Arthur Machen – Blood and Porridge

October 10, 2023

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 2)

© Penguin

One nice thing that’s happened to me during the past couple of years has been my discovery of how good a writer Daphne du Maurier was. I’d long been aware of her reputation, but until recently the only thing I’d read by her was her famous short story The Birds (1952).

However, I have lately rectified this by working my way through her best-known novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951), as well as her short-story collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories (1971). Regarding the collection, I didn’t think its title story was quite as good as the famous film it inspired, also called Don’t Look Now, in 1973 – but I thought some of the other stories in it, like A Border Line Case and The Way of the Cross, were crackers.

Now I’ve just completed another book of du Maurier’s short fiction called The Blue Lenses and Other Stories, which was originally published in 1959 as The Breaking Point. I’m happy to report that the tales in it are every bit as satisfying.

Much of the Don’t Look Now collection had a common theme, that of English people travelling abroad and having problems – by turns humorous, serious and horrible – as they leave their comfort zones and encounter the new and the strange. This theme reappears in a couple of stories in the The Blue Lenses one. Ganymede even uses the basic scenario of Don’t Look Now itself, i.e., an English visitor coming unstuck in Venice. The tale, though, isn’t a macabre one but a painful comedy of errors. An older gay Englishman lusts after a teenage Venetian waiter and gets his comeuppance from the lad’s shady relatives, who happily lead him on whilst milking him of his money. Ganymede has a few uncomfortable moments where you wonder if it’s being anti-gay or, alternatively, anti-Italian. But du Maurier – herself believed to have had a lesbian relationship with Gertrude Lawrence – gets away with it, balancing our sympathy for the pathetically naïve Englishman with our satisfaction at him getting his just deserts from the Italians. For all his pitifulness, he is still a predator.

The Chamois has an English couple travelling to some far-flung Greek mountains because the man, obsessed with hunting the goat-antelopes of the title, has been tipped off about the sighting of a notable and shootable specimen there. To get to the peaks that are its territory, they entrust themselves to the care of a goatherd-cum-mountain-guide with a primordial appearance. The woman, narrating the story, describes him as “wrapped in his hooded burnous, leaning upon his crook…” with “the strangest eyes… Golden brown in colour…” There follows a series of psychological revelations about the couple. The man hunts to make up for inadequacies in his psyche and the woman, shall we say, is simultaneously turned off and turned on by his hobby. And a weird, almost mythical narrative unfolds wherein they find it harder and harder to distinguish between the beast they’re seeking and man-beast who’s escorting them.

Similar weirdness occurs in the stories The Pool and The Lordly Ones – the former about a pubescent girl staying at her grandparents’ country house and experiencing strange dreams involving a pond in the woods beyond the garden, the latter about a misunderstood mute child who runs off with some unidentified ‘beings’ who come in the night while he and his family are holidaying on a remote moor. Both contain dashes of W.B. Yeats-style mysticism and Arthur Machen-style folk horror and are among the best stories in the book, even if in The Lordly Ones I saw the ending coming a mile away.

The remaining stories are admirably varied. The Menace is a comedy with a slight science-fictional element, about a movie heartthrob called Barry Jeans who sets hearts aflutter by communicating as few words and expressing as little emotion as possible onscreen. Offscreen he’s not much more vocal or expressive and listlessly leaves all decisions to his bossy wife and his sizeable entourage of hangers-on. Then some new technology ushers in ‘the feelies’, which promise to be as game-changing for the film industry as the arrival of ‘the talkies’. In the feelies, film stars are wired to a machine that transmits their sexual energy – what Austen Powers would call their ‘mojo’ – to the audiences watching them in the cinemas. Barry’s entourage are horrified when preliminary tests suggest that the inscrutable star’s mojo is almost non-existent. So, they embark on a drastic campaign to pep that mojo up. The Menace sees du Maurier taking the mickey out of Hollywood and I suspect it might have been inspired by some unedifying experiences with the place – for example, she was sued for breach of copyright after Rebecca was made into a film in 1939.

