The Ghost Story Awards - Results

The Ghost Story Awards for books and stories published in 2015 have been announced.

The winner of the award for best ghost story book is Friends of the Dead by James Doig (Sarob Press). And the winner of the award for best individual ghost story is 'Malware' from the same collection. Congratulations to James for this double recognition of a fine book of tales in the traditional ghost story form but often with a modern twist too.

The Awards are sponsored by the literary society A Ghostly Company, and the journals Supernatural Tales and Ghosts & Scholars, and the winner receives a complimentary subscription to all three as well as a specially-made statuette.

Guest Post: Arthur Machen’s Secret History Tale THE TERROR by Dale Nelson

The Late Antique chronicler Procopius wrote The Secret History about the corrupt court of the Emperor Justinian.  Tim Powers’ Declare (2001) is a fictional secret history of the Cold War, revealing the traffic with malevolent supernatural powers that went on in the innermost Russian circles, and that played a part in the Soviet purges and state-engineered Ukrainian famine.

Machen’s 1916/1917 piece of pseudo-investigative reporting explains a bewildering series of home-front deaths that occurred during late May or early June 1915 and ended in the winter of 1915-1916.  News of the deaths was vigorously suppressed by Great War censorship.  These widespread and dreadful incidents impaired the Allies’ campaign against Germany, particularly because munitions factories were among the places attacked.  As readers will remember, the narrator concludes that domestic and wild animals were immediately responsible for the bizarre deaths, but the responsibility more truly lay with man; “the subjects revolted because the king abdicated.” Humanity has been defecting from its spiritual superiority to animals, and, instinctively sensing this, the animals lashed out, and may do so again.

The narrator explicitly refers to the truth of “tradition.”  It seems that he’s thinking of the four-level ontological hierarchy that E. F. Schumacher expounded to modern people in A Guide for the Perplexed (1977).  The levels are discontinuous.  The lowest level of being is the mineral; rocks exist, but have neither life nor agency.  Plants exist and possess life, and agency such that they may break down their immediate environment for their own use, e.g. as when tree roots break up a sidewalk.  Animals exist, have life, have sensation, and exhibit agency such that they may build up their immediate environment for their use, as when birds build nests, beavers construct dams and lodges, etc.  Mankind exists, lives, feels, and exhibits agency even to the extent of refashioning their inner world, as when a person decides to learn something or to break a bad habit. 

Those are the four levels of visible being.  There’s an inverse correlation between abundance and agency; rocks, which comprise nearly all of the world’s mass, have no agency, while at the other extreme, people, much less abundant than plants or animals, possess agency far transcending that of any other inhabitant of the visible creation.  Human beings were appointed steward-priests of the visible creation, but many have have lost an awareness of their vocation and of the dignity belonging to their nature.  In Machen’s story, this results in calamitous consequences to themselves and the beasts.

The traditional hierarchy is one of the chief ideas in Shakespeare.  It’s reflected in an extensive speech of Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (I:3).  If the proper relationship between things (each in its proper “degree” or level) is violated, chaos and destruction assert themselves where harmony should have been. 

…Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy….

Although its manner is journalistic and its mode is that of the weird tale, Machen’s “Terror” turns out to be a mythopoeic fiction implying the truth of the perennial doctrine of the hierarchy of being.  “The Terror” describes numerous imaginary incidents in a revolt of the animals.  The Eastern Orthodox tradition maintains the reality of the converse situation, in which men and women of sanctified life have enjoyed a peaceful and trusting relationship with animals.  The story of St. Seraphim of Sarov and the bear is relatively well-known.  A doctor of veterinary medicine, Joanne Stefanatos, compiled a book of such accounts in Animals and Man: A State of Blessedness (1992).

(By the way, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s 2011 essay collection Pulphead contains what is, in effect, a Gaia-hypothesis variation on The Terror, an admitted hoax called “Violence of the Lambs.”  The New Yorker reviewer found it the weakest piece in the book.  Also: in Chapter 10 of The Terror, “Porth never tolerated Ethiopians or shows of any kind on its sands” refers to blackface minstrel entertainments.)

