Ann Lee - The Manchester Messiah by Roger Dobson

“A history of the Shakers will be a curious book”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

The only known publication of Roger’s St John Press, Ann Lee: The Manchester Messiah is a 1987 illustrated booklet celebrating the 250th anniversary of an extraordinary and mesmeric prophetess, the founder of the Shakers. A drama of passion and courage, triumph and tragedy, it is one of the strangest stories ever told. Roger's account traces the history of Ann Lee from humble beginnings in Manchester to the leadership of a movement that still survives today.

An unexpected find in the attic uncovered a few copies [now sold out].

THE LIBRARY OF THE LOST - Roger Dobson

Why did W.B. Yeats want a hair from the head of Aleister Crowley, and how did the artist Althea Gyles get it for him? What was the terrible lesson learned by scholar and demonologist the Reverend Montague Summers? Why was Sherlock Holmes reticent about his college years? Which unlikely chronicler of the decadents numbered among his friends Christine Keeler, Sir Oswald Mosely, Colin Wilson and an assortment of beat poets?

The answers are to be found in The Library of the Lost by Roger Dobson, just published by Tartarus Press and Caermaen Books. This finely produced volume offers twenty illuminating essays on classic authors of the fantastic such as Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel and Jocelyn Brooke, and such strange and outré figures as the Reverend Montage Summers and the artist Althea Gyles. There is a foreword by the eminent Spanish novelist Javier Marias reflecting on his friendship with the author.

Here is an extract from my introduction:

“Roger Alan Dobson was an author, journalist, actor, and bookman who loved to explore the stranger margins of literature and its most outré characters. He wrote with learning and enthusiasm about the lost souls of the Eighteen Nineties and those writers who moved among the ways of magic and mystery. He liked nothing better than to visit the old haunts of these arcane characters, walking among obscure streets and overgrown graveyards to find their homes and their tombs. When he was not out on such pilgrimages, he liked to be writing, working prodigiously at essays, radio and television scripts, letters and contributions to newspapers and periodicals. He also enjoyed bookish conversation, always ready to share his latest discoveries or to learn more from other bibliophiles and scholars.”

This is a book brimful of Roger's journeys among the byways of books, which will appeal not just to connoisseurs of the fantastic in literature but also to all those who enjoy the quest for the rare and recondite.

Mark Valentine

Update 12 July - now out of print. Thanks to everyone for their interest in Roger's book.

Caermaen Books: A Checklist

CAERMAEN BOOKS - A Preliminary Checklist by Mark Valentine

Arthur Machen – Apostle of Wonder edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Booklet. 62pp. Limited to 250 copies. 1985.

Arthur Machen – Artist & Mystic edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Booklet. Limited to 300 copies. 1986.

Taverns and Temples: A Guide to Some London Haunts of Arthur Machen by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Pamphlet, 4pp. 1986.

Dreams and Visions: A Brief Journey Into the Remarkable Imagination of Arthur Machen. As Recorded by Morchard Bishop. Booklet. 1987. [A chapter from the unpublished memoir The Table Talk of Arthur Machen by Morchard Bishop].

The Town of A Magic Dream – Arthur Machen in Whitby edited by Richard Dalby. Booklet. 1987.

Machenstruck: A Choice Compendium of Tributes to the Apostle of Wonder as selected by The Society of Young Men in Spectacles. Booklet. 1988. [Includes a tribute by Michael Powell here published for the first time.]

Aklo, A Journal of the Fantastic. Edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Booklet. Spring 1988. [First issue].

The Haunter of the Dark by H.P. Lovecraft. Adapted and illustrated by John Coulthart. Folio booklet. 1988.

Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Work by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton. Paperback. 1988.

Aklo, A Journal of the Fantastic. Edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Booklet. Summer 1989.[Second issue].

Aklo, A Journal of the Fantastic. Edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Booklet. Winter 1990-91. [Third issue].

Aklo, A Journal of the Fantastic. Edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Booklet. Summer 1991. [Fourth issue].

Aklo, A Journal of the Fantastic. Edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Booklet. Autumn 1992. [Fifth issue].

Aklo. [A pin badge.] Yellow background with the word 'Aklo' in stylised letters in black. [Date not known, possibly 1990].

Ornaments in Jade by Arthur Machen. With an introduction by Barry Humphries. Hardback. Published in association with Tartarus Press. 1997.

Aklo edited by Mark Valentine, Roger Dobson and R.B. Russell. Hardback. Published in association with Tartarus Press. 1998. [An anthology].

The Lost Club Journal No 1, Winter 1999/2000. Edited by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine.

The Lost Club Journal No 2, Winter 2000/2001. Edited by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine.

The Lost Club Journal No 3, Winter 2003/Spring 2004. Edited by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine.

