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  

'Paris Letters: An Anthology December 1935-July 1940'

Paris Letters: An Anthology December 1935-July 1940 edited by Chris Harte collects columns by the journalist and bohemian David Arkell. I knew of him previously because of his enjoyable Looking for Laforgue: An Informal Biography (1979), a Quest for Corvo style book about the French symbolist poet who influenced the Imagists, Eliot and others, and his Alain Fournier: A Brief Life 1886-1914 (1986). These reveal his interest not only in French literary classics but in the elusive and transient. 

Chris Harte provides a helpful and interesting introduction which explains Arkell’s fluency in French due to family links and a literary background. He entered journalism, starting with local papers, but was spotted and recruited by the Rothermere empire and was sent to Paris as a correspondent and editor.

The columns are lively, bubbling with information about the byways of the French capital, including hotels, bars, revues, theatres and night-life. The tone is hectic, brisk and practical (giving, for example, prices and routes) but also lets the reader feel they are in on the modish high life. There are some good Parisian jokes and stories, some tips about handling taxi drivers, waiters and porters, and brief character sketches both of the notable and the unknown. He notes the number of Russian exiles in the city, and also the American style jazz clubs. I was reminded of the contemporary journals of Mary Butts in her swirling Parisian days and of the way Paris features in the fiction of the Roaring Twenties as a glittering cosmopolitan capital spinning like a roulette wheel. 

The selection gives a vivid background for those interested in the literary and artistic circles of interwar Paris, but is also a swiftly moving, cinematic portrayal of a legendary time, when the high-spirited young and the fashionable cognoscenti danced, drank, drugged and loved from midnight to dawn, until the lights went out all over the continent. The editor provides an afterword about Arkell’s internment in Occupied Paris and his later career after the Liberation. The book, ISBN 978-1-898010-22-7,  is available from the usual outlets.

(Mark Valentine) 

Announcing a New Journal: A Weird Occasional

 cover art by Johnny Mains

A Weird Occasional is just what it sounds like it should be. An occasional publication devoted to the weird, particularly the older and unknown stuff. Edited by Douglas A. Anderson and Christopher Tompkins, the first issue is now available. It includes three essays, and five obscure short stories. The contents are:

2 * Editorial * Douglas A. Anderson and Christopher Tompkins * ed 
5 * M.P. Dare: Beyond the Veil * Johnny Mains * ar 
19 * The Man Who Shot Cassius Crisp * Christopher Tompkins * ar
29 * Ballantine's Chamber of Horrors: A History and Bibliography * Douglas A. Anderson * ar
43 * Introduction to The Crooked Man * Christopher Tompkins * in
43 * The Crooked Man * A. M. Burrage * ss, 1919
49 * Introduction to Our Lost "Others" * Douglas A. Anderson * in
49 * Our Lost "Others":  Toltec Legend * Kenneth Morris * ss, 1933 
55 * Introduction to As a Fly in Amber * Christopher Tompkins * in
55 * As a Fly in Amber * Bernard Capes * ss, 1905
63 * Introduction to The Hut * Johnny Mains * in
63 * The Hut * Elim Henry D'Avigdor * ss, Whims (1889)
87 * Introduction to A Were-Wolf * Christopher Tompkins * in
87 * A Were-Wolf * Arlo Bates * ss, 1882

This oversize issue is about one hundred pages, and is solely available at Lulu (link here for issue one). It is done in color, which looks great, especially for my article on the  "Ballantine's Chamber of Horrors: A History and Bibliography," which includes full cover scans of all the titles in the series. The price is around $8--this is set at the cost of printing.

Comments and submission queries are welcome at aweirdoccasional@gmail.com 

The journal has a new website here.    

'B-Movie: Serial of Seven Stars' by Andrew Duncan

B-Movie: Serial of Seven Stars by Andrew Duncan, published recently, is a booklet text sequence inspired by Bram Stoker’s novel of Egyptian magic, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), or more exactly by a B-movie version of it. The poet explains: 'B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars is an attempt to recapture the feverish and irrational mythology of the B-movie, initially based on the classic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb . . .’

In the narrative, he goes on, ‘a cast of methodologically suspect occult scholars pursue seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, said to contain matter which had leaked through from another universe, detected by subtle and eerie distortions of geology and building fabrics. This quest re-enacts the Storage Wars series, in which junk dealers bid on sealed, abandoned storage lockers.’

Some section titles of the sequence will give a flavour of its themes: ‘Lud’s Gateway’; ‘Pharaoh, Your kindgom will be shook down’; ‘Demon Beast Invasion’; ‘Shape Memory Terror’; ‘Act for the Dissolution of Monsters’.

I greatly enjoyed this rich, allusive and strange text, which has affinities to the literary form and style of T.S. Eliot, David Jones and Iain Sinclair, uniting high modernism with demotic and pulp elements, as well as to the occult thrillers of Charles Williams, Mary Butts and others. It is the sort of work where the cavalcade of images offers new resonances on each reading, and the approach is both stimulating and adventurous. 

When I last looked, I couldn’t see the title listed at the website of the publisher, Equipage, but orders for similar booklets are typically £4.50 post free in the UK, and are to be sent to menghamr (at) gmail.com or c/o Rod Mengham, Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL, U.K. Payment is by cheque made payable to Rod Mengham. It would probably be best to ask about any overseas orders.

. . .

Three Short Absurdities

At dadakuku edited by petro c.k.,'An Error in De-Extinction'. 

At Ubu 6 edited by Rowan Beckett Minor, 'The Dice Deserts'.

At The Other Bunny edited by Johannes S.H. Berg, 'through the window'.

. . .

(Mark Valentine)