© 2016 Dale Nelson

Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies

Another new anthology of interest is Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, apparently currently available only from Lulu (trade paperback, $20.28, ISBN 978-1326376376).  It is an odd hodge-podge of articles and interviews concerned with various types of "folk horror," often film-related but also encompassing music, folklore and literature. Of general interest are the interviews, although many are shorter than one could wish for, even if they are mostly original. Those interviewed include writers Kim Newman, Philip Pullman and Thomas Ligottti (note that the Ligotti interview by Neddal Ayad dates from 2004, and also appears in Matt Cardin's excellent 2014 collection Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti). Others include artist Alan Lee, director (of The Wicker Man) Robin Hardy, and Simon Young, the driving force behind the current manifestation of the Fairy Investigation Society.  There are a couple of articles by Adam Scovell on Nigel Kneale (Beasts, and Quatermass II), and John Coullthart on the (sadly neglected) dramas of David Rudkin, and Jim Moon on M.R. James.  Plus many more items of interest.

This hefty trade paperback (nearly 500 pages) offers much to enjoy, but the fact that each article is formatted in a different way—some are double-spaced, though most are not; some have spaces between paragraphs, though most do not—shows an unfortunate lassez-faire to the design and editorship.

I reproduce below the three pages comprising the table of contents so one can see what else is in this volume. (Click on them to make them bigger.) 

'Beneath the Surface' - Gerald Warre Cornish

About a hundred years ago, Gerald Warre Cornish, training with the 6th Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry, and afterwards serving in France, wrote a story called ‘Beneath the Surface’. The framework of the story is similar to that of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912); an unorthodox explorer, regarded as vain and bombastic by his peers, is planning an expedition to remote parts. This maverick figure exercises a magnetic attraction, a strangely compelling force, on the narrator, who, despite general opinion, chooses to go with him. Ostensibly, Finn Lund, the shunned Danish explorer of Warre Cornish’s story, is commissioned to map certain unknown quarters of Mesopotamia. But in fact his quest is for the original Garden of Eden.

What impels Lund is a belief that the world we see, and all its natural processes, is simply what has been left behind by the passage of a much greater force. We are walking among the husks and shells of a vast creative energy, which he intends to pursue to its source. The narrator senses this force working within Lund too, and knows he must go with him to discover where it will lead. In the descriptions of this primeval power, often compared to a great river, and linked in this world to the meanderings of the Euphrates, there are passages of supernatural awe which rival those found in the fiction of Algernon Blackwood.

Warre Cornish was killed on the Somme on 16 September, 1916. The story, really a short novel, was posthumously published in Beneath the Surface And Other Stories from Grant Richards in 1918. There were six other stories, of a mixed sort similar to the range of periodical fiction of the day. One, however, ‘Anabasis’, is more unusual: it is an episode from ancient history, telling of the bid by Cyrus the Younger to seize the throne of Persia, as witnessed by the Greek historian Xenophon. It is vividly written, and at ease with the character of the time.

Warre Cornish’s style is plain and clear, without flourishes or any particular tone, but it is not dry or dull: it is notable for its brevity and lucidity. The volume included an introduction by the author’s brother-in-law, Desmond MacCarthy, husband of his sister Mary, known as Mollie, a Bloomsburyite. This, however, gives little biographical information, because the author “wished his stories to be published, but without any memoir or account of himself”.

A few facts about the author are available. He was born on 31 July 1874 at Eton, the son of Francis Warre-Cornish, then a a master and subsequently the Vice-Provost at the school, and his wife Blanche. His father was a friend and colleague of M R James, who joined and enjoyed the Shakespeare Society started by his mother. Gerald was at school at Eton and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, following the traditional (and Jamesian) route .

He took holy orders and was Curate at Westminster from 1899-1901, at Ewyas Harold, Herefordshire in 1902 and at Burley, Hampshire in 1903-4. From 1910-13 he was a lecturer in Greek at Manchester University. So he was already a mature man in his forties when he went to war: by comparison with most of the officers around him, in their early twenties or even younger, he would have seemed distinctly old. As an ordained priest, of course, he need not have joined the armed forces at all, or could have served as a chaplain.

Warre Cornish was the author of two other books. In 1908 he had published a school book, Alcestis of Euripides done into English verse, described as an “Acting edition for the use of the boys of University College School, Hampstead.” And in 1937 the Cambridge publisher Heffer issued St. Paul from the Trenches - A rendering of the Epistles to the Corinthians and Ephesians done in France during the Great War. This had been found handwritten in a muddy notebook on Warre Cornish’s body, and is a brisk, modern, almost colloquial rendering of the text. It quickly went through several editions. T.S. Eliot said of it: “Some years ago Dr. J.H. Oldham lent me the translation of St Paul’s Epistles made by Gerald Warre Cornish (who fell in action, I believe, in the First World War). It struck me as admirable and very useful.”