Ghost titles

The following Caermaen publications were announced, but never appeared, although typescripts and proofs exist:

The White Road by Ron Weighell [subsequently published by The Ghost Story Press, 1997].

Purefoy & Arthur [a chapter from the memoirs of Hilary Machen. Published in Aklo, edited by Mark Valentine, Roger Dobson and R.B. Russell, 1998]

The Enchanted City – Arthur Machen & London by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

The Lost Club Journal No 4.

(Caermaen Books was the small press established by Roger Dobson and myself from our addresses in Oxford and Northampton - and later elsewhere - to publish books and booklets about Arthur Machen and some of our other literary interests. MV)

Martin Secker, Child of The Yellow Book - Roger Dobson

It is a truth universally acknowledged that some publishers are almost as interesting as authors (we should emphasize the word almost). Great individuals are a vanishing breed as the suits and accountants are gradually taking over what used to be a gentleman’s profession. Nineties enthusiasts have reason to be grateful to Martin Secker (1882-1978), whose Unicorn Press revived much engrossing material.

For example, ‘A “Period” List’ printed on the jacket of Roger Lhombreaud’s Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography (1963) includes such treasures as Aubrey Beardsley’s His Best Fifty Drawings, Dowson’s Poems (7s. 6d.), George Egerton’s Correspondence and Diaries, Lionel Johnson’s The Complete Poems, Richard Le Gallienne’s From a Paris Garret, Arthur Machen’s Hieroglyphics and The Hill of Dreams, Vincent O’Sullivan’s Opinions, Arthur Symons’ Aubrey Beardsley: A Memoir and eight titles by Wilde.

Mervyn Horder, the chairman of Duckworth & Co. from 1950-78, published a tribute to Martin Secker in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1979, writing: ‘Adolescent during the 1890s, he always retained a temperamental affinity for the Yellow Book period and spoke of himself as a child of that age. His spiritual home was the Domino Room of the Café Royal . . .’ A copy of Lord Horder’s article was found among the papers of the late Colin Summerford, a member of Machen’s circle. Colin was friendly with Secker (Machen got on less well!) and helped Horder with the Blackwood's piece: he is listed in the acknowledgements. Horder cites the authors Secker published between 1911 and 1934:

"fiction by Compton Mackenzie, D.H. Lawrence, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton, Norman Douglas, Oliver Onions, Gilbert Cannan, Francis Brett Young, Arthur Machen, Rafael Sabatini; criticism by Lascelles Abercrombie, Edward Thomas, Arthur Ransome, Arthur Symons; the collected poems of James Elroy Flecker, Alfred Douglas, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay, Martin Armstrong, T.W.H. Crosland, Ford Madox Ford, Maurice Baring; the early plays of Noël Coward. Works in translation included those by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arnold Zweig, Leon Feuchtwanger, Franz Kafka, François Mauriac — most of them well in advance of their general fame."

Secker was born at 24 Holland Road, Kensington. His father’s forebears were German and his mother Irish. As a young man wishing to make a start in publishing — after an abortive beginning working for the Bank of England, where he claimed to be the only employee sacked for incompetence — he approached a number of successful publishers, William Heinemann, John Lane and Grant Richards, before being taken on as an apprentice by Eveleigh Nash. Over the next eighteen months he learned the trade, and by 1910 was ready to branch out on his own. He established his company — always with a tiny staff — at 5 John Street, the Adelphi. A few years later he took on Rafael Sabatini, the author of The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, as a partner, but Sabatini proved less than ideal and he was replaced by the reliable P.P. Howe, the biographer of Hazlitt. (While hunting for the residences of Ernest Dowson’s family, an address for Sabatini accidentally caught our eye in the 1922 Kelly’s directory: he lived at 81 Albert Bridge Road, not far from Albert Mansions, where Dowson’s father took his life, perhaps, in 1894.)

Financial difficulties arose in the 1930s. ‘Secker’s friendliest friends would never have called him a businessman,’ writes Horder. ‘Secker had his share of that amiable vanity which animates, at the same time as it fatally weakens, most one-man band publishers — the simple idea that because he in his wisdom has chosen to publish a book, the world will automatically rush to buy it.’

