The Road to Hell - Gillian Edwards

In my post about Sun of My Life (1951) by Gillian Mary Edwards, I mentioned that four books by a Gillian Edwards (without the ‘Mary’), one a novel and three non-fiction, had been published by Bles in the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies. After further investigation, I can now confirm that these are by the same author. The dustwrapper flap of the novel, The Road to Hell (1967), makes the link clear, and tells us she was now working as a secretary to the Professor of Zoology in Cambridge. And it turns out that the book has a definite supernatural fiction interest.

In The Road to Hell, the narrator is a man in his forties on a wandering holiday on a Mediterranean island, away from his wife, family, and secure job in finance. He comes via a precipitous path to a remote village with a ruined castle above it: a festival is in progress. He is beguiled by the charm of a teenage girl he chances upon bathing in a rock pool: her family offer him hospitality. He wishes to repay them, but soon learns that here money has no value: everything is done by barter and mutual assistance.

The village is poor, primitive, the villagers illiterate, but they are contented in their own way. The only cultured people he meets are the village priest, who largely accepts their simple ways, and an enigmatic figure at the castle called “the Prince”, whom the villagers avoid. There are no modern amenities, not even a doctor or teacher, and the narrator notices that the villagers are grossly cheated by a visiting pedlar who takes their crafts and produce for a pittance. He determines to help them, and sets up basic banking, marketing and credit facilities. The title already tells us where his good intentions will lead and, in contrast to her earlier novel, which contrived an optimistic ending, this has a distinctly darker finish.

When discussing Sun of My Life, I said that the book had an almost allegorical and mythic quality. That is even more the case here. The story is clearly designed to point a message, and also deals in archetypal figures. The fate of the poet in the first book, and the piecing-together of his life and work, had a haunting quality, certainly, but this was purely metaphorical. In The Road to Hell, there is by contrast an overt fantastic element, when the secret of the urbane, courteous and sophisticated Prince is revealed: for this is a Faustian story. That aspect is very stealthily and subtly handled, and readers will find here a surprising and delicate modern handling of the theme.

Overall, however, I did not find this book quite so attractive as the first. To be candid, we could have done with rather more of the Prince and rather less of the peasants. And I think the stronger allegory makes the story rather over-determined. There is not enough scope for uncertainty, mystery, enigma. The incidental details, the individual portraits, are beguiling, and the book is well-contrived, but it is just a bit too single-minded in pursuing its proverbial paved way.

Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow has tracked down a brief notice of the book in the Birmingham Evening Mail of 31 March 1967: ‘Miss Edwards has given a new twist to the classic tale of the man who sold his soul to the devil. A well-meaning man enlists the aid of the dark powers to bring prosperity to an unsophisticated village . . . and in so doing brings the village people all the ills of civilisation. A neat, if incredible, little tale, it rather luridly underlines the need for careful consideration of even the best of good intentions.’ That’s a fair, if somewhat brusque summary. Even so, the book strengthens the sense that here is an overlooked writer with an original imagination, narrative strength and a talent for the strange.

There may be more yet to come about this author.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Quair Books, Leeds

Sun of My Life - Gillian Mary Edwards

At a local second-hand bookshop recently I found a copy of Sun of My Life (Gryphon Books, 1951) by Gillian Mary Edwards. I was attracted at first by the neo-Romantic dustwrapper design.  This proved to be by Ley Kenyon, an artist who used his design skills in a P-O-W camp in WW2 to forge identity and other papers: he is one of the characters portrayed in the film The Great Escape (1963).

The description on the back panel of the dustwrapper was also intriguing: ‘The hero of this book is a dead man. It is a study of detection, and yet there is no crime. Rupert Quarles saves an acquaintance, a young poet, from suicide only to see him die of pneumonia.’ There was, however, no biographical information about the author, for the flap merely said, ‘Written with delicacy, imagination and a delightful understanding of her fellow men, this first novel introduces a new writer of unusual promise’. This might be thought somewhat bland. The bookseller had written in pencil on the front free endpaper, ‘None on line’. There are (or were) in fact one or two, but under 'Gillian M Edwards', not the full name.

The narrator, Quarles, is an urbane, prosperous man-of-the-world in his thirties who gives shelter to Peregrine Latimer, a former college acquaintance, a poet in penury who is starving and ill. A proud, temperamental character, Latimer objects to this help. He does not want charity. To his surprise, Quarles finds later that the poet has bequeathed him a tidy sum ‘in the confident knowledge that he will understand what to do with it.’ But Quarles does not understand this enigmatic message, nor, at first, why Latimer had not used (most of) the money himself when he was so obviously in need.