‘Beneath the Surface’ was praised by G K Chesterton. “Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man,” he wrote, in a chapter entitled ‘The Other Side of the Desert’ in The New Jerusalem (1920), than was admitted by the partisans of either “Science or Scripture”. He continued: “It was never so well expressed as by one of the most promising of those whose literary possibilities were gloriously broken off by the war; Lieutenant Warre-Cornish, who left a strange and striking fragment about a man who came to these lands with a mystical idea of forcing himself back against the stream of time into the very fountain of creation.”

However, the spiritual energy evoked in ‘Beneath the Surface’ does not have any overtly Christian overtones, despite its author’s vocation. It is much nearer to the pantheistic forces that permeate Blackwood’s books, and there is even a suggestion of the existence of past lives, echoing Blackwood’s interest in reincarnation. It is true that biblical symbolism is used in the quest for the lost Eden, but this too is given a broader dimension. We can sense Warre Cornish trying to express universal truths that didn’t quite fit into the conventional faith of his time.

MacCarthy rightly says that “the transitions in the story from the normal to the transcendental are skilfully managed”. Indeed, the author is able to avoid the ponderous esoteric jargon that Blackwood sometimes uses: he convincingly conveys what the strange experiences would seem like through the words of a character described by a colleague as “the most unassuming, long-suffering man in the world”. MacCarthy also praised Warre Cornish’s “integrity of imagination”, meaning I think both the way the story remains true to itself, and the author’s steady, scrupulous following of his own ideas and ideals. Certainly ‘Beneath the Surface’ is a minor classic in the literature of mystical fiction.

(c) Mark Valentine 2016

Guest Post: "Something Like" by Dale Nelson

As young readers, we were captivated by certain stories and books.  The ones we most loved we probably have gone on reading over again ever since.  In the early years of our reading lives, we sought books new to us that would have something like the same magic.  The obvious thing to do was find books with similar plots and that were marketed as being something like what we already loved.  

Loving The Lord of the Rings, we noticed books that publishers marketed as being in the Tolkien tradition – which, if you are my age, meant everything from Silverlock to The Tritonian Ring to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to the Gormenghast books to Lord Foul’s Bane to The Sword of Shannara and many more.  If we were lucky, something kept us from tackling some of these too soon, and enabled us to sense, even as young readers, that others weren’t worth reading at all.  But likely enough we read our way through lots of journeys across imaginary landscapes inhabited by beings venerable, noble, or ghastly.   A few of them might remain favorites, even though some of the stories in this group now don’t seem all that Tolkienian; and some of the books we read back then we couldn’t chew our way through today if we were offered good money to do so.

What we didn’t realize during much of our reading lives was that sometimes, perhaps often, when we wanted “something like” Tolkien, it wasn’t necessarily an imaginary world romance that we desired.  We wanted something that would evoke an excitement and the stirring of imagination like Tolkien’s masterpiece did (and still does).  But, at least as we grew older, this mood – I’ll call it that for convenience – this mood might not require a work of fantasy, and, in fact, if mood like this is what we really wanted, the day could have arrived in which the right non-fantasy might be more pleasing than almost any so-called “Tolkienian fantasy.”

For example, one might find Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Long Walk trilogy* more satisfying than any number of works of fantasy, when in the mood in which one would love a long narrative about striding through wonderful changing landscapes, sleeping rough and waking with a fine appetite as the morning sun casts long shadows over hills and distant forested mountains, traveling on foot eagerly or maybe wearily and encountering people who speak other tongues and whose memories are rich with lore we have never heard, and making progress over many months to a remote destination. 

To take a different author – if you read Lovecraft in your early teens, he may have captivated you and you may have sought, in other authors, something like some special mood that you’d found in HPL.  It may have been years before you realized that you really aren’t all that fond of pulp horror and never were; that what you relish in Lovecraft is a mood compounded of curiosity, uneasy reverie, and antiquarian appreciation.  If that’s so, then you may derive far more satisfaction from reading Joseph Mitchell’s essay “Up in the Old Hotel” than stories by Lovecraft’s epigones, with their rigmarole of plot and “Mythos” allusion.