After his firm went into receivership in 1934, Secker was obliged to enter into partnership with Frederic Warburg and Roger Senhouse, and in 1935 the firm of Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd was created. ‘By then Secker, aged fifty-two, was far too set in his ways, far too much of a lone wolf to accommodate the publishing habits of those of a pair of younger partners, and by 1937 he was on his own again.’ He acquired the publishing rights and assets of Grant Richards (called ‘the impeccable Granty’ by Secker) and carried on Richards’ business as The Unicorn Press Ltd, operating from the Unicorn Bookshop in King Charles Street (now gone) and then at 4 and 5 Royal Opera Arcade, which had formerly been Leonard Smithers’s office. Secker changed his imprint to The Richards Press, in honour of ‘Granty’ after Richards’ death. In 1948 John Gawsworth made him a Redondan peer in his first Birthday Honours List: Secker had published Prince Zaleski in the New Adelphi Library in 1928. After Secker retired, the publisher John Baker took over the shop and continued with the Nineties reprints. Horder comments:

"Both witty himself and a catalyst of original wit in others, he acted as a kind of laughter-vortex in any company; long after blindness overtook him, he still got carried away by his favourite funny stories, the suicide of John Davidson, the premature knighthood of Sir George Hutchinson, what Gilbert said on Sullivan’s death, and so on — and would tell them with the tears pouring from his eyes. He remembered from a news item that Davidson, who regarded himself as a failure and was a prey to violent depressions, hired a rowboat and jumped overboard some miles off the Cornish coast; nothing was found in the rowboat but a formal letter from Davidson to the directors of the Great Western Railway complaining that the charms of the Cornish Riviera had been grossly overstated in their advertising."

In 1972 deterioration of the retinas of both eyes left Secker completely blind. He was glad to receive friends and neighbours, who would read to him and gossip. Secker died after a series of strokes, on his ninety-sixth birthday on 6 April 1978. His ashes were scattered by his wife Sylvia and son Adrian in the garden of Bridgefoot House, Iver, in Buckinghamshire, where Secker had lived for more than seventy years.

(This is one of a series of writings Roger Dobson compiled for The Lost Club Journal issue 4, which alas never appeared).

The Simmons Papers: A Borgesian Jest? - Roger Dobson

If your preference in literature is to be pleased, puzzled, perplexed and presented with paradoxes, we recommend the novella The Simmons Papers (1995) by Philipp Blom, author of To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (2002). The Simmons Papers is, states Faber and Faber’s blue advertising wrapper-band, ‘The Only Novel about the Letter P’, and this hardly seems likely to be a matter of dispute. The book relates the tragi-comic story of P.E.H. Simmons (1901-89), appointed Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University in 1935. Simmons holds this distinguished post for only three months before resigning because of anti-German feeling: his mother came from Leipzig. After his resignation Simmons remains in Oxford until his death, but never again holds a university post. He writes philosophical treatises that make him a revered figure in European and American universities, though he is such a crusty conservative figure that his status means little to him

The main body of The Simmons Papers is devoted to Simmons’ strange manuscript, an elusive work given several wildly different interpretations by various academics. In the manuscript Simmons describes his work on what he calls ‘the Definitive Dictionary’, which sounds very much like the Complete OED, in a building that resembles the Oxford University Press building in Walton Street. Dr Javis, the editor-in-chief of the Dictionary project, has allocated the letter P as Simmons’ domain, a letter Simmons is fascinated by and proud of. The letter, of course, is his own first initial. ‘P as a letter is a vast mystery,’ he muses. Attentive readers will note that each section of the manuscript begins with P: ‘Personally . . .’, ‘Probably . . . ’, ‘Practically . . . ’, etc. Simmons’ immediate predecessor in the P section had a great fondness for plants, and those that are cited begin with P: a pine, primroses, a palm, poppies.

As the editor (i.e. Philipp Blom) explains in one of the introductory biographical sections: ‘There has been fierce discussion as to whether this account of a piece of extraordinary scholarship is fictional, or is an autobiographical representation of Simmons’ work in the years 1976-9.’ One scholar, Huxley Mandelbrodt (his deconstructionalist statements, which are largely pretentious gibberish, are quoted in footnotes throughout the manuscript), claims it is ‘a subversive un-writing of the gender issues in European literature’. ‘Other positions, suggesting that the work is a coded account of masonic rituals, a translation from ancient Hetitian hymns, or the manuscript of the long-lost novel The Messiah by Bruno Schulz, which Simmons acquired on a trip to the Ukraine in August 1967, and intended to publish under his own name, have failed to find a wide echo within the community of literary scholars.’ It is left open by the editor whether the ‘manuscript published here is a work of art, the emanation of a surprisingly fruitful fantasy, a work of reminiscences, the document of a mental disarray and decay of a fine mind’.

