Flowering Dusk

I have had a copy of Ella Young's autobiography Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately (1945) for more than thirty-five years, but this was my first read-through from the beginning to the end. Of course I'd read parts before--in particular, the chapters on Kenneth Morris. Young knew Morris in Dublin in 1895-96, and came to encounter him again in southern California in the late 1920s. It was Young who got her own publisher, Bertha Gunterman of Longmans, Green, to read the manuscript of Morris's Book of the Three Dragons, and thereby it was published in 1930. Young spends a significant number of pages discussing Morris, his writings, his love of classic Chinese poets, and she quotes a number of Morris's recensions of the poems (he wouldn't call them translations), and from his letters to her. But she mostly doesn't give dates, or the context that scholars want. Plus the book is written in the present tense, as if the reader is there in the moment. It was this artistic choice that kept me from reading the entire book for so long.  

Yet now having done so, I see its attractions and came fairly quickly to appreciate Young's choice of style and her talent in achieving it. She knew practically every artistic figure in Ireland, and many of the key figures in the rebellion were her friends. So one gets interesting personal perspectives on Maude Gonne and William Butler Yeats, at particular times of their lives; of AE, Standish O'Grady, and on to Patrick Pearse and Eamon de Valera and Roger Casement. If one knows who these people were before reading Young's memoir, all the better. She continues on in a similar manner after she left Ireland in 1925 and came to America on a lecture tour. Lured west, she got to California, and settled there. But she also travelled with Ansel Adams (who photographed her in her mid-60s, when she still had an almost classically-styled sculpted beauty), and she stayed a while in New Mexico with Mabel Dodge Luhan, and hobnobbed with Frieda Lawrence and Georgia O'Keefe. She recorded her impressions of various native peoples (e.g., Zuni) traditional ceremonies. In California she was welcomed by a number of people of Irish descent. One of these was Noël Sullivan, whom Young described as:

A sojourner in many cities, he has touched hands with many people, success-crowned or forlorn, yet he belongs to another era and other comrades. Sensitive to every phase of culture, to every colour of beauty, he cannot separate these in his consciousness from the grave-pall black, the underlying misery of life, He is concerned with the agonies of the soul, as men were concerned in the days when they knew how to build cathedrals and palaces, and fenced themselves in cloisters from the fires of Hell and the more heart-piercing fires of Paradise.

Ella Young by Oscar Maurer

With such descriptions of people (and there are many in this book) one wants to know more about such individuals. And it turned out that Sullivan was the rich nephew of Senator James D. Phelan--and it was Sullivan who funded a lectureship at the University of California in Berkeley, named after his late uncle, through which Ella Young was employed as a lecturer from 1931-36. 

Throughout Flowering Dusk there are examples of Young's mysticism, via her experiences of ghosts and beliefs in fairies, all pointing towards a larger more interesting world than the mundane one. Her experience of "fairy music" is splendid: 

The music as I first heard it was orchestral and of amazing richness and complexity . . . There is a myriad-tongued litany; there are voices that call on fixed notes; there are also voices that wrangle and seem to shout aimlessly: clamorous, clangorous voices that do not repeat a rhythm on one note, yet the turmoil they make resolves itself into harmony with the whole . . .  This faerie music has in it the sound of every instrument used in a great orchestra, and the sound of many, many instruments that no orchestra possesses, It has singing voices in it sweeter than human: and always it has a little running crest of melody like foam on a sea-wave or moon-gilding on the edge of a cloud. All these sounds, and sounds more indefinable, are going on at the same time: undertones and overtones to a great main melody; to a lilted air, a snatch of song; or the resonance of a swung bell.

Young published other books of interest: several small collections of poetry; a collection of Celtic Wonder Tales (1910), the first edition with fine decorations by Maude Gonne; and three children's books, two retelling Irish stories, The Wonder Smith and His Son (1927), and The Tangle-Coated Horse (1929), and the more personally imaginative The Unicorn with Silver Shoes (1932). Flowering Dusk is her longest and most-significant prose work, but the manuscript was cut for publication during the paper-shortages of W.W. II. In 1956, at the age of 88 and diagnosed with cancer, Young chose to end her own life. 

“Eminent in Everything Except Fame”: Cyril Hodges and Kenneth Morris

Cyril Hodges (1915-1974) was a Welsh poet, remembered as a successful businessman who was a generous patron of the arts, including in particular some Welsh poetry magazines. He did publish some small books of poetry, and deserves to be remembered for some of his poems too.

I first encountered him through my work on Kenneth Morris. Hodges first book was China Speaks (1941), published under the pseudonym of Cyril Hughes. It contains twenty-one poems translated from the Chinese of the T'ang period, all of which were based on the prose recensions made by Kenneth Morris, though Hodges did compare them with the work of other translators.  Here is the final poem in the booklet:

                Resignation

                by Wang Wei

Dawn after dawn . . . what is their sum?
That final dawn to which we come!
Spring after Spring . . .  what should we praise?
The Spring preceding winter-days?
Night with its wings encloses all;
These roses wither, fade and fall:
If it must be that we decline,
Let it be sweetly . . . into wine;
And if Death’s seed in all must lie,
Let memory be the first to die!

His next collection, Seeing Voice: Welsh Heart (1965) appeared under his real name, in an elegant volume printed in Paris, with original lithographs by the American artist Paul Jenkins (1923-2012). Most of the seventeen original poems center on figures from Welsh mythological tales, and Hodges give details on the poems in the several pages of notes at the end of the volume.