It will probably take time and wide reading to find our way to these books, essays, and stories that are, obviously, not imitations of the books we already know and love, and yet are (for us) rewardingly “something like” them.  Writers of paperback blurbs probably won’t help us.  I’m not sure that we will have lots of great discoveries if we try first off to abstract out the things we like in our favorites other than plot and genre, and then try to formulate a means of finding so-far-unread things that will also offer this or that mood or quiddity.  Rather, it’s likely to be the case that we realize only after we read “Up in the Old Hotel” that it engenders a mood something like that which we experienced in reading “The Shunned House,” and so on.  It’s liberating when we realize that we are free to let go the type of search for “something like” books that depends on binding ourselves to similar plots and genre.

Conversely, how sad if it happens that we read deeper and deeper into a genre, with ever more diminishing returns of enjoyment, till the time comes when we throw off the whole thing as something we have outgrown, casting aside not only a series of inferior works but even the original – and still excellent – one that got us started.

*A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water; The Broken Road – a young man rambling from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933-1934; see also Nick Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water.

© 2016 Dale Nelson

1919

It perhaps goes without saying that after I had acquired The English Catalogue of Books for 1937, my thoughts next turned to the volumes for other years. In no time at all, I had decided I also needed the Catalogue for 1919. This volume was somewhat slimmer than its successor of eighteen years later.

The year was still affected by the exigencies of war. Indeed, despite the exact timing of the Armistice, the dates of the war were not settled for quite a while. It is still possible to see war memorials in Britain which give it as 1914-1919, possibly because some soldiers were still engaged in conflicts in that later year. There were little-known military episodes such as the Allied Intervention in Russia, a disguised attempt to aid the Tsarist forces, and skirmishes with German freebooters, not least in the Baltic. J C Squire, surveying 1919 in an editorial in the London Mercury for January 1920, said that he thought it might in future be regarded as a war year.

The number of books published in Britain and Ireland in 1919 was, according to the catalogue, 7,327 new titles and 1,295 new editions (reprints). This represented an increase of 906 from 1918, which the editor regarded as a satisfactory indication of the return of peace. The volume was, however, still sufficiently slim for me to skim all the way through it, making notes of those books I would have been tempted to buy had I been around then.

Difficult to resist, for example, White Snow, by “A Young Actress” — who probably wasn’t – the confessions of a cocaine-taker, or Dope Darling by Leda Burke, who certainly wasn’t – she was David Garnett – or indeed Dope by Sax Rohmer. Clearly novels of the white powder were en vogue that year. Connoisseurs of apocalypse might, however, be more drawn to The Sixth Vial by L Argyle (which at least makes one wonder what happened to the seventh vial, perhaps still to be spilled).

It was quite a good year for novels of fantasy and the supernatural. If the Proserpine Prize for such books that I outlined in my account of the 1909 awards (see Seventeen Stories) was still in existence despite the shady transactions of that year, there would certainly be a number of titles in contention.

Stella Benson’s Living Alone, for example, the story of a young woman with powers of witchery, would rightly have its champions, as would Ronald Firbank’s exotic romance Valmouth. In the brisker style of the popular thriller, Gerald Biss’ werewolf yarn The Door of the Unreal might be on the shortlist, together with the hard-to-resist title The Shrieking Pit by Arthur J Rees. The more reflective pleasures of A P Barker’s A College Mystery, so well constructed a ghost story that it has often been taken for real, certainly ought to be under consideration, together with Madeleine by Hope Mirrlees, which I have never read since it is so hard to get, but which must surely have some of the imaginative qualities later found in the author’s Lud-in-a-Mist.

The 1937 catalogue, you will recall, suggested that readers need not be daunted by the number of new books, since they could simply concentrate on the “outstanding” books in the various literary forms. As it happens, Squire’s January 1920 editorial was quite forthright about what these were, at least for the novel. Of the acknowledged old masters, he said only two had produced books of note: Joseph Conrad, with The Arrow of Gold; and H G Wells, with The Undying Fire, “an imaginative, an exciting, and an eloquent book.”

Of books by less established hands, Squire singled out five for particular mention: Romer Wilson’s If All These Young Men; Clemence Dane’s Legend; The Mask by John Cournos; What Not by Rose Macaulay; and The Young Physician by Francis Brett Young. It would be fair to say that few if any of the seven in total he named have much survived: maybe just the Conrad.

Two unlikely and peculiar books from the same time have perhaps fared rather better. It’s hardly surprising that war memoirs, both fictional and factual, soon began to appear in this year. One of the strangest was certainly The Road to En-Dor, by E H Jones, the story of an escape from captivity. It achieved success as soon as it was published, was constantly reprinted, and still attracts fascination today: there have been various proposals to make a film of it.