It’s hinted that the work may indeed be fiction, for nowhere in the introductory matter, where Simmons’ life and university career are described, is it stated that he works as a lexicographer. ‘The remaining forty years of his life [after his resignation as Waynflete Professor] were spent in relative obscurity, unknown to any but a small and constant number of tutees and old friends.’ It is revealed that depression dogged the philosopher all his life. ‘At times the “black days”, as he referred to them in his diaries, became so overwhelming that Simmons had to be taken into institutional care for weeks on end. At such times he lived in complete isolation, but for medical visits he received and a caretaker who brought him the daily papers.’ In the manuscript Simmons describes how, in his office at the publishing house, the inter-office messenger, Malakh, brings him books, journals and his letters. Is Malakh the institution’s caretaker? Could it be that all Simmons’ life in the Dictionary office is an illusion? In one episode Simmons describes how in a fit of madness he attacks Malakh and has to be physically restrained. Lending credence to the idea that Simmons is confined to a madhouse is that his two predecessors in P section were likewise eccentric, if not insane. His immediate forebear writes a book entitled Insights into the Lucidity of the Occult and the Mysterium of the Divine Letter. The author, called only ‘the Doctor’ in the manuscript, explains in this book that it was his earthly mission to rebuild the temple of Solomon: ‘In an architectural drawing in his own hand, the temple appeared to have the shape of a gigantic P.’ Relieved of his duties by Dr Javis, the Doctor, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of the Boddhisatva, hangs himself.

Readers may find themselves delighted by Blom’s book, while they rack their brains to find the key to the text- if there is a key. It seems as though it might be an allegory, but an allegory of what precisely? Or is it merely a satire on intellectual pursuits, suggesting that too much knowledge can drive one mad? Or perhaps a giant legpull? Every element of the book can thus be subjected to analysis to determine whether it has deeper significance. For example, why has Simmons never met Dr Javis? ‘Javis is indeed so far removed from the sphere of ordinary office work and editing that I myself have not yet had the privilege of meeting him, or of being summoned to his office, although this is undoubtedly bound to happen at some point in the future.’ Dr Javis has a personal secretary, Mr Lloyd, but Simmons wonders if Lloyd is fictitious: ‘one of those myths which arise during such a complex undertaking as the editing of the Definitive Dictionary over a long time when communication is poor.’

The author has fun satirizing the long ‘Communications of the Great Academy’, which Javis sets up to regulate the editing of the Dictionary. These are issue in daily supplements and the ‘rulings encompass every possibility, provide for all contingencies. From the consumption of sandwiches during working hours to the format of the writing paper, the standardized way of using paper clips’, etc. Is this a satirical thrust at OUP communiqués sent to staff? Apparently Philipp Blom, who was born in Hamburg in 1970, studied in Vienna and Oxford and then worked in publishing for a time . . .

Simmons lunches at Braun’s Hof (he’s allowed out then?). Was this Brown’s Hotel which used to exist in St Giles (now an Oxfam Bookshop) or the nearby trendy Brown’s restaurant in the Woodstock Road? Your co-editor’s landlady inherited one of the stair carpets from Brown’s Hotel: a most depressingly worn item. Midway through the text Simmons falls in love, with a woman he can’t see properly since he is short-sighted. Looking from his window across the courtyard he sees a co-worker in a floral dress, ‘a lady of radiant beauty, the fairest among women and a lily among thorns’. She seems to be working in M section, which pleases the old scholar. ‘M is the nasal relative of P . . . They are connected through B, the sonor, or voiced stop.' Note the author’s name: Philipp Blom.

The book is full of in-jokes like this. Simmons solemnly cites a monograph by Pierre Menard. Menard had no earthly existence but sprang from the fertile mind of Jorge Luis Borges. Indeed, The Simmons Papers can be viewed as an elaborate Borgesian jest. Simmons works on the third floor, Room B 304. The editor comments in a footnote: ‘This location has not been decoded by literary scholars. To his puzzlement, however, the editor of these pages has realized that it corresponds with his own room in his college.’ There are allusions to The Waste Land, Jacob’s ladder (‘ . . . “And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night”, in a classical but little-read text’), etc. All in all, a mind-boggling, very entertaining puzzle that people will enjoy racking their brains over. If anyone who reads it knows what it is about, please tell us.

(This is one of a series of previously unpublished pieces by the late Roger Dobson originally intended for The Lost Club Journal.)

Joyce Carol Oates: Xavier Kilgarvan’s casebook - Roger Dobson

There are some novels one does not wish would end. Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) by Joyce Carol Oates is such a one. This is a glorious, almost Dickensian feast of a novel. The principal mystery is why the book isn’t better known to crime fiction addicts in Britain, since it stands head and shoulders above most modern offerings in the genre. Mysteries is a tripartite novel laced with Gothicism, relating the cases of detective Xavier Kilgarvan. It’s written in parodic, genteel Victorian style, with authorial asides to the reader, pious interpolations in italics and forests of exclamation marks.

In the first adventure, ‘The Virgin in the Rose-Bower; or, The Tragedy of Glen Mawr Manor’, we find Xavier (‘our hero’), a callow youth, investigating a locked-room murder in an opulent bedroom at the manor house of his estranged Kilgarvan relations. The tale is enriched with hints of the supernatural: dark angel figures, or ‘angel-demons’, are rumoured to haunt the neighbourhood of Glen Mawr. The ghost of the ‘Blue Nun’, who had poisoned several husbands at Winterthurn in the 1790s, has been seen. Xavier penetrates the cellar and attic of the manor, wins the heart of his young cousin Perdita and discovers the secret curse of the Kilgarvan family, though the truth is so loathsome that he eventually burns his notes, keeping the revelation from the world. The sensitive Xavier never really recovers from the horrors of the case. It’s a story one really has to read at least twice before one can grasp all its twists and subtleties.

