The 40pp chapbook, with sixty illustrations, is in a limited edition of 250 copies.It includes a frontispiece illustration by noted fantasy artist Les Edwards and a signed and numbered print of a linocut by Sharon Gosling. Withnail publications tend to go rather quickly.
(Mark Valentine)
He borrows a bicycle, delivers the message to Mr. Kingsborough at his residence, Los Xicales. Harker catches a glimpse of the sister and at a phrase of her conversation, ‘her voice rang in his brain like a memory’, but the brother swiftly dismisses him and seems to pay little heed to the warning. The borrowed bicycle is stolen, and the novel steps boldly into the terrain of romantic adventure: a paradise of metaphor and simile.
Sard Harker, by poet John Masefield, published by Heinemann in October 1924, is set in Santa Barbara, ‘an imaginary country on the north-east coast of South America, a tinpot Ruritania run by dictators and financed by the United Sugar Company’ (as John Clute has noted in The Book Blinders). It is in the great tradition of exotic English adventure in South America, W.H. Hudson’s first book, The Purple Land (1885), and his Green Mansions, published in 1904, the same year as Joseph Conrad’s novel of political intrigue Nostromo. John Buchan’s The Courts of the Morning (1929) is another interwar entry in the tradition. Even more than with the works of Buchan, Sard Harker is closely adjacent to the fantastic. Trying to take a short-cut to get back to his ship, Harker steps upon a sting-ray and receives a full dose of its sting. He writhes in agony on the beach:
'The poison seemed to swing him round and double him up. It seemed to burn every vein and shrivel every muscle and make every nerve a message of agony. He managed to cast loose the wrapping from the foot. The foot no longer looked like a foot, but like something that would burst. In his deadly sickness he thought that his foot was a pollard willow tree growing to the left of the road. [. . .] When he came to himself a little, he said something about the stars being too many, altogether too many, for the job in hand. He said that he could not pick up the guiding lights. Then he felt that every star was a steamer’s masthead light, and that all those myriads of steamers were bearing down upon him without sidelights.'
In early passages of the novel, Masefield sketches the history of Santa Barbara and the revolution of 1887, of Harker’s childhood and early maritime career, and plants the deep roots of coincidences that will unfold years later. The cast of characters includes dodgy ministers, crooked detectives, warm-hearted old salts, a dirty, beautiful woman in a shack on a beach, snakes both human and reptile, murderous villagers, kindly wives, and vultures. When Harker explains the meaning of his name to the beauty in the shack, ‘one who listens’, she muses about what people listen for: ‘“The sea wind in the heat,” she said thoughtfully, “and the crowing of the cock in the night of pain; and, in life, the footstep of the beloved who never comes; or when he does come, goes on the instant.”’ She asks him what he listens for. All he will say is, ‘A change of wind, perhaps. Adios.’
Harker falls among evil companions who put him on a freight train to nowhere, into a desert mining town where he only just escapes a firing squad and heads for the hills. The landscape is harsh and ancient and impossibly beautiful. Harker crosses mountains upon mountains, hears a dead friend speaking to him in dreams, and then hears the rocks speaking and winds singing. It is the South America of abandoned villages and mysterious temples, a land of adventure and visions, and wild honey. As he attempts to cross the snowfields, the boundary between dream and waking is fluid, for the figurehead of the Pathfinder appears to him in a dream. She guides him across the glacier and disappears as he finds another tomb and then the trail down to another port town, San Agostino. Masefield specifies that his trek lasted nineteen days. Harker has returned to the workaday world: a fellow officer hails him and asks, “Could you take the Yuba to Santa Barbara?”
And upon arrival in the capital port, Harker is thrust back into political intrigue and high Gothic coincidence and confrontation. Captain Cary has died of a fever and after his burial at sea, the Pathfinder has gone upon the rocks: ‘the day after he goes, the sea smashes all that ever he made, as though it were nothing.’ Harker meets his long-lost childhood love, and is imprisoned with her by a devilish false priest, who ‘now wore a scarlet robe wrought with symbols, which gave him the appearance of a cardinal of the Middle Ages.’
