A Book in Old Scarlet: Bodkin and Eden's 'A Guide to Caper'

A Guide to Caper (1924) by Thomas Bodkin (words) and Denis Eden (pictures), which celebrates its centenary this month, is a book of vignettes of a city inhabited by bears. Caper, we are told, is not its real name.

In his introduction Bodkin pays tribute to a childhood book he calls (in capitals) a PRECIOUS BOOK, bound in ‘Officers’ Scarlet’. It consisted upon opening of one long—very long—fold-out page with a series of panels illustrating an English spa town. This might have been one of the well-known ones such as Bath or Malvern, or it might have been imaginary. The boy would pore over these pictures and delight in them. It also had a charming aroma he has not been able to rediscover. 

It was because of this book that he and his friend, Eden, decided to make one of at least approaching the same kind (though not folding-out), about a place that is only found by going the wrong way. This also is bound in bright scarlet, though in copies I have seen this has tended to fade over the years. 

As in some of the tales of Lord Dunsany, illustrated by Sidney Sime, the visitor enters through a great city gate, and beyond this may be seen towers, domes, spires and turrets. Other pictures depict The Chemists’ Quarter (though there are no chemists), The Palatine Avenue, The Fountain in the Fruit Market, The Museum, The City Under the Stars.

Eden’s twenty-one pictures are delightful, full of unusual small details, so that there always seems something else to discover. They faithfully reflect Bodkin’s text, so it is evident the two worked closely together. But not everything is described in the prose, so that the reader might well notice other things, or even have a different view about what is depicted: there could be many versions of Caper. There is also the sense that, though the text is written for children, the author has half a sly eye on adult readers too. 

There is something else unusual about this book. Fairy tales and fantasies usually involve princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and the sumptuous courts kept for them by servants. Not here. No royalty nor aristocracy, no priesthood, is represented. Though there is a ruinous Royal Palace, ‘There are no kings now in Caper, only a Ruler who is called the Mayor of the Palace. The chief inhabitants take turns at being Mayor. Each one holds the office for seventeen days at a time.’ They mostly spend the time sleeping.

Caper does not seem to need much governing, for the citizens run things. As in any mortal city, there are those less fortunate: cripples, the poor, the tired, the aged. But the city has an almshouse, a soup kitchen, a public park and a public playroom, a museum, a guild or friendly society, and other benevolent institutions. It is, in brief, a Commonwealth. This is quite a contrast to the power, wealth and pomp taken for granted in most fantasy realms.  

None of this near-realism, if we may say that of a book about bears, detracts from the charm of the vignettes: in fact, they are enhanced by it. We feel that though this is a toytown place it has a certain odd plausibility and a slight air of melancholy which makes it more haunting.

Besides, the author and artist also indulge in flights of whimsical fantasy. The Bookshop in the city is: ‘the biggest and the best shop in Caper . . . the Ursors are great readers . . . As there is only one book shop in Caper it has to keep open almost all night, in case any Ursor might finish his book before it was time to go to bed and want to begin another.’ This strikes me as a Good Idea. Books are inexpensive: ‘Quite good books can be had for a flower or a sugar-topped biscuit’, though, says the narrator, ‘I have heard of a book so rare that the price of it was a young tree.’

The artist seems to be William Denis Eden (1878-1949), a student at the Royal Academy from 1898 to 1901. At the end of the book is a note: ‘The original drawings reproduced herein are for sale. For particulars apply to Denis Eden, Esq., care of the Publishers, 97 & 99, St. Martin’s Lane, London.’ It is rather tempting to write even now and ask if they have any lurking in their archives.

He illustrated at least one other book, Whistles of Silver (1933) by Helen Parry Eden, presumably a relation. In a copy of the Caper book I have, Eden has hand-drawn an emblem on the half-title, depicting a bear framed in a circle formed by his own name.

Thomas Bodkin was an art historian from an Irish background with several studies to his name. He also introduced The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1922) with illustrations by Harry Clarke and wrote a foreword to a study of the artist Glyn Philpot (1951).  A Guide to Caper was reprinted in 1945. It seems a pity they did not work together on other books.