The Alibi is the collection’s most twisted tale, about a well-to-do and respectable man who one day seemingly flips: “He was aware of a sense of power within. He was in control. He was the master-hand that set the puppets jiggling.” He walks away from the routines, conventions and obligations of his upper-middle-class existence, invents a new identity for himself and secretly rents a room in a seedy part of London. Initially, he plans to commit murder – but his Nietzschean madness subsides somewhat and instead he starts living a parallel life as an aspiring artist, using the room as his studio. But his project gets knocked for six when the story reaches an unexpected and nasty conclusion.

Different again is The Archduchess, an exercise in magical realism. It describes the final days of a ruling dynasty in a Ruritanian microstate called Ronda, somewhere in southern Europe, which has discovered the secret of immortality. It’s difficult to know where du Maurier’s sympathies lie here. Is she writing in favour of the dynasty and, by extension, of aristocracies and the status quo everywhere? Or is she satirising it? One thing I will say – her account of a devious revolutionary named Markoi, who edits the main newspaper and uses it to seed the minds of the population with doubts, suspicions and eventual paranoia, so as to engineer the downfall of the ruling order, strikes a chord today. Markoi seems all too familiar in a modern world of fake news, where Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News helped propel Donald Trump into the American presidency and, in Britain, the Barclay Brothers’ Daily Telegraph did something similar with Boris Johnson.

Finally there’s the title story, The Blue Lenses, which I found terrifying. Its set-up is a familiar one, about a woman in a hospital recovering from an eye operation who discovers that things suddenly aren’t as they’re supposed to be. But unlike the hero in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), who removes the bandages from his eyes and finds that the world really has gone to hell, the nightmare experienced by the heroine of The Blue Lenses is ambiguous. The surreal, if not grotesque things she sees have a subjective quality and you wonder about her sanity. What makes the story more effective is her decision to pretend to the hospital staff around her that nothing is amiss, while she tries to figure out what’s happening. Her desperate efforts to stay composed heighten the horror of the situation.

As a collection, The Blue Lenses and Other Stories ticks off the checklist of things I want to find in a collection of short fiction: clear, lucid prose, plenty of incident, a variety of tones and genres, the writer’s willingness to use their imagination whether the story is grounded in reality or not, and a commitment at all times to telling an entertaining yarn. It’s another package of du Maurier marvelousness.

From famousauthors.org

October 16, 2022October 24, 2022

More Wordsworth’s ghosts

© Wordsworth Editions

Another Halloween-inspired reposting about books of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories…

I’ve just read two more collections of ghost stories published in the excellent Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery and Imagination series. Other books in this series have featured work by still-celebrated writers like E.F. Benson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James and Edith Wharton; but also by writers like Gertrude Atherton, Amayas Northcote, J.H. Riddell and May Sinclair, who were prolific and / or acclaimed in their day but whose names slipped into obscurity following their deaths. Getting republished by Wordsworth Editions might, of course, help to rescue their names from obscurity.

The two latest Wordsworth collections I’ve read were both published in 2006. They are A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread by R. Murray Gilchrist and Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew.

Firstly, I’ll talk about the collection I enjoyed less. R. Murray Gilchrist was born in Sheffield but lived for much of his life in Holmesfield, 800 feet up in Derbyshire’s Peak District. By the time of his death in 1917 at the age of 50, he was responsible for 22 novels and about 100 short stories. However, A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread is something of a misnomer because most of the stories featured don’t particularly evoke feelings of ‘dread’. Rather, they are tales of darkly gothic romance, where the atmosphere – and, alas, the prose – is often stiflingly thick.

