Tennyson's Latest

 

A few years ago, Mr John Howard and I enjoyed a week’s book-browsing sojourn in the Lincolnshire Wolds, one of the least-known parts of England. These gently rolling hills contrast with the fens to the South, the crumbling North Sea coastline to the East and the industrial encrustations along the Humber to the North.

Within the Wolds there are some pleasant small towns, including Louth, scene of my forthcoming story ‘Kraken Tide’, and Horncastle, which had one of the most extraordinarily overcrowded second-hand bookshops ever seen, with the narrowest of passages between great tottering towers of tomes.

The shop also had a few curios and, for a reason that now eludes me, I decided I wanted a green ceramic Humpty Dumpty with gilt shoes that was in the window.  The proprietor’s attempts to lure this out caused ominous tremblings in the book stacks which, had they fallen, would certainly have shaken chimney-pots and caused the crows to caw across a wide area. 

I don’t even like eggs.

Also nearby is Woodhall Spa, an early Victorian hydro and still a quiet resort set among ancient woods and heath-land, with a mock-Tudor pavilion that became a picture house, the ‘kinema in the woods’. Nearby was the scene of my story ‘In Cypress Shades’ (available in The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things), where a clearing in the woods witnesses an unusual rehearsal of John Milton’s Comus, A Maske.

It was during this visit that we also made a pilgrimage to Somersby, the birthplace of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, still a very sleepy out-of-the-way village. When we drew up, two young girls were firing arrows at the post box on the village green, with all the semblance of some arcane Artemisian ritual.

One might imagine that such a mighty eminence in English Literature would be celebrated at the very least with a visitor centre involving a café, audio-visuals, a declaiming actor in cloak and tall hat, and a gift shop selling Charge of the Light Brigade plastic sabres, Come Into the Garden Pot Pourri and Crossing the Bar Funeral Stationery, with perhaps even a few books of his poems.

Nothing of the sort. What was charming here was the highly diffident acknowledgement of the poet’s association with the place. This was only to be found in the church, and consisted in its entirety of a fabric pin-board with a few fading information sheets and a small glass case containing one of the poet’s quills. This modest display was much more pleasing than anything grander. Later, even in the shire city itself, we discovered that the Tennyson Room in the museum, remembered by Mr Howard from many previous visits while residing in Lincoln, had vanished and was unknown to the attendants.

It all reminded me of the rather vague sense of the poet held by P G Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster who is being wooed by a spoony girl who asks him, ‘Do you like poetry, Bertie?’, to which he replies (I paraphrase), ‘Oh, er, rather. There’s nothing I like better than curling up with Tennyson’s latest.’

However, there are still those who recognise the grandeur and power of Tennyson’s vision and among them is the Peterborough poet Cardinal Cox. His recent opuscule Idylls of the Poet is a rich, sympathetic response to Tennyson’s work and, in particular, his Arthurian themes. I remember once reading a poetry editor of the kitchen-sink Fifties complaining that every other poem he was sent was about King Arthur, but this is no longer the case and Mr Cox is to be commended for his attention both to Tennyson and to the mythic king.

His booklet begins with a boy, escaped from the stuffy rectory, lying on an ancient burial mound, where his imagination begins to interlace with that of a Dark Age minstrel reaching out to him over many centuries. This is a beguiling device, which reminded me of Lucian Taylor dreaming in the Roman camp near Caerleon, in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. The two poets resume their association in further prose interludes throughout the booklet, as Tennyson grows older. This strange overlapping is a form of haunting, perhaps, or a timeslip: that is left nicely ambiguous.

Within this framework, Cardinal Cox offers ten poems, each based on a Pre-Raphaelite picture with an Arthurian theme, by such renowned artists as Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but with some lesser-known ones too. These re-tell, or re-imagine, otherworldly scenes of knights and damsels, sorcerers and seers, raven queens and rune-casters, in a timeless, mythic realm.

Suitably, these verses are composed in a High Victorian style, in closely rhymed couplets or quatrains or other traditional patterns, incantatory, like old magical spells. These forms also help to suggest the spectral influence of the ancient bard, who would have woven just such refrains in the feasting-halls of forgotten kings.

The ambience is satisfyingly redolent of the medievalist Arts & Crafts work of William Morris and his followers, but also laced with the haughty grotesquerie of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

Idylls of the Poet may be obtained direct from Cardinal Cox in return for an SAE, from 58 Pennington, Orton Goldhay, Peterborough, PE2 5RB, or by contacting:

cardinalcox1[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk

Phantom Cities - The Sodality of the Shadows

 

 

 

Phantom Cities is a collection of twelve musical pieces augmented by twelve prose vignettes and atmospheric artwork, in a crepuscular, noir style. It is the work of The Sodality of the Shadows, a group who take their name from the mysterious esoteric order founded by Arthur Machen and his close friend, the occult scholar A E Waite.