(Mark Valentine)

 

'The Old Ladies' by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

The prolific and popular author and novelist Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) knew something about cathedral cities and what went on behind the pleasant façades. The son of an Anglican priest who later became a bishop, Walpole had been sent to schools in Canterbury and Durham, cities which boasted ancient and magnificent cathedrals, and Truro, where the cathedral, newly designed in a soaring authentic gothic style, was under construction. The years Walpole spent living in cathedral cities were not forgotten – he went on to create one of his own.

Many of Walpole’s novels are loosely connected: not intended to be read in any specific order but including recurring characters and settings. Among these were four novels that, in the ‘by the same author’ listing at the front of his books, are grouped under the heading ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’. Set in the Glebeshire cathedral city of Polchester – based on Truro and used in other novels and short stories – the first, The Cathedral, appeared in 1922. The second, The Old Ladies, was first published one hundred years ago in October 1924.

Although there are glimpses of Polchester Cathedral and the charismatic Archdeacon Brandon, The Old Ladies is true to its title and concerns three elderly women whom circumstance has brought to meagre rented rooms on the top floor of a ‘windy, creaky, rain-bitten’ tumbledown house in Pontippy Square (1). Walpole describes the background and bleak situation of each of the ‘old ladies’ in some detail: their characters, which interweave with each other due to their proximity, contrast greatly. Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer have one thing in common: their crippling genteel poverty. Forced to live on rapidly declining incomes, their lives are ones of constant retrenchment and quiet desperation. Mrs Payne, however, is able to live within the limits of her income. Her ‘lazy indifference’ to anything but her craving for sweets and cake is some protection from the dismal world of the other two women.

Lucy Amorest is a widow who longs to be reunited with her son, who emigrated to the United States but has not written for a long time. Her cousin also lives in Polchester; wealthy but in declining health, he taunts her with hints of the fortune he might leave. May Beringer has no-one but her little dog, Pip – and a piece of red amber carved into a dragon, a gift from her only true friend, now estranged. Her money will only last a few more months. Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer are rather pinched, timid women, seeking only to endure in a society that, without admitting it, does not need them or care whether they live or die. In contrast, Agatha Payne, another widow, exploits the good nature of the other ladies as weakness and is in effect a ‘psychic vampire’. A ‘large, stout, and shapeless woman’ (29), she has a vitality and strength partly fortified by an overbearing but outwardly polite domination of the other two. Although Mrs Payne is physically healthy, the housekeeper feels it would be no ‘wonder if she went queer in the ’ead any day’ (53). She finds a new focus in life when she notices, and instantly covets, Miss Beringer’s prize possession: ‘ . . . she saw, straight before her, as though it had been placed there for her especial glory, the heart and centre of all the colour of the world’ (92). From that moment Mrs Payne is determined to possess the piece of amber – by any means.

Against the background of Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer’s approaching destitution, the novel describes the mental contest for possession of the amber. Mrs Payne’s manner to Miss Beringer is politely intimidating as she threatens never to leave Miss Beringer alone unless she is given the amber. But the psychological battle (and is it only a ‘psychological’ one?) is turned after Miss Beringer’s death, when Mrs Payne declares that she is being haunted. She refuses to believe that Miss Beringer is dead, finally rejecting Mrs Amorest’s explanations and sympathy: ‘You can’t help me! It's between us – and I’ll beat her yet!’ (303).

Hugh Walpole’s ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ may be compared to the Barsetshire novels of Anthony Trollope – especially when they take place in or near the cathedral city and explore the machinations of the clergy and other inhabitants of the cathedral close and city. As born storytellers, both men can verge on the melodramatic or sensational, but if Walpole is a Trollope, he is one gone ‘gothic’. The Old Ladies has a constant dense and claustrophobic atmosphere of being enclosed, walled away from the world: most of the story unfolds indoors – rooms in the decaying house in Pontippy Square, or the sickroom of Mrs Amorest’s cousin. The gothic is nearly always psychological rather than supernatural – although Walpole wrote much explicitly supernatural fiction too, mainly in its ideal short story form (exemplified by the collection All Souls’ Night). The novels are works of realism, set in the real world, but allowing for instances of bizarre intrusion: psychological or possibly, from the character’s point of view, supernatural.

Although the return of Brand, Mrs Amorest’s son, ensures that one of the women will end her days in peace and security, her closing words are hesitant: “Is it right, do you think, to be so happy?” Under the circumstances, perhaps one out of three was not such a bad result.

