Warminster

I took seven books to the counter of the bookshop. Outside the day was damp and overcast, the clouds all iron, indigo and grey. The hills across the bay were dimmed, full of shadow. The proprietor looked at the paperback on top of the pile. “The Warminster Mystery,” he read, and jerked his bearded head in dismissal, “no mystery there. Warminster’s right by some big army camps, that’s all it was.”

I felt as if I were being reproached for buying the book, but put this down to the often unusual sales techniques of second-hand booksellers. I murmured something about it looking interesting. “I thought Warminster was quite an unusual little town,” I added, rather insipidly. “Maybe,” he grudgingly conceded, “perhaps I was too young to appreciate it.” This sounded like a cue for me to ask about his childhood, but it wasn’t one I intended to pick up. I let the remark drop into the silence, handed over the money and went out.

I had visited the Wiltshire town on one of my journeys some years ago in quest of mystical places: the same quest that took me to Glastonbury, Avebury, Maiden Castle, the Rollright Stones, the Malverns and other, obscurer, places. I knew that Warminster had been in the early sixties the focal point for a flying saucer “flap”, as they are called: a sudden surge of reported sightings of unidentified flying objects. But that wasn’t its only link to the strange and uncanny. It was also said to be a fulcrum for a network of ley lines, and at the heart of an unpublished landscape zodiac, known only to a few zealous researchers. What more inducement could be needed to find out more? 

So I am delighted to see that the excellent Castles in Space record label have announced pre-orders for Warminster UFO Club, an LP by hauntological musician Drew Mulholland offering filmic compositions inspired by the Wiltshire town’s noted UFO flap. 

That bookseller’s dismissal of the mystery sounded as if it were common sense. When there is a cluster of sightings of strange lights, an explanation in some military dimension seems plausible. Even the very name of the town seems to offer a clue. But when I began to read the book, I soon found there were two reasons why this explanation was not quite so convincing as it seemed. For one thing, some of the sightings had been reported by military personnel, and they were of all sorts of ranks and posts. If the lights had indeed been caused by manouevres, or experiments, or some secret activity at the nearby bases, they might have been expected to know about these: and they might also have been expected to be told to keep quiet.

Secondly, the range and variation of the experiences and encounters reported in Warminster went much further than the strange lights, dramatic though they were. In fact, a common report was of strange noises on the town roofs, like giant hailstones or falling masonry, or the flapping of the wings of a vast flock of crows. There were also other peculiar noises, of whistling, buzzing, grinding, droning. Other phenomena included animals and birds behaving strangely, odd telephone calls, and that indefinable sense of a presence which we should not too easily dismiss simply because it is less specific. The locals, indeed, simply called all these phenomena ‘the Thing’, showing that to them it was more than simply flying saucer sightings.

The book was by Arthur Shuttlewood, a local journalist: it was probably the most popular of quite a number by him on the same theme. The Warminster Mystery was published in Tandem paperback in 1973; it was followed by The Flying Saucerers (Sphere, 1976), UFO Magic in Motion (Sphere, 1979) and the unimaginatively-titled More UFOs Over Warminster (A Barker, 1979). He had also published Warnings From Flying Friends from Portway Press in 1968, a library publisher and UFOs: Key to the New Age in 1971 from the Regency Press, usually a subsidy publisher.

His style is often vivid and exclamatory, and may not inspire confidence. We must also acknowledge that as a newsman the author could not help but have an interest in heightening and sustaining the idea of a strange and special crisis going on in and around the town. But in fact once the hyperbole is cleared away, he is quite precise about giving dates, locations and the names of witnesses. One thing is clear from his book: in the early 1960s, a significant number of “ordinary” Warminster people said they had seen or heard something well outside the common run of natural experience.

Interest in UFOs, ley lines and similar Aquarian Age motifs has waned in the sixty years since their peak, and they are now regarded mostly as cultural phenomena with a certain retro charm, symbols of a particular time, evoked with a bemused affection. There is a well-informed discussion of the matter on the BBC News website (“The mystery of Warminster’s ‘UFO’”, 20 May 2010) by Kevin Goodman, described as a ‘UFO expert’: he also runs the UFO Warminster website (www.ufo-warminster.co.uk). 

