‘A Rather Beautiful Refuse’ – Mayvale by H E Clifton and James Wood

Mayvale (1915) is a slim volume of 44 pages in mottled royal blue boards with its title in gilt lettering. My copy has faded around the edges, leaving a panel of deep blue in the middle, like a night sky seen through an attic window. In one corner of this is a ring-mark, from some long-ago cup or glass, and its ghostly sphere now looks like a crescent-moon, waxing.

It is very scarce in this book form, or indeed any form at all. Co-written by H.E. Clifton and James Wood, it is notable for its preface by Wyndham Lewis, one of his earliest pieces, in fact among his first publications in a book. Lewis had earlier devised his album of illustrations to Timon of Athens, and two issues of his Vorticist journal Blast! There is a passing reference to wanting to hear about the preface in a letter from T S Eliot to Lewis of circa November 1915.

‘Mayvale’ first appeared in the one penny varsity newspaper The Cambridge Magazine, vol 5 no 8 (4 December 1915) and this appears to be a bound offprint from that, with a two page advertisement for the magazine at the end. The paper is described in these notices as ‘a leader in progressive thought of the younger generation’. This offprint volume is dated by the British Library to 1915 too.

The prose, arranged in very short chapters of a page or so or even a few paragraphs, is written in what Lewis describes as an ‘elliptic’, ‘external’ style. ‘Its beauty,’ he writes, ‘is, in the first place, the accident of a method. The method is a patchwork of streaks and islands of life, and rigidly exteriorised in vision.’

That is to say, people, places and incidents are described, but with no attempt to evoke their inner meaning or interpret them. The effect is therefore photographic, like sifting through a sequence of black-and-white snapshots, leaving the reader to consider what each scene means, if anything. The setting is a coastal town and a minor private school, and follows a boy’s arrival there, late because of a rock-fall on the railway line, and then the masters and scholars he encounters. Although a few desultory things happen, they are presented in the same even, detached tone throughout: there is not exactly a plot, and the ending is inconsequential. It seems to me likely that some of the figures in the book are portraits of Cambridge contemporaries or possibly even those involved in Lewis’ art circles.

This is a very early example of English experimental writing, and seems now like a harbinger of later avant-garde prose such as Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward’s Mortmere stories. (These also include scenes at a private school and a railway accident, which is either a curious coincidence or an intentional tribute). Some of the passages in Mayvale have an eerie beauty and the effect of the technique is, curiously enough, not realism, but a drifting, dreamlike atmosphere.

Lewis evokes the ‘vague and demure behaviour that it chooses, it leaves you with Norfolk jackets with outside pockets, a kiss (that might have been sulphurous, but was probably Pierrotesque), the rings of a white-haired old gentleman.’ Mayvale, while it apparently simply describes observable encounters and occurrences, also makes these everyday things seem uncanny, charged with meaning. ‘The restlessness of closed lives crossed for a moment, have been put together for you,’ avers Lewis, calling the piece ‘a rather beautiful refuse.’ It would be absurd, Lewis concludes, to become interested in any person or thing in the story, but (as he clearly knew) in fact the reader does: and not only that, the reader may well be induced by the technique to see the people and things around him anew, with the same objective and curious gaze as the book.

Of the two authors, it seems possible that H E Clifton was Hubert Everard Clifton MC (1891-1916), a Lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment who died at the Fort Pitt Military Hospital, Chatham of pneumonia after being wounded in action during the Battle of the Somme. Clifton was born in Loughborough on 18 July 1891, the son of a Wesleyan minister. He went to the Magnus Grammar School, Newark and The Rydal Mount School at Colwyn Bay: the latter could well have provided some of the seaside and school scenes in Mayvale.

He then entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1910 and was awarded a BA in 1913. A law student, he intended to train for the profession but joined up when war broke out. He is described as “an exceptionally clever caricaturist”, a skill involving the same sort of keen observation evidenced in the prose, and which may also support the idea that the characters in Mayvale are based on people he knew.

Although he had left Cambridge by the time of the publication of the piece, he was not posted to France until June 1915, and so may have kept up his associations with the university: the Cambridge Magazine was taken by many ex-students, and copies could be found as far afield as Egypt and India. Its contributors were also drawn from a wide literary field, not solely from current undergraduates.

As to Clifton’s partner in prose, James Wood, he may be a J E H Wood of St John’s College, Cambridge, who read Classics there in 1913, but I have not so readily found any further information about him. It appears that this strange, singular work was the only publication of either author.

Sources

With thanks to Adam Green, Senior Assistant Archivist, Trinity College Library, Cambridge for help with information about H E Clifton and J E H Wood. Biographical details about H E Clifton principally from the Nottinghamshire County Council war memorial website.

