Friday, October 17, 2025

The Centenary of ‘Portrait of a Man with Red Hair’ by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) gave his novel Portrait of a Man with Red Hair the subtitle ‘A Romantic Macabre’ and referred to it as a ‘penny dreadful’. According to Rupert Hart-Davis’ biography Hugh Walpole (1952) he wished to write a ‘simple thriller’ for relaxation. On the strength of a synopsis he sold the story for serialisation in the United States, and within days of acceptance had made a start. Always a fast writer, Walpole completed a quarter of it in ten days, finishing the whole story in about two months. However, the magazine editor then repudiated the arrangement, calling the novel ‘distinctly gruesome and unpleasant’. It was with no such qualms that the house of Macmillan took on Portrait of a Man with Red Hair and first published it one hundred years ago in October 1925.

In a ‘dedicatory letter’ Walpole described the book as ‘a simple shocker which it has amused me like anything to write, and won’t bore you to read.’ Perhaps he had decided to prepare his readers for something ‘gruesome and unpleasant’ with what would now be called a trigger warning. Throughout most of the novel dreadful things, and more so the fear of them, would never be far away: touches of sudden sadistic violence, episodes in a pervasive gothic atmosphere of psychological intensity, come scattered throughout Walpole’s many novels.

Even to a reader who skipped the dedication the opening sentence should seem set to suggest an unusual novel: ‘The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away.’ It takes a moment more to see that Walpole has used a most traditional device: the protagonist on a leisurely train journey, followed by a walk to the final destination. Here, Harkness, who is soon revealed as a young American tourist, is going to visit the Cornish seaside town of Treliss.

When Harkness sees Treliss for the first time it is ‘absolutely the town of his vision’ yet gives him ‘a clutch of terror as though some one was whispering to him that he must turn tail and run’ (30). Once in his hotel Harkness accidentally overhears the distress of a young woman, Hesther, and resolves to himself to help her against her heartless husband and father-in-law. Wandering in the hotel garden before dinner, Harkness observes, fascinated, a man with red hair ‘standing straight on end as Loge’s used to do in the old pre-war Bayreuth “Ring”’ and whose eyes ‘were alive and beautiful, dark, tender, eloquent…’ (52). Introducing himself, the man, Crispin, invites Harkness to join him and his family for dinner. Harkness then realises who the girl was – and the identity of her husband’s dominating father. Crispin now comes to dominate the story, even when not directly appearing on the page.

Having involved himself with the Crispins, Harkness has no choice – and would not want one – except to follow through on the consequences of his promise. He agrees to go along with a plan already hatched by David Dunbar, Hesther’s previously rejected suitor, and Jabez Marriot, a local fisherman, to rescue Hester from Crispin’s house. Harkness has been invited there to view Crispin’s collection of prints and other precious objets d’art. During the visit Crispin tells him his own terrible story: an upbringing that taught him that it was necessary to suffer pain in order to understand the true heart of life – and to control. To inflict pain and then tend the victim is to be greater than God. ‘I myself am increasing my power every day. First one, then another. First through Pain. Then through Love. […] I should myself be superior to the suffering of others, because I know how good it is for them to suffer’ (135).  

The rescue of Hesther goes to plan until a sudden and very thick fog prevents the party from escaping across the bay. In a hushed and haunted journey the fugitives attempt to walk to another village, but in the fog find themselves back at Crispin’s house. Wholly in a madman’s power, Harkness and Dunbar are told they can ‘Make your adieus then to the lady. Your eternal adieus’ (234). The two men are eventually led, stripped naked, to a large room at the very top of the house and each tied to a pillar as Jabez already is. Their prison is ‘a high white place with a round ceiling softly primrose. One high window went the length from floor to ceiling, and this window, which was without bars, blazed with sun and shone with the colours of the early morning blue.’ What should be an exalted place in the heights has been corrupted by Crispin’s sadistic madness; his intentions are obvious. But there the story reaches its climax perhaps rather too simply, too easily. The headlong pace sustained throughout comes to an abrupt end and peters out in the few pages remaining – leaving the reader to realise that the entire exhausting action has taken place over less than a single day.