He describes how at one point the town had its own UFO newsletter, The Fountain, published from Star House, a privately-funded research centre, and a separate volunteer network, called Info. Goodman reports that “Arthur Shuttlewood died in Warminster in 1996. With his death, the last lingering memories slowly faded away,” but he adds, “all I can say is this: something strange did happen there. I know. For a time, I was part of it.”

By the time I visited, in the 1980s, the town was quiet again. There was no obvious sign of its dramatic past. It seemed a slow, steady, subdued sort of place. I was looking then, not for the afterglow of the UFOs or the doings of the Thing, but for clues to the secret zodiac that, so far as I knew then, had never been documented or described. 

The Wiltshire Zodiac, with Warminster at its centre, was one of a number of such landscape mysteries that had begun to be identified, or imagined (depending on your point of view), under the influence of the Glastonbury Zodiac, originally described by the sculptor and mystic Katharine Maltwood in 1935: I am working on an informal bibliography of them. So if you should happen to notice any astrological symbols while poring over maps of Wiltshire or exploring its mystic terrain, do let me know.

(Mark Valentine)

The Star Called Wormwood

Morchard Bishop was the pen-name of Frederick Field Stoner, who also wrote as Oliver Stonor. He is mostly remembered today in the literary field as the friend and champion of Arthur Machen. He compiled ‘The Table Talk of Arthur Machen’, a record of conversations with the Welsh author. This currently remains unpublished, though a chapter was issued as a chapbook, Dreams and Visions: A Brief Journey Into the Remarkable Imagination of Arthur Machen (Caermaen Books, 1987). 

I corresponded briefly with Oliver when Roger Dobson and I were compiling the Dreams & Visions booklet. He seemed to me, from his letters, a meticulously courteous, diffident gentleman, kindly interested in and supportive of our fledgling Machen publications. Here we were, two young, inexperienced Machenites, able to publish only a card-covered, stapled booklet of one part of his work in a small edition: and yet this distinguished man-of-letters, with a dozen books to his name, treated the project warmly and seriously.

At Machen’s suggestion he had translated, in his mid-Twenties, Le Moyen de Parvenir (as The Way to Succeed), a rambling, Rabelaisian work by a 17^th century canon of Tours, a ‘gargoyle of a book’, as Machen put it: the latter had himself attempted a translation which could only be issued in a censored form. Bishop’s edition was his first book, in 1930.

As Bishop, he was the author of a biography of William Blake’s patron in Blake’s Hayley (1951), which was well-received, and as Stonor he compiled A First Book of Synonyms (1963). But he also wrote (as Bishop) seven novels, from 1932 to 1948, which have not received very much attention. One of these at least is highly original and peculiar, and also shows a courageous independence of mind. It was an anti-war book published in 1941 by that great maverick and connoisseur of the singular, Victor Gollancz.

The oddity of the book begins with its title, which is in full The Star Called Wormwood. An Investigation of the possible reasons for its Decline and Fall as described in the VIIIth chapter of the Apocalypse. The dustjacket description, in bold black letters on the publisher’s trademark pale yellow colours, announces: ‘Mr Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Mr William Blake in the war-world of 2839 (or is it 1939?)’.

(We may note in passing that this use of a future year to satirise a current one predates George Orwell’s 1984, which was originally going to be called 1948 until his publishers dissuaded him.)

Bishop follows Beroalde’s practice of having elaborate literary apparatus before the narrative of the book begins. In his introduction, Bishop says that it has been drawn to his attention that the book might be seen as criticising the current war and might even harm the war effort: he notes wryly that he is touched by such faith in the book’s influence. He explains that it is aimed rather at the futility of war generally than this specific one, and adds that, once embarked on a war, it is better to get it done with despatch.

The novel begins in the early Victorian period: a stable lad, accidentally shot, hovers in his consciousness. The shock of the injury, and a surgical intervention on the brain, catapult him into the future. This device is somewhat reminiscent of the effect of the lesion on the brain made by Dr Raymond on Mary in Machen’s The Great God Pan, and with similar cosmic effects.

But instead of meeting the ancient Greek deity, the stable boy meets two great poets and visionaries, Coleridge and Blake, and is regaled by their recondite conversation. The author is obviously steeped in their work and thought, and any admirer of these will enjoy his portrayal of them.  The boy, who is uneducated, has to try to interpret what they say in ways he can understand, which makes for a whimsical effect.

