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. 

Recent Publications

 Some recent publications are worth noting here at Wormwoodiana.  First is issue no. 17 of Chris Mikul's long-running Bizarrism.  It contains some six articles, of varying lengths, and three book reviews. The longest article, on "The Ghost of Harry Price", clocks in at twelve pages is is highly interesting, giving a good chapter-sized perspective on the famous ghost-hunter, and it includes coverage of Robert Aickman's interactions with Price. One of books reviewed is Edward Parnell's Ghostland.  Information and orders go to Chris Mikul:  chris.mikul88 <at> gmail <dot> com. 

Kevin Dodd has published a long-in-the-works book on the pre-Dracula evolution of the vampire in the nineteenth century. The title is a bit general, The Tale of the Living Vampyre: New Directions in Vampire Studies. The book contains eleven chapters, including one each covering male homosexual vampires (as found in Count Stenbock), and lesbian vampires (like Le Fanu's Carmilla).  Dodd has also recently published part 1 (of 2) of "Plot Variations in the Nineteenth-Century Story of Lord Ruthven"--in the new Journal of Vampire Studies, edited by Anthony Hogg, which includes a number of other highly interesting articles (including two on Montague Summers). 

And there is John D. Haefele's tome (at 762 pages), another long-in-process study which I'm still working my way through: Lovecraft: The Great Tales. Haefele in turn works his way through Lovecraft's oeuvre, giving new ideas about influences and interpretations. This is all the more welcome as the Lovecraft field has been dominated for too long by a small number of critical voices. Haefele offers different ways of looking at familiar texts, and some are quite illuminating.

Finally, a note on the passing of Alistair Durie (1944-2021), who published only one book himself--the omnibus of cover art in the eponymously-named Weird Tales (1979), but who was widely-known to pulp and fanzine collectors, both for his legendary collection and for his generous assistance given to many researchers in the field (myself included). He will be missed.

'Surrealism' in Scarborough

Many universities and public libraries in Britain are getting rid of a lot of their stock. Some of this is picked up by big book warehouses based in obscure industrial estates off ring roads. They operate on a pile ‘em high and move ‘em on model. The books are sold at very low prices but listed with minimal description.

If you don’t mind playing lucky dip or you find the markings in used books have their own fascination anyway, they’re sometimes worth a try. I’ve received perfectly nice and even unexpectedly signed copies in dustwrapper: and conversely books that look like they’ve been through a cement mixer, a sewage plant and a pulping mill one after the other. 

I would rather libraries didn’t have to, or didn’t choose to, get rid of books, but if they do, I’m glad there are places to take them. And I find the “usual evidence” (as the booksellers discreetly term it) of the libraries in the books often has a certain interest. An example is this copy of Surrealism by Roger Cardinal and Robert Stuart Short in the Studio Vista/Dutton Pictureback series (1970). 

The library stamps show it was variously owned by the North Riding/Main Library/College of Education Scarborough; the Yorkshire Coast College/Learning Resource Centre; and the Scarborough TEC/ [Training/Education/Careers]/ College Library, under whose aegis it was withdrawn. There is a mini-history here of further education in the somewhat louche clifftop town, and at each name change the book got stamped again.

These stamps are not only on the endpapers but randomly applied to several illustrated pages, presumably to deter excision. As a consequence, both Max Ernst’s vast eye and a picture of an anteater are additionally captioned North Riding Main Library, as if advertising that these manifestations might be viewed there. Anything’s possible in Scarborough. The Duke of the North Ridings, incidentally, is a character in Charles Williams' War in Heaven (1930), a poet as well a peer, who joins in the guarding of the Grail. 

Scarborough was the favourite resort of the Sitwells when young, and its seaside features (bandstands, punch and judy shows, piers, crumbling hotels) sometimes appear in their prose and verse. For reasons that now escape me, I once pitched an arts project that would have involved bursts of Sitwell poetry being recited to passers-by from hidden machines at street corners and from the wind shelters on the promenade. I can’t think why it wasn’t taken up.

The final endpaper in the Scarborough Surrealism carries a white sticker on a white page, like an improvised homage to Kazimir Malevich. 

(Mark Valentine)