The next time we encounter Xavier, just before the end of the 1890s, he is twenty-eight, a veteran of a number of celebrated investigations and acclaimed by the Hearst press as a ‘Detective of Genius’. Like Sherlock Holmes, he is a master of disguise. In ‘Devil’s Half-Acre; or, The Mystery of the “Cruel Suitor”’ five girls are found ritually murdered over a period of months in a desolate rock-bound region south of Winterthurn. An innocent Jewish mill manager is hanged for the crimes but Xavier suspects the decadent dandy Valentine Westergaard. Advances in detection leads Xavier to look forward to the day when evildoing will cease — a forlorn hope, but one which illuminates his noble character.

The final story, ‘The Bloodstained Bridal Gown; or, Xavier Kilgarvan’s Last Case’, is the most intriguing mystery of all. A red-haired spectre, carrying an axe, is seen running away from a rectory where two people have been slaughtered and the rector’s wife, Perdita, Xavier’s great love, has been ravished. Curiously, even before the horror occurs, a telegram is sent to Xavier’s home at 38 Washington Square, New York City, pleading:

XAVIER KILGARVAN RETURN TO WINTERTHURN IMMEDIATELY
YOU ALONE ARE OUR SALVATION

Quite a few clues as to the identity of the murderer are planted along the way, and Ms Oates plays fair with her readers. Being a revisionist (and feminist) detective novel, events do not unfold as in a conventional crime story, and the author delights in wrong-footing her readers and mischievously usurping the conventions of the genre. Victorian piety, respectability, hypocrisy and cant are mercilessly ridiculed in Ms Oates’s mock pompous style. The parody and satirical episodes, however, are kept firmly in place and do not injure the novel’s suspense. The jacket blurb refers to the book’s ‘romantic ending’ — and this is one way of putting it. It is enough to say that the book’s climax rivals that of Psycho. Apparently Xavier’s cases echo, in dreamlike fashion, authentic and infamous murders.

Bellefleur (1980) is another splendid Gothic family saga by Ms Oates. A mysterious curse lies on the Bellefleurs — they never die in bed, it is rumoured, or their menfolk perish in absurd ways. However the real ‘curse on the Bellefleurs, it was said, was very simple: they were fated to be Bellefleurs, from womb to grave and beyond’.

Joyce Carol Oates knows the field of supernatural fiction well: she described Lovecraft as ‘bizarre, brilliant, inspired, and original, yet frequently hackneyed, derivative, and repetitive’: a fair summing-up. And she once claimed that Muriel Spark’s ‘The Portobello Road’ and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’ are the most accomplished British ghost stories of the 20th century.

A Mystery-Haunted Landscape: The Novels of Mary Webb - Roger Dobson

Even polymorphous littérateurs have their prejudices and blind spots. Anthony Burgess ungallantly sneers at Mary Webb in Little Wilson and Big God (1986), claiming that his first wife, Llewela Isherwood Jones (‘Of Christopher Isherwood . . . neither the Jones father nor daughter had heard’), was ‘unliterary, a fact confirmed by her liking for Mary Webb’. While at Manchester University in the late 1930s, around the time Burgess, then plain John Wilson, had discovered Finnegans Wake, Llewela gave him The House in Dormer Forest (1920) as a birthday present, though ‘she had overcome her devotion to that writer in a way that Stanley Baldwin never did’. Presumably Burgess never attempted to read the Shropshire author (perhaps he grew tired of listening to Llewela sing her praises), for he would have discovered that here was a visionary much concerned with harnessing language for artistic and symbolic ends:

"Well, it is all gone over now, the trouble and the struggling. It be quiet weather now, like a still evening with the snow all down, and a green sky and lambs calling. I sit here by the fire with my Bible to hand, a very old woman and a tired woman, with a task to do before she says good night to this world. When I look out of my window and see the plain and the big sky with clouds standing up on the mountains, I call to mind the thick, blotting woods of Sarn . . . There was but little sky to see there, saving that which was reflected in the mere; but the sky that is in the mere is not the proper heavens. You see it in a glass darkly, and the long shadows of rushes go thin and sharp across the sliding stars, and even the sun and moon might be put out down there, for, times, the moon would get lost in lily leaves, and, times, a heron might stand before the sun."