The Star Called Wormwood is a learned, thoughtful, unusual novel that will not be to every reader’s taste. It does not attempt to offer the usual narrative satisfactions, nor does it try to emulate, for example, Machen’s lyrical, enchanted prose. It is perhaps closest, in the Machen canon, to such works as The Chronicle of Clemendy and Hieroglyphics.

Yet it has a distinctive character and certainly stands out from the run of fiction of the day, or any day. It has a certain oblique, eccentric quality. The Star Called Wormwood is one of those completely original books that ought to appeal to the adventurous reader. It would not have been out of place in Gollancz’s ‘Rare Works of Imaginative Literature’ series, alongside Lindsay, Shiel, Visiak and Le Fanu.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Peter Harrington Books

Charles Williams and Sax Rohmer

 

 

Among his many other accomplishments, Charles Williams was an assiduous reviewer of crime and detective fiction for several newspapers and magazines, during the period 1930-35. These have been collected and edited by Jared Lobdell in The Detective Fiction Reviews of Charles Williams 1930-1935 (McFarland, 2003), and they make fascinating reading.

One of the reviews is an important source for revealing how Williams came to start writing his seven occult thrillers. On 29 December 1933 he reviewed a group of five books, which included The Bride of Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer.

Commenting on this, he says (p.104): ‘As for Mr Sax Rohmer, there again my piety, but this time a more dutiful and less exhilarating piety, comes in. There are some few absurd books of my own which exist only because one evening, having finished one of Mr Rohmer’s, I said suddenly to myself: “I also will write a novel.” It wasn’t, when finished, much like any of his, but can one now see the mother in the kid’s milk?” He goes on to complain that “The Mandarin Fu-Manchu doesn’t seem quite as good as he used to be . . .”

Another source, quoted in Grevel Lindrop’s Charles Williams – The Third Inkling (Oxford University Press, 2015, p.116),  gives us the exact date when Williams read the Sax Rohmer novel. Writing to Olive Willis on 23 December 1925, he told her that, having decided to write a thriller: “It took me seven weeks; it was first thought of on 8 July and finished by the end of August.”

This was Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), then called Adepts of Africa, his first novel but the fifth to be published. So far as I know, Williams did not name the Sax Rohmer thriller that inspired him, in a somewhat backhanded way, to start his own career in fiction, perhaps out of tact, for he undoubtedly thought his were better. But can we make any guess at which title this was?

By 1924, Sax Rohmer was already the author of about a dozen novel-length thrillers and it could of course have been any of these that Williams was reading. It might be thought that it was a Fu-Manchu thriller Williams read, and that in his own novel he simply substituted an African adept for Rohmer’s Chinese master, before developing the idea along his own lines. But as he was reviewing a Fu- Manchu novel when he revealed Rohmer’s inspiration for his own work, surely he might have specifically made that link if it had been one in that series that had started him off.

The two Rohmer thrillers to which Williams’ own books are closest are probably The Orchard of Tears (1918) or Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), since they both involve his own often-invoked figure of a sinister magician,  and like his have somewhat breathless plots. The second of these is the one that I think likeliest, in the absence of other evidence, to have set Williams thinking that he could do that, since it is the one by Rohmer that has the most intricate occult dimension.

However, perhaps there may be a clue in the chronology. Williams had been working for the Oxford University Press since 1908 and was already a busy man-of-letters, well-informed on topical literature. He had read the Rohmer book in question on the tube, going home in the evening from giving a lecture. 

It is possible, therefore, that what he had was the latest Sax Rohmer, perhaps picked up from a station book-stall. I haven’t found out if it was in the publisher’s Spring or Autumn lists, but the Sax Rohmer book that appeared in 1925 was Yellow Shadows, a Limehouse thriller which also happens to begin on a train, when a beautiful Chinese woman bursts in on the protagonist and begs him for help.

Other than its tumultuous action and ‘exotic’ dimensions, this book is not particularly close to the book Williams went on to write, but then he does say his wasn’t like Rohmer’s. And perhaps Williams, who could have an impish sense of humour, nodded whimsically to the title of the book he read when he in the end named his own book Shadows of Ecstasy.

(Mark Valentine)