The legacy sends Quarles off on a quest to find out just what his friend meant. He follows up clues from the poet’s few possessions and, in a succession of encounters, meets those who knew him: his estranged father (a military man who despised his son’s conscientious objection during the war); a half-sister who admired him but did not know him well; a Cambridge don who could discern that he seemed a doomed figure; another college friend, now a successful detective novelist, who wants to help with the quest, but finds it is much messier than fiction; an aristocratic Parisian mistress, and others. The structure is quite like A J A Symons’ The Quest for Corvo (1934), the gradual piecing-together of a biography from many disparate sources, often with unexpected revelations and discoveries.

The different angles and perspectives on the poet create varying, sometimes contrasting portraits, and the book invites the reader to decide which of them hold the most truth. There is a sense of a subtle allegory in play, and the book almost begins to achieve a mythic quality. The haughty tragedy of the poet, with his fierce integrity and fine arrogance, is haunting and compelling. The author even dares to offer one or two examples of his work, which is traditional in style but modern in content, and convincing enough. However, she opts for an over-neat, conventionally romantic ending, rather against the grain of the rest of the book. Some readers will enjoy its gladdening symmetry, others may feel rather wistfully that what promised to be a rare and elusive work of literature, has suddenly reverted to a popular formula.

I have found out virtually nothing about Gillian Mary Edwards, other than incompletes dates of ‘1918—', according to University of Oxford Libraries. She has a namesake, a historian and politician, the wife of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, too young to be this author. A Gillian Edwards, without the middle ‘Mary’, was the author of one novel, The Road to Hell (1967), and three books in the Seventies on the folklore and history of unusual words, and of fairies: all four were from the same publisher, Bles. Whether these are by the author of Sun of My Life is unclear, though there is some word-play, including an acrostic, in the book.

The only other possible clue about the author is that two scenes in the book are set in Suffolk: one at Bury St Edmunds, the other at Dunwich, in the remote, huddled village that is all that is left of the medieval city seized by the sea. This is described evocatively, in all its lonely melancholy, suggesting the author knew it well.  

Quite why there are so few copies of the book around is itself a bit of a mystery. Gryphon Books were a provincial press, not among the major houses, but they published P C Wren, Conan Doyle, Osbert Lancaster, Stanley Weyman, and the Pembrokeshire thriller writer L A Knight. The Edwards book was thus rather out of their usual line, and, as it was also a first novel, perhaps they did not venture a large print run. But this is a confident, unusual, well-crafted novel, a thoughtful mystery, with a theme that will appeal to enthusiasts of recondite literature and bookish fiction, and with a cast of interesting and picturesque characters. 

Addendum: Many thanks to Scott at the wonderful Furrowed Middlebrow blog, dedicated to early and mid 20th century women writers, who speedily found the full dates for Gillian Mary Edwards: born Newmarket, Suffolk, 7 October 1918, died 20 March 1994. He also uncovered a local press report (from the Diss Express of 14 September, 1951) that gives very useful information about her. She was the daughter of the postmaster at Harleston, Norfolk, then moved with her parents to Cambridge. She went to Reading University, 'where she read a great deal of poetry' and, since she was small in stature, coxed boats. 

She was successively a war-time civil servant, the secretary to a psychiatric clinic, worked in a 'famous school' in Scotland (one of the scenes in her novel is set at a remote, rather seedy Scottish school), then as an assistant almoner, then in a bookshop, and finally, in the report, for a Cambridgeshire local authority. The cutting adds that she had won a literary competition and also sold short stories. Those should be worth seeking out.

(Mark Valentine)

Best British Short Stories 2023

Nicholas Royle, the author of the book-collecting memoir White Spines, is also a great champion of the short story. At his Nightjar Press he publishes well-designed pamphlets of a single story each, including many in the strange, uncanny or enigmatic field. This month sees the publication of four new titles: Snowdrops by Cliff McNish; The Little Ghost by Giselle Leeb; The Judgement by Tim Cooke; and Signals by Amanda Huggins.

In another role, he is also the editor of an annual short story anthology and Salt Publishing have recently published Best British Short Stories 2023. This includes my one thousand words short story ‘Qx’, first published online in Soanyway, Volume 2 Issue Eleven, edited by Derek Horton and Gertrude Gibbons. The Salt book is its first print publication.

The volume offers twenty stories, chosen from journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online. It includes a story by the late David Wheldon, the author of the haunting allegorical novels The Viaduct and The Course of Instruction (and of The Automaton from Nightjar, 2017); and a work by AK Blakemore, that pays tribute to the Cornwall-based mystic, artist and antiquarian Ithell Colquhoun.

Until 19 December, Salt are offering 15% off all their books ordered through their website and using discount code 14D8BSR85BNY.

(Mark Valentine)