Precious Bane, from which the above is taken, is a triumphant brew, mingling folk wisdom, eroticism, mysticism, superstition, romance, the macabre, poignancy, tragedy, death and humour — quite an achievement for a ‘sub-literary’ author. Ghosts even materialize near the end, though they are of the psychological rather than genuine variety. Mary Webb’s poetic language elevates her books from rural melodrama into a higher sphere, ensuring they will always have readers — perhaps when A Clockwork Orange is forgotten. As Robert Lynd observed:

"If it is necessary to classify novelists — and we all attempt to do it — Mary Webb must be put in a class that contains writers so different as Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy, for whom the earth is predominantly a mystery-haunted landscape inhabited by mortals who suffer. To class her with these writers is not to claim that she is their equal: all that we need claim is that her work is alive with the fiery genius of mystery, pity and awe. It is not too much, indeed, to say that in her writings fiction becomes a branch of poetry . . ."

Mary Webb was born Mary Gladys Meredith at Leighton, near Shrewsbury, below The Wrekin, in 1881. She came of Celtic stock: her father, George Meredith, was a teacher and gentleman farmer. A tender portrait of him appears in Mary’s first novel The Golden Arrow (1916), where he is the kindly, mystical sheep farmer John Arden, father of the heroine Deborah. Mary’s mother, Alice Meredith (née Scott), was related to Sir Walter Scott. Like Arthur Machen, bidding farewell to Gwent eighty miles to the south in the year she was born, Mary had a living spiritual relationship with landscape. In her novels and poetry this is expressed in metaphysical terms:

"For indeed every tree and bush and little flower and sprig of moss, every least herb, sweet or bitter, bird that furrows the air and worm that furrows the soil, every beast going heavily about its task of living be to us a riddle with no answer. We know not what they do. And all this great universe that seems so still is but like a sleeping top, that looks still from very stillness. But why it turns, and what we and all creatures do in the giddy steadfastness of it, we know not." (Precious Bane)

In 1912, two years after the death of her father, which affected her severely, she married Henry Bertram Law Webb (1885-1939), a Cambridge graduate, writer and philosopher, who taught at Meole Brace, the village where the Merediths lived. He was Mary’s soulmate, and much of his strength and integrity are reflected in Kester Woodseaves, the hero of Precious Bane. Henry’s teaching career took them to Weston-super-Mare, where Mary began writing The Golden Arrow, set against the primeval, brooding backcloth of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones (called Wilderhope and Diafol in the novel). Returning to Mary’s ‘hills of heaven’ in 1914, they lived idyllically at Pontesbury, near Shrewsbury, and later built Spring Cottage on Lyth Hill, one of Mary’s beloved viewpoints. The couple subsequently moved to London, living from 1923 at 5 The Grove, Hampstead (now 12 Hampstead Grove). ‘Transplanting to London did not suit her,’ Henry later confessed, and Mary escaped to Lyth Hill at every possible opportunity; but it at Hampstead, in three months in 1923, that Mary wrote Precious Bane: an amazing tour de force.

That ‘book in a thousand’, as one US reviewer referred to it, is Mary’s best-loved novel. Set in south-west Shropshire around the time of the Battle of Waterloo – thought he book has a timeless quality as it deals with eternal verities – it tells the story of Prudence Sarn’s struggles against rural superstition and the fear of witchcraft. Prue’s wisdom, tenderness and courage make her one of the most memorable heroines in romantic literature. She is cursed with a ‘hare-shotten lip’, a witch-mark supposedly caused when a hare crossed her mother’s path, and this has condemned her to a lonely spinsterhood. ‘Being as how things are, you’ll never marry, Prue’, her brother tells her. In Prue’s girlhood she is innocent of her ‘bane’; only the insensitivity of those around her finally brings it home to her. Prue is granted a deserved fairy tale ending in the arms of Kester, who sees through her disfigurement to the soul within. He rescues her from villagers at Sarn who accuse her of witchcraft, and rides off with her into a blissful life together.

For Prue’s creator there was no happy ending. By 1926 Henry had drifted out of love with her, transferring his affections to a girl he was coaching for university entrance. Henry was the centre of Mary’s world, and this betrayal devastated her. Her health, never robust after a childhood thyroid complaint, broke down under a starvation diet of tea, ‘bread and scrape’ and self-neglect. She died, of pernicious anaemia, at Quarry Hill Nursing Home at St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, on 8 October 1927, and was buried at Shrewsbury.

Fate conspired against her in death as if life. Her five completed novels had been well received — Rebecca West, no mean critic, stated after the publication of Gone to Earth (1917) ‘Mary Webb is a genius’— but sales were disappointing. After her death the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin praised her novels at a dinner of the Royal Literary Society Fund; she was, he said, ‘one of about the three best writers of English today, but nobody buys her books’. The resulting press coverage aroused public interest, her neglected books were revived, with Introductions by G. K. Chesterton and John Buchan among others, she was widely translated and her works sold in their hundreds of thousands. Then, in 1932, came Stella Gibbons’ parody of the rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm. The book also satirized the works of D. H. Lawrence and T. F. and John Cowper Powys, but Mary Webb was viewed as the principal target. Critics were already hostile to the concept of Mary as a writer of importance. How could a woman from a rural backwater have any artistic merit when the common herd adored her books? Who could trust the opinion of a Tory politician on literature? Thus for many years Mary Webb was facilely dismissed as old fashioned, a mere ‘woman’s writer’. But her books are surely too rewarding to languish long in the shadows.