In Portrait of a Man with Red Hair the reader is surrounded and carried forward by Walpole’s sense of place, his gift for describing landscape, weather, and the ever-changing light. The great and heavy fog that descends and occupies most of Part III serves to maintain the tension, if not to increase it, but when the fog has cleared and the novel finished, all seems somehow to have been curiously insubstantial, as if the glowing countryside and enveloping fog had never quite been experienced after all. Perhaps this is appropriate for a ‘simple thriller’ written to provide a few hours’ vivid entertainment – which it certainly does.

(John Howard)


Wednesday, October 15, 2025

"Ordeal by Beauty" by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942) is a name familiar to readers of older weird fiction primarily for his single volume of ghostly stories, Black Spirits and White (1895), published early in his career, after which he abandoned the writing of fiction for his profession as an architect, specifically of the gothic type. He still wrote, and Darkly Bright Press has just reprinted his 1921 lecture (the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University) titled "Ordeal of Beauty"--which was published in a volume of lectures and essays, Convictions and Controversies (1935). 

Cram's lecture begins:

Staggered by the shattering of our hopes for the civilization in which we had taken such pride of ownership, and bewildered by its failure to avoid the old pitfalls of war and its apparent inability to lift itself from the chaos that followed thereon, we fall to a searching of conscience for the finding of the reason of it all, and to a scanning of history in the hope that there we may discover some assurance against its happening again. 

The sentiment expressed still reverberates today. From there Cram narrows his consideration and turns anti-modernist and spiritual:

Gothic is not a passing phase of the building art already completed and dead, it is the voicing of an eternal spirit in man, that may now and then withdraw into silence, but must reappear with power when, after long disuse, the energy emerges again. Gothic is the fully developed expression of Christianity, but it is even more the manifestation of Christianity applied to life, that is to say Christian civilization.  

One suspects Cram's contemporary, Arthur Machen, would agree with a lot of this. Today, however, some of these views seem long out of fashion.

The lecture makes for a slim book, and as with many Darkly Bright Press titles, it has a small limitation. Interested readers should act quickly. Details here

Friday, October 10, 2025

The Centenary of 'God Head' by Leonard Cline

Leonard Cline's first novel, God Head, appeared on 10 October 1925, on the first list of books published by the newly founded Viking Press of New York. God Head is not fantastical but it is mythopoeic. It is set in northern Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior, vaguely during the First World War. Cline’s narrator, Paulus Kempf, is a labor agitator, and after the police break up a strike he was fomenting, Kempf flees into the woods for his life. There, at length, he comes to a small settlement of Finns, who take him in and help him regain his health. During his recovery, Kempf is told tales from the Kalevala, of Kullervo, Lemminkainen, and Väinämöinen, and these stories shape the narrative and influence Kempf’s developing ideas. Thereby he comes to think of an immortality of the flesh through the masterdom of humanity, and Kempf tests out his ideas on the Finns, lusting after the wife of his host, playing on the superstitions of the old people, and creating of the frowning face on the cliff a chanting god head to symbolize his dominance. This bald précis does not convey the majesty of this work, nor the brilliance of its style. On original publication Laurence W. Stallings wrote of it in The New York World: “It would be eminently fair to believe that Leonard Cline could write rings around half a dozen of our ten best novelists” (21 October 1925); and Donald Douglas wrote in The Nation: “More than anything else it is Mr. Cline’s prose holding light like a steel net which transmutes a wild melodrama into an ordered and thrilling rhythm of word and scene and folklore” (6 January 1926). An English edition was published by Jarrolds in 1927, under the title Ahead the Thunder. God Head was translated into Finnish by Juri Nummelin as Jumalan Pää (2020). 

God Head is the single-best forgotten novel that I have ever encountered.*

A special Centennial edition God Head, with extra content, is forthcoming.

*Most of this piece is adapted from my entry on the book in Late Reviews (2018). 

Sunday, October 5, 2025

The Centenary of 'The Spell of Sarnia' by Mrs Baillie Reynolds

The Spell of Sarnia, which was published one hundred years ago this month, is set on Guernsey (Sarnia is one of its older names). This is one of the Channel Islands, which are not part of the United Kingdom but belong to the English Crown in the monarch’s historical role as Duke of Normandy. Mrs Baillie Reynolds had clearly researched the island’s customs, folklore, laws and surviving Norman French language (Guernésiais) in some detail and is occasionally a little too keen to share her studies. Still, the island would be little-known to most of her readers and she conveys its unusual qualities evocatively.

