The First Modern Ghost Story Anthology: One Hundred Years of 'The Ghost Book' by Cynthia Asquith

  

 In my collection Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), I included an essay (adapted here) on The Ghost Book, Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny edited by Cynthia Asquith, which may be seen as the first modern ghost story anthology. It celebrates its centenary this month: it was published in Hutchinson’s Autumn list, in plenty of time for the traditional season of ghost story reading.

The editor clearly understood the ghost story as a highly literary form, and was successful in attracting notable names for her book, both in the genre and in general literature: this is a discerning selection. There are several tales that have become classics in the field. Perhaps the most notable is ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’ by D.H. Lawrence. I note in my essay: “The overtly supernatural element – the boy who courts luck and finds it by riding his rocking-horse to learn the names of winners at the races – is simply taken for granted, presented matter-of-factly. This is tersely effective. The glimpses of his visionary rides are brief but sufficient to let us see their flickering, fevered quality.” The keen edge of the story is in the response of the adult characters to the boy's gift, uneasy, but willing to exploit it. 

Another notable story is Walter de la Mare’s ‘A Recluse’, where the author subtly conjures a creeping sense of unease but  without any very definite intrusion of the supernatural: all we really witness are a few odd noises, such as might be heard in any old country house. But de la Mare is a master of significant, ominous, yet ambiguous details. There is a horseman at the beginning, who doesn’t (as de la Mare notes) play any further part in the story, and yet because this is a rich, mythic image it lingers with us.

Hugh Walpole’s ‘Mrs Lunt’ is set in a haunted, candle-lit house by the sea in Cornwall. A writer (whose work is described as being like that of de la Mare’s The Return) goes to visit another author at Christmas, at his friend’s urgent imploring – he does not want to be alone. The fellow-author’s need for comfort leads to some awkward physical embraces between the men, which we can now understand as Walpole hesitantly exploring his own homosexuality. The tale is about a vengeful ghost (his host’s wife) and the plot is fairly conventional, but it has some strong, effective images, eg of the woman appearing among a grove of dark trees.

But Asquith did not select only the highly conventional, haunted house sort of story. ‘At the Villa Desiree’ by May Sinclair, is a modern interpretation of the form, with a sophisticated setting, a strong psychological element and suggestions of emotional vampirism: yet for all its complexity it still has a strong impact. Marie Belloc Lowndes’ ‘The Duenna’ is similar in mood and type of setting to the Sinclair and also about emotional tensions, with a dual haunting. The story is well-turned, worldly, psychologically deft, if perhaps a little too neat.

Clemence Dane’s ‘Spinster’s Rest’ is a rich, mythic story with an inter-dimensional element.. A young woman goes to be the companion to an old lady who is always knitting – but we soon gather that it is fates that her needles create. Her house has upper rooms that lead into dream worlds. As in the stories of de la Mare, the crossing between this world and the symbolic world is subtly achieved.        

L. P. Hartley’s ‘A Visitor from Down Under’ is brisk, sardonic and assured, a deft exposition in black humour. There is an eerie scene, slightly comic, between a bus conductor and the bony spectre who buys a ticket to the stop near his victim’s hotel, which is nicely peculiar, although the literal-minded reader might wonder why a form that can make its own way out of the infernal regions then needs to catch a bus. The absurdity is part of the fun, of course. 

The editor’s own story,‘The Corner Shop’, as by ‘C.L. Ray’ is a nicely-done story of the “what I found in the curio shop” type, with a moral message (honesty in dealings) that is yet not too intrusive, and the sort of ghost that has to come back to complete something undone. The plot is predictable, but the setting and the characters, and the outcome, are appealing, if perhaps just a bit too cosy.

Three veteran writers in the field are not represented by their best work here. Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ is a quite conventional haunted house story, of the sort where a past deed of violence is replayed. It is skilfully built up, but doesn’t have that extra edge of originality or vision. Arthur Machen’s ‘Munitions of War’ is one of his ‘legends of the war’, brief and anecdotal. Oliver Onions contributes short pieces self-deprecatingly called ‘Two Trifles’, sketches based on the idea that the (then fairly new) wireless waves are interfering with the ethereal forms of spectres.

Humorous ghost stories are a difficult craft: too facetious and they can seem inconsequential. Here, however, ‘The Lost Tragedy’ by Denis Mackail provides a pleasing contrast to the darker pieces, with his yarn about the spirit of Shakespeare at a country house auction looking for one of his legendary lost plays that he doesn’t want found. There is an enjoyable scene at a rambling second-hand bookshop with teetering piles of titles everywhere. This is an amiable bit of bookish whimsy.