His third collection was a card-covered booklet of eighteen poems, Remittances (1971), followed later that same year by Coming of Age, a collection of forty-one poems (my copy is a trade paperback, but there was also reportedly a casebound hardcover), with illustrations by Sue Shields. Two poems (“The Mead Song of Taliesin” and “Blodeuwedd”) are reprinted from Seeing Voice: Welsh Heart, but none come from Remittances. An introductory statement by the author notes that the book is “a gathering into one centre all the influences that have swayed me since I became fully conscious of being Anglo-Welsh.”

Hodges occasionally has some really memorable lines. Particularly I have liked one poem titled “Pen Rhys,” which appeared in The Anglo-Welsh Review in 1968, and was reprinted in Coming of Age:

                      Pen Rhys

Because a madness grew (and I am Welsh
And therefore mad with justice), I’ll be song
Spat out of rock and poverty,
Reprieved from balancing of right and wrong.

I’ll be amoral as the rain-washed stone
On bleak Pen Rhys, and whistle with the wind,
Grass-bent and empty of desire:
To have desired at all is to have sinned.

I’ll reach an age where nothing matters more
Than the cold rage of being; and I know
The condemnation and the praise
Are truly nothing should that wind blow.

In another poem from Coming of Age, “Instruction from the Magi,” Hodges recalls two people who taught him much. For one, he gives only the initials “J.E.” but the other he names as Cennydd (i.e., Cenydd, or Kenneth Morris):

 . . . Cennydd, you incited me
With prophecies and predictions
Of freedom. Now you are safely dead and freed
From the blame the half-dead bear alone.
And now begins that near-known meaning
Of wind whispering between empty stones.

. . .
I think that Cennydd knew my destiny, had read it
In the stone Book of Carnac: J.E. had plumbed
My bloodiness with a cunning knowledge.

Above all, they were never rational; but small
And frail and unconquerable men: they have taken my heart
To their graves that their blood may flow in the veins
And arteries of Wales. There will be battle,
Payment for the essential and the undesired mead.

I created a garden from the dry, cracked limestone
Of Morgannwg, and asked no more than the lies
Of comfortable Iolo, and Iestyn’s victory,
And the falsity of books upon a winter night.

Because of two dead men I must re-live Cattraeth,
Pay for the mead I did not drink, and see the glaze
Of staring English eyes in the blazing sun.

I wish I could know some peace again upon my borders,
Behind a flowering hedge taller than Englishmen.

I think that Cennydd knew my desity, had heard it
From the talking winds of Carnac: J.E. had heard
Some whisper of that wind and recognised the voice.

In an autobiographical note in Contemporary Poets (1970), edited by Rosalie Murphy, Hodges wrote a bit more about his association with Morris:

“Educated only to high school standard, but thereafter was fortunate to meet Dr. Cenydd Morus and to study Welsh literature with him. His tuition civilised, formulated and gave some unity of purpose to what would otherwise have remained an unresolved flux of callow prejudices. He was eminent in everything except fame, content to impart his knowledge freely to one who shared his own delight in that knowledge."

Morris died in 1937, when Hodges was twenty-two. Hodges afterwards married and had three sons. In later years he lived in Penarth, and was friends with Kenneth Morris’s executor, Alex E. Urquhart, who in his nineties aided me in my work on Morris, and shared with me Hodges's booklets and poems after I visited him in Penarth in 1992. At that time he showed me Morris’s desk, which he still had and used, as it had come to him after Morris’s death fifty-five years earlier.

Note:  I also keep an occasional blog on Kenneth Morris here.

Reissue of detective novel by R.A.V. Morris, the older brother of Kenneth Morris

First published in 1922, The Lyttleton Case by R.A.V. Morris went through some seven printings through 1930, before lapsing into obscurity, possibly because the author wrote no follow-ups of the detective adventures of Chief Inspector James Candlish. In 1971, in their Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor called it "an early specimen of the well-written, slow, carefully plotted puzzle," and concluded "this is an acceptable tale of murder, impersonation, and abduction, withe entertaining asides about the contemporary scene."  

Ronald Arthur Vennor Morris (1877-1943) was the older brother of the classic fantasist Kenneth Morris (1879-1937). R.A.V. Morris published only this one book.

The Lyttleton Case is now republished (on May 18th) by HarperCollins in their Detective Story Club series about which I have written previously.  I wrote a short introduction for this reissue, which is a nicely done hardcover at the low price of £ 9.99 from Amazon in the UK. The cover of the new edition is above.  Below I'll post some of the early dust-wrappers from early editions.

1922 edition

Third Impression, 1923

1927 two shilling edition

New and Revised Entries at Lesser-Known Writers

Just a quick note to say that (after an unplanned too-lengthy hiatus) I've revived my Lesser-Known Writers blog, adding new entries (with more scheduled), and revising some old ones.

Of the revisions, I'm pleased to have added some new information and a photograph to the Maximilian J. Rudwin entry, and now to have a new entry on the previously elusive David T. Lindsay.

New entries include (among others):

L.A. Lewis (with a photograph!)

H.B. Gregory

Gertrude Dunn

Tom Ingram  (with mention of Aickman)

I've also started a new blog called A Shiver in the Archives, which has revealing posts on Dunsany, Kenneth Morris, Lovecraft, Eleanor M. Ingram (with a photograph), and others.  Have a browse.