'Cold Harbour' by Francis Brett Young: A Guest Post by John Howard

Perhaps the 1920s was the golden age of leisure travel. That was when the covers of Ordnance Survey maps began to feature drawings of sturdy hikers and cyclists poring over maps working out the route which would see them safely to their destination, or car passengers sitting in comfort while their chauffeur intently studies another signpost. But away from cities and the widened and straightened arterial routes and new bypasses, the ‘open road’ could still be a trial for the motorist: clouds of dust in summer, rivers of the flood at any time. And the potholes… There are probably many who would say that British roads have scarcely improved in the hundred years since the publication in November 1924 of Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young.

Born in Halesowen, a Worcestershire town on the edge of the Black Country, Francis Brett Young (1884-1954) trained as a doctor but sold his practice and settled down to writing novels. Many were set in the English West Midlands and the border country of the Welsh Marches; through the consistent use of recurring place names and landscape features – for example, Birmingham became ‘North Bromwich’ and Halesowen ‘Halesby’ – Brett Young created his own ‘West Midlands Mythos’. The endpapers of the Severn Edition featured an attractive stylised map by Geoffrey Eyles which serves as an entrancing portal to Brett Young country – but all is not as serene as it appears. Several of the earlier novels, such as The Dark Tower (1915) and Cold Harbour itself, possess a gothic atmosphere of dark, sharp, urgent sensibility: driven people with brooding secrets in a troubled landscape which is not only the long result of human intervention but an ominous character in its own right.

Cold Harbour begins with an urbane ‘Prelude’ set far away from England, on Capri, and narrated by the nameless host, a former doctor and now expatriate author, entertaining his guests. Sitting out on the moonlit terrace after dinner is Ronald Wake, an old friend who still practiced medicine, and his wife Evelyn. Making up the foursome is Harley, the island’s new Anglican chaplain. To the host’s practised eye, it seems that all three of his guests are tasting freedom. The clergyman, invalided out of the army, has been given a cure in more than one sense; the Wakes are enjoying their first holiday in Italy since the end of the war. Although the Wakes had escaped an autumnal London, they were still ‘haunted by the tinkle of a phantasmal night bell’ (2). Also haunting the warm night is the calling of the island owls. A little more conversation makes it clear that the Wakes have a story clamouring for release, and the four decide to remain out on the terrace while Evelyn begins to tell it: ‘I feel as if this sweet house might be . . . how can one put it? . . . contaminated by a story like this. Under the open sky it’s different: safer, somehow’ (7).

Earlier in the autumn the Wakes had been driving home from a short break in Wales. Foul weather and repeated punctures on the main road to North Bromwich forced them to turn off near Halesby and take refuge in a small inn. The story that develops is a complex interwoven one, a series of oral recollections that not only strike off each other but open dialogues between past and present. Harley listens as the three discuss and piece together their accounts, which all centre on one man: Humphrey Furnival, whom the Wakes encountered at the inn. Furnival is now owner of an old house close by – Cold Harbour.

Humphrey Furnival is perhaps the most memorable character in Brett Young’s work. Discussing Cold Harbour in Supernatural Horror in Literature H.P. Lovecraft accurately summarised Furnival as a ‘mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend . . . [who] is redeemed from triteness by many clever individualities.’ Furnival had quickly become obsessed with his purchase and its history, which he reconstructed from Celtic times. Bloody violence, death, scandal: have they perhaps permeated the house itself? Furnival explains – even as he seems to stand apart from it: ‘I only offer you the material, the turnip and the candle out of which to build your bogey, if you want one, as most people do’ (169). In the meantime, Jane Furnival describes the dreadful and spiritually polluting effect of Cold Harbour as she assures Evelyn Wake that Furnival is in danger from the evil forces in and around the house – if not already possessed by them. The Wakes are glad to leave and continue their journey to London. After meeting the Furnivals it seemed to them that it was ‘as though the whole course of our lives had been changed, as if they’d been thrust out of their normal, peaceful orbit by a blow from something dark and invisible whirling out of space’ (186).

In the chapter ‘Symposium’ the host and his guests piece together the interlocking narratives and consider what they have found. Humphrey Furnival ‘has made himself king of a desert island. Napoleon on Elba’ (208); the Furnivals seem trapped by their house, seemingly unable to escape. Or have they somehow become willing collaborators and co-creators? There would seem to be only one way that Furnival’s reign could be ended and the couple gain release.

Writing in his Preface to the Severn Edition, Brett Young stated: ‘I can always feel “in my bones” whether a house is “good” or “evil,” and it seemed to me well worth while attempting to convey that sort of sensation or impression in words.’ Time has proved him right. After a century Cold Harbour remains, with its meticulous construction and attention to detail and character portraits, not only the chilling account of a haunted house and its inhabitants, but a truly regional horror story which encompasses an entire landscape and history. 