The music offers plangent, echoing vistas of dark uncanny passages, a brittle hovering on the twilight borderlands of the city and its Other, a world of eccentric recluses in attic rooms, narrow shops selling curious wares, cloaked figures, abandoned houses.

The album is available via Bandcamp as a compact disc, limited to 100 copies, or as a vinyl album, limited to 200 copies, and as a digital album available for download. You also get digital access with the CD,  and digital access and a CD with the record. The CD comes with a 24 page booklet and the album with a full size insert.

‘Sir', he said, shuffling the loose blotting-paper pages of the A-Z compulsively, and watching them narrowly as they moved, 'I will have none of the official tube map, that well-loved but treacherous wiring diagram, in its bright primary colours, that illusion of light and order. I have instead charted the lines alongside the streets, sir, you will see them here in my black ink . . .’ 

(from ‘And there are other stations’)

 

 

 

On Limited Editions

 

My first ideal in published books was the exquisite creations issued in the Eighteen Nineties, in which narrow rivulets of prose and verse seeped through the long white plains of the page. I admired the bon mot of the time about the poet whose verse got successively slimmer and margins wider until in the end he issued a book consisting entirely of margins, with no print to sully it. 

Though it was said in jest, the minimalist in me quite liked the idea. These books also appeared in very small runs, particularly by the standard of the industrious Victorians, usually of only a few hundred copies. So I felt an affinity with them, the more so as the stories I was writing aspired to have an aesthetical air to them.

I also admired those writers whose entire ‘catalogue’ of books was equally slim, their complete works consisting of no more than four or five volumes. I used to joke about the dangers to the artiste of a ‘chubby oeuvre’, consisting of far too many wearisome tomes. I had, and still have not quite relinquished, the idea that the true writer does not write all that much.

So it was consistent with these preferences that my first book of stories was itself a ‘slim volume’ and was limited to 200 copies. But this was also making a virtue out of a necessity. The publisher was fairly new and finding its way. This was the first collection by an unknown author who had only published so far about a dozen stories, all of them in zines or booklets which themselves had very small print runs, typically about 100. So it was already quite a risk to suppose that this number of readers could be doubled. Well, luckily, in the end, the 200 copies were sold.

By the time of the next book, four years later, the publisher had built up a reputation and had extended their usual print runs to 300. There was still some risk, however, in seeking a further one hundred readers for a still unknown author of somewhat peculiar work. Nevertheless the print run for this second volume of stories did eventually sell out, though of course it took more time than the 200 print run had.

It was five years before a further book of fiction appeared, this time again from a new publisher, in fact his first book. It is hard to know how many copies of this were printed, but it is probable the number was once more around 200. The three or four subsequent collections with this publisher also came out in numbers that remain a bit mysterious, one or two of them perhaps of only about 80-100 copies, but certainly not all that many.

Since the stories in these volumes had not received an airing that even I, minimalist as I was, thought was quite sufficient, I made a selection from them which was taken up by a third publisher who had recently progressed from booklets to hardbacks. He decided, with a generous confidence, to print some 400 copies. Alas, this audacity was not rewarded. 

It took over seven years to get rid of all these. Still, the experiment was useful from my point-of-view. I now knew the upper limit of interest in the stories. It appeared that 300 might be reasonably safe and maybe you could, at a pinch, push this up to 320 or even 350, but beyond that was certainly imprudent. (Oddly, though, a later sister volume of my stories from the same press sold its 400 copies in three years.)

I soon after reverted to my first publisher and made the experiment, kindly suggested to me by an eminent editor of ghost stories, of collecting my very oldest stories, fortified by a few newly written. These youthful stories are a bit rough around the edges, though perhaps they also have a certain vitality. I was doubtful myself whether any more than a few loyal or curious readers would want them, but in fact in due course even these eventually sold out.

By this time the earlier editions had begun to appear on the second-hand market, sometimes with improbable prices attached to them. This led some readers to complain that if they wanted to read these books they had to pay an awful lot of money. These lamentations caused me in the end, rather against my preference, to allow the books to be made available in paperback and electronically. But in fact, not many further sales resulted in either form. It was scarcely worth the effort of reformatting.            

The Alexandrian poet C P Cavafy, whose work I read often, used to have a few of his poems put together in slim booklets of about 20 copies, which he gave away to particular chosen friends. He resisted the suggestion that he should submit then for wider publication, which did not seem to interest him. There is a drily humorous edition of the letters exchanged between him and E M Forster, in which the latter, rather like an over-excited English spaniel, tries to cajole the poet into allowing his work to be translated into English and published by a major imprint in London and elsewhere.

