Seventeen Stories/Selected Stories

Limited edition hardbacks are a delight for the connoisseur and collector and an adornment to the bookshelves, but have you ever also hankered for a book that you can just bung in your valise, rucksack or beach bag? The battered dog-eared wind-torn rain-spattered sand-encrusted companion of your adventures?

If so, your hankering is now answered with the publication by The Swan River Press of paperback editions of Seventeen Stories (2013) and Selected Stories (2012).

Now you can if you wish read ‘The Axholme Toll’ while exploring the legendary inland island itself, or visit fenland Ely as you thrill to ‘The Fall of the King of Babylon’.

Or perhaps you may, when the times permit, want to contemplate strange heresies while in ‘A Walled Garden on the Bosphoros’; or in Prague, City of Magic, see if you can find ‘The Bookshop in Novy Svet’. 

If so, these handy and inexpensive editions will fit lightly in your luggage while losing nothing of their inner lustre.

Of course, you may also need one at home so that you don’t have to handle the rare and precious original volume but can still enjoy the stories in these practical paperbacks while eating a buttered crumpet, sipping your favourite Sikkim tea, or powdering your fingertips with rose-scented Turkish Delight. Now you can smear the pages with impunity. 

The Swan River Press have also just published paperback editions of Stephen J Clark’s excellent volume of occult novellas, The Satyr (featuring Austin Osman Spare), and Robert Lloyd Parry’s warmly-received Jamesian anthology Ghosts of the Chit-Chat.

Paperback editions of some of my other story and essay collections are also available from Tartarus Press and Zagava Books.

(Mark Valentine)

The Courteous Revelation

 

It wasn’t just the dustjacket that made me look more closely at the book, although it had an attractive angular art deco design of a couple in summer clothes on the beach under a bright blue sky.

No: what made me pause was the title. Which at first sounded quaint. I imagined some portly solicitor peering over half-moon glasses. “Well, my boy, now that you have come of age, it is my duty and privilege – yes, a privilege indeed – to reveal to you that you are in truth the rightful Lord of All the Lands That May Be Seen and Most of Those Beyond, Save Only Thunder Ness.”

And at this the young man grew pensive. “And why am I not the Lord of Thunder Ness?” he asked, and the old solicitor sighed.

But in fact Dudley Carew’s The Courteous Revelation (1927) takes its title from a phrase by Sir Thomas Browne quoted as an epigraph in the book: "I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous revelation of Spirits . . . " Now this sounded promising. It suggested a novel that would involve at least a glimmer of a mystical dimension.

It starts pleasantly enough with Peter, a bank clerk, in the third-class carriage on a train to a station in deepest Somerset, yea beyond even Yeovil. He is on his fortnight’s holiday and is full of relief at his release from drudgery. Then we get some back-story. Peter’s mother came from a genteel family and his infancy was spent in a beautiful house by a river. But at the age of six his father died and his mother remarried, to a profligate bounder who soon ran through the money. The family home was lost: and on leaving school, Peter was articled to a bank.

He finds his fellow bank-workers brash and vulgar.  However, he is not all snob: when he escapes to The Oval to watch the cricket he strikes up a conversation with a salt-of-the-earth gor’ blimey working man and they share some rueful feelings about cricket and life in general.

Class evidently troubled Carew. An excellent article at The Cricket Monthly by Gideon Haigh discusses a later novel, Son of Grief (1936), which also explores class displacement. There was then a marked distinction between cricketers who were Gentlemen (amateurs) and those who were Players (professionals, and often working-class). There were even Gentlemen vs Players matches.

Son of Grief concerns a young gentleman who has to cross the divide after a somewhat lively amatory liaison makes him a social outcast. He eventually achieves liberation with the cricket-fancying wealthy widow of a Northern radish tycoon. Though he was evidently sincere in wanting to explore class questions, Carew’s approach is unfortunately fairly artless: he is not able to transcend caricature.

Even so, I persevered with The Courteous Revelation, because I like books that begin with a train journey to lonely country, and I wanted to see how the implied mystical dimension developed. And it was just as well I did, for once his character alights at the station we are soon in a different atmosphere.

Peter is invited to stay at a charming country house by a young woman he encounters. The reader soon sees that this is his childhood home, and she is his mother, as she was when he was a young boy: and yet he is there as an adult stranger from a later time. Some sort of time-slip has taken place. This world is at first, though not for long, idyllic: but how has it happened—and how long can it last?

There is a particularly effective scene when Peter walks to a neighbouring property across the fields, but finds when he gets there that the house is a mildewed ruin with rusting gates. Evidently, he has now strayed back into his own contemporary world again. The spell, or whatever it is, does not extend all that far from the village where he is staying.