(John Howard)

The Croglin Vampire - England's Earliest Vampire Legend?

Withnail Books of Penrith have announced the latest in their series of limited edition literary booklets. This is The Croglin Vampire, with the sub-title England's Earliest Vampire Legend? Editor Adam Newell has brought together a wealth of original and new material surrounding a mysterious folklore tradition in a remote Cumbrian village. This illustrated history traces the origins of the story and its continuing resonances, which include links to a Dracula movie and a Swiss heavy metal band. 

The 40pp chapbook, with sixty illustrations, is in a limited edition of 250 copies.It includes a frontispiece illustration by noted fantasy artist Les Edwards and a signed and numbered print of a linocut by Sharon Gosling. Withnail publications tend to go rather quickly.

Update 2 November: now sold out.

(Mark Valentine)

'Sard Harker' by John Masefield: A Guest Post by Henry Wessells

The year is 1897. A sailor ashore in one of the sugar countries of leeward South America that had experienced a civil war a decade earlier. Chisholm Harker, known as Sard (for ‘sardonic’), is a straight-edge first officer on a British sailing ship, who accompanies his Captain for a day’s leisure in Las Palomas before the Pathfinder sails. They attend a boxing match that descends into foul fighting and crooked refereeing. Harker has served under Captain Cary since he went to sea at thirteen, and has risen to hold a position of trust, so when they overhear talk suggesting that there is a plot to kidnap an Englishwoman resident in the port city, Harker is despatched to warn her brother before rejoining the ship.

He borrows a bicycle, delivers the message to Mr. Kingsborough at his residence, Los Xicales. Harker catches a glimpse of the sister and at a phrase of her conversation, ‘her voice rang in his brain like a memory’, but the brother swiftly dismisses him and seems to pay little heed to the warning. The borrowed bicycle is stolen, and the novel steps boldly into the terrain of romantic adventure: a paradise of metaphor and simile.

Sard Harker, by poet John Masefield, published by Heinemann in October 1924, is set in Santa Barbara, ‘an imaginary country on the north-east coast of South America, a tinpot Ruritania run by dictators and financed by the United Sugar Company’ (as John Clute has noted in The Book Blinders). It is in the great tradition of exotic English adventure in South America, W.H. Hudson’s first book, The Purple Land (1885), and his Green Mansions, published in 1904, the same year as Joseph Conrad’s novel of political intrigue Nostromo. John Buchan’s The Courts of the Morning (1929) is another interwar entry in the tradition. Even more than with the works of Buchan, Sard Harker is closely adjacent to the fantastic. Trying to take a short-cut to get back to his ship, Harker steps upon a sting-ray and receives a full dose of its sting.  He writhes in agony on the beach:

'The poison seemed to swing him round and double him up. It seemed to burn every vein and shrivel every muscle and make every nerve a message of agony. He managed to cast loose the wrapping from the foot. The foot no longer looked like a foot, but like something that would burst. In his deadly sickness he thought that his foot was a pollard willow tree growing to the left of the road.  [. . .] When he came to himself a little, he said something about the stars being too many, altogether too many, for the job in hand. He said that he could not pick up the guiding lights. Then he felt that every star was a steamer’s masthead light, and that all those myriads of steamers were bearing down upon him without sidelights.'

In early passages of the novel, Masefield sketches the history of Santa Barbara and the revolution of 1887, of Harker’s childhood and early maritime career, and plants the deep roots of coincidences that will unfold years later. The cast of characters includes dodgy ministers, crooked detectives, warm-hearted old salts, a dirty, beautiful woman in a shack on a beach, snakes both human and reptile, murderous villagers, kindly wives, and vultures. When Harker explains the meaning of his name to the beauty in the shack, ‘one who listens’, she muses about what people listen for: ‘“The sea wind in the heat,” she said thoughtfully, “and the crowing of the cock in the night of pain; and, in life, the footstep of the beloved who never comes; or when he does come, goes on the instant.”’ She asks him what he listens for. All he will say is, ‘A change of wind, perhaps. Adios.’

Harker falls among evil companions who put him on a freight train to nowhere, into a desert mining town where he only just escapes a firing squad and heads for the hills. The landscape is harsh and ancient and impossibly beautiful. Harker crosses mountains upon mountains, hears a dead friend speaking to him in dreams, and then hears the rocks speaking and winds singing. It is the South America of abandoned villages and mysterious temples, a land of adventure and visions, and wild honey. As he attempts to cross the snowfields, the boundary between dream and waking is fluid, for the figurehead of the Pathfinder appears to him in a dream. She guides him across the glacier and disappears as he finds another tomb and then the trail down to another port town, San Agostino. Masefield specifies that his trek lasted nineteen days. Harker has returned to the workaday world: a fellow officer hails him and asks, “Could you take the Yuba to Santa Barbara?”