These are stories where every building is an imposing structure with ‘stacks of twisted chimneys’ and ‘great square windows’ and is ‘a vision of gables’ that’s ‘so covered in ivy that from a distance it seems like a cluster of rare trees with ruddy trunks and branches’; where every garden is adorned with statues of satyrs, nymphs, dryads, dragons and the goddess Diana; and where the air is always suffused with the sickly-sweet smells of flowers, such as roses, lilies, honeysuckle, ‘withering snowdrops’ and ‘scarlet poppies, with hearts like fingers’ that effuse ‘a close and sleepy perfume’. The villain of the story The Manuscript of Francis Shackerley even gives off ‘a rich smell of violets’ and it’s said that ‘his skin by some artificial means had been impregnated lastingly with their odour.’

Unfortunately, Gilchrist’s writing is frequently hamstrung by melodrama (“O the midsummer noontide; the trembling air; the golden dusk that clung around the fir trunks!”) and is occasionally, clunkingly awful (“My thoughts had withered, my words had grown unpregnant”). There’s an attempt to emulate the morbid, decadent intensity found in such tales by Edgar Allan Poe as Berenice (1835), Ligeia (1938), The Oval Portrait (1842) and Eleonora (1850), but while characters indulge in much internal and external pontificating and running hither and thither to no great effect, the impression you get is one of bluster rather than of anything genuinely, dissolutely macabre. Some of the stories I found a real chore to get through.

Still, there are a few items where Gilchrist dials it down a bit and manages to strike a properly creepy note. The Lover’s Ordeal is a tale of a dare that unexpectedly ends up featuring a vampire. The Grotto at Ravensdale sees a newly married couple encounter tragedy at the titular, and haunted, cavern. The Priest’s Pavan is about a harpsichordist forced to play some demonic music at a wedding party. And A Night on the Moor itself is an atmospheric piece where the main character experiences a time-slip.

Also, two additional stories, The Panicle and The Witch in the Peak, are tagged on in an appendix at the end. Presumably this is because they eschew the aristocratic characters, lavishly gothic settings and rather po-faced tone of the other stories and instead have straightforward and refreshingly humorous narratives where working-class people experience supernatural goings-on in the Peak District. The 19-century Derbyshire dialect is rather hard to decipher, but I enjoyed these two stories more than anything else in the collection and would have liked more with their flavour.

© Wordsworth Editions

Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer is more modest in its ambitions and I have to say I found it the more enjoyable read because of that. It has eight stories, all connected by the recurring character of Aylmer Vance – ‘a curious-looking man, tall and lean in build, with a pale but distinctly interesting face’ – who as the title indicates is sensitive to paranormal activity and acts as a supernatural detective, trying to explain and put an end to hauntings suffered by other people. The narrator, however, is an acquaintance of Vance’s called Dexter. Vance tells the first three stories to Dexter, then Dexter becomes an unwilling participant in the fourth one, and then for the remaining four stories joins forces with Vance and serves as a Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

There’s nothing spectacular here, but there are some imaginative ideas – the fire-raising ghost of a frustrated poet in The Fire Unquenchable, for example, or the malevolent spirit of a pianist using his music to haunt the woman he lusted after when alive in The Indissoluble Bond. Meanwhile, The Stranger, about a young woman attracted to a mysterious figure she encounters in a local wood, is a nicely pagan affair with a hint of Arthur Machen; and the final story, The Fear, is impressively oppressive and ‘does what it says on the tin’.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Aylmer Vance as much as I might have done. This was because a year earlier I’d read a Wordsworth Editions collection called Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, written by William Hope Hodgson, which was a set of tales about, yes, another supernatural detective called Thomas Carnacki. The Carnacki stories were good enough to have influenced later writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley and the Vance stories can’t help but seem a little pedestrian in comparison.

Aylmer Vance also suffers from a problem that’s inevitable when you have a series of supernatural stories that are mostly self-contained and have different elements (ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, etc.) but also have the thread of a recurring character. If paranormal activity does happen, it must happen incredibly rarely. Otherwise scientists would have observed and recorded it and acknowledged its existence by now. So how does someone like Vance manage to defy all laws of probability and have eight full-blooded encounters with the supernatural in its different forms? William Hope Hodgson at least seemed aware of this credibility problem, for he interspersed his genuinely supernatural Carnacki stories with ones where the hauntings turn out to be hoaxes.