Cavafy is unfailingly polite and sometimes wearily acquiesces but whenever he can he defers such suggestions or courteously deflects them. There is a nice phrase I once read about him: that he preferred to have only ‘selected readers’. To Cavafy the appreciation of a circle of discerning friends was enough.  I admire this approach while not being able quite to emulate it. Still, three hundred or so is still fairly selective: and indeed self-selected by the readers themselves. There is no evidence that more than about this number will ever succumb to the charms of my recherché prose. 

 (Mark Valentine)

A Forgotten Episode from Heart of Darkness

 

 

 

Withnail Books of Penrith Cumbria takes its name from the cult film, with the motto ‘I’ve opened a bookshop—by mistake’. The proprietor specialises in cult literature, has a shelf labelled Really Weird and enjoys books on obscure subjects. 

It was here I found the improbably-titled Tobacco Cultivation in England, an unusual item in the bibliography of the poet and nature-writer Ronald Duncan. Another visit offered a book on barbed-wire collectors in the American West.

Alongside this fascinating stock, Withnail Books also publishes nicely produced booklets of rare literary material. In the past they have issued a newly discovered piece by Saki, a ghost story possibly attributed to Mary Shelley, an unreprinted letter by T E Lawrence, and other interesting finds.

The latest publication offers At the Door of Darkness, ‘a forgotten episode’ from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a passage excised before the book was published. Though known to Conrad scholars, it has not been available more widely before.

The new publication includes a transcription of the deleted text from the manuscript, the heavily edited passage as eventually published in the printed version, and a detailed introduction by editor Adam Newell, together with a linocut frontispiece by Sharon Newell and images of Conrad's original manuscript pages. It is in a limited edition of 100 copies.

 

Powers and Presences

 

 

 

Sarob Press have recently announced Powers and Presences, a shared volume of new fiction by John Howard and Mark Valentine. The stories are inspired by the seven mid-20th century supernatural thrillers of Charles Williams,  and comprise: 

“The Dance of Gold” by John Howard, a novella in which the rector of a rural parish discovers the secret of a legendary coin and the enormous responsibilities of becoming, even temporarily, its guardian.

 “Kraken Tide” by Mark Valentine, a long story in which a vast storm flooding the Lincolnshire coast coincides with the activities of a mysterious black magician and, possibly, the secrets of the Templars.

 “Seek for the Pomegranate” by Mark Valentine, a long story about an ancient Roman talisman which leads two young scholars into a mystical adventure and the Orphic Mysteries. 

Both authors also provide afterwords about their interest in Charles Williams' work. 

John Gawsworth's Anthologies

John Gawsworth was the pen-name of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong (1912-1970). Beginning in the early 1930s, he published a series of eight anthologies, one as edited by Gawsworth, another as edited by Fytton Armstrong, and the rest anonymously.  I have all eight anthologies, but completing the chronology of when they were actually published hasn't been possible.  Perhaps one of the UK newspaper subscription databases might help sort this out, at least as to when the first reviews might have appeared, but I don't have access to any of these. Can anyone help?

The eight anthologies, with the month of publication (when known) are as follows:

October 1932. Strange Assembly: New Stories (London: Unicorn Press), ed. John Gawsworth

January 1933. Full Score: Twenty-five Stories (London: Rich and Cowan), ed. Fytton Armstrong

December 1934. New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors (London: Hutchinson).

Month? 1935. Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries: A Specially Selected Collection of Sixty-Three Complete Stories by Well-Known Writers (London: Associated Newspapers). With Thirty Illustrations by Norman Keene, and a Foreword by John Gawsworth.

Month? 1936. Thrills: Twenty Specially Selected New Stories of Crime, Mystery and Horror (London: Associated Newspapers). Twelve Illustrations by Norman Keene.

Month? 1936. Masterpiece of Thrills (London: Daily Express). Reportedly this book was a newspaper give-away.

October 1936. Crimes, Creeps and Thrills: Forty-Five New Stories of Detection, Horror and Adventure by Eminent Modern Authors (London: E H Samuel). With 30 unattributed illustrations.

October 1945. Twenty Tales of Terror: Great New Stories (Calcutta, Susil Gupta). This anthology reprints fourteen stories from Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries (1935) and six stories from Thrills (1936).

I'm presently trying to annotate some letters related to contributors in the 1935-1937 period, so figuring out in which months those anthologies were published would really help.  Thanks. 