Daphne du Maurier's ‘Monte Verità' - Roger Dobson

Towering ‘Monte Verità’ by Roger Dobson

Saying anything about Daphne du Maurier’s story ‘Monte Verità’, in an attempt to whet readers’ appetites, risks ruining its spellbinding effects. The only injunction necessary is: Don’t miss this one. More haunting than Rebecca, more bizarre than ‘Don’t Look Now’, with echoes of Picnic at Hanging Rock and ultimately as enigmatic, this novella is one of the most enchanting productions of du Maurier’s pen.

A fantasy, dealing with the quest for truth in the modern world in the form of an unforgettable love triangle, the tale opens in New York, the skyscraper blocks of which reflect the ‘holy mountain’ theme of the story, with the unnamed narrator (à la Rebecca) musing on the strange events that unfolded in his youth many years earlier, in 1913 and in the 1930s. To the luminously beautiful faces he sometimes sees in the New York crowds he longs to cry, ‘Were you among those I saw on Monte Verità?’

Years before, the narrator’s great friend Victor has married a Welsh beauty, Anna, who possesses ethereal, unearthly qualities and cares nothing for material possessions. Staying with them at Victor’s estate in Shropshire, the narrator finds Anna’s bedroom is as bare as a nun’s cell. One night he sees Anna standing barefooted on the frosty lawn gazing at the moon. Her peace affects the house itself. The narrator tells her:

‘You have done something to this house. I don’t understand it.’
‘Don’t you?’ she said. ‘I think you do. We are both in search of the same thing, after all.’
For some reason I felt afraid . . .
‘I am not aware,’ I said, ‘that I am in search of anything . . .’
‘Aren’t you?’ she said.

The story, as can be seen, has echoes of Rebecca, in that the heroine becomes the lady of the manor, but we are never allowed into Anna’s mind. She is more unfathomable than the first Mrs de Winter. Victor and Anna holiday in a mountainous region of Europe, but the narrator cannot accompany them, and regrets his decision for the rest of his life.

Du Maurier’s narrator is deliberately vague about the setting: ‘There are many mountain peaks in Europe, and countless numbers may bear the name of Monte Verità.’ When the couple scale the Mountain of Truth, Anna leaves Victor behind and climbs to the summit alone. It is her destiny, and Victor’s undoing. Once the reader has encountered those who dwell on the mountaintop, the sacerdotesse, they will never be forgotten. A young village girl tells how she met the beings:

"I was with my companions on Monte Verità. A storm came, and my companions ran away. I walked, and lost myself, and came to the place where the wall is, and the windows. I cried: I was afraid. She came out of the wall, the tall and splendid one, and another with her, also young and beautiful. They comforted me and I wanted to go inside the walls with them, when I heard the singing from the tower, but they told me it was forbidden . . . They were more beautiful than the people of this world. They led me back from Monte Verità, down the track where I could find my way. Then they went from me. I have told all I know."

And that is more than enough . . . At the finale the mystery at the heart of the story remains intact and unexplained, but many readers will find this welcome rather than regrettable; just as a woman in a swimsuit can be more alluring than one naked as Eve (though, of course, it all depends on who the woman is).

Du Maurier herself perhaps gives too much away in the prologue, for the story begins with the climax and then flashes back. The reader would be better starting the story several pages in, at the paragraph beginning ‘We were boys together, Victor and I . . .’ (This pioneering Lost Club technique is known as ‘creative reading’. You should hear about the impudent and blasphemous manner in which we recommend The Lord of the Rings be read.)

‘Monte Verità’ was first published in The Apple Tree (Victor Gollancz, 1952), retitled, for obvious commercial reasons, in Penguin, Pan and Arrow paperback, as The Birds and Other Stories. Though superior to ‘The Birds’ and ‘Don’t Look Now’, not much critical attention seems to have been paid to the story. Margaret Forster’s biography Daphne du Maurier (1993) devotes half a page to it, focusing solely on its erotic aspects (yawn), suggesting that intimacy between men and women was, in du Maurier’s eyes, unsatisfactory: a facile tie-in with the theory concerning her (unconsummated?) affair with Gertrude Lawrence. Fiction writers create scenarios at their peril. Some critic will always arise to take the themes of a story literally and apply them psychologically to the author’s life.