Asquith’s selection is notable for its wide range of responses to the theme and its openness to modern ghost stories. Indeed, there is nothing overtly Gothic. Nor are there any antiquarian stories, even though M R James was already by this time well-established as a leading voice in the field. It also avoids the rustic, folk-story type of tale. Because the stories are all new, we are also spared the old staples found in other anthologies (Scott, Defoe, Dickens, Gaskell). These are sophisticated, subtle, often cosmopolitan stories, and they set the standard for future anthologies in the field.

(Mark Valentine)

 Image: Lady Cynthia Mary Evelyn Asquith (née Charteris) by Bassano Ltd, 11 June 1923

© National Portrait Gallery

The Centenary of 'Fairy Gold' by Compton Mackenzie: Uncanny Landscape on a Cornish Island

In the opening essay of my collection Tea and Gargoyles (Tartarus Press, 2026), I write about fiction ‘On the Edge of the Uncanny,’ and discuss examples where, though ‘[t]here may be no clear incursion of another reality, yet there is an uncanny atmosphere, or a series of subtle, finely-shaded implications. In particular, there is an evocation of eerie landscape.’

Fairy Gold  by Compton Mackenzie, which celebrates its centenary this year, is another example. The author was in his early forties when the book appeared. He was already a prolific and popular novelist, the author of half a dozen bestsellers.

Lt Deverell MC, injured in Flanders, is sent to a home posting, heading a small garrison on the island of Roon, off the coast of the County Palatine of Lyonesse (a charming light disguise for Cornwall). It sounds idyllic to the weary young officer after the trenches. There is, though, a certain frostiness from the owner of the island, the Knight of Roon, who objects to the deployment, the more so as his own young son has been despatched to Flanders. But there are compensations: the soldier is drawn to the Knight’s nineteen year old daughter, Vivien Romare, and also wins the friendship of her sparky 12 year old younger sister and of the local boatman.

Mackenzie has strong story-telling qualities. He is deft in sketching in his cast of characters. They are recognisable types rather than originals, but picturesquely portrayed: the diffident subaltern, the grudging landowner, jealous of his prerogatives,  the slow, shrewd old boatman, the Blimpish Colonel on the mainland, the gamine younger daughter.

His evocation of landscape is compelling. The location is clearly modelled on the Isles of Scilly, but with aspects of the author’s own tenancy in Herm, one of the Channel Islands: he was later to live on Barra in the Outer Hebrides. Novels about imaginary islands are often attractive, providing the promise of romance and mystery, and Mackenzie offers a fully-imagined, rich description of Roon.

Prominent on the island are Romare’s Watchmen, ‘seven great menhirs’ sited on ancient burial mounds. Vivien believes Roon is haunted by the spirits originally worshipped here. She tells of a legend that there is fairy gold beneath the stones, but that they must not be disturbed, for if the stones fall the island will be inundated by the sea. A further legend tells of her family’s ancient origin as descendants of a  marriage between the island and the sea. The island also has a walled garden in which the compartments are dedicated to the sun, moon and planets, with suitable flowers and plants, the fancy of a Dame of the island devoted to astrology.

The reader feels the lonely witchery of the island, and at times Mackenzie matches Machen and Blackwood in his lyrical prose and attention to the spirit of place.The island itself seems to have an active presence and to make itself felt through shadows, phantom breaths and murmurings, which unnerve the superstitious soldiers. Vivien is sensitive to its  magic and tries to honour its traditions and seek its guidance. Off Roon itself is an an outlying islet, Carrackoon, with its own haunted reputation. Beyond this are two great citadel rocks like pagan deities, Mab and Merg.

The title recalls some folk tales in which fairy gold turns to dust in daylight or on return to the mortal world, so the reader is prepared for the term to be ironic, implying a false promise. Deverell’s posting is cut short and he is soon replaced by a different subaltern, who has an interest in archaeology and wants to deploy the men on military trench-digging, which will double as an excavation.  He brushes aside objections. We are here in M.R. James and E.F. Benson terrain: don’t disturb ancient ruins. Later this theme is carried further, and a discovery unearthed which is as valuable but also as potent as the crown in ‘A Warning to the Curious’. This sacrilege obsesses Vivien and she broods over how to remedy it, perhaps with a great personal sacrifice. The novel does not fully emulate the dark and macabre scenes found in antiquarian ghost stories, but in one interpretation it does depict fateful consequences.

