Finally, an Affordable Reprint of Medusa by E.H. Visiak

The British Library, in their Tales of the Weird series, has just published a reprint of E.H. Visiak's rare 1929 novel, Medusa. It is introduced by Aaron Worth, and he begins, appropriately, with the bizarre position that Medusa has come to occupy to moderns readers. Owing to hyperbolic nonsense from Karl Edward Wagner (in his infamous 1983 Twilight Zone magazine lists), most readers of Medusa in the last forty-plus years have come to the book with completely mistaken expectations. Forget them. Come to Medusa with a clean slate, and you might find some attractions that have no relation to the reputation that Wagner and others have put upon it. Forget as well the fact that E.H. Visiak was one of the few literary friends of David Lindsay, author of A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Visiak was an idiosyncratic thinker, and though he wrote on Lindsay, he clearly didn't understand either Lindsay or his book very well. 

Visiak gave Medusa a subtitle: "A Novel of Mystery, Ecstasy and Strange Horror." And it is that indeed. It begins as a kind of Stevensonian adventure, and shifts a few times to become something other, and something larger. Embedded in the narrative are Visiak's views on childhood as a ideal state of innocence, later spoiled by human passion---which was first formulated in one of Visiak's earliest published poems: 

            The Child State Thou Hast Lost

            I think that childhood only lives,

            I think that childhood only knows

            Some glimmer of the After Light,

            Till passion dim the facet bright . . .  

 

            I think the darkness is the cell

            Of the Great Artificer,

            And storming winds his furnace blow:

            Far deeper vision thou shalt know. (1906)

As one reads Medusa, it is worth bearing in mind how this relates to the main characters.

Below is the cover of the new edition, and under that, the rear cover with a blurb and a tentacled portrait of Visiak himself (c. 1910). (The art is credited to Mag Ruhig.) 

'29 Songs' by David Power, with settings of Visiak and de la Mare

Some years ago, the National Centre for Early Music in York, situated in the converted church of St Margaret, ran a series of concerts under the heading ‘Late Music’, offering work by contemporary composers. At a performance of songs for solo voice and piano accompaniment, I was surprised and delighted to find there were several pieces setting verses by E H Visiak.

Visiak (1878-1972) was an early champion of David Lindsay (whom he befriended), the author of the fantastical seafaring romance Medusa (1929), and of other very strange fiction, and an eminent Milton scholar. But his early work was as a poet. He published five main volumes: Buccaneer Ballads (1910); Flints and Flashes (1911); The Phantom Ship (1912); The Battle Fiends (1916); and Brief Poems (1919).

The composer of the pieces I had heard was David Power, also a notable Lindsay scholar, and I am pleased to report that a selection of his work has now been issued on the Prima Facie label, entitled 29 Songs, 1985-2016, performed by Robert Rice (baritone) and William Vann (piano). They include not only five pieces based on Visiak poems, but others setting work by Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ronald Duncan. 

It was also a pleasure to see three songs from pieces by the late Paul Newman, editor of the journal Abraxas, biographer of Frank Baker, authority on White Horse hill figures and lost gods, Wormwood contributor, and much else besides. There are also works by other contemporary poets. Each of the pieces is brief, a few minutes at most, but achieve an admirable concentration of character.

In the accompanying booklet, David Power records that he first discovered Visiak through Colin Wilson’s book Eagle and Earwig, then greatly enjoyed Visiak’s autobiography Life’s Morning Hour. He agreed with Wilson that Visiak ‘had a gift of writing about things as if seeing them for the first time and brought an almost visionary freshness to ordinary things.’ This inspired him to set some of his poems to music.