As Kingsley Amis commented — and his words should be inscribed in letters of gold above every critic’s desk — ‘Where there are no mysteries or hidden cross-references in a writer’s work they must be invented. The favoured technique is that of trivial/accidental association, whereby anything in the text that reminds the critic of anything else, however uselessly, is fair game.’ Amis relates the story of the student ‘who is supposed to have remarked that the first two words of the phrase “to be brutally frank” was reminiscent of Hamlet’s soliloquy’. Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre without the necessity of keeping a mad wife in the attic at Haworth. Tolkien spent half a century writing about elves; does this mean he believed in their existence? As Anthony Powell has a character say in Books Do Furnish a Room (1971): ‘X. [Trapnel] said that no reader ever believes a novelist invents anything.’

The only really significant revelation in the du Maurier biography regarding ‘Monte Verità’ is that Victor Gollancz suggested a rewrite when, in the original version, Anna was transformed into a — but see the biography. Some hints of du Maurier’s original plot twist appear in the story, but revealing them would spoil readers’ pleasure.

(This is the first of a planned series of short articles by the late Roger Dobson, originally intended for further issues of The Lost Club Journal, and, so far as we know, previously unpublished. Thanks to Ray Russell for converting this material from obsolete disks).

R.I.P. - Roger Dobson, author and bookman

I am sorry to report the very sad news that Roger Alan Dobson, author, journalist and bookman of Oxford, has died. He was the co-editor, with me, of several booklets about Arthur Machen, of Aklo, the journal of the fantastic, and The Lost Club Journal (devoted to neglected writers). He also wrote radio plays, including a successful BBC Radio 4 production about the Kingdom of Redonda, the Caribbean literary realm associated with M.P. Shiel and John Gawsworth, which fascinated him: in recognition of his work here, Spanish novelist Javier Marias ennobled him in his Redondan court as the Duke of Bridaespuela .

Roger was proud of his Manchester upbringing, and wrote a study of Ann Lee, the Manchester Messiah, about a local prophetess. He was a regular contributor to the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review (ABMR) on recondite literary subjects, including one article which made out the case that Sherlock Holmes must have gone to a Manchester college. This exhibited the sense of mischief Roger often brought to bookish matters: he was also implicated, with his friend the bookseller Rupert Cook, in the letters and writings of the hoax poet (who showed signs of coming alive), C.W. Blubberhouse. He also contributed lively and learned material to Colin Langeveld's Doppelganger Broadsheet, sometimes as the querulous 'Professor Herbert Trufflehunter'.

I came to know Roger in the early Nineteen Eighties when I was told he was an enthusiast of Arthur Machen, whose work I discovered at the age of seventeen. This proved to be a considerable under-statement. Roger knew more about Machen than anyone else I ever met, and between us we started a modest campaign to revive interest in him, which was at a low ebb in the early Eighties. We met or corresponded with many who had known Machen, including his son Hilary and daughter Janet, and close friends such as Colin Summerford and Oliver Stonor: in time, we found others who were intent on celebrating him, leading to the Machen societies, journals and other publications since. Roger wrote the Machen entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, after rightly arguing for his inclusion: edited John Gawsworth's biography of Machen; co-edited Machen's Selected Letters (with Godfrey Brangham and R.A. Gilbert, 1988); and contributed to Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, with illuminating essays on Machen mysteries. A checklist of his writings is in preparation.

But Machen was far from Roger’s only literary interest: he was immensely well-read, and talked charmingly and with infectious enthusiasm about many other, especially semi-forgotten, figures. For some years he and I would meet in Oxford, where Roger had a bedsit at 50, St John Street, a former home of Tolkien, and have long talks about books and authors who ought to be revived. Roger’s special passion after Machen was George Gissing, whom I then did not quite get (I suppose because he was insufficiently ‘like’ Machen): but he insisted on the wonder of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, and I have recently come to see why: how I wish I could tell him.

Roger had been a journalist in Manchester and Bristol, and still occasionally did freelance work, but (like Machen) he came to dislike this, and preferred to write on literary themes. However, he never lost the journalistic knack of knocking on doors to elicit information, when he wanted to pursue a writer’s homes and haunts, which included Machen’s house in the Chilterns (then owned, to Roger’s delight, by a gentleman with the Welsh kingly name of Cadwallader); and the grave of the alchemist Thomas Vaughan in an obscure Oxford village (“the graveyard plan is on the back of a cornflakes packet”, the sexton told us).

Roger was a very private man: though I was among his closest friends in those Machenstruck days, I never learnt very much about him, except his bookish enthusiasms. He was devoted to literature and, as with Machen and Gissing, it seldom rewarded him materially: but it gave him rarer things; the joys of scholarship, shared discoveries, and the stubborn integrity of a proud spirit.


Mark Valentine



Below: Roger Dobson (right), with other Machen friends, striding off down the old lane from Llanddewi Fach to Llanfrechfa, a favourite walk of Machen's (photographs: Iain Smith).