The Centenary of 'The Rector of Maliseet': A Guest Post by John Howard

One of the most appealing ways to start a story is with a leisurely journey by train. For the author it provides the ideal opportunity to introduce the protagonist, set the scene, and hint at what might be in store; for the reader the sense of movement and progression can foster a pleasing anticipation. Useful information may be gained through casual or overheard conversation in the confined space of the railway carriage, or at the station when the destination is at last in sight. Although the journey is over, for the story it is merely the end of the beginning. Now read on… As did those who opened The Rector of Maliseet by Leslie Reid, first published one hundred years ago in February 1925.

It is late summer, a warm September. Leonard Carr has been engaged as secretary to St John Clare, an old college friend of Carr’s father. Clare is a clergyman of the Church of England and Rector of Maliseet, a quiet and remote village in ‘unvisited Raithshire’: a perfect situation for a young man recovering from illness. The sun is already low when Carr changes trains for the final part of his journey. Although there is plenty of lyrical description of the landscape under the slowly dying light, here and throughout the novel it also possesses a ‘brooding’ aspect. It is certainly beautiful to look at – yet there seems more to it, something lying just beneath or beyond what can be seen.

Apart from his liturgical obligations and duties in the parish, the Rector has spent his time ‘collecting material for a large work dealing with the lesser-known saints of early Christian times’ (36). This fills several drawers in a cabinet; Carr’s job is to arrange the notes so the Rector can make them into a coherent narrative for his book. Carr quickly warms to his task and enjoys reading the material. He finds one account particularly intriguing. Ambrose, abbot of the nearby but long-ruined Pellerin Abbey, had been pious and zealous, but fell under the influence of Satan. Ambrose had periods of remorse which did not last. He finally decided to commit suicide and throw his soul on the mercy of God – but there the document ends, incomplete, the remainder torn away.

Carr attends church on Sundays, and sometimes in the evening, when he is the only member of the congregation. He had previously observed that candles are kept continually burning on the altar: an ancient tradition. Carr slowly begins to find parallels between Ambrose and the Rector. Each has two sides, spiritual and sensual, which are at war with each other (157). The Rector continues to be reticent and mysterious; Carr explores the disused part of the Rectory and finds that his employer uses a room there, which he keeps permanently locked.

Carr had become acquainted with Forbes, the village doctor. Over dinner Forbes explains that he found some old documents, including the conclusion to the story of Ambrose. The abbot, intent on killing himself, had climbed the steps cut into a huge rock outcrop known as The Stone – and at the top had been forgiven by God. Now permanently reformed, he went on preaching tours. He was appointed Rector of Maliseet and began the custom of perpetually burning candles on the church altar.

Several weeks later, Carr asks the Rector about the missing conclusion to the story. He talks about Ambrose before he degraded himself: ‘To such men there may come a time when they are as nearly on an equal footing with God as it is possible for men to attain. […] God made his presence known in a way that had been denied to any other individuals in history. There was the utterance of a spoken compact – made between the Almighty and a human creature. The Lord made a promise to Abbot Ambrose, which, for His own good reason, he did not fulfil’ (233).

It seems the promise was that Ambrose should ‘have the privilege of seeing God’ (239). This would be granted on Midsummer Day – that same day – at The Stone, which is first place to catch the rising sun. Carr gets to The Stone just as the sun rises and sees the Rector at the top. Then the priest vanishes from sight. Carr observes that the Rector, in death, looks untroubled for the first time (270). A connection or bond between two remarkable men over some seven centuries has come to a tragic but appropriate conclusion.

Just as the initial situation of a young man travelling to stay and assist with the work of an unusual clergyman is reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s novel The Human Chord (1910) so Reid’s invocation of landscape and certain features within as the ‘awful loveliness of paganism’ often reaches the intensity that was such a characteristic feature of Blackwood’s best work. There are ‘secret forces in nature’ which he cannot say are evil or good, but are certainly powerful, belonging to an ‘ultimate world beyond good and evil’ (197f).

In The Rector of Maliseet the priest does not, as in The Human Chord, seek the Divine in order to harness and control it for his own purposes. Rather, it is the reverse: he wishes only to see, to be transformed. Yet both men of God are impious; they find there is a price to pay for their quests. From the outset it is clear that Carr is narrating the entire sequence of events many years later. There was one at least who emerged from that time wiser – even if not, as it would seem, sadder.

The Centenary of 'Harvest in Poland' by Geoffrey Dennis

Geoffrey Dennis was the author of five novels under his own name and at least one other, a thriller, as one of a shared pseudonym. He also wrote a most unusual prose work, The End of the World (1930), which has attracted connoisseurs of the stylish and recondite.

This month marks the centenary of the first publication of his Harvest in Poland (1925), a rather overlooked but powerful novel of the supernatural. A new and revised edition was issued in 1931.

The novel follows the spiritual journey of a young man, Emmanuel Lee, who has psychic sensitivity. It falls in two parts. In the first we are introduced to his background and time in provincial England, including a fairly sympathetic, open-minded portrayal of spiritualistic circles. Then he makes the acquaintance of a Polish aristocrat and accompanies him to his family estates in Poland, where hints of shadowy forces begin to emerge. These are subtly conveyed in careful details, building an atmosphere of the sinister and uncanny involving opposing dualistic forces. There is some affinity to Middle European fantastic literature of this period, for example by Gustav Meyrink and Leo Perutz.