The secret of its appeal is the very unusual way in which the two heroes of the tale tried to get out of their Turkish prison – by faking ghostly spirits using a ouija board, and convincing the commandant that these could lead him to a hidden treasure – and, incidentally, mastery of the world. Eventually, mostly by pretending to have gone mad, they were indeed released – just weeks before the end of the war. Like the exploits of T.E. Lawrence, the exotic locale, bizarre story and sheer high spirits and ingenuity of the protagonists caught the public imagination.

The second unusual title of 1919, which still has its admirers, me included, is The Journal of A Disappointed Man by W N P Barbellion, the pen-name of Bruce Cummings. He was a British Museum naturalist suffering from multiple sclerosis, who gives insouciantly his date of death on the last page of his book (in fact, he survived a further two years). His diary consists of nature observations, but more to the point observations about himself – his moods, hopes, worries and the gradual understanding that he has a fatal illness. Aphoristic and audacious, it is not a sombre book, despite the tragedy: the author’s keen intelligence, self-awareness and terse style give it a lasting interest.

The English Catalogue of Books for 1937

The Commercial Road bookshop, Kirkstall, Leeds is closing in early May when the lease comes up – the shop itself has already been relet. It stands near a busy junction: and almost opposite, up the hill, is the derelict Kirkstall Liberal Club, all too obviously symbolic, a Seventies or early Eighties edifice which even when built seemed to consist of an accidental collision of plunging rectangles. Now, surrounded by crushed and rusting beer cans and the tattered shrouds of fast food, it is boarded up and slowly disintegrating. Even the planks over the windows sag, as if it is too much effort even to sustain its decay.

In the shop, I found half a dozen books. The nicest was a third edition of Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel, his sequel to Three Men in A Boat, in a pictorial dustwrapper. This account of a bicycling tour has never had quite the popularity of the riparian adventures, even though (or perhaps because) the formula is similar. Loosely inserted part way through was a cutting probably from the Radio Times about a performance of the book featuring Naunton Wayne and two other “silly ass” character stalwarts. A book of WW2 poems by Alan Rook that I took to the counter had been in the shop, said the owner, since he had taken it over, many years ago, as he could tell by the handwriting of the price, which was not his own, but that of a previous owner. It seemed somehow odd and apt that the book should escape almost at the last moment.

A particular delight, however, was a copy of The English Catalogue of Books for 1937, in bottle-green binding, a list of every book known to have been published in Britain and Ireland (note the somewhat cavalier use of “English”) in that year: some 12,209 of them, to say nothing of a further 5,077 reprints.

The introductory matter is brisk and opinionated. Under the heading, “Are There Too Many Books?” it observes that “since the economic depression of 1929-30 there has been a progressive increase each year”. The reason, it suggests, is that there are now more human crafts and sciences than ever before: “A few years ago the information relating to aeroplanes, the cinematograph, or radio transmission could be (and was) contained in a handful of books”: now, it says, there are even sub-divisions of these subjects.

It is idle, it avers, to say that this number of books is too many for any reader to comprehend. Most of them are technical and only of interest to the specialist. And of the rest, we surely only want “the outstanding books in the various other classes of literature. . . So for the ordinary individual reader, the flood of books shrinks to a mere trickle.” This breezy confidence that the reader can identify the best books and not bother with the others seems somewhat misplaced. As Arthur Machen pointed out, the thumping successes of his time, such as Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere, were in not too many years soon forgotten and unread.

If, however, like me, you are more interested in the peculiar and unusual than necessarily the books judged at the time to be the best, the Catalogue still offers many hours of happy browsing in search of odd and promising-sounding titles or authors . I knew this would be an endless source of fascination for me, and so it proved even on the very first browse. Opening it at random my gaze at once alighted on a book by Terence Greenidge that I did not even know existed: Tinpot Country: A Story of England in the Dark Ages, no doubt a political satire. The author was a friend of Betjeman and Waugh, a railway enthusiast, who wrote a book of poems paying tribute to his two chief preoccupations, Girls and Stations. A reputed companion volume, Boys and Stations, by another hand, may be mythical.

On the other hand, the spirit of bibliomancy should not be invoked too often. The next mystic dip neatly illustrated the editor’s argument by offering me R S Morrell’s Synthetic Resins And Allied Plastics, no doubt a worthy volume in its own way, but not quite in my field.