With his prisoners before him, the former Father Garsinton, self-styled Holy One, Sagrado, ‘sat still for a moment upon his throne. Once again Sard had the impression that something evil flowed into the man to make him bigger: he seemed to dilate and glow with an increase of personality.’
It is, perhaps the oldest convention in the fantastic, that the evil villain is powerless not to expound to the helpless, intended victims; and thereby chronicle his own doom, and permit the survival — against all odds — of the innocent. This is solely the province of literature. The bombs fell without warning in Dresden or Tokyo or Gaza or Beirut or . . . The other thing the Gothic teaches us from its beginnings is that psychological horror is the fiercest of all: horrors inflicted by one human being upon another. The supernatural is by definition outside the realm of human experience, and its intrusion into the world is (as Wendy Walker has suggested) the literary expression of profound injustices, which upon examination, are rooted in laws made to protect owners at the expense of the dispossessed.
John Masefield (1878-1967) was trained as an officer in the merchant marine service and went to sea at sixteen, sailing on the four-master Gilcruix round Cape Horn to Chile. It is reported that despite his love of the sea he was an indifferent sailor and was eventually shipped home ‘distressed British seaman’. Harker’s nautical attitudes seem deeply rooted and carefully observed from within. Masefield jumped ship in New York and travelled in the U.S., working for a time in Yonkers and reading the great English poets. He returned to England for good in 1897, and soon made his name as a poet, beginning with Salt-Water Ballads (1902). Masefield was named poet laureate in 1930 but his manner remained ‘simple and unaffected … He took special pleasure in helping younger writers’ (ODNB). In person, he was tall and blue-eyed, with 'an expression of perpetual surprise' (Muriel Spark).
Sard Harker was the first of three novels by John Masefield set in the country of Santa Barbara. ODTAA (1926) looks at the history of Santa Barbara before the events of Sard Harker and is as episodic as its title suggests: ‘one damned thing after another’; The Taking of the Gry (1934) is a further return to the land.
I read Sard Harker in a copy of the deluxe issue (one of 350 copies signed by the author), that had remained unopened after page 20, so I felt a bit like someone coming into an abandoned house. I opened the pages, and read the novel with delight. The central chronicle of Harker’s inland travels is startling and vivid and richly imagined. I have given only the barest outlines of the book and the pleasure is all in the reading. It’s not Nostromo but the adventure is as gripping as anything written in the 1920s.
Dust jacket of Sard Harker (London: William
Heinemann, 1924), courtesy of James Cummins Bookseller, New York City. ODTAA map from the deluxe edition, private collection of Henry Wessells.
Mark Valentine, "Lost Gonfalon"
Reggie Oliver " Le Vieux des Bois"
Timothy J. Jarvis "A Monstrum"
alongside many familiar names like Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Carroll, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, James Morrow, Peter Straub, Paul Tremblay, and many others.
Not sure when the print edition will come out, but you can see the announcement and the full list of contents here.
The latest issue of the M.R. James journal Ghosts & Scholars is now available. Issue 47 has been guest edited by Helen Kemp, with cover artwork by Loretta Nikolic.
This issue includes four new stories in the Jamesian tradition, ‘The Light of Darkness’ by David A. Sutton, ‘A Crooked Path’ by Josh Reynolds, ‘Professor Parkin’s Christmas Holiday’ by Tina Rath and ‘Whitaker on Daemons’ by George Frost.
In non-fiction, Katherine Haynes asks ‘Is George Martin bewitched and is he a murderer?’, in a new consideration of MRJ’s ‘Martin’s Close’, and Dr Richard Hoggett discusses ‘M.R. James and the Abbey of St.Edmund, Bury St. Edmunds’. Norman Darwen provides a note on M.R. James and the psychic researcher Harry Price, while in her regular column Rosemary Pardoe argues that MRJ’s stories are not characteristically Victorian and that they do have, like more modern stories, elements of doubt and ambiguity. There are also book and podcast reviews.