Mrs Baillie Reynolds was the married name and writing name of Gertrude Robins (1861-1939), the author of about fifty popular novels. Typically, they have a strong romantic interest involving an enigmatic young man and a high-spirited young woman, who become entwined in some mystery. For such a prolific, well-established author she has received surprisingly little attention.

The romantic interest in The Spell of Sarnia focuses on Aymon Vauxlaurens, the last scion of a line of Seigneurs of a manorial estate in a far corner of the island. His family became impoverished, the great house has been sold, and it is now a sports club. He works as an insurance clerk in London. However, he has been summoned back to the island by his last known surviving relation, a Great Aunt. She urges him to buy, with his modest patrimony, a run-down former pharmacy once owned by the family. She thinks this holds the secret to a highly prized perfume, the Sarnian Bouquet, once perfected by the family but whose formula is now lost. The quest for the fragrance provides the chief mystery in the plot, along with the possibility of other legacies, and they are gradually uncovered in highly traditional treasure-hunting hiding places. Thus far the plot follows conventional routes.

However, Baillie Reynolds also depicts a strong folkloric element based on rural witchcraft. A neighbour of the Great Aunt is a white witch and she has seven times received a verse prophecy, somewhat in the manner of Nostradamus, concerning the young Seigneur. Some parts of it can perhaps be deciphered, but other parts are obscure, and the aged dame herself does not know what it means: she is only the messenger. The Seigneur is respectful but somewhat sceptical and wonders if she has been put up to it. A malevolent witch, adept in curses, is her opponent. The Seigner has his own opponent in an ambitious tycoon, the owner of the sports club, who is buying up other property on the island. 

How far Baillie Reynolds drew on genuine traditions of Guernsey witchcraft and folk customs must remain a bit moot. She was writing in the aftermath of Margaret Murray’s highly influential The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), when ideas of surviving witch traditions were very much in vogue and were deployed by other writers in the interwar period.

As well as the ancient beldame there is a psychic young woman of notably otherworldly appearance and demeanour, Oriane Vidal, who also seems to have secret knowledge of the perfume. She possesses a crystal ball and induces Vauxlaurens to look into it after dinner one evening, revealing an apparent vision of the past. He puts this down to her mesmeric influence and the strength of her father’s vintage wine. She suggests his lineage may give him a sort of intense insight equivalent to second sight:

‘In this island . . . everything and everyone is condensed to a degree which would startle people who are not natives. You inherit the tradition of a family which has been bone and flesh of Guernsey for hundreds of years. You have been away—you have suddenly returned. The whole of your heredity rises as it were to meet you on the threshold . . . Your destiny lies here . . . lies here condensed. You feel it so strongly that it makes you uneasy . . .

In the fencing and misunderstandings that ensue between Aymon and Oriane I was reminded somewhat of the amatory complications in David Lindsay's Sphinx and The Violet Apple, and indeed this book helps to show the sort of context in which his novels appeared, including the way in which fantastical elements could be woven into an otherwise fairly typical romance story.

The novel culminates in two more overtly supernatural episodes, one involving mind control by hypnotic power, the other a demonic goat, though in both cases the possibility of delusion is left open. The author quotes a West Country phrase used as a protection against evil, ‘numny dumny’, a colloquial version of ‘in nomine domine’. Author Bob Mann has noted this is also used in ghost stories by Ulric Daubeny and A.L. Rowse.

Baillie Renolds’ tale is told with ease and charm, but the supernatural aspects offer another dimension and, despite gestures towards rationalisation, they are not disowned. This aspect does not really enter the realms of the truly unearthly, but it is much more than window-dressing: The Spell of Sarnia is a genuine work of supernatural fiction. The author revealed in an interview with The Bookman that she began by telling made-up ghost stories to her brother, so evidently this was a lifelong interest. Baillie Reynolds also conveys well Guernsey's distinctive historic resonances.

(Mark Valentine)