware that I had written you of my intention to go to "the Andes.” If I did, as of course I did, I must also have told you that I intended to go by the way of Mexico, which I am doing, though it looks now as if "the Andes" would have to wait.
    My enemies are fond of saying that I cannot keep my friends. They are right to this extent: many of my friends I do not keep. I can endure many vices and weaknesses in a friend, but one thing I can not and will not endure—the attribution of nasty little vices and weaknesses to me. When a friend offends in that way he (or she) sooner or later receives a formal note from me renouncing the advantage of further acquaintance. You and my foolish relatives are the only persons who have hitherto been exempt. You have offended seventy-and-seven times and I have overlooked it, but in the letter that angered me you passed the limit and (I say it with no feeling but regret) you go into the discard. No pleasure can come of a relation that is not inclusive of respect. If I am what you think me I am unworthy of your friendship; if I am not you are unworthy of mine. You will be spared henceforth the necessity of being either "ashamed" or proud of me, for I hereby withdraw your right to be either.
    It is true that the latter half of your letter was apologetic, but that was insincere, for if one perceives that a letter is offensive, before it is posted, one can put it into the waste-basket.
    So—I bid you farewell.

    Sincerely yours,
    Ambrose Bierce.

    I do not know how, nor when, you are to get this letter; there are no mails, and sometimes no trains to take anything to El Paso. Moreover, I have forgotten your address and shall send this to the care of Lora [Bierce]. And Lora may have gone to the mountains. As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.

************
Update 12/27/13: 

Mark Valentine has sent along a few interesting URLs.  The first brings up an earlier portrait of Bierce drawn by Soulé Campbell and printed in Bierce's Collected Works (1909):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bierce_by_F._Soule_Campbell_(2).jpg

And the second brings up a contemporary (1913) article on the artist:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1970&dat=19131015&id=cPoxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=POQFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1027,2321670

Henry S. Whitehead News

First, I'll present here my "Late Review" (one from the current issue, no. 21, of Wormwood) of Whitehead's one novel, published the year before his death. I do so primarily to share the incredibly horrid and unappealling dust-wrapper of the book, reproduced below at right.

Whitehead, Henry S. Pinkie at Camp Cherokee (New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931)

Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932) is remembered primarily for his short stories, many of which were originally published in Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s and early 1930s and collected posthumously in two volumes published by Arkham House, Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946).  Less known is the fact that Whitehead published two books during his lifetime, the first being a work of populist theology, The Garden of the Lord (1922), the second being a novel for boys, Pinkie at Camp Cherokee. 

            In the 1920s, Whitehead was involved with a number of summer camps for boys, and he was one of the owners of Camp Cherokee on Long Island, so in one sense his novel can be viewed as a kind of advertisement for the camp. Whitehead’s first story for boys, “Baseball and Pelicans,” had been submitted to Clayton H. Ernst, editor of The Open Road for Boys, and it was published in the June 1926 issue.  Ernst told Whitehead that he should write a book around the tale, and Whitehead took up this advice during the winter of 1929-30 while he was ill. The two main episodes in Whitehead’s short story were expanded into a novel titled Pinkie—Superguy.  The title was sensibly changed by the publisher to Pinkie at Camp Cherokee. It centers around a young red-haired boy from Barbados named James Roderick Evelyn Maurice Kelley-Clutton, who is nicknamed Pinkie because his skin turns pink rather than tan when exposed to the sun. The story is told by a regular boy Bill Spofford from Pencilville, Ohio. Pinkie, with his British accent and complete lack of knowledge of regular American traditions, serves as the proverbial fish out-of-water, and an object of ridicule for most of the boys at the camp, until they come to realize that not only is he talented—his running abilities win a competition, and his unorthodox batting, cricket-style, wins a baseball game—but worthy of their respect and friendship.  Of course rivalries between campers and other nearby camps are presented in a simplistic us/good versus them/bad mentality, and the chumminess between the friendly boys is often cloying and sentimentalized. The attitudes are dated, and the whole book would be a dire read save for two stories inserted as tales told to groups of boys. In one (pages 83-90), Pinkie tells a story around a campfire of a West Indies negro superstition about acquiring luck from a Dead Man’s Tooth. In the second (page 148-158), the camp Chief tells the weird life-story of a thin match.  Remarkably, this tale appeared in a slightly different and longer form as “The Thin Match” in the March 1925 issue of Weird Tales. These two inserted tales account for the only value of this book to the modern reader.  

I'd also like to call attention here to an article by David Goudsward coming out later this month in The Weird Fiction Review, no. 4, from Centipede Press. Goudsward's article is called  "Halsey and the Padré: A 14-year-old’s perspective on H. S. Whitehead".  The article shows a side of Whitehead's personality not usually explored, that of his role at a boys' summer camp.

And another piece of Whitehead lore includes the following photograph, originally published in The New York Times, for Sunday, January 26th 1930.  Upon seeing it Whitehead was inspired to write a letter to twelve-year-old Teddy Gants, the second figure from the left. 

The letter, sent from Dunedin, Florida, reads:

Dear Mr. Teddy Gants,

I noticed your picture in the N.Y. Times of Sunday, January 26th, and as I looked at it I said to myself: "There's exactly the kind of boy I want in my camp!"

So it occurred to me to drop you a line and ask if you go to camp summers, or if, perhaps, you might be interested in Pine Bluff Camp at Port Jefferson, Long Island. Pine Bluff is a mighty fine camp, with more than 100 boys, and a good place for an athlete. I've always been one, all my life, and was three years a Metropolitan District (N.Y.) Sr. Champion All-Around athlete.

Maybe if you, or your father or mother, are interested in your going to camp, you might drop me a line, and I can have the catalogue sent to you, etc. Or, if you will let me know your home address I can come in and talk it over when I come north.  It won't be very long now.

We have everything at Pine Bluff from handball up and down!

Best wishes,
Very sincerely yours,

Henry S. Whitehead

Teddy Gants, a twelve-year-old girl, noted of the letter, "Say, I wonder what kind of person that man thinks I am."  But that question should really be directed toward the letter-writer.