Back at his childhood home, the emotional complications of his parents’ life begin to be revealed and things develop a tenser edge. The smooth bounder is too much in evidence, but Peter realises that he is powerless to change anything. When he tries clumsily to intervene, he is asked to leave.

He returns to London and picks up the threads of his humdrum life, but is now reconciled to it. He rejects art, poetry and sophistication in favour of the boisterous enjoyments of the colleagues he previously deplored and the girlfriend he had half-heartedly wooed. It’s a slightly odd, rather over-emphatic transformation and also feels rather banal after the mysterious interlude.

Dudley Carew (1902-1981) is known today, if at all, as a friend of Evelyn Waugh from schooldays. He published a memoir of him, A Fragment of Friendship, in 1974. He was the son of a clergyman, from Haywards Heath, Sussex, and fell under Waugh’s spell at their public school, Lancing College.

An autobiography, The House is Gone, appeared in 1949. It is a rather diffident book, and Carew himself notes that he cannot write with the same sense of the numinous about childhood as Forrest Reid. Indeed, it has a somewhat dutiful tone, rather like a list of acknowledgements to the schoolmasters, college friends, cricketing colleagues and others he has known.

He worked for the London Mercury and played for The Invalids, the touring cricket team run by the editor, J C Squire, and the most interesting chapter in his memoirs is about this episode. He was also a cricket correspondent for The Times, and published several books on the game, including England Over (1927) and To the Wicket (1946).

His brief obituary in the 1982 edition of Wisden, the cricket almanac, is curtly approving, noting that though at Lancing ‘he was not in the XI, he became well known as a cricket journalist . . .  He was certainly one of that company who tried to raise descriptions of matches from mere reporting to literature.’

Carew, it seems to me, could have been a writer of stories of strange wonder in the English countryside in the de la Mare style: he has the gift of imagining fully a world out of true from the usual one, and presenting it with measured credibility. He catches moments well, brittle silences, a garden at dusk, a fraught starlit conversation. The Courteous Revelation at its best has an elegiac ambience, and succeeds in exploring an otherworldly possibility with plausibility. 

(Mark Valentine)

 

“Eminent in Everything Except Fame”: Cyril Hodges and Kenneth Morris

Cyril Hodges (1915-1974) was a Welsh poet, remembered as a successful businessman who was a generous patron of the arts, including in particular some Welsh poetry magazines. He did publish some small books of poetry, and deserves to be remembered for some of his poems too.

I first encountered him through my work on Kenneth Morris. Hodges first book was China Speaks (1941), published under the pseudonym of Cyril Hughes. It contains twenty-one poems translated from the Chinese of the T'ang period, all of which were based on the prose recensions made by Kenneth Morris, though Hodges did compare them with the work of other translators.  Here is the final poem in the booklet:

                Resignation

                by Wang Wei

Dawn after dawn . . . what is their sum?
That final dawn to which we come!
Spring after Spring . . .  what should we praise?
The Spring preceding winter-days?
Night with its wings encloses all;
These roses wither, fade and fall:
If it must be that we decline,
Let it be sweetly . . . into wine;
And if Death’s seed in all must lie,
Let memory be the first to die!

His next collection, Seeing Voice: Welsh Heart (1965) appeared under his real name, in an elegant volume printed in Paris, with original lithographs by the American artist Paul Jenkins (1923-2012). Most of the seventeen original poems center on figures from Welsh mythological tales, and Hodges give details on the poems in the several pages of notes at the end of the volume.

His third collection was a card-covered booklet of eighteen poems, Remittances (1971), followed later that same year by Coming of Age, a collection of forty-one poems (my copy is a trade paperback, but there was also reportedly a casebound hardcover), with illustrations by Sue Shields. Two poems (“The Mead Song of Taliesin” and “Blodeuwedd”) are reprinted from Seeing Voice: Welsh Heart, but none come from Remittances. An introductory statement by the author notes that the book is “a gathering into one centre all the influences that have swayed me since I became fully conscious of being Anglo-Welsh.”

Hodges occasionally has some really memorable lines. Particularly I have liked one poem titled “Pen Rhys,” which appeared in The Anglo-Welsh Review in 1968, and was reprinted in Coming of Age:

                      Pen Rhys

Because a madness grew (and I am Welsh
And therefore mad with justice), I’ll be song
Spat out of rock and poverty,
Reprieved from balancing of right and wrong.