However, though powerfully evoked, this is not the novel’s only theme. In many ways, it does not escape from the conventions of popular circulating library fiction of the period, and Mackenzie tries to cram too much in. He wants to evoke the beauty of the island, depict the vicissitudes of the lovers,  satirise elements of Army life, provide a typical Victorian financial drama about impoverished gentry, and conjure the enduring power of legends. The effect is too diffuse. The novel shifts focus too often, and this vitiates the creation of a sustained atmosphere. The plot trajectory, involving elements of tragedy, farce and romance, is fairly evident from early on, and the story just lacks that extra twist of the unexpected or unearthly that might have moved it into more striking terrain. It can, however, still be relished for the strength of its otherworldly landscape mysticism and the weird episodes.

It took me a while to find a copy of Fairy Gold. Indeed, at the time of writing there is no copy for sale online in Britain, though there are copies overseas. This suggests it was not one of Mackenzie’s more successful novels, many of which are often to be seen in second-hand bookshops (and are often encountered alphabetically by those seeking Machen). He was soon to achieve much greater attention with his rather sprightlier novels Vestal Fire (1927) and Extraordinary Women (1928), both set on Capri, which were evidently much more to the taste of a war-weary country ready to be delighted by the sensuous and exotic.     

(Mark Valentine)

The Centenary of Adventures of Monsieur De Mailly by David Lindsay

David Lindsay (1876-1945) wrote seven novels, and Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly is always seen as the odd one out. Unlike his other six, it is not especially philosophical, and it is often relegated to the inferior status of potboiler. (Though Lindsay himself said it was not one, as is noted below.)  Even critically there has been nonsense written about it—e.g., Bernard Sellin (mostly a perceptive critic) claimed that Lindsay’s wife probably had a hand in it (“It is also probable that The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly was as much the work of Jacqueline as of David Lindsay. . . . being of French origin on her mother’s side, she was well qualified to provide all the relevant information on the background of the plot” The Life and Works of David Lindsay,  p. 28) But Lindsay’s wife was actually from a Romanian Jewish family that emigrated first in the early 1880s to Rosh Pinna (then in Ottoman Palestine, but now in Israel) before then coming to England in the mid-1890s. So Sellin’s supposition has no relevance.

Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly was, paradoxically, the most successful book published by Lindsay during his own lifetime. It was his only novel to be reprinted, and it was the only one to achieve a contemporaneous American edition.

In the U.K., Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly (the title has no initial indefinite article) was published by Andrew Melrose of London in September of 1926. This month it celebrates its centenary. The firm Andrew Melrose was bought out by the increasing maw of another publisher, Hutchinson, in very late 1926, and Hutchinson soon reprinted de Mailly (the most notable differences from the first printing being the change of address on the title page and the change of printer). The novel was retitled A Blade for Sale: The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly for publication in February (but dated March) 1927 by Robert M. McBride of New York.

Lindsay’s own title for the book had been The Enterprises of Monsieur de Mailly. Basically, it tells some stories of twenty-seven year old Gaston de Mailly and his scandalous affairs in and around Paris and Versailles in the year 1700, during the reign of Louis XIV.  To his friend E.H. Visiak, Lindsay wrote: “It has been called a potboiler, but it is not one. I wrote it from high spirits, as the result of a somewhat protracted course of Saint Simon” (14 September 1929). The course of Saint Simon refers to the multi-volumed Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, covering the years from 1692 through the passing of Louis XIV in 1715 and beyond. If Lindsay did not read the memoirs in French, the most recent translation into English before the writing of de Mailly was the six volume abridged series translated by Francis Arkwright, published in 1915-1924.

Of the few U.K. reviews, that in the Scotsman was the longest, noting:  “There is excellent invention in the weaving of the intricate web of intrigue and adventure in which De Mailly finds himself involved, and through which he manages to adroitly wriggle or boldly cut a way” (7 October 1926). The Scotsman reviewer even expressed hope to hear more of de Mailly in the future, for: “A hero so instant in thought, word, and deed is not to be lightly parted with.” The Spectator gave it a one-sentence review (“The book is full of excitement” 9 October 1926). The Times Literary Supplement did not review it, alone among Lindsay’s novels.

In the U.S. I have found over a half dozen reviews, all positive, though a few are very short. Frederick H. Martens in the Literary Review (of The New York Evening Post) noted “the triumphant emergence of the ready-witted hero from a wicked web of ingenious plot and counterplot with glory, gold and girl is excellent Dumas” (2 April 1927). The reviewer in the New York Times wrote: “A pleasant bit of Summer reading is assured in A Blade for Sale, which portrays the daring adventures of Gaston de Mailly, a soldier of fortune. Mr. Lindsay has liberally treated the plot with humor, mystery, romance and action, a combination that will prove popular with readers of varied tastes” (12 June 1927). The Tuscaloosa News & Times Gazette (of Alabama) claimed “it is exceedingly well written and there are many moments when it reminds the reader of the masterpieces among all writings of its kind” (1 May 1927).