At the end of the book is a list of publishers, not enumerated, but at a quick calculation possibly about fifteen hundred of them. These also have their fascination. What titles, for example, issued forth from the Actinic Press of Featherstone Buildings, Holborn, WC1? What precisely were the aspirations of the World Dominion Press, Founder’s Lodge, in the deceptively-named Mildmay Park, N1? Who were Lomax’s Successors at The Johnson’s Head, Bird Street, Lichfield, Staffs? What were the Essential Services (1918) of the imprint of that name at Balham High Road, SW12?

What quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore came from The Raven Press of 1 Whitefriars Drive, Harrow Weald, Middlesex? What went on behind the windows, supposing there to be any, of Messrs Hallows & Slaughter, Ltd, of 121, Victoria Street, SW1? There is surely something about each of these concerns suggestive of The Red-Headed League or The Absent-Minded Coterie, The Lost Club, or the other singular institutions we encounter in Victorian detective stories.

I am coming to believe that there may be more mysteries in the English Catalogue than just the annual dozen or so issued from the hand of Edgar Wallace. What better place to hide codes and secrets than in its close and seemingly harmless bookish print? Perhaps if, in the style of Mr Dyson in The Three Impostors, I were to go to one of these addresses and give the title on the thirteenth line of the one hundred and twenty-ninth column, I might find myself admitted to some inner chamber where is revealed at last, by flickering candle-light, the true, long-hidden mission of the Jehovah Syndicate.

Mark Valentine

Notes on Contributors

How many of us read the ‘About the Author’ section, or the Notes on Contributors, those short biographies given on dustwrapper flaps, or front free endpapers, or at the back of books? They are perhaps the sort of thing, along with the blurb, that the casual browser glances at when deciding whether to buy a book. And, when the book is bought, they are apt to be perused before the reader settles into the text itself. These Notes, we may think, are generally read, whereas the book may sometimes be put aside.

I must admit to finding them diverting, often for the wrong reasons. In an anthology I once received and soon jettisoned (mercifully I’ve forgotten its title), each piece was preceded by a whole two pages about the author. By the time I’d got to the end of these, I had next to no energy left for the stories. In one, an author thought it important to tell us that he owned not one, but two, holiday homes in, let us say, Moldavia (it wasn’t, but I’m trying to be discreet). I could not help thinking that at least one of these might have been better used as the home of a Moldavian. On the other hand, a note I recently saw in the Times Literary Supplement (the TLS), advising us that “X is a freelance writer living in London”, and no more, might be deemed somewhat laconic.

Quite a few writers (me included) sometimes opt, in their notes, to give an idea of quantity, as if the sheer volume of their output might reassure the reader. We learn that Y has written several hundred stories, and Z has appeared in over forty publications. “Oh yes: how many good ones?” seems the only suitable retort. Sometimes we appear to be caught in the middle of a bizarre bidding game, as each author tries to trump the next with the weight of their output.

I am reminded of the old story about the impressively prolific and long-lived romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, who boasted she had written “over 200 books”, to which a weary commentator drawled in reply, “Oh, really? One a year, then.” Although Barbara and I share a birthday (not, I hasten to add, in the same year), I don’t actually know myself how much I’ve written, and I have a sort of superstition about not counting. This is partly because early on I thought that, like the Decadent writers I so much admired, a “slim oeuvre” of a few wan volumes was all one needed. The puzzling yearning to continue writing has, however, rather put paid to that idea by now.

My own approach when asked for biographical notes is generally just to list recent publications so that, if readers like my stuff they know where they can find more, and, if not, they know what to avoid. Occasionally, however, editors ask for “something more personal”. Yet even the briefest of personal revelations has its pitfall. Each year, the TLS gossip column ‘N.B.’, on its back page, conducts a campaign against the proliferation of gift books for Christmas, because of their vacuous content and vulgarity. One year their chief fulminator noticed that the authors of such books seemed always to live in the country with cats. Ah.

But I have at least, I hope, largely managed to avoid two other practices that have caused special vituperations amongst the tetchy. One is the would-be jollified potted biography, where for example we learn the author is “the third most dangerous tiddlywinks player in Chichester”. The other is the author with a sequence of improbable jobs: “Westward Penge has been a carver of ship’s figureheads, artichoke juggler, and unsuccessful gigolo and for a while made his living as an itinerant sword-swallower in Central Europe.” I don’t think my own crust-earning sequence of “paper boy, petrol pump attendant, archaeology assistant, filing clerk, civil servant” has quite the right ring, somehow.

Still, supplying a few hundred words about yourself is certainly better than being asked for a photograph.

Picture: Shadow and Shimmer, our cats.