Vance writers Alice and Claude Askew, incidentally, were a husband-and-wife team who supposedly penned over 90 novels during a 14-year period in the early 20^th century. During World War One, they found themselves in Serbia and later in Greece, working at a British field hospital and then for the Serbian Red Cross and also writing war despatches for publications like the Daily Express. Like R. Murray Gilchrist, they died in 1917 but in a particularly tragic manner. Both were killed while they were travelling from Italy to Corfu, when their boat was torpedoed by a German submarine. Claude’s body was never found. However, Alice’s body was recovered and she’s buried on the Croatian island of Korčula.

October 20, 2021October 20, 2021

Kingsley goes green

© Penguin Books

And here’s another re-posting in anticipation of Halloween, one that originally appeared on this blog seven years ago. This time, I offer my thoughts on Kingsley Amis’s ghostly novel of 1969, The Green Man.

I can claim to be neither an expert on nor a fan of Kingsley Amis. While I’ve enthusiastically worked my way through the fiction of several of his contemporaries – Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Graham Greene – until recently I’d read only a couple of Amis’s short stories and one of his books, Lucky Jim. The latter was an early (1954) example of the literary sub-genre now known as the ‘campus novel’ and I have to say I found it pretty dated and unfunny.

I suspect the main reason for my aversion to Kingsley Amis, though, is the persona he projected when he was alive. He didn’t seem like a nice piece of work and so I rarely felt an urge to dip into his writing. In the 1950s he trumpeted his support for the Labour Party but by the 1980s he’d become an enthusiastic fan of Mrs Thatcher. He seemed to me pretty typical of people whose politics undergo a severe rightward turn during their lifetimes. Socialist egalitarianism and liberal permissiveness are great things when you have youth, and a lack of material possessions, on your side. But when you reach a point in your life when you’re too old, and too moneyed, to benefit from them any longer, and when a younger, upstart generation arrives on the scene with their own ideas about how to do things, it’s time to change into a reactionary old fart and whinge about other people being radical in a way you once were yourself.

But far worse than Amis’s Conservatism was the fact that in later years he seemed unashamedly anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic. I’ve read an interview with his long-suffering second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in which she, rather gallantly, blamed much of that nastiness not on Amis but on his fondness for alcohol. In other words, his odiousness was really just the drink speaking. However, I can’t help thinking of an old saying they have in Northern Ireland: “If it’s not in you when you’re sober, it won’t come out of you when you’re drunk.”

Still, I have one reason for liking Amis, and that’s because unlike nearly everyone else in Britain’s snobbish literary establishment at the time, he didn’t look down his nose at genre writing. He was openly supportive of it and occasionally dabbled in it himself. For example, Amis was one of Ian Fleming’s most heavyweight admirers and it’s fitting that, after Fleming’s passing, he was the first person to write a non-Fleming James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, which he published in 1968 under the pseudonym Robert Markham.

Amis was also a big fan of science fiction and in 1960 he wrote a critique of the genre, New Maps of Hell. As J.G. Ballard noted, New Maps of Hell was important for science fiction’s development because Amis “threw open the gates of the ghetto, and ushered in a new audience which he almost singlehandedly recruited from those intelligent readers of general fiction who until then had considered science fiction on par with horror comics and pulp westerns.” Predictably, though, the curmudgeonly Amis went off science fiction in the 1960s when younger sci-fi writers like Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and Thomas M. Disch started going all experimental and New Wave-y on him. Before long, he was raging at how those whippersnappers had contaminated his beloved science fiction with horrible things like “pop music, hippie clothes and hairdos, pornography, reefers” and “tricks with typography, one-line chapters, strained metaphors, obscurities, obscenities, drugs, Oriental religions and left-wing politics.”