This is a David Lindsay novel unlike his others, and if a reader can approach it for what it is (a historical adventure novel of the time of Louis XIV), it is good indeed.

The Centenary of Styrbiorn the Strong, by E. R. Eddison

E. R. Eddison (1882-1945) was young when he was struck by what he called "saga-madness." By 1901, when he was eighteen, he had translated for himself the short and little-known violent "Saga of Vermund Kögur Fjorleif's Son"--the first published translation into English would not appear until 1997, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, volume 4, as a part of  "The Saga of the People of Reykjadal and of Killer-Skuta." This short text is complicated, and Eddison did not translate the additional text associated with it (which appears with it in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders). Eddison looked into the matter in 1935, but didn't pursue it.  In late 1944, publisher Stanley Unwin (of George Allen and Unwin) asked Eddison about translating an Icelandic saga for his firm, but Eddison, by then fully engaged in the writing of his novel The Mezentian Gate, turned him down. Eddison died the following year at age 62. 

Between all this activity are two related and very important books by Eddison, his 1930 translation of Egil’s Saga (Cambridge University Press), and the book whose centenary we are observing, the novel Styrbiorn the Strong, published in September 1926 by Jonathan Cape in London and by Albert & Charles Boni in New York, both of whom had previously published Eddison first novel, The Worm Ouroboros.

 Jonathan Cape asked Eddison himself to supply a blurb of one hundred words for the publisher's catalog, and the blurb was also used on the front free end-paper of Cape's dust-wrapper of the book: 

The Swedish prince, called Styrbiorn the Strong, after a meteoric career in which he shook the lands of the Baltic, fell in the year 983, still in his early youth, in an attempt to wrest the kingdom from his uncle. 

The writer follows history closely. His intimate knowledge of the Viking civilization and spirit is taken at first hand from the ancient literature of the North. In his swift, dramatic narrative he takes no sides, but leaves his actors--Styrbiorn, King Eric the Victorious, and his fatal Queen--to impress their personalities on the reader by their own words and actions. 

Eddison crafted the book slowly, and not in sequential order. He wrote chapter I in August 1922 (following the publication of The Worm in May), and by January 1923, he had written what became chapters II, XI, and the final XVI. He intermixed the writing with periods, some long, of research. He finally finished the book in late November 1925, shortly after his 43rd birthday. Eddison wrote most of the book at his desk at his Club, the Atheneum, in London. After a short period for revision, the book went to his publisher Jonathan Cape, who read it himself,  and they set terms for its publication. 

Styrbion the Strong was published by Jonathan Cape, with a dust-wrapper and interior illustrations by Keith Henderson (Eddison‘s brother-in-law). Albert & Charles Boni used a small number of Henderson’s decorations (without credit), and used a dust-wrapper illustration by another artist (also not credited). The book was well reviewed in both England and the U.S. 

The New York Times noted:  “Not in a long time has any writer in English made of an old Norse saga so fresh and heroic and resounding a tale as has Mr. Eddison in Styrbiorn the Strong” (19 September 1926). Both L.P. Hartley in The Saturday Review and Mary Agnes Hamilton in Time and Tide singled out Eddison’s ending for especial praise. Hartley wrote “the last scene is finely worked up to and described with economy of detail and great dramatic effect” (2 October 1926) and Hamilton: “Mr. Eddison is superb in description of fighting, and possibly one is paying his hero the highest tribute when one avows that the final chapter—the one in which he is received into Valhalla—is the most moving of any” (8 October 1926). Yet in later years Eddison himself noted that if he were writing the book then, he would end the book before the final chapter. A very short review (signed P.S.) in The New Statesmen lumped Styrbiorn together with Kenneth Morris’s recent collection, The Secret Mountain and Other Tales, claiming the two books which “deserve much more space than I am able to devote to them here, come as close to pure romanticism as prose fiction conveniently can. . . . Both books, I should add, are produced with care and (what is not always the same thing) with taste” (29 January 1927). In commenting upon the book to a friend, Eddison himself compared it to The Worm Ouroboros as follows: “only about one-third the length of the Worm, narrower in scope, tragical & (except the last chapter) staged purely on earth, whereas the Worm was staged in Heaven” (letter to Thomas Moult, 5 November 1926). I leave it open for debate as to how to interpret that the Worm was set in Heaven!

Styrbiorn, ironically Eddison’s most accessible book, languished for many years. In 2011, the University of Minnesota Press re-issued it in an expanded affordable trade paperback, including for the first time Eddison’s four page “Letter of Introduction” to the dedicatee, his brother Colin; and the full unabridged form of Eddison’s “Closing Note.”  An “Afterword” by Paul Edmund Thomas is also included.