RIP Gary William Crawford (1953-2020)

Critic, poet, fiction writer, and small press publisher Gary William Crawford passed away in his native  Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 9th, at the age of 67, after a long illness.

Gary published some six booklets of poetry, including Poems of the Divided Self (1992); In Shadow Lands (1998); The Shadow City (2005); The Phantom World (2008); Voices from the Dark: Selected Poems 1979-2009 (2009); and, in collaboration with Bruce Boston, Notes from the Shadow City (2012).

He also published two booklets of his own short fiction, Gothic Fevers (2000) and Mysteries of Von Domarus, and Other Stories (2006).

He was probably best known as a critic and publisher.  He founded Gothic Press in 1979, and edited six issues of the magazine Gothic (1979-1987), which featured criticism as well as fiction and poetry.  (Galad Elflandsson's notable story "The Exile" first appeared in issue 2 in 1979.) A listing of the contents of the six issues can be found here.  Another magazine, Supernatural Poetry, began in 1987, but apparently lasted only for one issue. From 1992 through 1997 he published fourteen issues of Night Songs, another dark poetry magazine.


Of his nonfiction, his work centered in particular on three authors, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell.

His massive J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography appeared from Greenwood Press in 1985. With Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers he co-edited the seminal collection of Le Fanu criticism, Reflections in a Glass Darkly (2011). And with Brian J. Showers he issued an updated booklet covering Le Fanu's writings as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: A Concise Bibliography (2011).  In 2006 he founded and edited a twice-yearly online journal Le Fanu Studies.

A booklet-sized study Robert Aickman: An Introduction appeared in 2003. And he edited a booklet of three essays on Aickman, Insufficient Answers (2012). (The three essays are by Philip Challinor, Rebekah Memel Brown, and Isaac Land.) In 2011 he started an online Robert Aickman: A Database, which in 2014 expanded to include a twice-yearly online journal, Aickman Studies.

Ramsey Campbell (1988) was a Starmont Reader's Guide to the author.  Gary's last book was a collection of essays he edited, Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror (2014).  

Other booklets of especial interest published by Gothic Press include poetry collections by Bruce Boston, Conditions of Sentient Life (1996) and Cold Tomorrows (1998); Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner (2007), edited by Benjamin Szumskyj;  and (apparently the final Gothic Press chapbook) Unburying the Past: The Hermeneutics of Truth in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Novels (2015), by Claudio Di Vaio.

After Gary's increasing health problems, the Le Fanu and Aickman online databases and journals went offline sometime in 2016 or 2017. Some materials can still be found via the Wayback Machine, e.g. for Le Fanu here, or for Aickman here.  He also worked on a larger critical book on Aickman but this was never completed.

He also wrote articles on  Walter de la Mare, Fritz Leiber, and Stephen King, and contributed to various reference books, like Jack Sullivan's Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986) and Marshall B. Tymn's Horror Literature (1981). 

Rex Ryan/R.R. Ryan

It's been a few years since I posted some contemporary notices of Rex Ryan's death in 1950.  Earlier I had posted a number of notices about him in an attempt to put together some biographical information about this elusive author and playwright, including his strange upbringing with a jailbird father (for what now would be considered white collar crime) in a large house with a "Buebeard's Chamber".

Browsing the British Newspaper Archive, a few more newspaper references have appeared about him in the recently digitized South Yorkshire Times and Mexborough and Swinton Times.   The following article, dated 1 October 1926, as well as including a rare photograph, has some new biographical information:

The article reads:

“Mr Rex Ryan whose ‘Tryning’ is one of the interesting performances of the Venner Repertory company’s excellent production of 'If Winter Comes,' at the Mexborough Hippodrome this week, has had an interesting career.  He began with Shakespearean work at 16 years of age, and gained part of his training with Florence Glossop Harris.  He went through the stock company school, and ran his own companies for several years.  Then he specialised in the work of Oscar Wilde, of which he is very fond, and was particularly happy in the part of Lord Illingworth in ‘A Woman of No Importance.’ He joined Mr. Venner three months ago, and made his first acquaintance with Mexborough during the present stay of the company.  Mr Ryan knows Ireland very well – loves it – and admires greatly the work of the Dublin school, which grew up round the historic effort of Miss Horniman and the Abbey Theatre.  But he is most interested in the work of Basil Macdonald Hastings, whom he regards as the Ibsen of England.  Mr Ryan is a native of Liverpool.”

Another article, dated 21 October 1927, mentions a series of "crime plays", including "The Black Triangle", which I've written about before:

And another of 23 September 1927, which includes some interesting information about a series of performances, including "Maria Marten", the infamous murder in the red barn: