The Centenary of 'Harmer John' by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

For some three decades Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was a popular and prolific author who was capable of writing (if not publishing) at least one novel per year. These were substantial books, with heft not only in weight but scope and intention: products of a man who loved the work of Victorian novelists skilled in the creation of wide worlds to be entered and explored at leisure, settings teeming with characters and incident that reflected society – even as they could also lean towards its darker and more sensational aspects. Walpole would throw himself into his own novels with an engagingly childlike enthusiasm, writing swiftly and fluently with a reliability that enabled his books to be announced and published with an almost clockwork regularity. However, there was one novel that did not follow this established routine: Harmer John, first published one hundred years ago in October 1926.

In his biography Hugh Walpole (1952), Rupert Hart-Davis described how Walpole began his new novel at the end of 1922 but had almost immediately to put it aside for work on another novel that he could have complete and published in a magazine and in book form before the more complex and reflective Harmer John could have been ready. (The ‘extra’ novel, written over a few weeks, was The Old Ladies, which became the second of the ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ set in the Glebeshire cathedral city of Polchester, preceding Harmer John, the third.)

Problems over scheduling were not the only reason for Walpole’s atypical delay in finishing Harmer John. In 1920 he had attended a concert and heard the young Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior (1890-1973), who was ‘the joy of the evening […] quite superb. Just the voice for me’ (Hugh Walpole 197). The two men met – and Walpole embarked on one of his most important and intense voyages of friendship, one which survived, despite initial discomfiture when Melchior remarried, until Walpole’s death. It was during that period of emotional and time-consuming distraction that Harmer John was written; it was perhaps out of relief as much as gratitude that Walpole dedicated it to Melchior, under the name he always used for him, ‘David’.

Subtitled ‘An Unworldly Story’, Harmer John is the account of the Dane Hjalmar Johanson’s time in Polchester from his arrival during a storm in December 1906 to his sudden and violent departure less than a year later. It dramatizes the conflict between the unworldly and the world, narrated in hindsight from 1926 by an unnamed native of the town who later reveals himself to have met and helped Johanson at the time. Characteristically, Walpole did not only show Polchester as a community consisting of people, but broadened his gaze to also take in and involve their setting: the streets and buildings of the town with its great cathedral, under all kinds of weather and effects of sunshine and moonlight.

Johanson was an innocent and rather naïve young man when he found refuge at Mrs Penethen’s boarding house. Handsome and with a superb body, a qualified instructor in gymnastics and masseur – ‘personal trainer’ – Johanson set himself up in business. Polchester quickly seemed to catch his enthusiasm and embrace him, accepting, on the surface at least, the novelty of his foreignness even as it stumbled over his name and adopted him as ‘Harmer John’. Johanson wanted to be friends with everyone, no matter who they were – and expected the same in return. He saw the best in everyone and always tried to do the right thing: to do what he thought was right. From that basis Walpole worked out and depicted the consequences of such an attitude – especially when held by a visitor, an immigrant – in a small, isolated, rather conservative community.

Book I, ‘His Arrival’ portrays Johanson’s ambition to transform Polchester and improve its people. He will have ‘a school for sculptors and artists and painters and make this town beautiful, keeping the old lovely things and making new things in tune with them’ (66). Things seem to be going well for the new inhabitant, yet he is unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that in his drive to make his mark he has also made enemies – including the unscrupulous and driven Samuel Hogg, owner of most of the property in Seatown, Polchester’s small but shamefully nasty and repulsive slum district.

It is Seatown, rather than Polchester, that would determine Johanson’s fate. Angered by what he had heard, he goes exploring for himself and enters a house lived in by a woman nursing her dying child. Perhaps thinking him the doctor, she allows him to stroke the girl’s forehead. ‘Over all the house there stood silence. For a long time his hand moved, then, the child gently sleeping, he took her and laid her gently in the bed’ (206). Soon rumours that Johanson had healed her start to spread; and from that time Hogg takes for himself the role of ensuring that Johanson’s plans come to nothing and will lead to his departure. Johanson’s developing relationship with Polchester, and several of its key citizens, is elaborated in Book II, ‘Of How He Stayed With Us’. Setbacks occur and relationships turn sour due to misunderstanding and intransigence. To his friends Johanson still ‘has the divine gift of tenderness and compassion’ – but for all his desire to ensure the best for Seatown, he still fails to realise that many of its inhabitants hate him (350ff).

In Book III, ‘How He Left Us’, despite the escalating gossip and misinformation about him, Johanson does not lessen his ambitions for change (422f). Johanson’s visit to a dying woman in Seatown and her death while there, gives Hogg and his associates an opportunity not to be missed. The incited riot is a fine example of one of the outbursts of violence and physical expressions of hatred and abuse that occur throughout Walpole’s work, as if he had been saving and impounding them for release at climactic moments. Left for dead, Johanson is thrown into the river: but his body is never found. Years later rumours still persist that ‘Harmer John’ did not die – and might return.

The date of Johanson’s death is given as 7 October: as well as the date of a fictional death, was it also that of a real birth? Walpole’s dedication to ‘David’ also included the date ‘October 7th, 1920’. Was this the date, a fortnight or so after Walpole first saw him, that he considered the inauguration of his deep friendship with Lauritz Melchior, another handsome blond Dane? Walpole always maintained a special fondness for Harmer John, one of his most ‘intensely personal books, into which he felt he had put more of himself than he had bestowed on any of his others’ (Hugh Walpole 358f). Friendship is never wasted.

(John Howard)

The Centenary of ‘Portrait of a Man with Red Hair’ by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

 

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) gave his novel Portrait of a Man with Red Hair the subtitle ‘A Romantic Macabre’ and referred to it as a ‘penny dreadful’. According to Rupert Hart-Davis’ biography Hugh Walpole (1952) he wished to write a ‘simple thriller’ for relaxation. On the strength of a synopsis he sold the story for serialisation in the United States, and within days of acceptance had made a start. Always a fast writer, Walpole completed a quarter of it in ten days, finishing the whole story in about two months. However, the magazine editor then repudiated the arrangement, calling the novel ‘distinctly gruesome and unpleasant’. It was with no such qualms that the house of Macmillan took on Portrait of a Man with Red Hair and first published it one hundred years ago in October 1925.

In a ‘dedicatory letter’ Walpole described the book as ‘a simple shocker which it has amused me like anything to write, and won’t bore you to read.’ Perhaps he had decided to prepare his readers for something ‘gruesome and unpleasant’ with what would now be called a trigger warning. Throughout most of the novel dreadful things, and more so the fear of them, would never be far away: touches of sudden sadistic violence, episodes in a pervasive gothic atmosphere of psychological intensity, come scattered throughout Walpole’s many novels.

Even to a reader who skipped the dedication the opening sentence should seem set to suggest an unusual novel: ‘The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away.’ It takes a moment more to see that Walpole has used a most traditional device: the protagonist on a leisurely train journey, followed by a walk to the final destination. Here, Harkness, who is soon revealed as a young American tourist, is going to visit the Cornish seaside town of Treliss.

When Harkness sees Treliss for the first time it is ‘absolutely the town of his vision’ yet gives him ‘a clutch of terror as though some one was whispering to him that he must turn tail and run’ (30). Once in his hotel Harkness accidentally overhears the distress of a young woman, Hesther, and resolves to himself to help her against her heartless husband and father-in-law. Wandering in the hotel garden before dinner, Harkness observes, fascinated, a man with red hair ‘standing straight on end as Loge’s used to do in the old pre-war Bayreuth “Ring”’ and whose eyes ‘were alive and beautiful, dark, tender, eloquent…’ (52). Introducing himself, the man, Crispin, invites Harkness to join him and his family for dinner. Harkness then realises who the girl was – and the identity of her husband’s dominating father. Crispin now comes to dominate the story, even when not directly appearing on the page.

Having involved himself with the Crispins, Harkness has no choice – and would not want one – except to follow through on the consequences of his promise. He agrees to go along with a plan already hatched by David Dunbar, Hesther’s previously rejected suitor, and Jabez Marriot, a local fisherman, to rescue Hester from Crispin’s house. Harkness has been invited there to view Crispin’s collection of prints and other precious objets d’art. During the visit Crispin tells him his own terrible story: an upbringing that taught him that it was necessary to suffer pain in order to understand the true heart of life – and to control. To inflict pain and then tend the victim is to be greater than God. ‘I myself am increasing my power every day. First one, then another. First through Pain. Then through Love. […] I should myself be superior to the suffering of others, because I know how good it is for them to suffer’ (135).  

The rescue of Hesther goes to plan until a sudden and very thick fog prevents the party from escaping across the bay. In a hushed and haunted journey the fugitives attempt to walk to another village, but in the fog find themselves back at Crispin’s house. Wholly in a madman’s power, Harkness and Dunbar are told they can ‘Make your adieus then to the lady. Your eternal adieus’ (234). The two men are eventually led, stripped naked, to a large room at the very top of the house and each tied to a pillar as Jabez already is. Their prison is ‘a high white place with a round ceiling softly primrose. One high window went the length from floor to ceiling, and this window, which was without bars, blazed with sun and shone with the colours of the early morning blue.’ What should be an exalted place in the heights has been corrupted by Crispin’s sadistic madness; his intentions are obvious. But there the story reaches its climax perhaps rather too simply, too easily. The headlong pace sustained throughout comes to an abrupt end and peters out in the few pages remaining – leaving the reader to realise that the entire exhausting action has taken place over less than a single day.

In Portrait of a Man with Red Hair the reader is surrounded and carried forward by Walpole’s sense of place, his gift for describing landscape, weather, and the ever-changing light. The great and heavy fog that descends and occupies most of Part III serves to maintain the tension, if not to increase it, but when the fog has cleared and the novel finished, all seems somehow to have been curiously insubstantial, as if the glowing countryside and enveloping fog had never quite been experienced after all. Perhaps this is appropriate for a ‘simple thriller’ written to provide a few hours’ vivid entertainment – which it certainly does.

(John Howard)

'The Old Ladies' by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

The prolific and popular author and novelist Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) knew something about cathedral cities and what went on behind the pleasant façades. The son of an Anglican priest who later became a bishop, Walpole had been sent to schools in Canterbury and Durham, cities which boasted ancient and magnificent cathedrals, and Truro, where the cathedral, newly designed in a soaring authentic gothic style, was under construction. The years Walpole spent living in cathedral cities were not forgotten – he went on to create one of his own.

Many of Walpole’s novels are loosely connected: not intended to be read in any specific order but including recurring characters and settings. Among these were four novels that, in the ‘by the same author’ listing at the front of his books, are grouped under the heading ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’. Set in the Glebeshire cathedral city of Polchester – based on Truro and used in other novels and short stories – the first, The Cathedral, appeared in 1922. The second, The Old Ladies, was first published one hundred years ago in October 1924.

Although there are glimpses of Polchester Cathedral and the charismatic Archdeacon Brandon, The Old Ladies is true to its title and concerns three elderly women whom circumstance has brought to meagre rented rooms on the top floor of a ‘windy, creaky, rain-bitten’ tumbledown house in Pontippy Square (1). Walpole describes the background and bleak situation of each of the ‘old ladies’ in some detail: their characters, which interweave with each other due to their proximity, contrast greatly. Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer have one thing in common: their crippling genteel poverty. Forced to live on rapidly declining incomes, their lives are ones of constant retrenchment and quiet desperation. Mrs Payne, however, is able to live within the limits of her income. Her ‘lazy indifference’ to anything but her craving for sweets and cake is some protection from the dismal world of the other two women.

Lucy Amorest is a widow who longs to be reunited with her son, who emigrated to the United States but has not written for a long time. Her cousin also lives in Polchester; wealthy but in declining health, he taunts her with hints of the fortune he might leave. May Beringer has no-one but her little dog, Pip – and a piece of red amber carved into a dragon, a gift from her only true friend, now estranged. Her money will only last a few more months. Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer are rather pinched, timid women, seeking only to endure in a society that, without admitting it, does not need them or care whether they live or die. In contrast, Agatha Payne, another widow, exploits the good nature of the other ladies as weakness and is in effect a ‘psychic vampire’. A ‘large, stout, and shapeless woman’ (29), she has a vitality and strength partly fortified by an overbearing but outwardly polite domination of the other two. Although Mrs Payne is physically healthy, the housekeeper feels it would be no ‘wonder if she went queer in the ’ead any day’ (53). She finds a new focus in life when she notices, and instantly covets, Miss Beringer’s prize possession: ‘ . . . she saw, straight before her, as though it had been placed there for her especial glory, the heart and centre of all the colour of the world’ (92). From that moment Mrs Payne is determined to possess the piece of amber – by any means.

Against the background of Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer’s approaching destitution, the novel describes the mental contest for possession of the amber. Mrs Payne’s manner to Miss Beringer is politely intimidating as she threatens never to leave Miss Beringer alone unless she is given the amber. But the psychological battle (and is it only a ‘psychological’ one?) is turned after Miss Beringer’s death, when Mrs Payne declares that she is being haunted. She refuses to believe that Miss Beringer is dead, finally rejecting Mrs Amorest’s explanations and sympathy: ‘You can’t help me! It's between us – and I’ll beat her yet!’ (303).

Hugh Walpole’s ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ may be compared to the Barsetshire novels of Anthony Trollope – especially when they take place in or near the cathedral city and explore the machinations of the clergy and other inhabitants of the cathedral close and city. As born storytellers, both men can verge on the melodramatic or sensational, but if Walpole is a Trollope, he is one gone ‘gothic’. The Old Ladies has a constant dense and claustrophobic atmosphere of being enclosed, walled away from the world: most of the story unfolds indoors – rooms in the decaying house in Pontippy Square, or the sickroom of Mrs Amorest’s cousin. The gothic is nearly always psychological rather than supernatural – although Walpole wrote much explicitly supernatural fiction too, mainly in its ideal short story form (exemplified by the collection All Souls’ Night). The novels are works of realism, set in the real world, but allowing for instances of bizarre intrusion: psychological or possibly, from the character’s point of view, supernatural.

Although the return of Brand, Mrs Amorest’s son, ensures that one of the women will end her days in peace and security, her closing words are hesitant: “Is it right, do you think, to be so happy?” Under the circumstances, perhaps one out of three was not such a bad result.

 (John Howard)