Amis seemed too to be interested in supernatural stories and in 1969 he tried his hand at writing one, a novel called The Green Man. This has long been a neglected entry in Amis’s oeuvre, overshadowed by more prestigious books like Jake’s Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986), out of print and near impossible to find in bookshops. It was, however, adapted into a three-part drama serial by the BBC in 1990, with the script written by none other than Malcolm Bradbury, an author whose own books like Eating People is Wrong (1959) and The History Man (1975) were examples of the campus novel that Amis had helped pioneer with Lucky Jim. The TV version of The Green Man starred the splendid Albert Finney and it began with a memorable and grisly sequence that didn’t evoke Kingsley Amis, or Malcolm Bradbury, so much as it evoked Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic schlock-horror movie The Evil Dead.

Anyway, I enjoyed the televisual The Green Man so much that I made a mental note to set aside my prejudices against Amis and hunt down the original novel of The Green Man. It wasn’t until nearly a quarter-century later, however, that I noticed a new edition of The Green Man sitting on a shelf in a bookshop, bought it and finally got around to reading it. So here are my thoughts about this particular foray by Kingsley Amis into the realms of the paranormal and macabre.

The Green Man is narrated by the fifty-something Maurice Allington, the character played by Albert Finney in its TV adaptation. He owns and runs an inn of some antiquity, the titular Green Man, on the way from London to Cambridge. Living on the premises with his second wife Joyce (his junior by a number of years), his teenage daughter Amy and his ailing father, Allington is unnerved when the hoary old ghost stories associated with the inn over the centuries start to intrude on reality. In particular, he has several encounters with the ghost of Thomas Underhill, a supposed sorcerer who lived in the building in the 17^th century; and he senses the presence of a more monstrous apparition, a demonic creature that Underhill once summoned up from the local woods to destroy his antagonists. The inn’s name is a clue to this demon’s constitution.

Allington eventually realises he’s become enmeshed in a scheme that Underhill has devised to transcend his own death. However, his attempts to outwit the ghostly sorcerer are hampered by his own failings: his ill-health, his liking for the bottle – to which, of course, his family and friends attribute his strange visions – and the distractions posed by his carnal appetites. Not only is the lusty Allington engaged in an affair with another younger woman, Diana, who’s the wife of the local doctor, but he’s devised a less-than-noble scheme of his own. He wants to persuade both Joyce and Diana to participate with him in a ménage à trois.

I hadn’t got far into The Green Man before I’d realised that both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness are its characterisations. Amis does an excellent job of sketching Allington, with his many vices and virtues. He’s annoyingly conceited, intellectually as well as socially. Talking about his book collection, he says sniffily: “I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel… to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself.” Allington, thus, is a poetry snob. “By comparison… verse – lyric verse, at least – is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.”

Actually, his love for the poetic and his disdain for the more mechanical medium of prose remind me slightly of the late 19^th century / early 20^th century occult writer Arthur Machen, who speculated in his fiction that supernatural phenomena are best perceived by people with receptive intellects and imaginations. These include the very young, the insane and the poetically-inclined. Perhaps that’s why, of all the people living, dining and drinking in the Green Man, the verse-loving Allington is the one with whom the supernatural intelligence of Thomas Underhill makes contact.

Meanwhile, feminist readers will no doubt feel like strangling Allington on account of his baser musings. “Ejaculation,” he comments at one point, “as all good mistresses know, is a great agent of change of mind and mood.”

And yet as a bundle of contradictory traits – stuck-up, sexist, cynical, drunken, cranky, comical, cunning, occasionally courageous and very occasionally principled – Allington is a believable figure in this story. He might be an unfortunate mess of vanity, lust and booze, but at the book’s finale, when he rushes out of the inn and into the night to try to save the sleepwalking Amy from the predatory green man, we aren’t surprised that he shows a streak of heroism as well.

