The Centenary of 'The Connoisseur and Other Stories' by Walter de la Mare

When I began to collect supernatural fiction in my late teens, I turned first to Billingham’s, the second-hand bookshop in the town centre which had been established in the Thirties in Towcester, an old Roman town ten miles west along Watling Street. Now in the county town, Northampton, they had an old-fashioned shop in St Giles Street.

Here I found, among other things, some Machen in the slim green volumes of the New Adelphi Library, and two short story collections by Walter de la Mare, The Riddle in royal blue binding, and The Connoisseur in sand coloured cloth, both with gilt titles. These soon became favourites. I found the stories beguiling and elusive, and I learned that tales did not have to be emphatic or dramatic: they could be atmospheric, they could conjure reverie.

The Connoisseur and Other Stories celebrates its centenary this month. According to his biographer Theresa Whistler in her 1993 study, the book ‘got a more mixed welcome than the general favour’ his new work usually received: ‘Many people found the title-story far too obscure, and the tales in general too elaborate.’ However, for his Best Stories selection (1942), de la Mare himself chose ‘Missing’ and ‘All Hallows’ from this volume.

The first story, ‘Mr Kempe’, has a framing device—a meeting in a pub—which introduces the main narrator, who then takes over the story. The initial first person narrator then becomes mostly a listener, with occasional brief interjections. This is someone else’s story. The effect is to give a sense of a certain distance, and also of ambiguity: how much of the story is reallly being told?

The pub narrator, walking in lonely cliffside country, seeks directions from Mr Kempe, a reclusive retired cleric who seems to have been sent askew by his meditations on the soul: does it exist or not? This obsession has led him to a rather grim, not to say grotesque, interest in the accidental victims of the precipitous path leading to his house. Thus far, this is a study in morbid psychology. But there is an ironic, almost throwaway remark by the pub storyteller, which implies a definite spectral aspect: the place was thronging with spirits, he notes, to which his host seemed oblivious. Thus, this is a story about ghosts, but they are simply just there, in the background, like the trees and the stones and the glimmering sea. Perhaps the implication is that our instincts and impressions are better than our intellect for experiencing the otherworldly.

The title story is in some ways uncharacteristic of de la Mare in that, although it starts in the exquisite London rooms of the aesthetical title character, who is about to receive an unavoidable visitor, it then moves into several scenes of an exotic Eastern realm, embracing concepts of reincarnation and fate. It is beautifully composed and rather like a mingling of tales by Algernon Blackwood and Lord Dunsany.

In two other stories, we listen to monologues by characters who have been oppressed by a sense of the dinginess of the mortal lot, and by despair at what appears to be an actively hostile universe. One, in ‘The Wharf’, is a mother on her own by the kitchen fire reflecting on an episode of serious illness which included a disturbing dream of angelic type figures shovelling a pile of men’s souls. A farmer’s wild flowers on a dung heap, and his matter-of-fact response to them, help her to reinterpret the vision. In ‘Disillusion’, a weary author explains to a doctor why he is low in spirits while at last admitting that his work at least still sustains him. These are brooding pieces about characters like Mr Kempe who have become obsessed but who unlike him may have a way out.   

Wanderers, strangers and listeners feature in several of the other stories in the volume. The second story, ‘Missing’, has a similar framing device to ‘Mr Kempe’ but here the venue is a frowsty café on a hot day. As before, the initial first person narrator gives way to a stranger he meets, who tells a long story. Here, de la Mare is adept at depicting the spell cast by the hard heat, the dreariness and desolation of the city streets and the café itself. The story was based, de la Mare noted, on a real encounter with a stranger in a tea shop.  Forrest Reid, in his 1929 study of his friend’s work, thought this story ‘among Mr. de la Mare’s masterpieces’ whose ‘sinister quality springs largely from its reticence.’ He ranked it with ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ ‘for sheer suggestiveness’. 

‘All Hallows’, perhaps the most notable story here, has another character wandering on cliffside paths, until he comes unexpectedly on the cathedral of the title. De la Mare said the story was inspired by a description of St David’s, Pembrokeshire, though he had never in fact visited it. That cathedral is not actually on the coast but is not far inland, and it is a grand edifice for the small village where it is situated. When de la Mare did later visit he admitted to being slightly disappointed by the setting, though delighted to be mistaken himself for a cleric. 

Here, the narrator learns from a talkative verger (there are few other kinds in fiction) of dark presences in the church which seem to be pursuing a subtle and gradual spiritual assault on its structure. We are never quite sure how to take his story, whether it stems from the mind of a lonely eccentric, as in ‘Mr Kempe’, and may be all the result of morbid fancy, of if there is indeed some shadowy power at work.