The Visiak songs here include ‘An Old Song’, with Satie like piano and a delicate, wistful melody; ‘Passion’, with the urgency and tumult suited to its theme; and ‘The Shipwreck’, grave, slow, elegiac. The setting of Ronald Duncan’s ‘Remember Me’ has a gentle, haunting melody, while the four de la Mare pieces capture the uncanny, nursery-rhyme oddity of his verses (from Peacock Pie), especially in the terse, tripping melody of ‘Five Eyes’. Paul Newman’s humorous ‘In my More Thoughtful Moments’ (‘I can feel sorry/For the Four Horsemen/Who never halt/ At an inn’) has a jaunty treatment capturing its tone.

In their commitment to mystery and their angular individuality, the songs seem to me to have an affinity with the piano works of Charles-Valentin Alkan. The album is  thoroughly engrossing, offering unusual selections and achieving an aura of the singular and strange. 

(Mark Valentine)

The Star Called Wormwood

Morchard Bishop was the pen-name of Frederick Field Stoner, who also wrote as Oliver Stonor. He is mostly remembered today in the literary field as the friend and champion of Arthur Machen. He compiled ‘The Table Talk of Arthur Machen’, a record of conversations with the Welsh author. This currently remains unpublished, though a chapter was issued as a chapbook, Dreams and Visions: A Brief Journey Into the Remarkable Imagination of Arthur Machen (Caermaen Books, 1987). 

I corresponded briefly with Oliver when Roger Dobson and I were compiling the Dreams & Visions booklet. He seemed to me, from his letters, a meticulously courteous, diffident gentleman, kindly interested in and supportive of our fledgling Machen publications. Here we were, two young, inexperienced Machenites, able to publish only a card-covered, stapled booklet of one part of his work in a small edition: and yet this distinguished man-of-letters, with a dozen books to his name, treated the project warmly and seriously.

At Machen’s suggestion he had translated, in his mid-Twenties, Le Moyen de Parvenir (as The Way to Succeed), a rambling, Rabelaisian work by a 17^th century canon of Tours, a ‘gargoyle of a book’, as Machen put it: the latter had himself attempted a translation which could only be issued in a censored form. Bishop’s edition was his first book, in 1930.

As Bishop, he was the author of a biography of William Blake’s patron in Blake’s Hayley (1951), which was well-received, and as Stonor he compiled A First Book of Synonyms (1963). But he also wrote (as Bishop) seven novels, from 1932 to 1948, which have not received very much attention. One of these at least is highly original and peculiar, and also shows a courageous independence of mind. It was an anti-war book published in 1941 by that great maverick and connoisseur of the singular, Victor Gollancz.

The oddity of the book begins with its title, which is in full The Star Called Wormwood. An Investigation of the possible reasons for its Decline and Fall as described in the VIIIth chapter of the Apocalypse. The dustjacket description, in bold black letters on the publisher’s trademark pale yellow colours, announces: ‘Mr Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Mr William Blake in the war-world of 2839 (or is it 1939?)’.

(We may note in passing that this use of a future year to satirise a current one predates George Orwell’s 1984, which was originally going to be called 1948 until his publishers dissuaded him.)

Bishop follows Beroalde’s practice of having elaborate literary apparatus before the narrative of the book begins. In his introduction, Bishop says that it has been drawn to his attention that the book might be seen as criticising the current war and might even harm the war effort: he notes wryly that he is touched by such faith in the book’s influence. He explains that it is aimed rather at the futility of war generally than this specific one, and adds that, once embarked on a war, it is better to get it done with despatch.

The novel begins in the early Victorian period: a stable lad, accidentally shot, hovers in his consciousness. The shock of the injury, and a surgical intervention on the brain, catapult him into the future. This device is somewhat reminiscent of the effect of the lesion on the brain made by Dr Raymond on Mary in Machen’s The Great God Pan, and with similar cosmic effects.

But instead of meeting the ancient Greek deity, the stable boy meets two great poets and visionaries, Coleridge and Blake, and is regaled by their recondite conversation. The author is obviously steeped in their work and thought, and any admirer of these will enjoy his portrayal of them.  The boy, who is uneducated, has to try to interpret what they say in ways he can understand, which makes for a whimsical effect.