 (John Howard)

The Centenary of 'Beau Geste': A Guest Post by G J Cooling

Beau Geste by P.C. Wren celebrates its centenary this month. It was to become highly popular, and the book with which he was always identified. The setting is in the period before the First World War and it starts with the meeting of a British civil servant in Nigeria and an officer of French cavalry. The latter has found a mystery of a fort containing only dead legionnaires, propped up against the battlements. Here he also finds a letter from Michael (Beau) Geste confessing to the theft back in England of the Blue Water jewel. To add to the mystery, three of his men disappear, before the fort is set alight.

The book then goes back to the three brothers Geste and their friends in their aunt’s house. The aunt is the owner of the Blue Water. The narrator is John, the youngest of the brothers. The brothers join the Foreign Legion and meet up with Hank and Buddy, two Americans who also appear in the third of the Beau Geste stories by P. C. Wren, Beau Ideal. The Legion had already been a magnet for neutrals such as Americans who sided with the Allies in the earlier stages of the First World War.

Beau and John are sent to defend the fort under command of the villainous Adjutant Lejaune. Following an attack, John and the dying Beau kill Lejaune after everyone else in the fort has been killed. Digby, the middle brother and the two Americans are in the relieving force and are the three who desert with John. John is the only one who gets back to England, where it is revealed that the Blue Water had never been stolen but surreptitiously sold by their aunt. Beau had nobly taken the blame to shield her and his brothers.

The exploits of T.E. Lawrence had quickened interest in desert warfare, but he pattern of the book may also be influenced by The Four Feathers (1902) by A.E.W. Mason, about the Mahdist war.  Accusations of cowardice lead three of his fellow British Army officers to give the hero Harry Feversham three white feathers, and his girlfriend Ethne then adds a fourth. The rest of the book concerns Feversham’s often almost suicidally brave actions to get the four feathers taken back. In this he is successful and eventually wins back Ethne as well. The books have in common the themes of nobility, self-sacrifice and honour redeemed. Both the books’ heroes have what might be regarded as quixotic motivations.

There are differences. The Four Feathers was written before the First World War and the huge casualties of the trenches, and so has attitudes uninfluenced by those events. Beau Geste was written after the war but is in a world apart: the French Foreign Legion and the whole Army of Africa were looked down on by the metropolitan conscript army charged with defending France against Germany. Both books may be seen as dealing with what has been called the ‘Scramble for Africa’, although French involvement in Africa goes back before. Indeed, the Foreign Legion’s involvement goes back to 1831.

The Four Feathers is very much an officer class book. The Geste brothers are equally upper class, but they enrol as ordinary legionnaires. Mason’s book has rather more complexity in terms of ambiguous characters and in its depiction of indigenous people. There is also more subtlety about Feversham’s character: Mason suggests Harry is afraid of showing fear rather than being frightened as such and this is one of the main themes of the novel.

Beau Geste amplified the legends of the Legion and led to many imitations, pastiches and parodies. It is undoubtedly melodramatic and contrived, but has pace, plot twists and excitement, story-telling qualities that have helped it to endure.

 (G J Cooling)

Image: Richard Selby Books (Bath)

Arthur Machen's The Terror: A New Critical Edition

Darkly Bright Press is open for pre-ordering their limited hardcover edition of  Arthur Machen's The Terror. This "New Critical Edition of the Mythopoeic Classic"includes the original Daily News serial of the text ("The Great Terror" October 1916), that of the first hardcover edition of the novel (Duckworth, February 1917), and the condensed version for the American periodical The Century Magazine ("The Coming of the Terror" October 1917). There are additional essays by Dale Nelson, Thomas Kent Miller, David Llewellyn Dodds, Fr. John Bethancourt, and myself (part of my contribution appeared in a recent issue of Faunus, though I've added a new section to it for this book version). Also considered is Machen's revised edition of 1927, with its unfortunate addition of one paragraph near the end, and a discussion of Emlyn Williams's unproduced screenplay, based on the novel. Plus lots of annotations (by editor Christopher Tompkins) and other associated items of interest. 

A flier is copied below, but do check out the publisher's pre-order page  which can be found here.