And upon arrival in the capital port, Harker is thrust back into political intrigue and high Gothic coincidence and confrontation. Captain Cary has died of a fever and after his burial at sea, the Pathfinder has gone upon the rocks: ‘the day after he goes, the sea smashes all that ever he made, as though it were nothing.’ Harker meets his long-lost childhood love, and is imprisoned with her by a devilish false priest, who ‘now wore a scarlet robe wrought with symbols, which gave him the appearance of a cardinal of the Middle Ages.’

With his prisoners before him, the former Father Garsinton, self-styled Holy One, Sagrado, ‘sat still for a moment upon his throne. Once again Sard had the impression that something evil flowed into the man to make him bigger: he seemed to dilate and glow with an increase of personality.’

It is, perhaps the oldest convention in the fantastic, that the evil villain is powerless not to expound to the helpless, intended victims; and thereby chronicle his own doom, and permit the survival — against all odds — of the innocent. This is solely the province of literature. The bombs fell without warning in Dresden or Tokyo or Gaza or Beirut or . . . The other thing the Gothic teaches us from its beginnings is that psychological horror is the fiercest of all: horrors inflicted by one human being upon another. The supernatural is by definition outside the realm of human experience, and its intrusion into the world is (as Wendy Walker has suggested) the literary expression of profound injustices, which upon examination, are rooted in laws made to protect owners at the expense of the dispossessed.

John Masefield (1878-1967) was trained as an officer in the merchant marine service and went to sea at sixteen, sailing on the four-master Gilcruix round Cape Horn to Chile. It is reported that despite his love of the sea he was an indifferent sailor and was eventually shipped home ‘distressed British seaman’. Harker’s nautical attitudes seem deeply rooted and carefully observed from within. Masefield jumped ship in New York and travelled in the U.S., working for a time in Yonkers and reading the great English poets. He returned to England for good in 1897, and  soon made his name as a poet, beginning with Salt-Water Ballads (1902). Masefield was named poet laureate in 1930 but his manner remained ‘simple and unaffected … He took special pleasure in helping younger writers’ (ODNB). In person, he was tall and blue-eyed, with 'an expression of perpetual surprise' (Muriel Spark). 

Sard Harker was the first of three novels by John Masefield set in the country of Santa Barbara. ODTAA (1926) looks at the history of Santa Barbara before the events of Sard Harker and is as episodic as its title suggests: ‘one damned thing after another’; The Taking of the Gry (1934) is a further return to the land.  

I read Sard Harker in a copy of the deluxe issue (one of 350 copies signed by the author), that had remained unopened after page 20, so I felt a bit like someone coming into an abandoned house. I opened the pages, and read the novel with delight. The central chronicle of Harker’s inland travels is startling and vivid and richly imagined. I have given only the barest outlines of the book and the pleasure is all in the reading. It’s not Nostromo but the adventure is as gripping as anything written in the 1920s.

Dust jacket of Sard Harker (London: William Heinemann, 1924), courtesy of James Cummins Bookseller, New York City. ODTAA map from the deluxe edition, private collection of Henry Wessells.

Conjunctions issue 83: Contents Announced

The contents for the forthcoming issue of Conjunctions, issue 83 (Revenants: The Ghost Issue, co-edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow), has just been announced, and it's very nice to see some names familiar to our small press world (including authors published by Tartarus Press and Swan River Press) amongst the contributors:

Mark Valentine, "Lost Gonfalon"

Reggie Oliver " Le Vieux des Bois"

Timothy J. Jarvis  "A Monstrum"

alongside many familiar names like Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Carroll, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand,  James Morrow, Peter Straub, Paul Tremblay,  and many others.  

Not sure when the print edition will come out, but you can see the announcement and the full list of contents here. 

Ghosts & Scholars 47

The latest issue of the M.R. James journal Ghosts & Scholars is now available. Issue 47 has been guest edited by Helen Kemp, with cover artwork by Loretta Nikolic.

This issue includes four new stories in the Jamesian tradition, ‘The Light of Darkness’ by David A. Sutton, ‘A Crooked Path’ by Josh Reynolds, ‘Professor Parkin’s Christmas Holiday’ by Tina Rath and ‘Whitaker on Daemons’ by George Frost.

In non-fiction, Katherine Haynes asks ‘Is George Martin bewitched and is he a murderer?’, in a new consideration of MRJ’s ‘Martin’s Close’, and Dr Richard Hoggett discusses ‘M.R. James and the Abbey of St.Edmund, Bury St. Edmunds’. Norman Darwen provides a note on M.R. James and the psychic researcher Harry Price, while in her regular column Rosemary Pardoe argues that MRJ’s stories are not characteristically Victorian and that they do have, like more modern stories, elements of doubt and ambiguity. There are also book and podcast reviews.

Update: this issue may still be available from Cold Tonnage Books. 

(All subscriber copies have been posted.)