The Star Called Wormwood is a learned, thoughtful, unusual novel that will not be to every reader’s taste. It does not attempt to offer the usual narrative satisfactions, nor does it try to emulate, for example, Machen’s lyrical, enchanted prose. It is perhaps closest, in the Machen canon, to such works as The Chronicle of Clemendy and Hieroglyphics.

Yet it has a distinctive character and certainly stands out from the run of fiction of the day, or any day. It has a certain oblique, eccentric quality. The Star Called Wormwood is one of those completely original books that ought to appeal to the adventurous reader. It would not have been out of place in Gollancz’s ‘Rare Works of Imaginative Literature’ series, alongside Lindsay, Shiel, Visiak and Le Fanu.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Peter Harrington Books

Victor Gollancz's "Connoisseur's Library of Strange Fiction" and Its Successor Series

The London publisher Victor Gollancz (1893-1967) clearly had a soft spot for eclectic books, including fantasy. Twice during his lifetime he published a series of fantasies, though he carefully avoided calling them such. 

The first series he called "The Connoisseur's Library of Strange Fiction," subtitling it "A Series of Reprints."  He announced five books though in the end he published only four.  In numbered order they were:

The 1946 Gollancz edition

1. A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay.  Published August 1946 at 8s 6d, just a little over a year after Lindsay's death.  Gollancz had bought the publishing rights to Arcturus and The Haunted Woman from Lindsay's widow. This edition includes a one-page "Publisher's Note" by Victor Gollancz, which publishes for the first time the (accurate) statement that of the small 1920 first edition of Arcturus, "596 copies were sold and 824 'remaindered.'" Most rare booksellers have latched on to the first number and ignored the second one, making the first edition of Arcturus seem all the more rare.  But those 1,430 copies were in fact sold, as the original publisher's ledgers confirm.

2. The Haunted Woman, by David Lindsay.  Published in January 1947 at 7s 6d.

3. Medusa, by E.H. Visiak. Published January 1947 at 7s 6d. Gollancz himself had published the first edition of this book in 1929.

4. The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams.  Published in February 1947 at 7s 6d. Gollancz himself had published the first edition of this book in 1931.

5. The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg. In earlier volumes of this series, the James Hogg book was listed as number 4, with The Place of the Lion as number 5. But when the latter was published, the ordering was reversed. No Gollancz edition of the James Hoog book was ever published.  The Cresset Press published an edition in September 1947.  Perhaps Gollancz didn't want to publish a book which had a planned competing edition.

The second series of reprints came a few decades later, under the title "Rare Works of Imaginative Fiction: A Series of Re-Issues." This time Gollancz published, in three groups, eight of the nine titles that he announced. Three are reissues from the 1946-47 series:

1. The Purple Cloud, by M.P. Shiel. Published 13 June 1963 at 18s.

2. A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay. Published 13 June 1963 at 18s.

3. Medusa, by E.H. Visiak. Published 13 June 1963 at 18s.

4. Wylder's Hand, by J.S. Lefanu. Published 24 October 1963, presumably at 21s.

5. The Greater Trumps,  by Charles Williams. Announced but never published. Gollancz himself had published the first edition of this book in 1932.

6. The Lord of the Sea, by M.P. Shiel. Published 24 October 1963, at 21s.

7. The Haunted Woman, by David Lindsay.  Published 16 April 1964 at 21s.

8. The Isle of Lies, by M. P. Shiel. Published 16 April 1964 at 21s.

9. The Ghost Ship & Other Stories, by Richard Middleton. Published 16 April 1964 at 21s.

In all, these titles lived up to the advertisements describing the series as "The Connoisseur's Library of Strange Fiction" and "Rare Works of Imaginative Fiction." 

 

revised 2 September 2022

E.H. Visiak, Detective!