Ghost and Scholars 47 is available for £6 (UK), £12 (overseas), including postage.
Please address orders and enquiries to Mark Valentine at: lostclub[at]btopenworld[dot]com
(All subscriber copies have been posted.)
As well as bookshops, there are many other places in Britain where a scattering of second-hand books is to be found, and one of these is in antiques centres. Sometimes a book-dealer may have a dedicated unit, but otherwise the book stock is often highly miscellaneous and presumably arrived alongside other things from auctions or house clearances. Recently I wandered around a local antiques emporium, spotting about half-a-dozen nooks where a jumble of books lurked.
In one of these I found a copy of the Punch Almanack for 1941, published November 1940, with Punch as a playing card king in full colour on the front cover. It was issued to mark the centenary of the journal. Inside, there was a Kai Lung story by Ernest Bramah, good to find, and lots of light wartime humour, such as the colour plate of a guest dressed as Mephistopheles at a fancy dress ball who confides that he has joined the A.F.S. (Auxiliary Fire Service), where he would have been in good company with the writers Henry Green and William Sansom, among others. There are other fine colour plates. There was also a highly enjoyable spoof ‘family curse’ story, ‘The Luck of the Wapentakes’, about an ominous barometer, drawing on such legends as ‘The Luck of Edenhall’ and haunted house stories generally.
Also to the fore I found some good-natured satire on modern art. Surrealism had probably first come to the vague attention of the British public through the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 and subsequent happenings. They tended to understand it as a term for all sorts of modern art and identified it in particular with the work of Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. By 1940, evidently, Punch and its contributors could make fun of it confident that readers would know what it was.
The satire is actually quite indulgent and affectionate. An artist, naturally bearded, scruffy and bohemian, is warned off painting near a naval dockyard even though his work is a jumble of angles, abstract and non-representational. A mild bespectacled gentleman in a telephone box in full heraldic regalia rings home to ask his maid to check if he is in bed sleeping and if so to wake him up.
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An adventurous advertiser has a full page display advising country cottage owners to add Surrealist sculpture and art and a tubular chair to the guest bedroom to make their Chelsea friends feel at home, but not to make any changes to dinner, which will still of course start with the advertiser’s famous chestnut soup. The advert is interesting for the assumptions made about its customers. They are of course comfortable, cozy people with a quaint old cottage in the country: but they are sophisticated and open-minded enough to have artistic friends and to buy modern art for the guest room. And, of course, they are discerning enough to know that some things, such as the chestnut soup, never go out of fashion.
Punch was at its height around this time, the Forties, with over 100,000 readers, but later became a standing joke, not in a good way, for being not particularly funny and for being often found in dog-eared copies in dentists’ waiting-rooms. Certainly, the humour always tended to be wry rather than uproarious, and conformist, not absurdist. It stuck with a sort of gentleman’s club milieu and did not pick up on the new vogues in humour and satire exemplified by The Goons, Round the Horne, That Was the Week That Was and so on. Despite several rescue attempts, it faded out around the turn of the millenium. But on the evidence of this, admittedly special, issue it had once been somewhat livelier than its later reputation, brisk, bright, broad-minded and inventive.
And Symington's Chestnut Soup? No longer made, I'm afraid. You'll just have to make your own. Chop and fry an onion and leek until soft and translucent. Add some chopped garlic, a teaspoon of sage and a teaspoon of thyme. (At this point you will be unable to stop singing the chorus of 'Parsley Thyme Rosemary and Sage'). Stir in so the herbs adhere to the onion and leek. Add a packet of pre-cooked chestnuts, continue stirring. Now add a splash of balsamic vinegar and a twist or two of black pepper. Add just enough vegetable stock to cover the contents and burble away for ten minutes or so. Take off the heat and stir in a good splurge of soya cream or oat cream. Voila. A dish fit for a surrealist magus.
(Mark Valentine)