Carnforth: Bookish Encounters

The railway town of Carnforth, Lancashire celebrates its association with Brief Encounter directed by David Lean (1945): key scenes were filmed at the station here, which now has a tea room of that name. During wartime, the town was thought a safer location for filming than the Home Counties, where the story is actually set. The station is on the little-known Lune Valley line from Skipton to Lancaster and beyond that to the seaside resort of Morecambe, and passes through lonely, dreaming country of green hills and woodland and old stone villages and manors.  

But Carnforth also has another attraction, a large second-hand bookshop which bears the painted announcement that it has 100,000 books. I have been calling there for many years. Originally it had three rooms of vintage hardback fiction, row upon row of forgotten authors. It was here, for example, that I found the unusual World War Two novel House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair, later reprinted at my suggestion by Persephone Books: here too were a number of Ronald Fraser books, when I began collecting them. They were all very reasonably priced too. I also once found here a rare and strange slim volume, Mayvale (1915) by H.E. Clifton and James Wood, notable for a preface by Wyndham Lewis.

Alas, old hardbacks now only occupy half a room, but there are still odd finds to be made, and there are good selections in other fields. Usually I manage to turn up unexpected titles, such as on one occasion Sherard Vines’ Green to Amber. He is an interesting character known, if at all, for his fantasy Return, Belphegor!, a satire about a demon sent to stir things up on Earth in the contemporary Thirties, which incidentally involves the Holy Grail. The novel I found is not a fantasy but has satirical aspects, so I thought it might be worth a look. There was also on that visit a rather louche novel by Richard Aldington, two Bertie Wooster paperbacks, an Evangeline Walton fantasy, and a book on Rockall, the island out in the Atlantic best known for giving its name to a zone in the Shipping Forecast. In the late Fifties, the Royal Navy landed and stuck a flag on this remote outcrop to claim it for Britain, and this book recounts the expedition and the history of previous sightings of the island.

At a later visit, after some steady, thorough searching, I had three worthwhile finds here. One was a thriller, Highly Unsafe (1936), in the Buchan style by Max Saltmarsh, who was actually Marian Winifred Saltmarsh, nee Maxwell (1893-1975), the author of just four such thrillers in the Thirties, and then apparently nothing else. Another was a quite scarce vintage crime novel, The Red Dwarf (1928) by Molly Thynne, a writer who has recently been rediscovered by crime buffs, and who sometimes uses folklore and the macabre in her work. The third was a signed copy of The Mocking Star (1931) by Michael Maurice, a Cambridge author of quite strange books I had been researching.

It was on one hot summer’s day that I also found here The Serpent and the Butterfly by Sue Mallinson, a heady 1980 occult thriller that I had never heard of when I chanced upon it, but something of the sultry intensity of the weather seemed to radiate from the book too. A young woman who has been a lifestyle journalist has saved up enough to take a year off and rents a cottage in the West Country: “On her first evening, she and her gypsy dog Imp go for a walk on the moors and are drawn towards a giant Menhir, upon whose face is the ancient carving of a Serpent. The great stone gives Lisa an uneasy feeling and inexplicably she shudders. Just then a butterfly lands upon a small pebble at her feet which takes on a strange, purplish glow." 

Soon she sees signs of a living pagan worship still in play and finds it disturbing and yet alluring. She befriends a young man who is a local bookseller, though he doesn’t seem to spend much time actually in his bookshop:  some rueful browsers might regard this as accurately observed realism. Together they explore ancient sacred sites and stumble upon more signs of something going on.

The book is very much of its time, a curious blend of Dennis Wheatley shockery and the period’s strong interest in ancient mysteries and ancient monuments. On the face of it, the plot follows the traditional lines of many occult thrillers, now seen as ‘folk horror’, where a cosmopolitan city-dweller encounters primitive rustic rituals: however, it goes some way beyond that into wider dimensions. The author’s preface says it was inspired by Castaneda, but also by her researches in mythology, magic and mystery. The novel describes and quotes enthusiastically from a noted ancient mysteries book of the period, Atlantean Traditions in Ancient Britain (1977) by the Glastonbury mage Anthony Roberts.

According to a brief note by David Langford at the SF Encylopedia, this is Sue Mallinson’s only published novel: a sequel, Atlantis Reborn, remains unpublished. There seems to be no information whatever about her to be found, nor did Mr Langford, when I asked him, have any more to offer. Unfortunately, it seems to be quite scarce. But now that there is a revived interest in Nineteen Seventies culture, particularly in the field of the fantastic and uncanny, it seems to me that the book would be greatly enjoyed by a new readership if reprinted.

(Mark Valentine)