The essence of de la Mare’s stories of this type, which includes examples in other volumes, such as ‘The Creatures' and ‘The Vats’, seems to be that not only is the landscape itself stranger than we might think, but so are some of its inhabitants. Wherever we go, he seems to say, we might encounter the peculiar and the uncanny, famously, in ‘Crewe’, even in the waiting room of a busy railway station. We think we walk in one world but there is another far stranger alongside it. In The Connoisseur and Other Stories he explores this theme with particular subtlety and ambiguity.

(Mark Valentine)

 

Carnforth: Bookish Encounters

The railway town of Carnforth, Lancashire celebrates its association with Brief Encounter directed by David Lean (1945): key scenes were filmed at the station here, which now has a tea room of that name. During wartime, the town was thought a safer location for filming than the Home Counties, where the story is actually set. The station is on the little-known Lune Valley line from Skipton to Lancaster and beyond that to the seaside resort of Morecambe, and passes through lonely, dreaming country of green hills and woodland and old stone villages and manors.  

But Carnforth also has another attraction, a large second-hand bookshop which bears the painted announcement that it has 100,000 books. I have been calling there for many years. Originally it had three rooms of vintage hardback fiction, row upon row of forgotten authors. It was here, for example, that I found the unusual World War Two novel House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair, later reprinted at my suggestion by Persephone Books: here too were a number of Ronald Fraser books, when I began collecting them. They were all very reasonably priced too. I also once found here a rare and strange slim volume, Mayvale (1915) by H.E. Clifton and James Wood, notable for a preface by Wyndham Lewis.

Alas, old hardbacks now only occupy half a room, but there are still odd finds to be made, and there are good selections in other fields. Usually I manage to turn up unexpected titles, such as on one occasion Sherard Vines’ Green to Amber. He is an interesting character known, if at all, for his fantasy Return, Belphegor!, a satire about a demon sent to stir things up on Earth in the contemporary Thirties, which incidentally involves the Holy Grail. The novel I found is not a fantasy but has satirical aspects, so I thought it might be worth a look. There was also on that visit a rather louche novel by Richard Aldington, two Bertie Wooster paperbacks, an Evangeline Walton fantasy, and a book on Rockall, the island out in the Atlantic best known for giving its name to a zone in the Shipping Forecast. In the late Fifties, the Royal Navy landed and stuck a flag on this remote outcrop to claim it for Britain, and this book recounts the expedition and the history of previous sightings of the island.

At a later visit, after some steady, thorough searching, I had three worthwhile finds here. One was a thriller, Highly Unsafe (1936), in the Buchan style by Max Saltmarsh, who was actually Marian Winifred Saltmarsh, nee Maxwell (1893-1975), the author of just four such thrillers in the Thirties, and then apparently nothing else. Another was a quite scarce vintage crime novel, The Red Dwarf (1928) by Molly Thynne, a writer who has recently been rediscovered by crime buffs, and who sometimes uses folklore and the macabre in her work. The third was a signed copy of The Mocking Star (1931) by Michael Maurice, a Cambridge author of quite strange books I had been researching.

It was on one hot summer’s day that I also found here The Serpent and the Butterfly by Sue Mallinson, a heady 1980 occult thriller that I had never heard of when I chanced upon it, but something of the sultry intensity of the weather seemed to radiate from the book too. A young woman who has been a lifestyle journalist has saved up enough to take a year off and rents a cottage in the West Country: “On her first evening, she and her gypsy dog Imp go for a walk on the moors and are drawn towards a giant Menhir, upon whose face is the ancient carving of a Serpent. The great stone gives Lisa an uneasy feeling and inexplicably she shudders. Just then a butterfly lands upon a small pebble at her feet which takes on a strange, purplish glow." 

Soon she sees signs of a living pagan worship still in play and finds it disturbing and yet alluring. She befriends a young man who is a local bookseller, though he doesn’t seem to spend much time actually in his bookshop:  some rueful browsers might regard this as accurately observed realism. Together they explore ancient sacred sites and stumble upon more signs of something going on.

The book is very much of its time, a curious blend of Dennis Wheatley shockery and the period’s strong interest in ancient mysteries and ancient monuments. On the face of it, the plot follows the traditional lines of many occult thrillers, now seen as ‘folk horror’, where a cosmopolitan city-dweller encounters primitive rustic rituals: however, it goes some way beyond that into wider dimensions. The author’s preface says it was inspired by Castaneda, but also by her researches in mythology, magic and mystery. The novel describes and quotes enthusiastically from a noted ancient mysteries book of the period, Atlantean Traditions in Ancient Britain (1977) by the Glastonbury mage Anthony Roberts.

According to a brief note by David Langford at the SF Encylopedia, this is Sue Mallinson’s only published novel: a sequel, Atlantis Reborn, remains unpublished. There seems to be no information whatever about her to be found, nor did Mr Langford, when I asked him, have any more to offer. Unfortunately, it seems to be quite scarce. But now that there is a revived interest in Nineteen Seventies culture, particularly in the field of the fantastic and uncanny, it seems to me that the book would be greatly enjoyed by a new readership if reprinted.