But on the other hand, Amis is hopeless at drawing believable female characters here. Joyce and Diana give little impression of having minds of their own. They seem like manifestations of Amis’s notion of what women should be like – statuesque, well-bred and utterly pliable to the needs of the local Alpha Male. “Together,” says Allington, “they made an impressive, rather erectile sight, both of them tall, blonde and full-breasted… Dull would he be of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed.” In their speech, meanwhile, they spout irritating upper-class adverb-adjective couplings: “jolly closed up”, “perfectly awful”, “frightfully exciting”, “damn good”. Late on in the book, Allington’s devious ménage à trois plan backfires and Joyce and Diana get their revenge on him, but this isn’t enough to convince me that they’re anything more than Kingsley Amis’s idea of desirable posh totty.

From artinfiction.wordpress.com

Elsewhere in the book, predictably, we’re treated to a list of things in the modern (or at least, 1960s-ish) world that the grumpy, ageing Amis finds appalling. He sounds off against radical students: “First one whiskered youth in an open frugiferous shirt, then another with long hair like oakum, scanned me closely as they passed, each slowing almost to a stop the better to check me for bodily signs of fascism, oppression by free speech, passive racial violence and the like.” He rails against popular music: “Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her room down the passage… I listened, or endured hearing it…” He has a go at trendy vicars: “I found it odd, and oddly unwelcoming too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the left of a hardened unbeliever like myself.” Readers will either find this aggravating or endearing. Now that Amis has been dead for a quarter-century and I’m in the process of turning into a grumpy old man myself, I have to confess I found it rather endearing – more so than I would have if I’d read the novel in my youth.

Failures in female characterisation aside, I generally enjoyed The Green Man and I had more fun reading it than I had with Lucky Jim. However, is the novel successful as a ghost story? In my opinion, for a ghost story to succeed, it needs to convey a degree of believability. If I can be lulled into thinking, however fleetingly, that this could be happening, I’m more likely to be affected, unsettled, even frightened by it. On this account, Amis’s book almost succeeds. For the most part, he convincingly moves the plot from being about a man whose home has some strange old tales attached to it to being about a man who has to deal with the unwelcome, ghostly protagonists of those tales. To facilitate this jump from the credible to the incredible, Amis adds some persuasive background details. A section where Allington visits a library at Cambridge University in search of a long-lost journal by Underhill has a scholarly believability that’s worthy of M.R. James.

Alas, all is betrayed by a scene near the novel’s climax where Amis goes too far and introduces another supernatural character, the most famous and powerful supernatural character of the lot – guess who that is. Now any story involving ghosts has implications about the wider scheme of things. It makes life after death a fact, which raises questions about the design and purpose of the universe and about the intelligence that might be behind it. However, for the sake of believability, it’s advisable for ghost-story writers to keep things localised and small-scale. In M.R. James’s celebrated short story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad, for example, what’s important is that the hero is being pursued along a beach by a terrifying supernatural entity. Not that this entity’s existence calls into question our scientific assumptions about the universe – because if it does exist, then scientists are likely wrong and the priests, magicians and shamans of history were likely right.

Amis, unfortunately, can’t resist exploring the universe he’s created in The Green Man further than is necessary and so Allington ends up having an unexpected visit from the Big Man Upstairs. Their confrontation resembles something from the classic 1946 Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger fantasy movie, A Matter of Life and Death. And that’s what The Green Man promptly becomes, a fantasy rather than a ghost story – a story that’s no longer believable and hence no longer scary.

J.G. Ballard once said of Kingsley Amis: “as with so many English novelists he was vaguely suspicious of the power of the imagination: it could be too much of a good thing. Yet the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own.”

Ironically, the problem with The Green Man is that in the end, and atypically, Amis lets his own imagination run away with him. The book would have been more effective if, like those English novelists whom Ballard complains about, he had decided that too much imagination here is a bad thing.