I’ll be amoral as the rain-washed stone
On bleak Pen Rhys, and whistle with the wind,
Grass-bent and empty of desire:
To have desired at all is to have sinned.

I’ll reach an age where nothing matters more
Than the cold rage of being; and I know
The condemnation and the praise
Are truly nothing should that wind blow.

In another poem from Coming of Age, “Instruction from the Magi,” Hodges recalls two people who taught him much. For one, he gives only the initials “J.E.” but the other he names as Cennydd (i.e., Cenydd, or Kenneth Morris):

 . . . Cennydd, you incited me
With prophecies and predictions
Of freedom. Now you are safely dead and freed
From the blame the half-dead bear alone.
And now begins that near-known meaning
Of wind whispering between empty stones.

. . .
I think that Cennydd knew my destiny, had read it
In the stone Book of Carnac: J.E. had plumbed
My bloodiness with a cunning knowledge.

Above all, they were never rational; but small
And frail and unconquerable men: they have taken my heart
To their graves that their blood may flow in the veins
And arteries of Wales. There will be battle,
Payment for the essential and the undesired mead.

I created a garden from the dry, cracked limestone
Of Morgannwg, and asked no more than the lies
Of comfortable Iolo, and Iestyn’s victory,
And the falsity of books upon a winter night.

Because of two dead men I must re-live Cattraeth,
Pay for the mead I did not drink, and see the glaze
Of staring English eyes in the blazing sun.

I wish I could know some peace again upon my borders,
Behind a flowering hedge taller than Englishmen.

I think that Cennydd knew my desity, had heard it
From the talking winds of Carnac: J.E. had heard
Some whisper of that wind and recognised the voice.

In an autobiographical note in Contemporary Poets (1970), edited by Rosalie Murphy, Hodges wrote a bit more about his association with Morris:

“Educated only to high school standard, but thereafter was fortunate to meet Dr. Cenydd Morus and to study Welsh literature with him. His tuition civilised, formulated and gave some unity of purpose to what would otherwise have remained an unresolved flux of callow prejudices. He was eminent in everything except fame, content to impart his knowledge freely to one who shared his own delight in that knowledge."

Morris died in 1937, when Hodges was twenty-two. Hodges afterwards married and had three sons. In later years he lived in Penarth, and was friends with Kenneth Morris’s executor, Alex E. Urquhart, who in his nineties aided me in my work on Morris, and shared with me Hodges's booklets and poems after I visited him in Penarth in 1992. At that time he showed me Morris’s desk, which he still had and used, as it had come to him after Morris’s death fifty-five years earlier.

Note:  I also keep an occasional blog on Kenneth Morris here.

The Captain: A History, Index and Bibliography

Some time ago, Chris Harte sent me a photograph of "Nicholas Olde" (the pseudonymous author of The Incredible Adventures of Roland Hern, published in 1928) to go along with my entry on Olde, here, at my Lesser-Known Writers blog. It was a discovery from his work on a book on The Captain, a UK magazine for boys which ran from 1899 through 1924. 

His book has since been published. It is titled The Captain: A History, Index and Bibliography (Sports History Publishing, 2021), ISBN 9781898010135 £10.95. It is a very thorough look at the 300 issues of The Captain that were published.  There is a plethora of photographs of the various contributors, as well as covers, and informative essays on the magazine itself, but the heart of the book is the the contents listing of each issue, and the indexes of writers (one of "Major Writers"--which has biographies of the writers-- the other of "Other Writers" which just lists the volumes of The Captain in which each writer appears), and illustrators (similarly, the "Major Illustrators" section has biographies, while the "Other Illustrators" lists just names and appearances).  

There were a huge number of writers and illustrators that are represented in The Captain, but let me list here a selection of names that might interest Wormwoodiana readers:  Francis Henry Atkins (and other nom de plumes), Charles Beadle, H. Bedford-Jones, A.E. Bestall, John Buchan, A.M. Burrage, Ernest Favenc, Warwick Goble, Lucy Moberly, Frank C. Pape, Max Rittenberg, Herbert Vivian, F.A.M. Webster, and P.G. Wodehouse.  I was interested to see Ridgwell Cullum identified as a pseudonym (new to me) of Sidney Groves Burkhard, and while Patrick Vaux is correctly identified as a pseudonym of MacLaren Mein, one of his other pseudonyms, Nigel Tourneur, is described as a probably pen-name, but not identified with Mein.  

Anyway, there is a lot of information in this book to enjoy and digest in its nearly four hundred pages, much more than one might expect considering its remit of covering one magazine. Thereby it helps fill in details on many of the writers and illustrators who filled its pages.