E F Bleiler describes Harvest in Poland as: ‘A long psychological novel portraying in supernatural terms both the degeneration of European society just before World War I and the spiritual odyssey of a sensitive young man . . . Somewhat reminiscent of the novels of E. F. Benson in its concept of spiritual evil, but much more powerful and grotesque’ (The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, 1983). Bleiler did, however, think the novel over-long.

The Neglected Books Page website quotes a passage from a review by H L Mencken in The American Mercury, which said that Dennis was: ‘[A] story-teller of unusual talent, with a great deal of originality.’ The novel was an ‘… impossible story told in terms of the most meticulous realism…His prose has a Carlylean thunder in it; he knows how to roll up gorgeous sentences.’

A distinctly different and frankly cruder occult novel by Dennis is The Devil and X Y Z, a collaboration with Hilary Saint George Saunders under the joint pen-name of Barum Browne. This is a crime thriller but with rather garish black magic elements. The Spectator (26 June 1931) reviewed it as follows: ‘In The Devil and X. Y. Z., Mr. Barum Browne gets most of the way towards writing a good thriller by creating a bad villain. Le Cure is the suave agent, not of those rather nebulous Powers who are always so pathetically anxious to import secret treaties and lethal inventions, but of the Powers of Darkness, and this treasure-hunting demonologist, with a past in the penal settlements of Guiana, makes a genuinely impressive figure when he holds the stage alone. Mr.Browne knows how to suggest evil. Unfortunately, the Forces of Light are represented by two insufferable undergraduates . . .’

To the extent that Dennis’ work is noticed at all, it is for The End of the World (1930), which was my own first encounter with Geoffrey Dennis’ books after it was recommended to me by the literary friar Fr Brocard Sewell, ‘equally for the manner as well as the matter’, he said. He admired the author’s  prose style. It is not a novel but a fantasia evoking the various ways that apocalypse might come: fire, flood, ice, etc, with great imaginative force. It was awarded the 1930 Hawthornden Prize. It has probably suffered from not being in any obvious category: not fiction as such, yet not a factual study. The nearest equivalent, I suppose, might be the work of Olaf Stapledon, in subject though not in style.

The Neglected Books Page notes this was selected by Morris Bishop for a feature in The American Scholar, Autumn 1956, on ‘The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years’: ‘It treats of the greatest of subjects: How? When? Which first? What after? It does so by means of a glorious space-time imagination, prickling humor and strange learning, sounded forth in mighty organ-tones, its diapason sounding full on man. And it has one of the finest last lines in literature.'

Geoffrey Pomeroy Dennis was born in Barnstaple, Devon on 20 January 1892. His novel Bloody Mary’s (Heinemann, 1934) describes a young boy’s abusive and sordid boarding school experiences. It is not clear whether this is at least partly autobiographical. He took a M.A. in Modern History at Oxford and then became an international civil servant, working as a League of Nations official in Geneva from 1920-1937. 

His book Coronation Commentary (1937), which must surely have been purely a piece of commercial work, incautiously repeated rumours that led to a libel action by the Duke of Windsor (Edward VII), which was settled out of court when the publisher and author agreed to pay “substantial damages”: the Lord Chief Justice said they ought to be horsewhipped. Dennis’ career at Geneva ended around this time, perhaps not coincidentally. The row may also have affected Dennis’ literary career: no other book appeared from him for twenty years, apart from the history of World War Two that he edited. His memoir of childhood, Till Seven, was published in 1957. He died on 15 May 1963.

There is no doubt that Harvest in Poland at least should be better-known as a visionary occult novel and that The End of the World will appeal to those who like oblique literary originals, but there is probably more to be found too in most of his books.

Checklist of books by Geoffrey Dennis

Mary Lee (Heinemann, 1922)

Harvest in Poland (Heinemann, 1925). Revised edition (Heinemann, 1931).

The End of the World (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1930).

Declaration of Love. Undiplomatic correspondence between Paris and Berlin (Heinemann, 1931)

The Devil and X.Y.Z. (Victor Gollancz ,1931). With Hilary Saint George Saunders, as ‘Barum Browne’.

Sale by Auction (Heinemann. 1932)

Bloody Mary’s (Heinemann, 1934)

Coronation Commentary (Heinemann, 1937)

Till Seven (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957)

As editor

In Memoriam Harold Parry, Second Lieutenant, K.R.R.C. Born at Bloxwich-December 13th, 1896; fell in Flanders-May 6th, 1917, etc. [Letters and poems by H. Parry. The editor's preface signed: G. P. D., i.e. Geoffrey P. Dennis. With a portrait.] (W. H. Smith & Son, [1918?])

The World at War. A history dealing with every phase of World War II on land, at sea, and in the air, including the events which led up to the outbreak of hostilities. Written by eminent authorities and edited by G. Dennis. [With plates and maps.] (Caxton Publishing Co, 1951)

Images:

The cover of the Knopf edition of 1925.

Signed inscription by the author in the New and Revised Edition of 1931.

(Mark Valentine)