(Mark Valentine) 

Ritual & Chivalry: Peter Vansittart's 'The Lost Lands'

  

 In a copy of Peter Vansittart’s The Lost Lands (1964), loosely enclosed, there is a letter from the historian Peter Green:

 “I read you novel in TS [typescript] before I left the Bodley Head, & did an immensely enthusiastic report on it, entre nous: but seriously, an extraordinary tour-de-force I think, & the atmosphere of decaying, plague-ridden, obsolescent ritual & chivalry as good as anything Charles Williams ever did—flavour rather the same too.” (Peter Green, letter to Peter Vansittart, 29^th December 1957, from Lyn Cottage, Harlton, Nr Cambridge).

Green was himself a historical novelist, of the classical period, the author of Achilles His Armour (1955) and The Sword of Pleasure (1957), and was also a leading biographer of Kenneth Grahame.

Williams did not write historical novels, but most of his plays are historical. Green may have had these in mind as to theme, and the novels as to atmosphere. It is an unusual perspective, but I think I can sense what he means, and it is an approach worth further exploration. I don’t think I asked Peter in our several meetings whether he had read Williams, but I think it likely he might at least have read the Grail novel War in Heaven, since he also wrote on Arthurian themes and was knowledgeable of the earlier fiction in this field. Charles Williams, of course, intentionally wrote fiction in the thriller form, inspired by Sax Rohmer, whereas Vansittart’s novels could not be further from this style.

The Lost Lands was the first book by Peter Vansittart I discovered, in Northampton public library, and I was entranced. I had never read anything remotely like it. I found it glimmering with precise, iridescent detail, and also oblique in technique and frankly sometimes baffling, in the sense that I did not quite know what was going on. The reader has to infer a lot, but I did not mind that. It was because of this find that I looked out for the author’s other books and eventually wrote to him, and then wrote about his work in several essays.

The publisher lauds Vansittart’s “uncanny ability to recreate not only the external features of periods remote from us in time, but their intellectual and emotional climates as well.” His success as a historical novelist was that he did not depict ‘ourselves in fancy dress’, but imagined deeply how people of the time would think, and what myths, beliefs, superstitions and rumours shaped their lives. This was his third major historical novel, starting with The Tournament (1961), which won high critical acclaim and became a sort of signature novel of his, and followed by The Friends of God (1963).

The Lost Lands is set in a 13^th century province in the marcher land between France, Burgundy and what is left of the Holy Roman Empire. Here, the Count must preserve the independence of his land in uneasy balance with these powers, the Bishop, the Dominicans and their Inquisition, and the increasingly powerful Knights Templar. The conventional faith operates alongside popular folklore, irrational, primitive, often brutal, obsessed by ritual, still semi-pagan. And some aristocrats, courtiers and scholars are drawn to a clandestine dualist faith, perhaps of Persian origin, which sees the world governed by two equal competing divine powers, neither necessarily all good or all evil. It seems to them a truer explanation of their everyday experience, in a time of war, plague, cruelty and corruption.

The novel includes richly detailed chapters on the rituals and mysticism of the Templars. While it is also clear-eyed about their ruthlessness and lust for power, Vansittart is adept at imagining the inner world of a Templar Grand Prior influenced by faiths encountered in the Crusades: Gnostic, Neoplatonist, Ishmaelite and Kabbalistic. 

There is a sort of psychic lineage here with the 20^th century dark magicians, occultists and visionaries in Charles Williams’ metaphysical thrillers, who invoke esoteric symbolic systems such as the Grail mythos, the Tarot, Alchemy and the Platonic Images. Both authors depict the strong allure and the spiritual perils of such paths, but in both cases this is also set within a fully worldly context: The Lost Lands moves among high figures of state and church, just as Williams relished including eminences of state and church in his thrillers.

Ultimately, a historical novel seems to me a different sort of beast to the metaphysical thrillers of the Twenties and Thirties with a contemporary setting, but Green’s insight into some shared timeless aspects in the work of of Vansittart and Williams is still worthwhile.

The Lost Lands, like many of Peter’s novels, is hard to find. Slightly easier is The Tournament and that will give a flavour of his style, his flair for strange imagery, and his immense learning in recondite byways.

(Mark Valentine) 

A Diary of Disappearances

Photographer, writer and psychogeographer Julian Hyde has announced  pre-orders for a new limited edition  chapbook,  A Diary of Disappearances: Disconnected Works. 

He describes this as: ‘full of mysterious texture. Essentially: it's a notebook left on a bus seat...fragments about an unnamed small town...forgotten ginnels, derelict swimming pools, empty bars, ghosts everywhere, nothing/everything happening. A collision of beauty and sadness.’

In his previous work, he has recorded images and notes that are attentive always to the unregarded, the ruinous, the marginal, and to the strange heady witchery of the everyday.  

To order or enquire, please contact j_kane001[at]hotmail[dot]com