The poet Kenneth Hopkins (1914-1988) was for many years a friend of E.H. Visiak (1878-1972). Hopkins published three detective novels featuring the elderly Dr. William Blow and his friend Professor Gideon Manciple.  In published order they are She Died Because . . .  (1957), Dead Against My Principles (1960) and Body Blow (1962).  In US editions, they were published out of order (Dead first, She second and Body third), between 1962 and 1965, and the blurbs get the ages of Blow and Manciple wrong. When She Died Because ... was first published in England, Blow's age is about 79.  Curiously, that's the same age as E.H. Visiak was at that time.  Coincidence?  No, for Hopkins dedicated the book "To E.H. Visiak, as dedicated a scholar as Dr. Blow, but luckier with his domestics."  And in inscribing a copy of Body Blow to John Arlott, Hopkins wrote: "No prizes for recognising the original of Dr. Blow."

She Died Because ... begins with Dr. Blow engaged in his fifteen-year task of editing the complete works of Samuel Butler, when he realizes he is hungry. He reasons through the facts to ascertain that his housekeeper must not have brought him food, and perhaps he had missed tea with his friend Manciple, who lives in the rooms underneath him. After observing the housekeeper's body lying on the floor of her room, Blow summons Manciple for help, not realizing it is three in the morning. Here's a paragraph of skillful and witty characterization, appearing in the one-sided conversation of Dr. Blow as he, at Manciple's urging, has telephoned the police:

E.H. Visiak in the mid-1960s

“Ah. Is that the police station? Just so. I am telephoning up about my housekeeper, Mrs. Sollihull. Sollihull—certainly not, my name is Blow: BLOW, Blow, Dr. Blow.  I must explain that I am not, however, a Doctor of Medicine. I should, in that event, have known at once that she was dead; as it was, Manciple told me. Manciple. Dear me, he is internationally known, I assure you.  I must ask you not to interrupt. My housekeeper, Mrs. Sollihull, when she didn’t bring my tea, you understand, as she always does, or rather did—at first I thought it was Wednesday, which would have explained it. Yes, you foolish fellow, I know it is Wednesday now, but it wasn’t yesterday. Really, the police are too stupid—he’s saying now, Manciple, that is is Wednesday. . . .  Policeman! You must please listen carefully or call one of your superiors, I am being very patient with you. My housekeeper, Mrs. Sollihull, is lying dead in her room. I have a witness. Now I want you to come round here first thing in the morning and deal with it—what time do you open? There is the body and everything. I shall be obliged to go out to breakfast in the circumstances, but I shall return by ten o’clock. Oh, certainly, if you prefer it. The address is Ten Priory Place; it is the second turning on the left after you pass the junction of North Street with High Street; and we are at the lower end, overlooking the sea—number ten, the top flat. I shall be waiting for you. It is very early, but you know your own business best, Good-bye.”

This lampooning of Visiak as Dr. Blow is affectionate, witty and addictive. I zipped through all three Dr. Blow novels when I first discovered them in Perennial Library paperbacks in the mid-1980s. And I periodically re-read them, both for sheer pleasure and for the insight they give to the often inscrutable character of their model.

Hopkins wrote Visiak's obituary for the Royal Society of Literature, noting that Visiak "lived a secluded life, and in later years his health was indifferent, and he reserved his energies for his own work, and for entertaining a few friends who delighted in his learning and insight. How many evenings have I passed in that seaside flat high above Adelaide Crescent in Hove, with the dark room heavy with cigar smoke, and Visiak's deep voice elucidating some tricky point in the interpretation of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, or a disputed reading in Of Prelatical Episcopacy: it all sounds pretty dull stuff, but Visiak had the gift of making it exciting, and that's a gift somewhat rare among scholars."

Besides the three Dr. Blow novels, Hopkins published five other mystery novels, four of which concern a newspaperman named Gerry Lee, including The Girl Who Died (1955), The Forty-First Passenger (1958), Pierce with a Pin (1960), and Campus Corpse (1963).  Hopkins's final mystery was Amateur Agent (1964), published under the pseudonym "Christopher Adams".